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You know something? I am sick and tired of people claiming that they actually know something about masses of people in other countries. You don't. You don't have the slightest idea how many Americans can locate Iraq on a map. You don't have the slightest idea how many residents of Airstrip One know that Iraq, err, Oceania hasn't always been our enemy, nor do you have the slightest idea how many residents of the United States are polyglots. You know what? Neither do I. People hear a statistic about how many people in this population are ignorant of a fact the poll-taker believes everyone should know, and from this people draw absurd conclusions about the overall ignorance of an entire population!

The irresponsible parroting of statistics is a far more pervasive and detrimental social phenomenon than American ignorance or arrogance.

American's look ignorant overseas because of a simple phenomenon that is certainly not confined to the USA: Ignorant people are loudmouths. Ignorant people believe their prejudices are facts, and they give voice to every damnfool idea that comes into their heads because they do not know that they do not know anything

It would be best if you took a good look at your own attitudes and inflammatory statements before you accuse Americans as a class, as if there were a monolithic "American" opinion or personality.

I'm not proud of of my country's present administration. My overall impression is that George W. Bush may be one of the least intelligent people to hold the Presidency in many years. I understand that the world is nervous about a "cowboy" President backed by an angry population, and so am I. But remember that while this man appears popular in our polls, this is more a result of our collective outrage than an endorsement of the policies of this administration. Remember he was barely elected, and some still dispute that he was elected. In two years there will be another election, and even if he wins, in four more years he will be out.

Will we start another war? Personally, I doubt it. But let me ask you this: Would there be UN inspectors in Iraq right now if the threat had not been built to a very real level? Diplomacy sometimes has a gunboat component. So even here, while I do not personally know what our government intends, an intelligent person may draw a very different conclusion from the facts than you appear to do.

Ignorance and arrogance are clearly not confined to the United States. The fact that America weilds vast military power does, I grant you, make American ignorance and arrogance of greater import. But even here, consider that North Korea is flexing its nuclear muscles again because Pyongyang (Wow! He knows a foreign capital!) has made the reasonable calculation that we cannot build up the interational tolerance nor perhaps the military capability for two engagements a continent apart. Perhaps America is under greater constraints than you realize.

So this jejune attitude of superiority requires some additional reflection, perhaps, on both sides of the ocean.

If all of you are so interested in finding out who this guy is, read here. There was an article written about him.

heh

I think there's slightly more at issue than just that. Though I'd agree that violent video games in and of themselves are highly unlikely to make a person violent, the question is whether violent video games may have a detectable effect on behavior on a significant number of people. For instance, violent games may encourage some people to "let out their anger" rather than reason through it and learn what is making them angry. And, it has been seen that expressing anger tends to cause an increase in one's liklihood to be angry, not a decrease. I posted about this before when GTA3 came up in a slashback. Hopefully I was clearer this time.

One amazing sign of intelligence is the ability of the brain to develop automaticity. A reflex occurs when a stimulus is strong and instead of the spinal cord sending the info to the brain for processing, it sends the correct (usually) response back. These reflexes are built into the circuitry. The human brain is capable of forming this kind of automation. Yesterday, when you saw your wife, or good friend or whomever, did you spend time processing all the individual features, analyzing their orientation to each other, and then running them by a list of all the names and faces you've ever met in the world? Or did the face instantly pop up a name? Now granted, there must be some degree of processing, but then again the spinal cord must decide if the pan is hot enough to jerk the hand away or not (not the greatest analogy). One of the greatest examples of automatic processing is the Stroop Effect. You are not wasting any thought on semantic meaning, but you can't stop the brain from putting meaning into primary memory (= short term memory, for laymen).

In Regards to Chess, masters of the game don't even bring up rules into primary memory such as where and how pieces can move. Attention is limited (thus controversy over driving car and talking on cellphone), so the more rules/strategies/tricks that become automatic, the more moves a chess player can think into the future. IANAE (correct acronymn??) but talk to any cognitive psychologist first if you disagree.

So you ask, how does automaticity show intelligence vs. process? It skips the processing part and leads to, for the most part, instant input/output (I'd love to see someone hook a monitor up to where a GPU should be and expect a sensical image). If there was intelligence behind natural selection, then one day, when something happens, like drought, people or whatever is alive at that time would all become pecfectly accustomed to said event because anyone/thing not perfectly accustomed would instantly die before reproducing.

