why is that any of your business (or some company's, or the government's)?
Because the person is your customer? If you don't want to run into negligence issue you have to act responsible as a company, it is as easy as that. You selling a game that can be addicting for some people and then looking away and pretending the problem doesn't exist is not responsible behavior.
Physical addiction is fighting a chemical dependency. Psychological addiction is a lack of self-control.
I don't quite see the difference there, in both cases you brain chemistry got out of wack and it will cause you trouble to get it back in line. Your "self-control" talk is quite frankly bullshit, as your self is basically your brain, if your brain doesn't function, your self-control will have issues too, they are not seperate.
Sorry, but claiming that a company may have been negligent when MAKING A FUCKING VIDEO GAME because it could be addictive is not legitimate in the slightest.
The negligence isn't creating the game, but letting people play it for 11 hours a day for five years without having any safeguards against it and yeah, in a MMORPG you normally have that kind of data right at hand.
Plenty of people claim (or are) addicted to porn, but no one is expecting the porn industry to step in and police their consumers.
The porn industry doesn't have exact statistics on the users behavior, the MMORPG industry has and very likely is using that data to "optimize" their games to be even more addictive.
It's a product. No shit they're going to make the product fun and one that you'll want to use.
The problem isn't that they make it fun, but that they specifically design them to keep you playing for month or years to come by a clever never ending trail of small rewards. When you combine that with a addictive personalty you start having problem, especially when you know it and don't do anything about it and thats where you rightfully might get into a negligence lawsuit.
Might as well blame everyone who ever made anything for every possible negative action that their products were involved in.
Products have been recalled and companies sued when the products have been found to cause harm, nothing revolutionary about that.
So, requiring a business to keep a psychologist on staff to deal with customers who really like what you sell doesn't qualify as "regulation"?
It is not regulation, just a way to avoid being found guilty of negligence. There might be other cheaper ways.
The problem here is simply that you have a person playing for 11 hours a day for five years and the company knows it and doesn't care, thats not responsible behavior, thats what I would call negligence.
Note also that if an in-game psychologist started bothering me when I was playing, I'd just/ignore him. and if that wasn't possible, I'd ignore him the old-fashioned way....;)
That would be a good sign for possible addiction and time to lock the account.
Why is it the responsibility of the game companies to police their users for addictive tendencies and then treat them?
The companies are the ones making the money and they are the ones that have all the data to determine the problematic cases. Responsibility is something that should work both ways, you can't just pray on the weak and except to get away with it without anybody complaining.
Games are the outlet, not the cause.
The ways the games are designed, I seriously doubt that. People don't play MMORPGs for so many hours because they are fun, but because they have a very well designed reward cycle that keeps people hooked, even if the underlying game isn't all that interesting. Your regular everyday webpage isn't designed that way, at least not on purpose.
How is the publisher to determine which of its players are addicted?
Look at the game clock which says "20'000 played"?
but all of this still does not mean he was addicted.
Yeah sure, playing a single game for 11 hours a day over a period of 5 years is totally normal gaming behavior...
Beside, I don't really see a need to exactly determine addiction or not, it doesn't need to be binary. Just have a chat with cases that fall outside the normal playing behavior.
Force them to have a psychologist on staff to deal with such addiction cases or something along the lines maybe? It doesn't even need to have a ruling, just pushing the issue into the public view a bit with the lawsuit might already help to let companies reconsider there current behavior.
If they can't cope with game addiction, then they need help with their lack of self-control.
Yeah, but instead they just get more addictive material from the game company. The thing is: The company knows that those people are addicted and it doesn't care, instead it milks them for more money. How responsible is that?
So what the judge is saying is that if online gaming services don't regulate against lengthy usage of their services by adult citizens they may face lawsuits like this?
Where did anybody say something about regulation? What about just having a moderator/psychologist on stuff that has a little chat with those people that hang around for thousands of hours?
While this lawsuit might sound a little ridiculous, pretending that problems with gaming addiction don't exist isn't exactly a very intelligent way to deal with the issue either.
"Science-Based Medicine" is just another pop "skeptic" group that bases it's charter on a very slippery notion of what "evidence" means.
So it bothers you that they actually want to see high quality evidence and don't believe every made up stuff that comes along? Way to go...
As said before, science is not only looking for evidence that proves your theory, but also those that destroys it. You seem to be completly blind to the late to the later kind.
It's a journal from the fucking BMJ Group that publishes papers about research regarding acupuncture.
