That's hyperbole, I'm afraid. It's a bacterium, just a very distant cousin. Great for studying evolution, irrelevant to Michael Chrichton. Based on the other bacteria recovered from the borehole sample, its hobbies most likely consist of "feeding on geothermal heat" and "being adapted to an extremely stable, homogeneous environment with no predators or other forms of life," which as a general rule means it's as helpless as the Kakapo.
Notice that I said acceptance. I've seen it happen, too. To my knowledge, gay rights movements have always considered such people problematic. There are lesbians who think that way too, FWIW, which leads to some pretty exceptional schisms and spats.
Feminism has officially always espoused gender equality as its primary goals. The movement was persistently subverted by radicals starting in the sixties. If anything, it's a victim of bad planning—when the movement was introduced, it was taken for granted that "giving women all the legal and social rights that men have" was equivalent to "gender equality." It is largely because of the success of the healthier parts of feminism that many educated people now assume by default that the partners in a heterosexual relationship (romantic or otherwise) should treat each other with equal respect. We're all inside the bubble now (at least in English-speaking, urbanized North America); that's why the only thing you can readily identify as "feminism" is crazy radical crap.
I believe feminist theory uses the term "intersectionality" to describe the problem of dealing with other issues and how they react with women's rights. Usually this is couched in terms of racial disparities (for example, intersectional feminism purports that black women in the US face face more challenges than black men and white women combined, and even if they don't, that's a heckuva lot of challenges.)
Transgender (I hesitate to say "transgenderism" as though it's some kind of movement—too bad "transsexual" is no longer vogue, or I could say "transsexuality" and avoid it altogether, so I'll just reify "transgender" as though that makes sense) is an interesting problem for feminism, because it tangles with the boundary between sex and gender. Early feminism was built on cultural assumptions about what was female, which were unmovable and positivist in their foundations. A major priority was on demoting cultural ideas that were harmful (by branding them stereotypes) and isolating them from the rest of what it meant to be part of the female sex. This was done without concern for the value (socially, personally, and so on) of these stereotypes—or the value of what was being accepted.
The conceptual threat of TG is as follows: here are newly-remade women and men who are not merely a little across the line, but far across the line. All of them are outliers, because the people who are only a little TG never admit it to themselves, or come out, or go through changes, mostly because the social stigmas are strong enough to keep them in their assigned genders and sexes. The people who do own up to their status then go on to reveal that, surprise, the stereotypes of their new position are natural consequences of their real psychology. Or, at least, they manifest easily under the right pressures.
Residual traits from childhood caused by early socialization are then mistaken for an underlying nature. For transwomen, it's often an analytical or militaristic leaning (because of the bias in education and children's toys), and for transmen who are more consciously tomboyish when young, it might be a dependent attitude (transmen are much less likely to self-treat before visiting a doctor than transwomen.) These traits are (wrongly) vital social cues to gender, and they end up being assigned more importance than they deserve.
And this is essentially the content of the Reconsideration of Gender Slumming: to someone hypersensitive to gender boundaries, but unequipped with real data about how gender identity develops in children, it looks like a grotesque media-fuelled parody, even though the psychology of the transgendered is actually desperate and deeply personal.
...and it would be nice if that were the only barrier facing transgender acceptance by feminists, but unfortunately you can still find a number who are socially conservative in other respects and only consider their own cause worthy. These are dying out, but their legacy can be seen in those who grew too narrow-minded and unwittingly adopted F1 views.
That's what I meant by "lost sight of their objective." But you must be careful to realise that feminism is a confused movement. To borrow your notation, you will often see feminist sources use F1 language without realising it isn't F2 language. Layers upon layers of manifestos and treatises have transmitted F1 ideas and terminology until it (essentially) subverted egalitarian-oriented feminists into using it like Newspeak. Sometimes the line is crossed, usually by women feminists, simply because they have no frame of reference for addressing sexism; they don't know where F2 ends and F1 begins, or what actually constitutes misandry. Men, on the other hand, have been the target of such for years, and everyone is very good at spotting most forms of genuine misogyny.