I suggest you increase your "experiences" a bit more and read up on autism here.

Or check this out. It's a list of symptoms from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (commonly referred to as "The DSM IV").

Sure, a lot of us geeks fit the criteria, but one must be very careful to not confuse introversion with autism. :-)

This is inferior to the great SILC protocol. But whichever you choose, it really doesn't matter. You think creating a "channel" on invisible irc will protect your defacer crew's conversations from the feds? Not if they go on invisible irc and join your fucking channel . There are many different ways that this so called security can be bypassed, and most of them involve a person being a dumbass -- and as this article from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology states, a dumbass, most often, is unwilling to admit or recognize that he is indeed a dumbass.

The relationship between media violence and behaviour is a complex question which is very difficult to research. For ethical reasons you can't do longitudinal exposure studies with young people randomly assigned which provide sound proof. Therefore the area is hotly contested. Wherever you get strong business interests you always can round up a group of scholars to argue your case. Take the effect of tobacco and global warming as two cases in point. In any scientific area anyone with half a clue can trawl through the literature and mount an argument by the way they spin the rhetoric. People reading it from outside the discipline have no way of judging the credibility of the argument. If I wanted to get some sense about how to write complex code for designing computer games I would not expect to find it from a group which consisted of thirty one psychologists and assorted types and only one trainee games programmer and one professional programmer. What would a group like that know about writing code?

In this case you are expecting me to believe a group pontificating about media violence which consists of 31 people whose job it is to sell and comment on the media and one trainee psychologist and one professional. Interestingly the spin in the media falsely hams up the weight of the psychology input - the Free Expression Project describes the academics as "scholars in the fields of media, psychology, and culture" - psychology should come a pathetic last in this list. The Reuters story describes them as "...the group of scholars, who included social psychologists, and media experts.." milking the tiny contribution from a couple of psychologists.

The Free Expression Policy Project is part funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation, these guys are getting their fifteen minutes of fame, while we get little enlightenment.

If I want to know about writing game code I would talk to the experts. If I want to know about the effect of media violence on children I would go to the American Psychological Association, they are worried, very worried, and so should we all be. There comment on television violence is below.

Here are the disciplines of the "experts group" providing advice on child psychology and media violence.

• Communications
• Film and Television studies
• Education in culture
• History and American studies
• English
• Psychology (still doing their doctorate)
• Media psychology
• Communications
• Author
• Communications
• Humanities
• Author
• Radio television and film studies
• Film and interdisciplinary humanities
• English
• Sociology
• Humanities and screen studies
• Hypermedia
• Gender studies and critical studies
• Film television and school, documentary maker
• Language literature and communications
• Multimedia designer, artist and games
• researcher
• Film studies
• Sociology and communications
• Editor of Cineaste magazine
• Journalist
• Communications
• Film and television studies
• Media studies
• Film studies
• Film studies
• Editor of Children's Software Review

Does TV really intensify violent behavior? After review of hundreds of research findings, three major national studies have concluded that heavy exposure to televised violence is one of the significant causes of violence in society:

• The Surgeon General?s Commission Report (1972).
• The National Institute of Mental Health Ten-Year Follow-up (1982).
• The report of the American Psychological Association?s Task Force on Television in Society (1992).

Viewing violence on the screen has the following negative effects:

• It increases the viewer's fear of becoming a victim of violence, with a resultant increase in self-protective behaviors and increased mistrust of others.
• It desensitizes the viewer to violence, resulting in a calloused attitude toward violence directed at others and adecreased likelihood of taking action to help a victim of violence.
• It increases the viewer?s appetite for becoming involved with violence.
• It often demonstrates how desirable commodities can be obtained through the use of aggression and violence.
• Sexual violence in X- and R-rated videotapes widely available to teenagers has also been shown to cause an increase male aggression against females.

These effects are both short term and long lasting. A longitudinal study of boys found a significant relation between exposure to TV violence at 8 years of age and antisocial acts--including serious violent criminal offenses and spouse abuse--22 years later.

