Once the immune system gets the upper hand, yes. But sometimes the immune system never gets the upper hand in those aborted treatments, or not completely. For example, Staphylococcus Aureus often just gets more or less isolated in a pus bag, and the immune system can't finish it off, or it takes a long time to finish it off. What could look like an abcess finally healing, could well be just reducing its size and having a recurring infection later.
Well, then you're still including folks like Uri Geller in the unethical category then.
1. Uri Geller himself claims that he has been employed by some companies to dowse for minerals or oil, though none actually admitted it. I'm sorry, but if that's true, that's _exactly_ fraud. He's taken some money for a service he can't provide, and based on some qualifications which are bogus.
2. There is a lot of damage done even indirectly in claiming to actually have psychic powers or being able to see into the future, for example by convincing people to lose their money on predictions and courses of action which don't work.
E.g., Uri Geller himself often tells people on what sports teams to bet, but it turns out most of the time his picks lose. E.g., dowsing, in addition to the money actually taken for providing that bogus service, usually results in a company wasting a lot of money to actually drill there. The whole buying the rights, hauling the equipment there, salaries, etc, adds up to a fair sum.
And while in this case it just boils down to money and faceless corporations, so I can imagine some people wouldn't feel much empathy there, but other quacks cause a lot more damage to normal people like you and me. E.g., psychic healers and the like routinely tell people to stop taking medicine, and are responsible for quite a few deaths. There have been even cases where some psychic or "holistic" healer quack told even people with _cancer_ to not have an operation, not take medicine, and ffs not even take the pain killers. So the they effectively have on their conscience (that is, if they had a conscience) causing someone to die in horrible pain over several months. How's that for damage done?
Way I see it, even if it's not done for money, convincing people to do harm to themselves is still morally wrong. And society as a whole already decided that the worst cases of it should be illegal. E.g., entrapment is not just morally wrong, but legally wrong too. E.g., claiming to be a medical doctor without a diploma is illegal in most places. Etc.
I don't have a problem there with those who admit they're just doing entertainment tricks, because then the audience knows it's just entertainment and won't base their RL decisions on it. E.g., not many people go and stake someone because they just saw a vampire movie. But claiming such powers to be real and giving people advice from a position of knowledgeable authority is an entirely different thing.
3. A lot of the charlatans claiming powers and secret knowledge are busy overtly attacking science and the scientific method, to make it easier for themselves to get their credentials accepted. This causes society as a whole a lot more harm than you'd think. If nothing else, by making more people susceptible to be harmed by the con artists from points 1 and 2.
But then that's the happy case, if only that was the damage done. It often causes people in positions of power and responsibility to put their funding and support in the quack camp, instead of doing some real science. When I hear stuff like corporations using numerology to thin the candidates pool, or using dowsing to find out where to drill next, that's not just directly X money which could be used on a more scientific approach and maybe discover something. That's also indication of a state of mind of trusting quacks over scientists, and I just don't see that company investing in scientific research the rest of the time.
To get back to Uri Geller, again, that's what he actively does all the time. To establish his credentials as the uber-psychic, he _has_ to attack the normal science, and that he does plenty.
So basically, to wrap this long rant up, there is no such thing as merely "hard" and "soft" psychics. "Hard" in that case invariably means a con artist who, directly or indirectly, does actual harm and is morally reprehensible in doing so. The question isn't just whether they bluff about their actual talents, but what actual harm they do based on that claim, or to support that claim.
Actually I'll disagree about people being unable to think logically or analytically, seein' as basically it's a built in mechanism.
That's how even learn to speak or function in the first years of your life. A baby has to, pretty much, reverse engineer speech and their own larynx and facial muscles, and do a lot of trial and error experimentation, to even start to speak.
Ok, let's say maybe that's a subconscious process, but then so is a lot of what we call "intuition" or, basically, how "Eureka!" moments work. There's a lot of processing in there that's really analytical thought, even if it doesn't happen in words.