This is an innate human problem, though, found in all populations who feel repressed. (The easiest example that comes to mind is Malcolm X.) There's a very easy analogy to the physical senses—when you've been cold for a long time, it's hard to tell when something's so hot that it is likely to cause pain. Both have the same source, in fact; it's a fundamental flaw in how nervous systems work and not something to get upset about, though it does need correction. We are good at measuring change, but not status quo, and beyond a certain magnitude, we cannot measure change either.
Good luck finding a party that both sides will regard as neutral, though. Maybe a bunch of transgendered people?
...and continuing on that point, now that I think about it, all that video shows is tracking the tip of a moving object. That's not really the full hand.
The commercial Kinect cameras are 640x480. Even if that's decent for finger-level tracking close up, a method designed to measure the activities and placements of fingers close to the camera is not going to have enough data to work on hands further away.
That being said, it does appear that the demo in the video you linked has sufficient discriminatory power that a fist should be relatively easy—he's not exactly holding his hand right up to the lens.
Most likely proxy hosts; the profit margins in the adult entertainment industry are (legitimately) slim due to (actual) rampant piracy. Without a nasty policy like the Great Firewall of China (and this proposal has already been objected to by an MEP as a sneaky attempt at internet censorship), such things are unblockable, and the motivation to risk locally-made content is way worse than just going overseas.
That all being said, no one seems to have noticed that "the media" didn't really include the Internet when this legislation was drafted in 1997. It does not appear to have been an intent of the original authors to obliterate the porn industry, just to get it off late-night television.
Feminists are a very diverse bunch. Every now and then you find a radical misandrist—or, more likely, someone who has lost sight of their objective and can no longer tell the difference between defending women's rights and assaulting men—who does say something appalling or across the line. As a result a lot of women and men, who espouse essentially egalitarian ideals, avoid the feminist label and find sexism uncomfortable (most of whom would picket for, say, suffrage) avoid the "feminist" label.
...for the sake of it, though, those arguments have been made; in the late sixties and early seventies, the GLF (Gay Liberation Front) was faced with feminists who believed that, by disengaging the other sex, gay men had deemed them unworthy of their attention and were trying to exclude women entirely. This is less of an argument against gay porn than it is about male homosexuality entirely. As an example, the author Susan Brownmiller apparently believed this. (The reality, of course, is that the gay rights movement has always been in solidarity with women's rights, and only in ancient Greece do we see cultural acceptance of the kind of chauvinism that was being claimed.)
For what it's worth, I expect that the porn industry generates sufficient economic activity that it will be spared by an unwitting accountant.
I think you've misunderstood; I'm saying bad game design is a technique used by scalpers like Zynga to force people to pay up. Microtransactions follow bad game design, they don't cause it (except perhaps by choice, at a business model planning level.)
Then you should really read the article again, because it constantly cites Henrich and his colleagues, and implies they feel this way:
“We were scared,” admitted Henrich. “We were warned that a lot of people were going to be upset.”
“We were told we were going to get spit on,” interjected Norenzayan.
“Yes,” Henrich said. “That we’d go to conferences and no one was going to sit next to us at lunchtime.”
HENRICH, HEINE, AND NORENZAYAN’S FEAR of being ostracized after the publication of the WEIRD paper turned out to be misplaced.
The applications of this new way of looking at the human mind are still in the offing. Henrich suggests that his research about fairness might first be applied to anyone working in international relations or development. People are not “plug and play,” as he puts it, and you cannot expect to drop a Western court system or form of government into another culture and expect it to work as it does back home.
As Norenzayan sees it, the last few generations of psychologists have suffered from “physics envy,” and they need to get over it. The job, experimental psychologists often assumed, was to push past the content of people’s thoughts and see the underlying universal hardware at work. “This is a deeply flawed way of studying human nature,” Norenzayan told me, “because the content of our thoughts and their process are intertwined.” In other words, if human cognition is shaped by cultural ideas and behavior, it can’t be studied without taking into account what those ideas and behaviors are and how they are different from place to place.