This is the part that has always amazed me. How can they ask you to do something this stupid with a straight face?

My last boss caused me great pain with such stupidity. One of my Debian buddies sent me a good explanation after I spent the afternoon complaining about it. That PHB did not even understand that laying me off was actually a reward. My nerves are finally starting to recover and I should be able to kick-ass on my next job ;-)

Video games have yet to affect my real life at all (other then reducing the amount of time I spend there). If you don't want your kids to play these games don't let them. Do not turn to society as a whole to police what your kids can do.

As mentioned by the parent (now, long since modded into oblivion), the issue of violent video games was covered this Wednesday on Nightline, and a partial write up can be read here.

Now, the coverage was obviously presented with a slant against video games. A similar slant was shown in a previous story they did about the big business of pornography. Nightline's often not about presenting an unbiased opinion.

Just the same, the most salient point probably made on the show, by a doctor of psychology I believe (correct me if I'm wrong), was that video games are akin to cigarettes in a sense. Most people who smoke don't wind up dying from lung cancer. Most people who play GTA3 also don't drive over pedestrians to get some midday stress relief.

The point here is perhaps that the true effect of these games, especially those which people use to "let out their anger", has not really been carefully studied. And, it has been seen that expressing anger tends to cause an increase in one's liklihood to be angry, not a decrease.

Despite the unwillingness of most game players to accept it, myself and a good deal of the Slashdot crowd included, it is possible that violent video games may have a subtle, but definite effect on a statistical significant amount of people. As it is, however, the current video game rating system should be sufficient to warn intelligent players and parents about games which may be inappropriate.

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments

Excellently stated.

Another point about parental involvement is that often, parents aren't properly educated about how to monitor and supervise their kids. Parenting is difficult, folks, and there's no user manual or README file for a kid. And, keeping this study in mind, many of the parents who think they're good at it actually are not.

So, what perhaps would have been a good suggestion to the legislators, to ease their boredom, would be the establishment of a federal department or program that would help educate parents on how to monitor their kids's usage of the internet. Proactive help, not reactionary restriction.

It increases the viewer's fear of becoming a victim of violence, with a resultant increase in self-protective behaviors and increased mistrust of others.

It desensitizes the viewer to violence, resulting in a calloused attitude toward violence directed at others and a decreased likelihood of taking action to help a victim of violence.

It increases the viewer's appetite for becoming involved with violence.

It often demonstrates how desirable commodities can be obtained through the use of aggression and violence.

Sexual violence in X- and R-rated videotapes widely available to teenagers has also been shown to cause an increase male aggression against females.

It increases the viewer's fear of becoming a victim of violence, with a resultant increase in self-protective behaviors and increased mistrust of others.

It desensitizes the viewer to violence, resulting in a calloused attitude toward violence directed at others and a decreased likelihood of taking action to help a victim of violence.

It increases the viewer's appetite for becoming involved with violence.

It often demonstrates how desirable commodities can be obtained through the use of aggression and violence.

Sexual violence in X- and R-rated videotapes widely available to teenagers has also been shown to cause an increase male aggression against females.

Take a look at Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments for an interesting look at why results like that are to be expected.

You don't like others because you don't like yourself. Deal with your sexuality first before hassling others about theirs.

this sounds like a rationalization to me

The statement describing the argument is the claim or the conclusion. Usually stated at the outset and identifying the topic of the argument, the claim is what the argument is about. It sounds simple, but it is amazing how often people do not know what they are arguing about.

The Principle of Rationality: Always assume that people have reasons for their beliefs.

Every claim must be supported by reasons. Reasons answer the question, "Why accept this claim?" If the reasons are good, then you cannot effectively attack the argument. This is a basic key to understanding argument: If the reasons are good and the logic is correct, you are bound to accept the claim.

Always attack the reasons for a claim, not the claim itself.

Any person lacking reasons is being irrational. People who lack reason often find themselves under medical scrutiny...Another person often lacking reasons is a fanatic.

In case it never occured to you, sex exists for procreation and babies don't happen in same sex relation.

'Normal' people raising their families just don't want that crap around their children. Deal. It's not fear (phobia), misunderstanding, hatred (of self or others) either - it's more like disgust, like smelling raw sewage. Sure, others can get used to it, but gawd, who would want to please the few who eat shit?

