That was one of the things I took issue to in some of the studies that this meta-analysis is built on. They measured for physical effects, found them, and then proceeded to say that therefore games made people violent.
I know for a fact gaming changes my blood pressure and heart rate; I checked it, just for giggles. (Digital blood pressure cuffs cost ~15 bucks. Go try it yourself!)
But I can't remember the last time I got some good violence on: I'm too old for that crap. The last time I did get in a fistfight, it was with a drunken soccer playing irishman, who, as far as I know, had never played a video game in his life, and that got started because we had a religious disagreement.
I was much more violent as a youth, and as a youth, I mainly played adventure-style games on my big bad 16mhz desktop (I was the envy of all my peers. EGA baby, 16 badass colors.) Far more likely that my violent tendencies were to be attributed to my status as a teenage boy.
To be fair to them, they're at least trying to isolate a factor, which is a lot more than what you're doing. The same drop in violent crime could be attributed to cable tv, and it could easily be argued that the drop would have been MUCH higher, if it weren't for those pesky games.
I would suggest that it's disingenuous to claim that there is a measurable increase in real world physical violence that can be directly attributed to video games, but it's much easier to suggest that other social indexes (like empathy) are affected.
Still, I don't think that there is anything resembling conclusive proof. The studies are all much too narrow, and many of the things measured are questionable.
Well the theory that smoking causes lung cancer has a vast sample set, actual chemical evidence, and predictive power.
This gaming study? It has none of those things. Small sample set (130,000 total participants, but the way he hacks up the data there are rarely more than 50k people in any branch of the study, and some of them are much smaller), no real world behavioural correlation, and no predictive power.
Well, psychological studies are almost always ridiculed here, so it's not just that we tend to be gamers, and therefore hostile to articles that make blanket statements about gamers. Psych is a fuzzy branch of study, and to hard core empiricists, there are a lot of things wrong with even their most basic assumptions.
Add to that the fact that it's a "meta" study, which collects data from 130 odd studies with different methodologies, and you start to slide into "wanking" territory.
A better study, conducted from scratch, with a wide sample set taken from groups that weren't already engaged in gaming. Actual controls would need to be used, and more than one factor tested at the same time. e.g. video games, vs sports, vs violent movies.
Or failing that, an actual real-world upswing in violence that could be credibly attached to a societal cause.
The problem with these studies is that they're all very shallow, with very small sample sets (which are often self-selected), and that their data isn't backed up by any real world numbers. I have seen countless studies that argue that violent games and violent movies make people more violent, and yet there is no corresponding increase in violent crime. How is that possible, if the effects are as significant as all the studies show?
Skimmed it. The "significant" effects seem to me to be well within the error margin of any such sort of study, given a self-selected sample set of gamers. Additionally his 130,000 number is disingenuous at best, since he chooses to included data from various studies to support various different aspects of gamer aggression: that is to say, he didn't lump studies that only recorded physical response (blood pressure, heart rate) in with social duty studies (would you kill a kitten for 10 dollars?)
Well and good, but you can't claim to have a 130,000 member sample set if you're not including data from all members in all parts of your study...Additionally it takes out the correlation between those factors in individuals: e.g. if a person recorded higher physical effects, but scored no differently on the social stuff, it wouldn't be reflected because that data point was only included in the physical.
I don't see anything groundbreaking, and I'm frankly suspicious of anyone who isn't actually doing research but merely doing another analysis of research that is known to be flawed in one way or another.
Blind to the researcher. You need to take two sets of people, test them, then put them into a secluded environment. One set has to do something besides gaming, and the other has to do nothing but gaming, and then see if you can measure any effects after, say, 6 months.
Even this is going to be problematic, because the "something else" has a vast potential for screwing up results. If something else is watching snuff porn, you're going to get different results from a group where the "something else" is volunteering in a maternity ward, or something.
In a nutshell, human behaviour is too multifaceted to pull out a single factor. Might as well correlate behavioural changes to Mountain Dew.
They did it for comic books back in the 50's and 60's. True story. The were accused of promoting communism, homosexuality, and violence. Before that I think it was jazz music?