At any rate, even later, logical and analytical thought are a part of your every day life. I've yet to meet anyone who was literally unable of it. You'd know them, because they'd be the guys who can't figure out how to work a lot of the every day items around them without being explained how to, every time they forgot or meet a new one. (Though it must be also said that it seems to be a somewhat common female syndrome to _pretend_ to be unable to do even the most trivial tasks, so the male knight in shiny armour has to come to the rescue. Think of it as trolling for attention, though, not as being genuinely unable to figure out where the USB cable from the camera goes.) And if someone was unable to follow simple "cause => consequence" logic, which is what some of the more illogical beliefs boil to, then they'd also be unable to solve such problems as "how do I turn the light on?"
Yes, there are _some_ such people, but they're a tiny minority. They're called retards. We're not even talking "less than average intelligence", we're talking the ones who get to be adults and (due to some brain disease or defect) still stuck at the mental level of a 2 year old or even worse.
Everyone else _is_ doing logical and analytical thought every day, even if they don't know fancy words for it. Believe it or not, you don't _need_ fancy lessons to do logic and solve problems in your head. Formal logic didn't teach people how to do it, it just reverse-engineered something that people were doing all the time anyway.
When people do appear illogical or unable of problem-solving is when, basically, they're not sincere (often even to themselves) about what problem they solve or about what axioms they use. They start from what they really want, solve that, then solve the extra problem of what acceptable excuse to use. When you see people string a bunch of fallacies to reach some utterly illogical conclusion, that's your clue that that's what's really at work: they're not telling you the _real_ problem they're trying to solve, or the _real_ criteria they're applying there.
People solve problems every day like "I want to have some power over you", "I want a status symbol", "I want to feel like I'm smarter than you all" (a nerd favourite), "I'm lazy and I want to work less" or "I want a bigger slice of the pie, fairness be damned." So they arrive at something that solves that problem, like, say "ok, so I'm buying a car with a wing, and you can freakin' keep taking the bus." But they can't tell you the real reason, or sometimes they can't even tell themselves the real reason. So now they have to work backwards to some reason why they objectively need an expensive car with a wing. If there is no real logic (that they can admit) that will reach the pre-defined "I need an expensive car with a wing" conclusion, then they'll have to string some fallacies to get there.
That's, in a nutshell, how people manage to look illogical, in spite of having a brain wired for logic.
Block-headed religiousness is just a particular case of that. People start from, basically, "death is scary and I need some way to think it won't _really_ happen" or "it's too depressing to think all this is my responsibility and fault, I need someone else who's responsible for my life" or even "dammit, I'm an insignificant loser, I wish I could feel like I'm someone really important, like saving the whole world
Heh. Actually, if anyone takes _that_ as their master trick question, they might be surprised how many valid responses there are to that, that _don't_ boil down to being ashamed of one's own body or having any reason to hide it. Now I'm actually all for privacy, but a question like that almost begs one to take the piss and play the devil's advocate:
- because I don't want to catch a cold,
- because, as it happens, I don't tan even if I spend two weeks on the beach (yes, it's not just because the monitor doesn't tan), and I'd rather not get burnt or even a cancer (UV tends to occasionally have that effect) just to make a silly point,
- because there are laws against that. (There are no laws about talking to your friends on the phone, though, so then why still insist that you need privacy there?)
- because when I sit on my computer chair on a warm day, I'd rather sweat my shirt and undershirt than get the chair itself wet and greasy (no matter how you are built, your skin does produce at least a bit of grease.)
- because when I'm outside and sit on a bench or better yet, on a rock, I'd rather get my pants a little dirty than get dirt and god knows what bacteria on my own skin. I'd also rather have dirty splinters and whatnot scrape against by pants than scratch my skin. (A lot of bacteria and viruses, e.g., herpes, can only get in through scratches and wounds.)
- because, frankly, I'd rather not see most _other_ people do the same. Let's face it, there are plenty of people out there I'd rather see clothed. Just go to any nudist beach and you'll notice the problem with lack of quality control. 'Nuff said.
- because clothes do offer some degree of protection against insects. Even a fly landing on your skin can be more distracting than one landing on your jacket.
- because clothes can serve as some degree of decoration, if you care about your image.
- because even if you're going for an erotic effect, sex appeal is only 10% what you have, and 90% what you leave to imagination. _Almost_ undressed, even if it's at the level of sexy lingerie, can actually be a bigger turn on than actually completely undressed.
Etc.
That's generally the problem with that kind of The Big Question to drop on non-believers and make them realize the error of their ways. It tends to actually have, no offense, of an "OMG, I'm enlightened now! I must give up everything I thought and join your cause!" effect than people imagine when they come up with it.