Stats don't always say what you think they are reporting. Especially when done in the form of a survey.

For a good breakdown of how people understand their own skill level take a look at this journal article. It does a good job of graphing people's self assessments against their actual performances.

The point is that just because a population is not confident about their skills as a computer user, does not mean that they are lacking those skills. Conversely, it is the confidant ones who lack the knowledge to be able to rate their own performance.

-pos

I work for a firm that indexes a scholarly database of research articles in psychology. We use a controlled vocabulary to describe the content of each abstract, which can vastly simplify life (for the users who know how to use it, natch.) Does Google (or anyone else) pursue this sort of strategy?

And as this article documents, these people think they know what they're doing on computers ("hey, look ma! I'm a computer guru, and with no hands!"), and they won't need any help, thankyouverymuch.

That's an entirely different matter. The humans in question simply aren't aware of their uselessness. The ad agencies, on the other hand, presumably have a fairly good idea of what can be sold vs. what might as well be a third belly button on their tongue.

I would not touch that bet with a ten foot pole!

A fellow Debian developer sent me this fascinating report about this subject. I had a boss who fit this profile. Now I am looking to find a decent job again ;-)

Then, once everything has made it through the review process, the costs have just begun. Have you ever looked at a copy-edited manuscript? Even a very meticulous author will have their manuscript returned with red marks everywhere. This is an incredibly boring job that requires a lot of knowledge and a lot of time--one that you can't get people to volunteer for. A do-it-yourself for-free journal will consequently suffer from misspellings, grammatical errors, incoherent styles, etc. Then there are legal issues. For example, every time you publish a figure or data that was published elsewhere, you need to get permission in written form. Publishing companies allow this to happen, but they pay lawyers and others to make sure everything is legal and kosher.

So, if you grant me that there are costs incurred, then you have to have accountants and bookkeepers--trained and trustworthy ones who won't abscond with the funds or "lose" them, as often happens in volunteer organizations who handle their own money. And someone to coordinate sales (to libraries and individuals). There are a lot of important, detailed things the publishers do, which can not be easily replaced by volunteers.

I have a feeling that anyone who decides to create a high-quality refereed journal will soon find that they are doing many of the same things a publishing company does, which in the long run is bad for academics, because the scientests/authors are wasting their time on administration instead of extending knowledge. The APA publishes their own journals, and they are no better (and in many ways worse) than the for-profit publishing companies. They won't even publish .pdfs of articles--everything is in crappy .html

"Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments."

They basically want to prove that incompetent don't recognize their incompetence (which may not be such a new idea for any compentent psychologist)

They use humor tests, and participant have to recognize which jokes are funny (or more precisely, which jokes the phsychologists have rated 'funny')

Considering the fact that the most funny joke was: If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is 'God is crying.' And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is 'probably because of something you did.', you have a nice GEB-like self-referencial article...

Here is an article the Slashdot staff might fight interesting.
It is entitled, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments".
All of you dot-bomb flunkies and management types should take a look at this too.

Is multitasking more efficient? Shifting mental gears costs time, especially when shifting to less familiar tasks

I'll give the brain hemisphere bit... it's tricky. See http://www.indiana.edu/~primate/brain.html

So, dig this: suppose the time-frame of compulsory education has been hiked up for the purpose of keeping children off the job market longer, so as to not devalue labor and thereby devalue the labor system.

Suppose the compulsory educational system, which is economically (and therefore ideologically) linked to every other industry, is regearing to keep the middle class from further expanding and gaining power.

Suppose that, with all the psychological research that's been done, someone actually thought ahead and said, "Okay, if we can institutionalize middle-class children within the first 2 decades of their life, we'll be able to not only increase the size of the prison-industrial-military complex, but also to grab more power for ourselves and our friends overall" Just the same way some retailer once said, "Let's hire some of these behavioral psychologists to figure out how to organize the store in the most influential possible way[s]."

The net effect of our compulsory school system is obvious: 23% illiteracy in America, 13% prevalence of social phobia, Major depression (18.9%), generalized anxiety (14.8%), and the 'Suicide Rate Among U.S. Teens Keeps Increasing'.