You obviously didn't read the article. The guys a psychologist. They don't "rule things out"; they make a hypothesis, collect supporting data, and publish. Their findings are basically fad driven, and impossible to truly prove or disprove.
This guy has been "studying" video game violence for more than a decade: that it's taken him this long to come up with "conclusive" results is near miraculous.
Well, I mean his study is conclusive. I guess that means he must be right?
Of course the article is completely fact free, with no actual methodology or conclusions other than "the effects are measurable."
Ooooo, measurable. Look out everyone, the effects are measurable. Whatever the hell they are.
Of course, they're not measurable in an upswing of violent crime, or anything like that. But gaming and puppy kicking behaviours? Strong correlation. Also, I'm told, gaming and pwning noobs is also strongly correlated.
Most cable companies offer a "free" dvr with a monthly fee that is comparable to TiVos, so if you were willing to pay the fee, you might as well just get the dvr from your cable company and save yourself the cash for the new hardware.
So, you base his marxism on one comment made before he was president? Even Adam Smith believed in taxes, and Smith also believed in taxing the rich at a higher level than the poor.
The dwell time in the body, for a given molecule of HTO, is between 7 and 12 days. Pretty much everyone in the world has some HTO in their body right now. Likewise carbon-14, likewise potassium-40. All those put together are less toxic than sitting out in the sun for a day.
Until the sugar and starch decays, moron. What you're talking about is basically a water molecule. How long any individual water molecule stays in the body is pretty hard to determine.
Unlike carbon-14 which binds into your bones! Scaaaaary!
Oooooo, scary tritium. Looks like hydrogen but has two scaaaary extra neutrons.
When you get done tilting at this windmill, I think you need to go take on carbon-14. It also has two extra neutrons. Scaaaaaary.
Newsflash bub, it's in your water already. It's in ALL water. It's in the air. And it was there before we started using nuclear power, and it'll be there after we're gone.
Fearmongering to try and sell your fricking solar panels is pathetic.
Yea, but in context they released 6 curies of tritium under regular normal operation (according to the NRC effluent website. Data as of 2007)...That's 6 trillion picocuries. And that's normal, and within their regulated limits.
If someone had a well right there, absolutely it would be very serious, they'd need to avoid drinking or cooking with that water. If it got into a river? It'd hardly show up.
Well, you can't measure the volume of a leak by the amount of radiation at the leak site, so who knows how much actually leaked...It probably wasn't THAT much, just because they don't USE that much.
Yea, I agree, it probably made it to the local water supply. It's just not a big deal. If you can assume that the highest concentration anywhere was at the leak site (which is reasonable) and that concentration was consistent with the lowest form of radio-medical imaging...It's extremely unlikely that it would be available in quantity anywhere outside of the immediate area of the plant.
The only people who'd be in danger would be people who had a well that was basically at the leak site. Any dilution would drop the exposure dramatically. If the spill made it to a river, it'd be basically indistinguishable from naturally occurring HTO (which is common enough that it's used like Carbon-14 to date liquids).
I keep thinking about how old the plant is, and wondering if they honestly didn't know. I mean, it's just not a big enough deal to risk the consequences of a lie.
I'd far rather drink a glass of water right from that pipe than drink an equivalent amount of pcbs. If you live through the HTO, you're fine, but those pcbs will keep killing you for decades.
Oh yea, well the new ones are being built by Southern Company which, like most power companies, is run by baby-raping plutocrats who would kill anyone for a buck if they thought they could get away with it. That's not sarcasm. That's honestly what I think of them.
You're living in a dream world if you think some other company is better, just because they haven't been caught yet.
My point of view is that all methods have a downside, and that nuclear has a more moderate downside than coal or oil. Hell, even hydroelectric has a better record of killing people than nuclear.
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That was one of the things I took issue to in some of the studies that this meta-analysis is built on. They measured for physical effects, found them, and then proceeded to say that therefore games made people violent.
I know for a fact gaming changes my blood pressure and heart rate; I checked it, just for giggles. (Digital blood pressure cuffs cost ~15 bucks. Go try it yourself!)