Yeah, I know, so what? That doesn't make the underlying problem of bias go away. As mentioned before: You need studies that stand up to scrutiny, not just that make it into your favorite acupuncture magazine, even if said magazine is mostly based around science.
The problem is simply that the effects of acupuncture are small, thus there is a very good chance that all the effects you are seeing are based on bias, not on actual stuff happening.
And regarding your "Science-Based Medicine" site, learn a little more about them before you say one more word.
I didn't link to any specific study, but the whole Acupuncture section of sciencebasedmedicine, which mentions quite a few more studies. They also have a bit to say about the BMJ Acupuncture magazine.
Please take a look at the Acupuncture in Medicine Journal (BMJ Group Publishers).
How good are the chances that a magazine that is out there to promote acupuncture will comes to the conclusion that it doesn't work and thus destroy itself? Rather slim I say. This to me looks like an rather obvious case of bias.
As said before, science is not just about looking for confirmation of your theory, but also about pocking holes into it or throwing it out of the window when it doesn't work. A magazine with the premise "It works, lets find out how" isn't the right way to look for evidence if it works at all.
A Mandbrot set has like two lines of source behind it, good luck trying to paint the complete set. Size of source code has absolutely nothing to do with the complexity of executing it. You can have short code that is impossible to calculate and extremely long code that is trivial.
Starting to create the brain from the genome means nothing short of simulating each and every molecule and all their interactions. Super-Computers struggle with one molecule these days (see protein folding), good luck trying to do it with all the octillion or however many atoms we have in the body.
At some point we might now enough about the interactions to optimize, but we are nowhere near that. Starting from the genome is the by far most complicated way to get to the brain, it is far easier to just observe it and then try to simulate it based on those observations instead of trying to simulate it on a atom scale.
You can point to poorly designed studies in every field.
It is not so much about the bad studies, but about the lack of good ones that show efficacy for acupuncture. If you read some more in the link I posted you should see that even well-respected medical journals have bad days and let junk slip through. Studies that show efficacy and stand up to scrutiny is what is missing.
effectiveness quotient higher than a lot of drugs available on the market today.
That says more about the lack efficacy of some drugs on the market then about the efficacy of acupuncture.
"Yin" and "Yang" refer to opposite states.
So what? When random needle sticking works just as good as real acupuncture needle sticking thats clear indication that acupuncture teaching is basically just made up nonsense, as it doesn't have any effects on the result.
Actually, in human trials spanning hundreds of years and hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of subjects, it's been shown to be effective.
The plural of anecdote is not data. To show the efficacy you need proper controlled test, not just random people feeling better after having a treatment, as that is easily attributed to the placebo effect unless you have proper controls. And when it comes to acupuncture the studies that come out positive tend to be badly designed while those that are well designed come out negative.
If that's not science, I don't know what is.
The point of science isn't just searching for evidence that confirms your theory, but also searching for evidence that destroys your theory. And for acupuncture there have been well designed studied that showed it is no more effective then sham acupuncture (untrained people sticking needles in random places). So even if you don't want to give up hope on that sticking needles in your body can help, the whole teaching around acupuncture is basically made up nonsense, that not only lacks evidence, but also fails at basic plausibility.
If particle physicists can use "charm" and "strangeness" I don't see why there's such a problem with "yin" and "yang".
The former was shown in experiments, the later wasn't.
The question of whether we can interpret that source code in anything other than "bare metal" (the biological womb) is obviously "yes, we can. but when?"
PZ's isn't saying that we can't do it with the genome, but that the genome alone isn't good enough to run a simulation. For a proper simulation you need to know how all the proteins interact with each other and we don't know that. Now of course you can probably derive that from the laws of physics, but that quickly becomes way to complex to be practical in the near future. Thus going from genome to the brain is just way to be complex to be doable.
However where PZ completly fails is in that he basically pulls a strawman, he takes a single thing that Kurzweil supposedly said and bases his whole argument on that, completly ignoring all the other arguments Kurzweil has and treating that one sentence as ultimate truth, while in reality it is likely that it was just an oversimplified comment for the press.
"mathematically simulate" means a hell of a waste of resources.
Not really, as it would allow a lot of optimizations. Of course Brain1.0 might be the brute force approach, but once that is up and running one could invest in making it run faster.
I find it highly unlikely that humans will be able to "reverse engineer the brain" within the next 10 years, if by "reverse engineer" you understand "being able to predict with a reasonable amount of certainty the behaviour of the brain for a given input".
Prediction won't work, but that doesn't really have much to do with how good the simulation is, but is simply the result of the fact that you can't get a completly perfect reproduction of the initial conditions.