Now I'm not a doctor, but it seems to me that (as is usually the case) it's not that simple. Among the things that come to mind:
1. Drug resistant bacteria aren't as much caused by taking too many antibiotics, but by taking too little of an antibiotic. People take the antibiotic for 2-3 days, then they feel better, and figure out "why bother taking the rest?" Or they take an antibiotic, it makes them feel worse, skip the rest of the treatment because they know better than the doctor. Etc.
Problem is, they have a shitload of bacteria left at that point.
Will someone decide to skip their bone loss drugs too? Probably, but I'd assume somewhat fewer.
2. The fact that it's already widely used to treat bone loss, should probably tell us that if it was that easy to develop resistance to it, it would have happened already. Not saying it's impossible to, but it might just take a lot more time.
3. The relatively fast development of resistance is massively aided by the fact that bacteria can exchange genes. (Hence the jab about inhibiting their sex life.) So basically once one develops resistance, it can pass that around.
Something that attacks that very mechanism, might slow down the rate of developing and spreading resistance a lot.
... The Sims, IIRC including expanison packs, 22 million units sold in the fiscal year 2007 alone (which is actually a bit misleading, since it's the one that ended in 2006), and every single one of them around the price of a full new game. The thing to look at there isn't just the number of copies sold, but the fact that they were all sold at full price, a couple of year after the launch. By the time other games were, basically, going "yay, we've sold the millionth copy at the bargain bin for $10 and the retailer took $8 of that", The Sims and its expansion packs were still going at full price.
The Sims 2 Pets: 5.6 million copies sold in the same one year. Correct me if I'm wrong, but according to some quick mental maths that's more than Call Of Duty, Lost Planet and Dead Rising _combined_, going by your numbers.
Also not a flame, but that's a non-violent franchise that outsold any violent franchise I can think of.
World Of Warcraft, ok, technically it has violence, but it's ultra-mild by the standards of Manhunt and the like. As violent games go, this one is among the last that would come to mind as "violent". It has IIRC somewhere around 10 million active subscribers. There you go, the game with less blood and guts sold more and made (hideously much) more money.
I'll aggree that indeed someone _will_ jump in to make yet another "all we have new is more blood and guts" game, because, as I was saying, it's easy to make one of those. I'm just disaggreeing with the assessment that it's as simple as, "One with more blood and guts will sell more."
You mean like The Sims outsold any FPS ever, even without counting the expansion packs? Don't mistake your own preferences for the One True Blockbuster. There were a _lot_ of games that sold very well in spite (or maybe because) of having little or no violence.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against violence as such. But if you're going to make claims about what sells, it would be, you know, nice, to actually look at some sales numbers and not just extrapolate based on what _you_ have bought. Not everyone is a clone of yourself.
A mistake many people make is assuming, basically, "there are so many violent FPSs, because everyone wants to play a violent FPS." Actually, wrong. The rise of the FPS was based on the fact that what counts isn't the raw sales, but sales minus expenses, a.k.a. profit. At the time when FPS was rising and, say, Adventure games skirted with extinction, actually adventures were a growing market and routinely outsold FPS. But the costs of making a modern adventure were rising faster, whereas an FPS was damn cheap to make. A FPS could make a bigger profit even if it sold half the number of copies. _That's_ why everyone rushed to make an FPS.
Violent games as a more global category, are a vaguely similar case.
Coming up with an idea like Sim City or The Sims or Civilization or Tetris, is something that requires someone to come up with a brand new idea. And it turns out that there's a severe shortage of people with ideas that are (A) genuinely new, and (B) not crap. And there's a lot of risk involved, since basically you're not sure of point B until you actually launch the game. You're betting a huge bunch of money on something that you don't know how many people will like. Being a new idea, the marketting department can at best take a guess.
By comparison, it's a no-brainer to make a violent game. Wop-de-freakin'-do, so this time it's with more damage textures and more death animations. That's sooo creative. Not. And you already have a good idea of the market too. You just need to look at how many people bought last year's game, and you can have a pretty informed guess as to how many will buy the remake in higher (and gorrier) res.
So the fact that everyone and their grandma does a violent game, isn't because it's the only thing that sells. Quite on the contrary, the other category outsells it quite often. They do violent games, because it's the simple, cheap, no-risks way out.