There's also several statements from other researchers that indicate Henrich's paper was transformative because it confronted assumptions about the universality of cognition:
"I have no doubt that this paper is going to change the social sciences," said Richard Nisbett, an eminent psychologist at the University of Michigan. "It just puts it all in one place and makes such a bold statement."
More remarkable still, after reading the paper, academics from other disciplines began to come forward with their own mea culpas. Commenting on the paper, two brain researchers from Northwestern University argued (pdf) that the nascent field of neuroimaging had made the same mistake as psychologists, noting that 90 percent of neuroimaging studies were performed in Western countries.
Researchers in motor development similarly suggested that their discipline’s body of research ignored how different child-rearing practices around the world can dramatically influence states of development.
Two psycholinguistics professors suggested that their colleagues had also made the same mistake: blithely assuming human homogeneity while focusing their research primarily on one rather small slice of humanity.
And if you had any doubts left, here's the paper's abstract: (bold emphasis mine)
Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability
Fun fact: when Google introduced Wave, they announced that it had superior contextual spell checking, and could (for example) correct "your" vs "you're". I tried plugging in that poem (on Docs) to see what would happen, and...
...it recommended changing "have" to "halve". And that was it.
The biggest issue is when psychologists assume that culturally-dependent things are universal. That's Henrich et al.'s big contribution—many things which have been taken for granted are actually very localized because of the homogeneous (and highly educated, privileged, civilized, etc.) study population.
The problem is that researchers assumed the programming they found in Americans was universal. This happened because of cultural blindness. The entire point of the discussion is trying to distinguish between what is programmed and what is not. You really, really need to RTFA.
Slashdot Mirror
That's hyperbole, I'm afraid. It's a bacterium, just a very distant cousin. Great for studying evolution, irrelevant to Michael Chrichton. Based on the other bacteria recovered from the borehole sample, its hobbies most likely consist of "feeding on geothermal heat" and "being adapted to an extremely stable, homogeneous environment with no predators or other forms of life," which as a general rule means it's as helpless as the Kakapo.
Notice that I said acceptance. I've seen it happen, too. To my knowledge, gay rights movements have always considered such people problematic. There are lesbians who think that way too, FWIW, which leads to some pretty exceptional schisms and spats.
Actually no, I'm just taking your word for it.
Feminism has officially always espoused gender equality as its primary goals. The movement was persistently subverted by radicals starting in the sixties. If anything, it's a victim of bad planning—when the movement was introduced, it was taken for granted that "giving women all the legal and social rights that men have" was equivalent to "gender equality." It is largely because of the success of the healthier parts of feminism that many educated people now assume by default that the partners in a heterosexual relationship (romantic or otherwise) should treat each other with equal respect. We're all inside the bubble now (at least in English-speaking, urbanized North America); that's why the only thing you can readily identify as "feminism" is crazy radical crap.
I believe feminist theory uses the term "intersectionality" to describe the problem of dealing with other issues and how they react with women's rights. Usually this is couched in terms of racial disparities (for example, intersectional feminism purports that black women in the US face face more challenges than black men and white women combined, and even if they don't, that's a heckuva lot of challenges.)
Transgender (I hesitate to say "transgenderism" as though it's some kind of movement—too bad "transsexual" is no longer vogue, or I could say "transsexuality" and avoid it altogether, so I'll just reify "transgender" as though that makes sense) is an interesting problem for feminism, because it tangles with the boundary between sex and gender. Early feminism was built on cultural assumptions about what was female, which were unmovable and positivist in their foundations. A major priority was on demoting cultural ideas that were harmful (by branding them stereotypes) and isolating them from the rest of what it meant to be part of the female sex. This was done without concern for the value (socially, personally, and so on) of these stereotypes—or the value of what was being accepted.
The conceptual threat of TG is as follows: here are newly-remade women and men who are not merely a little across the line, but far across the line. All of them are outliers, because the people who are only a little TG never admit it to themselves, or come out, or go through changes, mostly because the social stigmas are strong enough to keep them in their assigned genders and sexes. The people who do own up to their status then go on to reveal that, surprise, the stereotypes of their new position are natural consequences of their real psychology. Or, at least, they manifest easily under the right pressures.