And I nearly left out the continuous rise in teenage violence...

You see, the problem is, as Adam Yauch is quoted in the last link, that "Being on either end of a violent situation, whether you seem to have come out with the upper hand or whether you don't seem to, it doesn't resolve anything. It escalates the problem. Hatred leads to more hatred. Violence leads to more violence." Violence is not by any means limited to its overt outbreaks; it is a sadist/masochistic cycle which perpetuates itself. Our "educational" system suffers the Disney syndrome: the violence of management over the tenderness of interaction.

"Nature once had a chance to run riot in South Florida, producing jungles and swamps; now nature must submit to control. " And nature (which, yes children, is very much alive in each and every one of us) is pissed.

________________________________________________ __

For more information on this phenomenon, see the scary article at http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp7761121.html.

Then you go to teach, and the top few students seem pretty decent (they're much like you) and the rest of the class seems to suck. Well, no. The rest of the class sucks as much as they ever did, only now you have to notice, because you're grading all the papers, instead of hanging out with the leet geek types.

Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D
Research Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc.
Immunix: Security Hardened Linux Distribution
----
Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Oregon Graduate Institute

I have no idea if the gender of the parents makes any difference to the "success" of raising of a child. Recent research (for example, this) seems to indicate that ones peer group is far more important than ones parents in shaping your personality.

But who can raise children "better" isn't really the point. Raising children (which, for the record, my wife and I have opted not to do) isn't about who can do it best; as it stands, there's no test or qualifying exam or rigorous series of controls involved. I'll draw an analogy; maybe I think my posts are "better" than yours, because I'm smarter than you are, more informed and cosmopolitan in my tastes, and my arguments are sharper and funnnier than yours. Does that mean you shouldn't be allowed to post on /.? No.

Similarly, just because you may think that certain sets of people wouldn't make the ideal parents doesn't make it correct to disallow them from the activity. If it were up to me, i can think of scads of people who I think make less-than-ideal parents, but that wouldn't make it ethical for me to try to forbid them from doing so, dig?

mahlen

I cheated in the final of my metaphysics examination: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me. --Woody Allen, "Daily Mail" 1964

Your assertion that sexual relations are not damaging to children is simply denial.
The APA says "No responsible mental health organization, including the American Psychological Association, endorses pedophilia or denies its negative effects on children. Any statement that suggests otherwise is a serious distortion of the truth. The American Psychiatric Association writes: 'An adult who engages in sexual activity with a child is performing a criminal and immoral act which never can be considered normal or socially acceptable behavior.' "

Children are not simply little adults. They are cognitively and developmentally different from adults. Sexual activity involves us in the most profound physical, intellectual, and emotional risk possible. There is little in human life which is more tender and delicate than our sexual identity, perfomance, and pleasure.

To expose children to that while they are yet incapable of understanding the implications is phenominally damaging to them. Anyone who says otherwise is indescribably wrong.

I have read about, and in fact know, a large number of people who were sexually involved as children. The stories they tell about the damage inflicted on them by selfish adults who used them for sexual pleasure is a demonstration of the worst kind of evil. These adults struggle with worth and identity decades later. Their lives are colored by shame, inadequacy, rage, fear, and confusion.

They are trapped in a bondage of powerlessness, betrayal, and ambivalence.

You say that you do not involve yourself with actual children. That is a good thing. However, I submit to you that you are unlikely to be able to continue in this way. Things that we entertain in our brains become actions. These activities which you fantasize about will eventually fail to bring you the pleasure that you are currently experiencing. You know that this is true, because even today it takes far more to arouse you than it did even a year ago. This is the nature of sexual perversion.

We take no action without previously having thoughts about it. Your fantasies will eventually become actions of one sort or another.

Lust is always demanding, and never satisfied.

You assert that you did not choose your sexual orientation. I will not challenge that. I don't think that science has advanced sufficiently to determine the root cause of our sexual desires. Regardless, sexual relations with someone who is not your spouse is not acceptable. Sexual activity with children is loathsome and damaging to you and to children. A good reference on the damage caused to these children is called "The Wounded Heart" and can be found here:

Romans 1:18-24 says:
The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. "For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another."

I strongly urge you to get the help that you need before it is too late.