Ya know, there was a time when, like half the little boys out there, I dreamed of being an astronaut when I grow up. Reading such things about drinking filtered sewage and such, I'm suddenly very happy I didn't become an astronaut. (Or, depending on who you choose to believe, that I never grew up;) I have a lot more respect for the brave folks doing this for the benefit of us all, but, ugh, I'm very happy to be the little coward who lets someone else brave the risks of space and beta-test the piss filter.
Exactly. Maybe the fact that a perfectly usable and popular tool scores badly on their new metrics, _and_ there's no imaginable gain whatsoever if it changed itself needlessly to fit the new metric, should only tell them that their new metric needs some more work.
More likely Google doesn't give a shit whether or not some Web 2.0 metric gives it a pat on the shoulder or not. Google:
1. Makes its money out of serving ads, not out of being the site where you spend an hour on the same page. If you came, searched and looked at their ads, that's it.
2. Google's secret sauce is the brand name and search algorithm, not its Nielsen rating. People go to Google because they have something to search, and gets new users by word of mouth and by the deals it has with the likes of Mozilla to make their site the default home page. It's not like users start with Nielsen's Top X page and find out about Google there.
In other words, it seems... surrealistic to read the title and summary that Nielsen's ratings will hurt Google. Google doesn't get any income or users out of what rating it has, so the amount of "hurt" will be anywhere between insignificant and none whatsoever.
3. It seems to me like a flawed rating anyway, _especially_ coming from a usability expert. Google's search is a tool. Being able to just do what you needed done, quickly and with a minimum of useless fluff, is what a lot of us would call a good tool.
And the need for such tools won't go away just because some other sites work in a different way. Just because Ebay existed (as an example of a site where users spend a lot of time in a row), didn't make Google obsolete before, so why would it now?
4. Why the heck does it even matter, other than techno-fetishism, in Google's case, whether it's page refreshes or some AJAX kind of thing that fetches the results in the same page? No, seriously. Each search produces a different list, so essentially it _is_ a different "document". The browser is already perfectly able to display a new document. Why would anyone sane want to try to, basically, reinvent the page refresh in Javascript instead of using the browser's existing mechanism? No, seriously.
AJAX and the like make sense when you can actually have most of the data and the processing client-side, and you can actually offer some purely client-side functionality. In Google's case that's not even possible. You can't transfer the whole search database to the browser as XML and let the user tinker with the search expression locally, in the same document. So it's going to involve a round trip to the server and displaying a new result list anyway. So why not just let the browser display the new page?
Nielsen is generally a smart guy, but maybe there is no One True Metric to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. For some things it is a usability advantage to do more client side and not refresh the page, while for other things it makes no sense whatsoever. The focus should be on how well and intuitively is the user served by the site, not on promoting one arbitrary metric like time spent, taken out of context, for everything.
The problem is, how do you know someone's answer is a lie just because it doesn't match your One True Answer(TM)?
I know people who don't drink coffee at all for example, and, yes, they work in IT. Honestly, until I was in the late 20's, I didn't either. I'm naturally hyperexcitable, and coffee really doesn't help with that. Other people have blood pressure problems, heart problems, god knows what else that doesn't go well with caffeine.
Just having a nerdy job doesn't mean it's predestined that you skip sleep and are a zombie in the morning. If you can't answer anything but, "Mmmmmpph? Grrrrrrumph. Mrphythuber kurbendurby! Mrffff" before you had your coffee -- and that's at least one hour after you woke up, since you had to at least eat, dress and drive to work, even if you skipped shower -- it just means you skipped entirely too much sleep lately, nothing more. It just means you're the kind who can't plan your time well even at home, so, if I'm to be mean, as far as fitness for IT goes, why should anyone trust you to estimate your projects and better?
It may be a somewhat more common syndrome among nerds, but that's as far as I can tell just a consequence of the general attitude of "I'm right by definition, everyone else is wrong" (including the doctors who say you need 8 hours of sleep) and "I'm fundamentally different from everyone else, I'm a sort of superman". Whereas the "lowlier" people will just accept their fate and go to sleep, the nerd knows he's such a complete genius, that he's obviously right in every idea he has, including "I'll just play one more Civ 4 turn"... at 4 AM.