Let me make it simpler: yes, you can learn how to drive, and you can make AI that knows how to drive, but no one understands what your brain is actually doing while you're driving.
Yes, but once you have the simulation up and running things will get a lot easier for researchers, as you can literally watch into the head of your AI and thus figure out what is going on.
If you tell it to do A (via software), you know you will get B, based upon knowledge of how the circuits are hardwired.
That is only true for trivial programs, for anything complex it becomes very tricky to predict its behavior or even completly impossible (see halting problem), of course even more so if you insert a bit of/dev/random.
The same can not be said of the human brain, because it has the ability to change its hardware (via growing new connections between neurons).
That's really not all that different then doing a malloc(). That hardware and software isn't strictly separated in the brain doesn't really change its computational power. A fixed computer program running on complex data will give you the same complex behavior as self modifying code.
Biochemistry is incredibly important. The brain is not just a neural network; it is an electrochemical organ and the chemicals floating around in there greatly affect the operation of neurons.
That doesn't exactly sound like an unsolvable problem:
if (chemicalX_present()) { do_this(); } else { do_that(); }
The tricky part is figuring out the details, but thats also something where simulation and improvements in brain imaging can help, as you can compare the simulation to the real world and if there are substantially differences, invest into research in that area.
In reality there are many important differences between brains and computers, enough that I don't think digital computers are going to be more than a dead end.
Yeah, but so what? They are still useful tools to simulate the brain, if we understand it better, we can build specialized hardware for the task.
Slashdot Mirror
YOU STILL DECIDE TO KEEP PLAYING.
No, you don't. Thats kind of why addiction is a problem to begin with.
Should chronic masturbators sue the porn industry?
The porn industry doesn't monitor how much you play, MMORPGs do.
One is a chemical KNOWN to create this imbalance
Don't over consume it and you won't have an issue either. Still seems the same to me.
one that cannot easily be specifically found and diagnosed.
Eleven hours a day for five years. Doesn't take much to figure out that there might be a problem, which is why I call it negligence.
A lot of people may not play that often regularly, but will have a weekend where they can push that boundary.
We are not talking about those.
And if that is how I choose to live,
You don't "chose" addiction.
why is that any of your business (or some company's, or the government's)?
Because the person is your customer? If you don't want to run into negligence issue you have to act responsible as a company, it is as easy as that. You selling a game that can be addicting for some people and then looking away and pretending the problem doesn't exist is not responsible behavior.
Physical addiction is fighting a chemical dependency. Psychological addiction is a lack of self-control.
I don't quite see the difference there, in both cases you brain chemistry got out of wack and it will cause you trouble to get it back in line. Your "self-control" talk is quite frankly bullshit, as your self is basically your brain, if your brain doesn't function, your self-control will have issues too, they are not seperate.
Sorry, but claiming that a company may have been negligent when MAKING A FUCKING VIDEO GAME because it could be addictive is not legitimate in the slightest.
The negligence isn't creating the game, but letting people play it for 11 hours a day for five years without having any safeguards against it and yeah, in a MMORPG you normally have that kind of data right at hand.
Plenty of people claim (or are) addicted to porn, but no one is expecting the porn industry to step in and police their consumers.
The porn industry doesn't have exact statistics on the users behavior, the MMORPG industry has and very likely is using that data to "optimize" their games to be even more addictive.
It's a product. No shit they're going to make the product fun and one that you'll want to use.
The problem isn't that they make it fun, but that they specifically design them to keep you playing for month or years to come by a clever never ending trail of small rewards. When you combine that with a addictive personalty you start having problem, especially when you know it and don't do anything about it and thats where you rightfully might get into a negligence lawsuit.
Might as well blame everyone who ever made anything for every possible negative action that their products were involved in.
Products have been recalled and companies sued when the products have been found to cause harm, nothing revolutionary about that.
So, requiring a business to keep a psychologist on staff to deal with customers who really like what you sell doesn't qualify as "regulation"?
It is not regulation, just a way to avoid being found guilty of negligence. There might be other cheaper ways.
The problem here is simply that you have a person playing for 11 hours a day for five years and the company knows it and doesn't care, thats not responsible behavior, thats what I would call negligence.
Note also that if an in-game psychologist started bothering me when I was playing, I'd just /ignore him. and if that wasn't possible, I'd ignore him the old-fashioned way....;)
That would be a good sign for possible addiction and time to lock the account.
"skinners box"?
See Operant conditioning chamber.
How plausible is that?
Very plausible, you can see articles about how to design and spread rewards in gaming all the time in game development literature.