God loves you and wants relationship with you.

If you would like to know how you can avoid God's wrath, please contact me at tom_cooper at bigfoot dot com

One of the paradoxes of software engineering is that people with bad ideas and low productivity often think of themselves as supremely capable.

Actually, this isn't unique to software engineering. I recently read a fascinating paper on that very subject, which shows that the least capable are not only unable to perform a given task, but they lack the ability to judge their competence at that task, and hence grossly overestimate their abilities. See http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/ psp 7761121.html.

The link to the abstract is here.

Basically, it says after ten years, cigarette, alcohol, marijuana, and illicit drug use (not marijuana) atitudes were completely unaffected by dare.

Booyakka

First off, here is the first paragraph from Chapter 20 of "Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts" by Lynn Zimmer, Ph. D, and John P. Morgan, M.D.:

Today's adolescents have been bombarded with anti-marijuana messages. They were born during the early 1980's, just as President Ronald Reagan was focusing the drug war on marijuana, and just as Nancy Reagan was introducing her "just say no" slogan to American culture. Today's teenagers have had more drug education than any cohort of young people in American history. Aboutl half have received DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program... Despite this onslaught of anti-drug messages, the number of teenagers trying marijuana began rising in 1992, and has risen every year since... Mass campagins against drugs can even be counterproductive. The primary consequence of public warnings about glue sniffing in the 1960s seems to have been to introduce glue-sniffing to young people who otherwise might not have heard of it.

Here are some of the sources used in this chapter:

Baum, D., Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, Boston: Little Brown and Company (1996)

National Institute on Justice, "The DARE Program: A Review of Prevalence, User Satisfaction, and Effectiveness," National Institute of Justice Update, Washington, D.C.

Rosenbaum, D.P. et al., "Cops in the Classroom: A Longitudinal Evaluation of DARE," Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 31:3-31 (1994)

Every study that has examined the effectiveness of DARE has failed to show a correlation linking the program with a decrease in adolescent or adult drug use. If the purpose of the program is to get people to not use drugs, it has been a total failure. Total. TOTAL. It does not work.

DRCNet has a section dealing with DARE that is very enlightening. The Detroit News has an archived version of an anti-DARE article available here, and the American Psychological Association has a study showing DARE's lack of effectiveness here. And the Austin Chronicle has an article about how that city's police department dropped DARE due to its costliness and ineffectiveness.

So you're saying catharsis is a myth?

As I expected, a Google search for "catharsis" resulted in this article from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It is perfectly consistent with my point.

And pray tell, how is describing a mythic battle (complete with magic and monsters) going to make someone any better at killing REAL things?

If you hear the vivid details of a sword fight (disembowelment, etc.) then for a while you're going to think about fighting a lot more than other people would. Inevitably, you will consider strategies for fighting. Consequently, you are more likely to notice a good fighting solution to a problem before you notice the other solutions.

APA Journal

AAP Web Site

Joint Statement on the Impact of Entertainment Violence on Children

These results are not the fault of the technology but the fault of thoes who use it. Gov. Bush may be using incorrect wording and blaming the internet, but there is a strong correlation between some internet content and the dark harts spoken of. If the media had no effect on anyone why do advertizers spend billion of dollars on ads?

Gavin

crack users who have children, destroying lives before they are born...

The whole idea of the crack baby has been proven to be a myth. In summary, the reason that "crack babies" are so bad off is that they live in a shithole with drug addict parents. Think about it for a second. Very few children in such a situation are going to come out well. I've seen plenty of ADD kids, and their parents weren't crackheads.

For more information, you can search on google for "crack baby myth." Here's a couple of links to get you started:

FamilyWatch

The American Psychological Association

-Nathan

Note: I'm not saying that doing drugs or alcohol while pregnant is a good thing, only that the specific myth of the crack baby is just that, a myth.

From: apa.org

"Study 1 found that real-life violent video game play was positively related to aggressive behavior and delinquency. The relation was stronger for individuals who are characteristically aggressive and for men."

uh? think about this, agressive behavior was stronger as a result of violent video games in people who are characteristically agreesive. Now replace the words "Violent video games" in the above sentance, with any other activity and it still holds true. The statement

Agressive behavior was stronger as a result of home gardening and baking cakes in people who are characteristically agreesive.