Residual traits from childhood caused by early socialization are then mistaken for an underlying nature. For transwomen, it's often an analytical or militaristic leaning (because of the bias in education and children's toys), and for transmen who are more consciously tomboyish when young, it might be a dependent attitude (transmen are much less likely to self-treat before visiting a doctor than transwomen.) These traits are (wrongly) vital social cues to gender, and they end up being assigned more importance than they deserve.
And this is essentially the content of the Reconsideration of Gender Slumming: to someone hypersensitive to gender boundaries, but unequipped with real data about how gender identity develops in children, it looks like a grotesque media-fuelled parody, even though the psychology of the transgendered is actually desperate and deeply personal.
...and it would be nice if that were the only barrier facing transgender acceptance by feminists, but unfortunately you can still find a number who are socially conservative in other respects and only consider their own cause worthy. These are dying out, but their legacy can be seen in those who grew too narrow-minded and unwittingly adopted F1 views.
I am simply shocked, shocked, that I was misled by a copyright lobby.
That's what I meant by "lost sight of their objective." But you must be careful to realise that feminism is a confused movement. To borrow your notation, you will often see feminist sources use F1 language without realising it isn't F2 language. Layers upon layers of manifestos and treatises have transmitted F1 ideas and terminology until it (essentially) subverted egalitarian-oriented feminists into using it like Newspeak. Sometimes the line is crossed, usually by women feminists, simply because they have no frame of reference for addressing sexism; they don't know where F2 ends and F1 begins, or what actually constitutes misandry. Men, on the other hand, have been the target of such for years, and everyone is very good at spotting most forms of genuine misogyny.
This is an innate human problem, though, found in all populations who feel repressed. (The easiest example that comes to mind is Malcolm X.) There's a very easy analogy to the physical senses—when you've been cold for a long time, it's hard to tell when something's so hot that it is likely to cause pain. Both have the same source, in fact; it's a fundamental flaw in how nervous systems work and not something to get upset about, though it does need correction. We are good at measuring change, but not status quo, and beyond a certain magnitude, we cannot measure change either.
Good luck finding a party that both sides will regard as neutral, though. Maybe a bunch of transgendered people?
...and continuing on that point, now that I think about it, all that video shows is tracking the tip of a moving object. That's not really the full hand.
The commercial Kinect cameras are 640x480. Even if that's decent for finger-level tracking close up, a method designed to measure the activities and placements of fingers close to the camera is not going to have enough data to work on hands further away.
That being said, it does appear that the demo in the video you linked has sufficient discriminatory power that a fist should be relatively easy—he's not exactly holding his hand right up to the lens.
Whichever makes people more angry.
Most likely proxy hosts; the profit margins in the adult entertainment industry are (legitimately) slim due to (actual) rampant piracy. Without a nasty policy like the Great Firewall of China (and this proposal has already been objected to by an MEP as a sneaky attempt at internet censorship), such things are unblockable, and the motivation to risk locally-made content is way worse than just going overseas.
That all being said, no one seems to have noticed that "the media" didn't really include the Internet when this legislation was drafted in 1997. It does not appear to have been an intent of the original authors to obliterate the porn industry, just to get it off late-night television.
Feminists are a very diverse bunch. Every now and then you find a radical misandrist—or, more likely, someone who has lost sight of their objective and can no longer tell the difference between defending women's rights and assaulting men—who does say something appalling or across the line. As a result a lot of women and men, who espouse essentially egalitarian ideals, avoid the feminist label and find sexism uncomfortable (most of whom would picket for, say, suffrage) avoid the "feminist" label.
...for the sake of it, though, those arguments have been made; in the late sixties and early seventies, the GLF (Gay Liberation Front) was faced with feminists who believed that, by disengaging the other sex, gay men had deemed them unworthy of their attention and were trying to exclude women entirely. This is less of an argument against gay porn than it is about male homosexuality entirely. As an example, the author Susan Brownmiller apparently believed this. (The reality, of course, is that the gay rights movement has always been in solidarity with women's rights, and only in ancient Greece do we see cultural acceptance of the kind of chauvinism that was being claimed.)