But I can't remember the last time I got some good violence on: I'm too old for that crap. The last time I did get in a fistfight, it was with a drunken soccer playing irishman, who, as far as I know, had never played a video game in his life, and that got started because we had a religious disagreement.
I was much more violent as a youth, and as a youth, I mainly played adventure-style games on my big bad 16mhz desktop (I was the envy of all my peers. EGA baby, 16 badass colors.) Far more likely that my violent tendencies were to be attributed to my status as a teenage boy.
To be fair to them, they're at least trying to isolate a factor, which is a lot more than what you're doing. The same drop in violent crime could be attributed to cable tv, and it could easily be argued that the drop would have been MUCH higher, if it weren't for those pesky games.
I would suggest that it's disingenuous to claim that there is a measurable increase in real world physical violence that can be directly attributed to video games, but it's much easier to suggest that other social indexes (like empathy) are affected.
Still, I don't think that there is anything resembling conclusive proof. The studies are all much too narrow, and many of the things measured are questionable.
Well the theory that smoking causes lung cancer has a vast sample set, actual chemical evidence, and predictive power.
This gaming study? It has none of those things. Small sample set (130,000 total participants, but the way he hacks up the data there are rarely more than 50k people in any branch of the study, and some of them are much smaller), no real world behavioural correlation, and no predictive power.
Well, psychological studies are almost always ridiculed here, so it's not just that we tend to be gamers, and therefore hostile to articles that make blanket statements about gamers. Psych is a fuzzy branch of study, and to hard core empiricists, there are a lot of things wrong with even their most basic assumptions.
Add to that the fact that it's a "meta" study, which collects data from 130 odd studies with different methodologies, and you start to slide into "wanking" territory.
A better study, conducted from scratch, with a wide sample set taken from groups that weren't already engaged in gaming. Actual controls would need to be used, and more than one factor tested at the same time. e.g. video games, vs sports, vs violent movies.
Or failing that, an actual real-world upswing in violence that could be credibly attached to a societal cause.
The problem with these studies is that they're all very shallow, with very small sample sets (which are often self-selected), and that their data isn't backed up by any real world numbers. I have seen countless studies that argue that violent games and violent movies make people more violent, and yet there is no corresponding increase in violent crime. How is that possible, if the effects are as significant as all the studies show?
Skimmed it. The "significant" effects seem to me to be well within the error margin of any such sort of study, given a self-selected sample set of gamers. Additionally his 130,000 number is disingenuous at best, since he chooses to included data from various studies to support various different aspects of gamer aggression: that is to say, he didn't lump studies that only recorded physical response (blood pressure, heart rate) in with social duty studies (would you kill a kitten for 10 dollars?)
Well and good, but you can't claim to have a 130,000 member sample set if you're not including data from all members in all parts of your study...Additionally it takes out the correlation between those factors in individuals: e.g. if a person recorded higher physical effects, but scored no differently on the social stuff, it wouldn't be reflected because that data point was only included in the physical.
I don't see anything groundbreaking, and I'm frankly suspicious of anyone who isn't actually doing research but merely doing another analysis of research that is known to be flawed in one way or another.
Blind to the researcher. You need to take two sets of people, test them, then put them into a secluded environment. One set has to do something besides gaming, and the other has to do nothing but gaming, and then see if you can measure any effects after, say, 6 months.
Even this is going to be problematic, because the "something else" has a vast potential for screwing up results. If something else is watching snuff porn, you're going to get different results from a group where the "something else" is volunteering in a maternity ward, or something.
In a nutshell, human behaviour is too multifaceted to pull out a single factor. Might as well correlate behavioural changes to Mountain Dew.
They did it for comic books back in the 50's and 60's. True story. The were accused of promoting communism, homosexuality, and violence. Before that I think it was jazz music?
New == scary for a certain type of person.
You obviously didn't read the article. The guys a psychologist. They don't "rule things out"; they make a hypothesis, collect supporting data, and publish. Their findings are basically fad driven, and impossible to truly prove or disprove.
This guy has been "studying" video game violence for more than a decade: that it's taken him this long to come up with "conclusive" results is near miraculous.
Well, I mean his study is conclusive. I guess that means he must be right?