I think that above paragraph would also turn true if studied...

So what does this study really prove?

They aren't putting "normal" people in these tests, but people that are already voilent or agreesive in nature

"people who score high on measures of aggressive personality have highly accessible knowledge structures for aggression-related information. They think aggressive thoughts more frequently than do those individuals who score low on aggressive personality measures, and have social perception schemas that lead to hostile perception, expectation, and attributional biases "

Lets give a crack addict a bunch of smack and see if they become addicted to it. Here how do you tell if the smack is addictive or the crack addict is just "replacing" his addiction?

Harris and Klebold enjoyed playing the bloody, shoot-'em-up video game Doom, a game licensed by the U.S. military to train soldiers to effectively kill from the APA Journal article

Barnett looks like he's explained this one before. "Marine Doom, as you saw, is not just a twitch game. The way you get through a Marine Doom scenario and survive is through teamwork and listening to your fire team leader and doing what you're supposed to...."

"It's about repetitive decision making," Snyder swiftly interjects. Snyder's habitual deference - even off-duty, he calls his friends sir - doesn't always extend to allowing Barnett to finish his sentences. "We're trying to get these things ingrained by doing them over and over, with variations. A real firefight is not a good time to explore new ideas."

"You also saw how everyone was absorbed," Barnett adds. "That's another part of it. Kids who join the marines today grew up with TV, videogames, and computers. So we thought, how can we educate them, how can we engage them and make them want to learn? This is perfect."

The psychological profession long ago decided that the road to power and political relevance was to reject the Aristotilean idea of catharsis and instead follow the Platonic idea that "the poets should be banned from the Republic because they get the people all stirred up." Otherwise, they won't get invited to testify on Capitol Hill or TV talk shows.

There are some counter articles out there today that everyone should also read:

Lawmakers are uneducated about video game industry, panelist says

Illinois attorney general urges end to sales of violent video games to minors

And, most importantly: Federal judge dismisses lawsuit against movie, video game makers

I think the big question that everyone needs to ask themselves is who better serves American interests, jurists, or psychologists? I agree with R. A. Heinlein (who used to get guff from amateur psychologist when he was writing his juvenile novels, Red Planet, and others) that the psychological profession is full of charlatans and quacks. Of course, with the current low regard the First Amendment and the entire Constitution is held in in this country, I don't expect my opinions to hold much weight.

• loss of temper on a daily basis
  
• frequent physical fighting
  
• significant vandalism or property damage
  
• increase in use of drugs or alcohol
  
• increase in risk-taking behavior
  
• detailed plans to commit acts of violence
  
• announcing threats or plans for hurting others
  
• enjoying hurting animals
  
• carrying a weapon
  

• loss of temper on a daily basis
  
• frequent physical fighting
  
• significant vandalism or property damage
  
• increase in use of drugs or alcohol
  
• increase in risk-taking behavior
  
• detailed plans to commit acts of violence
  
• announcing threats or plans for hurting others
  
• enjoying hurting animals
  
• carrying a weapon
  

• loss of temper on a daily basis
  
• frequent physical fighting
  
• significant vandalism or property damage
  
• increase in use of drugs or alcohol
  
• increase in risk-taking behavior
  
• detailed plans to commit acts of violence
  
• announcing threats or plans for hurting others
  
• enjoying hurting animals
  
• carrying a weapon
  

To which the WAVE site has something along the lines of "Don't use this to stereotype please!"

If you know someone who acts like this at your school, talk to your parent or guardian, school counselor or another trusted adult about it. Also, learn more about What You Can Do If Someone You Know Shows Violence Warning Signs.

It is much more practical and better than 99% of the others out there...

So in short it appears to me to be a campaign to let people know how do deal with being bullyed, get them to not bully others and generally get through adolescence undamaged. The "Big Brother" bit seems to be spin by suspicious journalists. Here in Britain there's a (gasp) toll-free number called ChildLine for kids to ring to report abuse, bullying etc etc. Dark Instrument of the state's Legions of Terror? Hardly. By all accounts it 's been very useful for child victims of violence.