Why is it the responsibility of the game companies to police their users for addictive tendencies and then treat them?
The companies are the ones making the money and they are the ones that have all the data to determine the problematic cases. Responsibility is something that should work both ways, you can't just pray on the weak and except to get away with it without anybody complaining.
Games are the outlet, not the cause.
The ways the games are designed, I seriously doubt that. People don't play MMORPGs for so many hours because they are fun, but because they have a very well designed reward cycle that keeps people hooked, even if the underlying game isn't all that interesting. Your regular everyday webpage isn't designed that way, at least not on purpose.
How is the publisher to determine which of its players are addicted?
Look at the game clock which says "20'000 played"?
but all of this still does not mean he was addicted.
Yeah sure, playing a single game for 11 hours a day over a period of 5 years is totally normal gaming behavior...
Beside, I don't really see a need to exactly determine addiction or not, it doesn't need to be binary. Just have a chat with cases that fall outside the normal playing behavior.
And suing game companies will do...what, exactly?
Force them to have a psychologist on staff to deal with such addiction cases or something along the lines maybe? It doesn't even need to have a ruling, just pushing the issue into the public view a bit with the lawsuit might already help to let companies reconsider there current behavior.
If they can't cope with game addiction, then they need help with their lack of self-control.
Yeah, but instead they just get more addictive material from the game company. The thing is: The company knows that those people are addicted and it doesn't care, instead it milks them for more money. How responsible is that?
So what the judge is saying is that if online gaming services don't regulate against lengthy usage of their services by adult citizens they may face lawsuits like this?
Where did anybody say something about regulation? What about just having a moderator/psychologist on stuff that has a little chat with those people that hang around for thousands of hours?
While this lawsuit might sound a little ridiculous, pretending that problems with gaming addiction don't exist isn't exactly a very intelligent way to deal with the issue either.
"Science-Based Medicine" is just another pop "skeptic" group that bases it's charter on a very slippery notion of what "evidence" means.
So it bothers you that they actually want to see high quality evidence and don't believe every made up stuff that comes along? Way to go...
As said before, science is not only looking for evidence that proves your theory, but also those that destroys it. You seem to be completly blind to the late to the later kind.
It's a journal from the fucking BMJ Group that publishes papers about research regarding acupuncture.
Yeah, I know, so what? That doesn't make the underlying problem of bias go away. As mentioned before: You need studies that stand up to scrutiny, not just that make it into your favorite acupuncture magazine, even if said magazine is mostly based around science.
The problem is simply that the effects of acupuncture are small, thus there is a very good chance that all the effects you are seeing are based on bias, not on actual stuff happening.
And regarding your "Science-Based Medicine" site, learn a little more about them before you say one more word.
Please enlighten me.
Again, that study was seriously flawed.
I didn't link to any specific study, but the whole Acupuncture section of sciencebasedmedicine, which mentions quite a few more studies. They also have a bit to say about the BMJ Acupuncture magazine.
Please take a look at the Acupuncture in Medicine Journal (BMJ Group Publishers).
How good are the chances that a magazine that is out there to promote acupuncture will comes to the conclusion that it doesn't work and thus destroy itself? Rather slim I say. This to me looks like an rather obvious case of bias.
As said before, science is not just about looking for confirmation of your theory, but also about pocking holes into it or throwing it out of the window when it doesn't work. A magazine with the premise "It works, lets find out how" isn't the right way to look for evidence if it works at all.
That's how much source is behind the human brain.
A Mandbrot set has like two lines of source behind it, good luck trying to paint the complete set. Size of source code has absolutely nothing to do with the complexity of executing it. You can have short code that is impossible to calculate and extremely long code that is trivial.
Starting to create the brain from the genome means nothing short of simulating each and every molecule and all their interactions. Super-Computers struggle with one molecule these days (see protein folding), good luck trying to do it with all the octillion or however many atoms we have in the body.
At some point we might now enough about the interactions to optimize, but we are nowhere near that. Starting from the genome is the by far most complicated way to get to the brain, it is far easier to just observe it and then try to simulate it based on those observations instead of trying to simulate it on a atom scale.
You can point to poorly designed studies in every field.
It is not so much about the bad studies, but about the lack of good ones that show efficacy for acupuncture. If you read some more in the link I posted you should see that even well-respected medical journals have bad days and let junk slip through. Studies that show efficacy and stand up to scrutiny is what is missing.
effectiveness quotient higher than a lot of drugs available on the market today.
That says more about the lack efficacy of some drugs on the market then about the efficacy of acupuncture.