Or what about people who understood it as "the first job-related thing you do in the morning?" I mean, otherwise, the honest first thing would have been "I hit the alarm clock" or "i get out of bed".
At any rate, that's the problem I have with bullshit "let's see who's honest" questions at job interviews. More often than not they don't measure whether you lied or not, but whether you picked one of the acceptable lies.
E.g., in your example of measuring "sincerity", someone who doesn't drink coffee would have more chances of passing your interview by telling a _lie_. "Oh, yes, I drink a coffee like everyone else in IT." You're not measuring whether someone lies or not, you're actually applying a flawed stereotype and requiring people to lie that they're the embodiment of that flawed stereotype.
To illustrate it with another popular bullshit question, the "what's your biggest deffect?" used to be all the rage, and probably still is in a lot of places. So people starting getting rejected as liars when everyone started saying "I'm a perfectionist." It must be a lie, right?
Well, that's good and fine, but what about people who are genuinely OCPD cases? It's actually a somewhat common personality disorder among nerds, and you just need to witness some of the flamewars or threads on Slashdot to see that some (but, of course, not all) genuinely lack shades of grey between white and black. Of course, most would fail to see anything wrong with it. They'll be convinced that they're the ones who have the right, high-enough standards, and everyone else is just an underachiever with lax standards. But many have been told "you're too much of a perfectionist" often enough to at least be aware that by the faulty standards of everyone else it's perceived as a defect.
So what happens when someone is actually honest when they put that on the form? Right, they'll get rejected as a liar, because that's not one of the acceptable answers. In effect, paradoxically, they'd have had their chance to pass for a honest guy, if they thought up some creative lie.
Tell me again why you kept believing them after the first 3 times of not receiving the password despite them saying you would? How many times does someone have to call wolf before you stop believing them so you can take more drastic action? I can tell you that I definitely wouldn't be letting them drag me along for 6 weeks. Geez. You did most of the damage yourself and they just let it happen because they knew nothing else would come of their lies. Assuming someone is nice and ethical is great because you give them the benefit of the doubt but it shouldn't take you 6 weeks to figure out that something isn't right. It seems to run in your family though so I guess it's genetic.
Could be genetic, or it could be just education. No idea. Mom is pretty much the living D&D Paladin stereotype, so it's not entirely surprising either way.
To my partial defense, it was only the second time I ever had to call 1st level tech support in my life, and the first time I had just needed some quick info. Nowadays, yeah, I'd be a lot more annoying after the first 2-3 tries, but at the time I still had a head full of stupid ideas, like that _one_ of those guys would finally do his job, since they only had to click a couple of times to do it. Or, you know, freakin' _say_ it if something's wrong or they need more proof that I'm me. You know, not the most challenging or exhausting task, since I'm already on the phone with them.
I can't say I even had the excuse of being young and dumb, so obviously it's just dumb.
At any rate, that's not important. I'm... me. I can't take myself back to the factory and demand a refund, so I guess I'll have to live with myself as I am;)
The important part is: could it be that at least _some_ of the people in TFA are in the same situation? As they say, "if you're one in a million, there are six thousand just like you." And most personality disorders or education mistakes tend to be more frequent than one in a million. So I can't be the only one. Can it be that some people were just trying to be trusting and nice, above and beyond the call of duty, and for their effort they just got demonized as "lookit the evil guys calling 25 times a month to waste our resources?" Just a thought.
Ah, right, I should learn to read the title too. I only saw "telco and isp, why?", which left me kinda guessing what's meant there. My bad.
Well, because it wasn't meant to be a "name and shame" kind of post. But, on second thought, I don't really feel a need to protect the idiots, either. So, here we go: I'm talking about the Deutsche Telekom and their daughter company T-Online.
To their "defense", they used to be the state-owned monopoly, and it partially still shows.
Because these guys split their ISP department as a daughter company. Don't ask me why. So although you have to get your landline through the telco (telephone company) to get DSL from the daughter company, you still have to deal with two companies, both just as inept.
Well, it doesn't really make a difference to the story, I guess. It just sorta felt natural at the time to phrase it like that, since it's a telco and an ISP.
Or did you mean something else with that question?