Freud & catharsis

The book had some absolutely jaw-dropping assertions regarding intelligence, intelligence testing, college admissions, social ills, and most of all, race and intelligence. The series in the book went something like this:

There is a single measurable core of intelligence, known as g (as first proposed by a man named Spearman, near the turn of the century)

This g (g == general intelligence) factor is substantially inheiritable, and there are differences found along racial lines in it

g substantially effects how people succeed in life. The authors assert it is a better predictor of adult earnings, college admissions, and so on, than is any other measure (once the subject is 10+ yrs of age, where measuring g stabilizes).

It is a fascinating and controversional book, with a hefty bearing on the subject at hand. Some of the statistics in the book point out the enormous SAT differences in some of the top colleges in the US of students of different races. The Black vs White SAT scores for the top 13 schools varied as much as ~170 points. (this is freshman admission scores) That in itself is not particularly controversial -- you can't argue against a number. But Murray and Herrnstein assert that this difference is caused by inheiritable intelligence differences -- i.e., whites are smarter than blacks, as groups. In fact, they basically state that whites are a full standard deviation smarter -- that the intelligence of the average white person places them in the 86th percentile of the black population. The more PC and traditional way of explaining this is the effects of socio-economic status on the test-takers in question.

With such assertions, its easy to see both why the book sold 500,000 copies, and why it spawned off a half dozen books, a hundred articles, and a storm of discussion. But how does it pertain to Legos? Well, one of Herrnstein and Murray's social policy recommendations was the strong change or removal of affirmative action. They claimed that permitting the disparity in scores gave a view on campuses of blacks and latinos (the "lower intelligence" groups their statistics showed) as incapable, and that it deprived "more capable" students of their chances.

Critics of the book and its science and policy have stated that the statistics methods used (specifically, multiple-regression analysis on the effects of Socio-economic status and iq scores and other factors) were prone to inaccuracy and misinterpretation. Critics also favored an attack against g as a concept -- that is, stating that a single intellectual ability does not exist, preferring measurements by other theories, including 3 or 7 "intelligences". When all was said and done, more people clearly came out against the book that for its premises and conclusions. Some parts met with more controversy than others. (Some of the less mentioned parts mention how, since people of intelligence levels tended to associate due to work, etc, and therefore have children in those circles, that if intelligence is genetic then the smart are getting smarter and the dumb are getting dumber, basically-- compounded by the fact that people of high intelligence (correlated with high education) have less children, and later in life.)

Two viewpoints on the book, for those interested, can be found at this link. For anyone interested in admissions testing, intelligence and its relationship to affirmative action, this is a must read, as are its equally well written and well argued counterarguments.

Note: the views expressed by the Bell Curve are not necessarily MY views, per se. I only recently read the book and a couple of the books with counterarguments or collections of them, and have not formed any solid conclusions yet. But the controversy was large, and the documentation copious, so investigation is worthy regardless of your political or social predisposition. I'm all about comments, but given the inflammatory nature of the material, please keep in mind that I'm not endorsing either side, so leave the flamethrowers at home.

What I like to do is if someone states something such as what Mr. Singer has stated, I try to read as much as possible about the issue, then form my own opinion. I try not to form an opinion based on what a single group says, until I've heard both sides of the issue.

What scares me is when governments refuse to listen to both sides of an issue, or atleast acknowledge the other side of the issue.

An example of this can be found in a blurb in Focus on the Family which it appears as though the government is ignoring a study done by the American Psychological Association simply because what the APA is saying does not fit politically with what the government has been saying since the 1970's. At the time of this writing, the Focus on the Family web server is down, and I don't want to make a statement regarding the contents of the blurb because I can't quote it exactly. However, there are several good articles on the APA where if you just search on APA, you will find them.

Another example of this would be government funded studies which say that marijuana is not any worse then cigarettes or alcohol. Because the government has been saying for years that marijuana is bad for you, they refuse to acknowledge their own studies. The information regarding marijuana can be found on the ACLU website in their drugs section.

In both of these cases, I have not made a decision as to what I think about them, but I try to get further information in hopes of making a better decision.

Generally, even if I don't agree with what a person is saying, I will not try to stop them from saying it. They have that right to say what they think regardless of whether or not I agree with it.