"Yin" and "Yang" refer to opposite states.
So what? When random needle sticking works just as good as real acupuncture needle sticking thats clear indication that acupuncture teaching is basically just made up nonsense, as it doesn't have any effects on the result.
Actually, in human trials spanning hundreds of years and hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of subjects, it's been shown to be effective.
The plural of anecdote is not data. To show the efficacy you need proper controlled test, not just random people feeling better after having a treatment, as that is easily attributed to the placebo effect unless you have proper controls. And when it comes to acupuncture the studies that come out positive tend to be badly designed while those that are well designed come out negative.
If that's not science, I don't know what is.
The point of science isn't just searching for evidence that confirms your theory, but also searching for evidence that destroys your theory. And for acupuncture there have been well designed studied that showed it is no more effective then sham acupuncture (untrained people sticking needles in random places). So even if you don't want to give up hope on that sticking needles in your body can help, the whole teaching around acupuncture is basically made up nonsense, that not only lacks evidence, but also fails at basic plausibility.
If particle physicists can use "charm" and "strangeness" I don't see why there's such a problem with "yin" and "yang".
The former was shown in experiments, the later wasn't.
The question of whether we can interpret that source code in anything other than "bare metal" (the biological womb) is obviously "yes, we can. but when?"
PZ's isn't saying that we can't do it with the genome, but that the genome alone isn't good enough to run a simulation. For a proper simulation you need to know how all the proteins interact with each other and we don't know that. Now of course you can probably derive that from the laws of physics, but that quickly becomes way to complex to be practical in the near future. Thus going from genome to the brain is just way to be complex to be doable.
However where PZ completly fails is in that he basically pulls a strawman, he takes a single thing that Kurzweil supposedly said and bases his whole argument on that, completly ignoring all the other arguments Kurzweil has and treating that one sentence as ultimate truth, while in reality it is likely that it was just an oversimplified comment for the press.
Computers are designed to be deterministic and only deviate under faulty conditions caused by human error or design flaws.
/dev/random likes to disagree with that.
"mathematically simulate" means a hell of a waste of resources.
Not really, as it would allow a lot of optimizations. Of course Brain1.0 might be the brute force approach, but once that is up and running one could invest in making it run faster.
I find it highly unlikely that humans will be able to "reverse engineer the brain" within the next 10 years, if by "reverse engineer" you understand "being able to predict with a reasonable amount of certainty the behaviour of the brain for a given input".
Prediction won't work, but that doesn't really have much to do with how good the simulation is, but is simply the result of the fact that you can't get a completly perfect reproduction of the initial conditions.
Let me make it simpler: yes, you can learn how to drive, and you can make AI that knows how to drive, but no one understands what your brain is actually doing while you're driving.
Yes, but once you have the simulation up and running things will get a lot easier for researchers, as you can literally watch into the head of your AI and thus figure out what is going on.
If you tell it to do A (via software), you know you will get B, based upon knowledge of how the circuits are hardwired.
That is only true for trivial programs, for anything complex it becomes very tricky to predict its behavior or even completly impossible (see halting problem), of course even more so if you insert a bit of /dev/random.
The same can not be said of the human brain, because it has the ability to change its hardware (via growing new connections between neurons).
That's really not all that different then doing a malloc(). That hardware and software isn't strictly separated in the brain doesn't really change its computational power. A fixed computer program running on complex data will give you the same complex behavior as self modifying code.
Biochemistry is incredibly important. The brain is not just a neural network; it is an electrochemical organ and the chemicals floating around in there greatly affect the operation of neurons.
That doesn't exactly sound like an unsolvable problem:
if (chemicalX_present()) { do_this(); } else { do_that(); }
The tricky part is figuring out the details, but thats also something where simulation and improvements in brain imaging can help, as you can compare the simulation to the real world and if there are substantially differences, invest into research in that area.
In reality there are many important differences between brains and computers, enough that I don't think digital computers are going to be more than a dead end.
Yeah, but so what? They are still useful tools to simulate the brain, if we understand it better, we can build specialized hardware for the task.
The fact that we don't have voluntary access to aspects of the computations doesn't mean our brain isn't doing them.
Yeah, but that doesn't help you when you want to integrate those computations into your thought process. The point is simply that:
Brain + Calculator > Brain alone
Easily showing that the brain isn't the ultimate thinking machine, as it is not hard to improve upon it.
People who are attempting to simulate brains in supercomputers think that warehouse sized supercomputers are probably still off by 10^4.
Might be, but thats still just around 20 years away.