Well, in retrospect, it would have made sense. To my defense, though, we're in Europe, where most people are a bit less trigger-happy about using lawyers to solve a consumer issue. Lawyers are sorta more the last resort, than the warning shot;)
1. So at one point I decided to change my password for my email account. Their web-site had a brain-fart and changed my internet login password too, and, here's the fun part: neither the old one nor the new one worked. But, ok, let's say I somehow screwed up myself, that's not the issue. Read on.
So I call tech support. The guy makes me try both passwords, with and without caps lock, etc, none works. Asks for my invoice number. I receive the invoice together with the phone invoice, he assures me that's the number he needs. I read it to him. "Ok, all's right, you'll receive the new password by post in 1-2 days." Ok, I wait for a week, nothing happens.
I try again. I get asked for the invoice number. "Sure, we'll send you the new password by post. You'll get it in 1-2 days." Nothing happens. Some 3 days later, I try again. "Sure, we'll send you the new password by post. You'll get it in 1-2 days." Repeat.
At some point I get majorly annoyed and start calling daily. "Ah, oops, it wasn't changed, you'll get the new one by post." The circus repeated verbatim for one and a half months. By then I had dug out an old ISDN card and was using a call-by-call paid-by-minute provider just to, you know, be able to read emails on my other account.
Eventually I get _really_ annoyed and escalate it to hell and back. That was a lot of phone calls in a burst. Turns out that when I moved, both the isp department and the telco gave me new invoice numbers. Different ones. The phone bill only contained the telco one. So the retarded ech support monkeys saw that the number doesn't match, and lied to me. For a whole fucking month and a half, none of them could just tell me "oi, it doesn't match, come with some ID at one of our offices". Nah, they fucking lied to me.
2. My brother buys a house and moves, gives the same retarded telco and ISP the new address, is assured he'll have the new connection within a week. Let me also add that we found out at some point that he's flagged as a sort of VIP customer in their database. (No idea why, maybe because both he and his wife are addicted to their mobile phones, and get a bigger phone bill than some small-ish companies.) So, you know, you'd expect some better treatment than Joe Average.
At any rate, nothing happens. He calls again, get told, "oops, true, nothing was started, we'll send someone ASAP." Nothing happens. Calls again, gets told the same story. I advised him to escalate ASAP, but he too is the kind of idiot who believes that everyone is nice and will actually do what they assured him they'll do. Just like I am. So he too gets to call increasingly often for a month and a half, until he gets in a burst asking to escalate.
The problem? Let's say his house number is 42B. (Not the actual number, but the B is the right one.) So some call centre monkey mis-typed it as 42S. You know, finger slipped. Of course, S doesn't exist there, so they did nothing. But from there noone actually told him what the bloody hell is wrong there, and why they don't activate his connection. They lied to him, again and again, for a whole freaking month and a half. "Oh, yes, we'll send someone tomorrow."
Idiots.
So, you know, sometimes you have to call more than 25 times in a month, because the guys at the other end are simply complete lying cretins, or are required to work by some retarded rules that require them to be complete lying cretins. Sometimes if you just call once and give it a rest, the problem doesn't even _start_ to be solved.
So before demonizing someone for calling 25 times in a month, based on that awful experience, I'll at least give them the benefit of the doubt.
The spear is close range, relatively, but it also requires less... thinking, if you will. Most spear formations were just a wall of spear points. It's not just that you need less training, it's that people getting "omg, I can't do this" ideas won't affect their aim. You don't actually need to aim much. They can even close their eyes if they can't take the violence, and as long as they hold on to that spear, it's ok.
With a sword, you have to think in real time where you want to slash at that guy. With a spear you just have to keep it pointed that-a-way.
Melee is a scary thing even for modern trained soldiers. I'm still hearing stories passed through generations in my family about (now dead) relatives who didn't know if they killed anyone in a bayonet charge, or if it was friend or foe, because they just closed their eyes and ran that-a-way. You can do that with a spear (or rifle with a bayonet), you can't quite do that with a sword.
It's melee, but a slightly different kind of melee, if you will.
Other than that, indeed, I'm only claiming that it might well have been what got warfare invented. From there, we found ways to organize ourselves for that.
But indeed, correlation doesn't imply causation, so until someone invents a time machine, alas, it will remain just a hypothesis.