For what it's worth, I expect that the porn industry generates sufficient economic activity that it will be spared by an unwitting accountant.
Let's roll with it. If Groupon had been Battletoads... presumably it wasn't even a candidate for Battletoadsiness by the time he quit.
I think you've misunderstood; I'm saying bad game design is a technique used by scalpers like Zynga to force people to pay up. Microtransactions follow bad game design, they don't cause it (except perhaps by choice, at a business model planning level.)
That's what I see too. Pretty sure that's working as designed.
You will be confused to know that Day of the Tentacle is now a Disney property.
Blizzard announces Facebook Warcraft DOTA only available on XBLA and PSN. Sold.
Yes. The player is programmed to accept that they must make in-application payments by frustrating obstacles and essentially bad game design.
Then you should really read the article again, because it constantly cites Henrich and his colleagues, and implies they feel this way:
“We were scared,” admitted Henrich. “We were warned that a lot of people were going to be upset.”
“We were told we were going to get spit on,” interjected Norenzayan.
“Yes,” Henrich said. “That we’d go to conferences and no one was going to sit next to us at lunchtime.”
HENRICH, HEINE, AND NORENZAYAN’S FEAR of being ostracized after the publication of the WEIRD paper turned out to be misplaced.
The applications of this new way of looking at the human mind are still in the offing. Henrich suggests that his research about fairness might first be applied to anyone working in international relations or development. People are not “plug and play,” as he puts it, and you cannot expect to drop a Western court system or form of government into another culture and expect it to work as it does back home.
As Norenzayan sees it, the last few generations of psychologists have suffered from “physics envy,” and they need to get over it. The job, experimental psychologists often assumed, was to push past the content of people’s thoughts and see the underlying universal hardware at work. “This is a deeply flawed way of studying human nature,” Norenzayan told me, “because the content of our thoughts and their process are intertwined.” In other words, if human cognition is shaped by cultural ideas and behavior, it can’t be studied without taking into account what those ideas and behaviors are and how they are different from place to place.
There's also several statements from other researchers that indicate Henrich's paper was transformative because it confronted assumptions about the universality of cognition:
"I have no doubt that this paper is going to change the social sciences," said Richard Nisbett, an eminent psychologist at the University of Michigan. "It just puts it all in one place and makes such a bold statement."
More remarkable still, after reading the paper, academics from other disciplines began to come forward with their own mea culpas. Commenting on the paper, two brain researchers from Northwestern University argued (pdf) that the nascent field of neuroimaging had made the same mistake as psychologists, noting that 90 percent of neuroimaging studies were performed in Western countries.
Researchers in motor development similarly suggested that their discipline’s body of research ignored how different child-rearing practices around the world can dramatically influence states of development.
Two psycholinguistics professors suggested that their colleagues had also made the same mistake: blithely assuming human homogeneity while focusing their research primarily on one rather small slice of humanity.
And if you had any doubts left, here's the paper's abstract: (bold emphasis mine)
Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability
Fun fact: when Google introduced Wave, they announced that it had superior contextual spell checking, and could (for example) correct "your" vs "you're". I tried plugging in that poem (on Docs) to see what would happen, and...
...it recommended changing "have" to "halve". And that was it.
Wow.
You mean add Reddit? :) Quite honestly, I can't believe it got modded up either. :\
No, no. That's too shocking. That could never happen.
What evidence do you have that makes you doubt the presence/influence of cultural blindness?
Why do you expect citations from an editorial article that indicates elsewhere that he interviewed Henrich at length?
The biggest issue is when psychologists assume that culturally-dependent things are universal. That's Henrich et al.'s big contribution—many things which have been taken for granted are actually very localized because of the homogeneous (and highly educated, privileged, civilized, etc.) study population.
The problem is that researchers assumed the programming they found in Americans was universal. This happened because of cultural blindness. The entire point of the discussion is trying to distinguish between what is programmed and what is not. You really, really need to RTFA.