Of course the article is completely fact free, with no actual methodology or conclusions other than "the effects are measurable."
Ooooo, measurable. Look out everyone, the effects are measurable. Whatever the hell they are.
Of course, they're not measurable in an upswing of violent crime, or anything like that. But gaming and puppy kicking behaviours? Strong correlation. Also, I'm told, gaming and pwning noobs is also strongly correlated.
Oh yea, that works. I was diddling in screen once and I tried to resume a session, and the whole application crashed with the following error:
"The dungeon collapses. You die."
Yea, I get it. Good old Zork. But not when I'm trying to fucking work.
Most cable companies offer a "free" dvr with a monthly fee that is comparable to TiVos, so if you were willing to pay the fee, you might as well just get the dvr from your cable company and save yourself the cash for the new hardware.
So, you base his marxism on one comment made before he was president? Even Adam Smith believed in taxes, and Smith also believed in taxing the rich at a higher level than the poor.
That actually hurt my brain a little bit.
I'm curious though...What do you think a Marxist believes?
The dwell time in the body, for a given molecule of HTO, is between 7 and 12 days. Pretty much everyone in the world has some HTO in their body right now. Likewise carbon-14, likewise potassium-40. All those put together are less toxic than sitting out in the sun for a day.
Radiation is a fact of life big guy.
And the dwell time of an individual fat molecule is? I'm sure you know right off the top of your head.
Until the sugar and starch decays, moron. What you're talking about is basically a water molecule. How long any individual water molecule stays in the body is pretty hard to determine.
Unlike carbon-14 which binds into your bones! Scaaaaary!
Oooooo, scary tritium. Looks like hydrogen but has two scaaaary extra neutrons.
When you get done tilting at this windmill, I think you need to go take on carbon-14. It also has two extra neutrons. Scaaaaaary.
Newsflash bub, it's in your water already. It's in ALL water. It's in the air. And it was there before we started using nuclear power, and it'll be there after we're gone.
Fearmongering to try and sell your fricking solar panels is pathetic.
*6 curies for the whole of 2007, I should have said.
Yea, but in context they released 6 curies of tritium under regular normal operation (according to the NRC effluent website. Data as of 2007)...That's 6 trillion picocuries. And that's normal, and within their regulated limits.
If someone had a well right there, absolutely it would be very serious, they'd need to avoid drinking or cooking with that water. If it got into a river? It'd hardly show up.
Well, you can't measure the volume of a leak by the amount of radiation at the leak site, so who knows how much actually leaked...It probably wasn't THAT much, just because they don't USE that much.
Yea, I agree, it probably made it to the local water supply. It's just not a big deal. If you can assume that the highest concentration anywhere was at the leak site (which is reasonable) and that concentration was consistent with the lowest form of radio-medical imaging...It's extremely unlikely that it would be available in quantity anywhere outside of the immediate area of the plant.
The only people who'd be in danger would be people who had a well that was basically at the leak site. Any dilution would drop the exposure dramatically. If the spill made it to a river, it'd be basically indistinguishable from naturally occurring HTO (which is common enough that it's used like Carbon-14 to date liquids).
Nuclear plants are actually allowed to release a certain amount of it a year as part of normal operation, and the NRC calls it on their website, "...one of the least dangerous radioactive isotopes known."
Well, it leaked underground, and probably was in the form of tritiated water (HTO) which would tend to stick around a little longer.
I keep thinking about how old the plant is, and wondering if they honestly didn't know. I mean, it's just not a big enough deal to risk the consequences of a lie.
I'd far rather drink a glass of water right from that pipe than drink an equivalent amount of pcbs. If you live through the HTO, you're fine, but those pcbs will keep killing you for decades.
Oh yea, well the new ones are being built by Southern Company which, like most power companies, is run by baby-raping plutocrats who would kill anyone for a buck if they thought they could get away with it. That's not sarcasm. That's honestly what I think of them.
You're living in a dream world if you think some other company is better, just because they haven't been caught yet.
My point of view is that all methods have a downside, and that nuclear has a more moderate downside than coal or oil. Hell, even hydroelectric has a better record of killing people than nuclear.