To drag it back on topic, though: IIRC what got the brits with their panties in a knot about extreme porn, was a case where one deranged guy watched a bunch of snuff movies, then went and strangled a woman to death.
I'm sorry, but that's a completely different place to draw the border than "missionary position in marriage for procreation under the covers with the lights out". That's a fundamentally different point.
At that point we're not even talking about an aversion to sex, but about an aversion to _murder_. That's a fundamentally different thing.
I'm not a prude in any form or shape, and as far as porn itself goes, I couldn't care less if you watch people having sex. But if anyone's fantasy is _killing_ someone for sexual gratification, let me say I'd consider them dangerously disturbed. Or disturbingly dangerous. Regardless of whether it's triggered by movies or not, that's someone who's seriously messed up in the head.
We're not talking about anyone criminalizing you for masturbation, or for having a 69 instead of missionary position. We're talking a fantasy about murder. It's a freakin' fundamentally different activity than sex. We're not talking "slippery slope" kind of arguments from masturbation to murder, we're talking about someone who's turned on by murder and fantasizes about murder in the first place.
I don't even care if it's necessarily in a sex context or not, that someone better freakin' get some psychiatric help ASAP.
And much as I'm not necessarily about censorship as such, just to play the devil's advocate: I fail to see what good it does to provide movies for _that_ deranged minority. Again, I'm not talking about people having sex in a different position, not even BDSM between consenting adults, but people who are deranged enough to fantasize about murder. I don't want _those_ treated like yet another minority, or as, really, just a small deviation from missionary position, I want those in a freakin' mental hospital where they can't actually enact that fantasy.
Do movies trigger them to act on those fantasies? I don't know. But I'll say they're messed up in the head as it is. With or without movies, that's a disturbingly unbalanced person who gets an erection at the thought of taking a life.
And being that usually schizophrenia _is_ a slippery slope by itself, and it will often get worse over time if untreated, I'd rather have them treated before they get worse enough to actually start enacting those fantasies. I don't want them catered for and reassured that, really, they're no different than anyone else, and it's only bigotry and closed mindedness that gets people against them. I want them to go to a good psychiatrist ASAP. It's not bigotry, it's not closed mindedness, and it's not just some arbitrary religious dogma that makes people have an aversion to _murder_.
Ah, yes, Milgram. I'm aware of it, and the objections to it are many. It could make a thread all by itself.
Let's just say, though, that:
1. That people can obey authority, isn't exactly new in and by itself. We have an army, don't we? Claiming that you can just turn people into an equivalent of Eichmann, though, is a whole other thing, and so much bullshit it could fertilize a few acres.
On one hand we have (A) people who were coaxed at every step, weren't face to face with the victim, in some versions were assured by 2 additional teachers that it's not dangerous, etc, and even so a lot were disoriented and even shocked after the experiment, vs (B) Eichmann who continued to send people to the concentration camps even after he was ordered not to. And knowing full well what happens there. I'm sorry, but other than as trolling, I can't see how anyone can put an equals sign between the two.
2. None of the participants were face to face with the victim, and essentially we don't know what they even thought or understood there. Did they really think "I'm killing someone" or maybe, "this has to be a joke?" I know I'd think the latter in such an incredible a setup. Being asked to administer someone unseen a 450 V shock, ranks up there with "press this button to have an invisible unicorn kick and invisible gnome."
The debriefing was superficial to the extreme, and even so, apart from a couple of people who claimed life-changing revelations, most seemed to not even have fully understood what they have done. The "omg, I had a revelation about myself" gang were actually extremely few, although quoted all over the place. The number of those who weren't even sure what the experiment did, if anything at all, outweighed them by far.
3. Even if you take his number at face value, obedience was by and large proportional to the number of figures of authority reassuring the subject that they're, not, in fact, doing anything dangerous. Even whether the experiment happened in an university (where you'd assume no mass killings would take place in broad daylight), or not, played a huge role and modified the percentage quite a bit.
When additional "professors" were involved, compliance varied between almost none, when the additional "professors" said it's dangerous to go any higher, to almost complete, when they said it's perfectly safe.
I don't know about you, but I can hardly put an equals sign between (A) someone doing something, even as bizarre as in the Milgram experiment, while reassured (directly or indirectly) by experts that it's safe, and (B) Eichmann and the like, who knew full well what they're doing. Unless you make an experiment that says, in a nutshell, "push this button to kill someone", I don't see how that equivalence can be argued in any form or shape. Here the reassurance from figures of authority was that you're _not_ actually doing anything dangerous. It's just not the same thing.
