Slashdot Mirror
Professor, ECA Dispute Video Game Aggression Study
Earlier this week, we discussed research which linked aggression in children with video games. The Entertainment Consumer Association responded with a statement criticizing the research, as did Christopher Ferguson, a professor at Texas A&M. PCWorld sat down with Ferguson for a more in-depth discussion of the flaws with the study. In addition to bringing up the correlation vs. causation fallacy, he notes:
"Even if you took it at face value, which I don't, video game violence overlaps somewhere between, based on their own statistics, a half a percent to two percent, with a variance in aggression. If you woke up tomorrow and you were half a percent more aggressive than you were today, would you notice that? It's just not much of an effect. If the author said look, there's a little effect here, maybe video games increase aggression a tiny bit, but it's not going to make anyone into a serial murderer, yeah, alright, we may argue a little bit over the methodology, though I'd still say they should've controlled for other stuff. "
> Actually, there is a direct causal relationship between sea pirates and global warming. Sea piracy was made significantly less feasible by steam and later oil powered ships. A wind-driven pirate vessel made from wood could be beached anywhere with trees for repair and only had food as a requirement. Any small island could be a base of operations for pirates as long as they could send a boat ashore for food.
That is not a direct causal relationship. There may be a direct causal relationship between the use of faster ships using fuel that is relatively hard to obtain and the decrease of piracy, but global warming in itself has no effect on piracy (may not be entirely true: with higher temperatures, the north pole will melt and sea levels will rise, making the sea bigger, which could have an effect on piracy).