At most, what the Milgram experiment measures, is to what extent people would trust an expert against their common sense. But I suppose that wouldn't be as good for trolling for attention as, basically, "hey, looky, we can make people act like a famous (at the moment) war criminal". I mean, the former is just why you take medicine even if it makes you feel worse, while the later makes headlines.
4. Since that "it's not nearly as hard as you think" seems to be aimed at my claim that it's hard to turn a normal human into a premeditated murderer, I don't see anything suggesting premeditation in Milgram's experiment either. Even if you want to trust his conclusions to the letter, it's at best some people who were pressured to continue all the time, and at some point went with the flow because the authority figure next to them kept nagging them to continue. That's a freakin' huge difference between that, and, say, telling someone "the day after tomorrow you go and blow up a school." Most people gave up as soon as the authority figure wasn't in the same room (or wasn't perceived as enough of an authority figure, for that matter.)
Actually, it's the theory that fits the historical records we do have. Regardless of what you personally want or don't want to believe about humans, the earliest evidence for war we actually have, also suspiciously aligns with the first evidence for missile weapons. Maybe it's just coincidence, maybe we don't have all the pieces, but, really, that's the pieces we have so far.
Also, heh, please read some actual history, if you think the sword was anywhere _near_ the most common weapon. The sword was an expensive weapon of the elites. _The_ most common weapon by far was the _spear_, and more soldiers went into battle holding one than everything else combined. From the greek phalanx to the medieval pike formations, _that_ was the number one weapon.
Also note that I didn't say it's the _only_ way to have warfare, so I'm not exactly sure who you're arguing with there. I only said that it was the easiest way to get the ball rolling at a primitive point in human prehistory, when we didn't yet have all the groupthink indoctrination and everything else.
There _are_, yes, plenty of ways to get humans to pretend they're brave and fearless warriors, and use their own social instincts to make them do something antisocial. You'll notice I've listed some such mechanisms myself earlier in the thread.
I'll give you another one too: for a long time in ancient history and partially through the middle ages, society basically was split into warriors, clergy and peasants. We didn't have mass conscription until the French revolution. For most of history, if that's what you want to argue, society was split hard into those who can kill when ordered and those who won't be asked to. (Or won't be expected to do much good other than delaying the enemy a bit.) Armies were mostly made of a mix of warriors by caste (e.g., knights) and warriors by choice of profession (mercenaries).
That's why that combat with spears and swords worked: because you started with the people who can do it, and didn't really have to turn a peaceful peasant into a killing machine. Well, ok, you started with those who thought they can, and those who guessed wrong, wouldn't last long one way or another. Either they'd get killed/enslaved/whatever in the first battle, or they'd desert after the first battle.
Even for warriors by caste, there was always the way out of joining the clergy, if they didn't really have the stomach for combat. There were a lot of people who branched that way.
But all that happened much later in history. Before you can have an army and a whole society and indoctrination centered around the warriors, you have to start having wars at all. (And a country of a size where you can make an army out of the fraction who are willing to kill. A 100 people tribe won't do much warfare with only 3 guys who like to kill, especially since probably 1 of them will end up some kind of leader.) And I'm guessing that having anonymous killing might have helped there a lot.
I'm not one of the 3%, but in some ways I'm close.
Just as a quick off-topic: unless you've either been diagnosed as a sociopath, or actually been in a situation to do someone a lot of harm and couldn't even think why you'd ever care about what they feel, you don't really know that. Maybe you are, maybe you aren't.
See, everyone is able to rationalize evil, whether as the logical course of action, or as the natural state and behaviour of the human species. Or both. That's why those 3% are accepted and even admired by many. They're the guys "tough enough to do what needs to be done", or similar excuses. It doesn't really make you one of them just because you can follow a logical argument, even one boiling down to "well, it's logical to kill someone to get their stuff if you need it". Everyone can follow such an argument, just because, well, we all have brains.
To actually be a sociopath, you'd need to not even understand why you'd care about that other guy, nor need to rationalize it to yourself in any form or shape. It's all about lack of a connection to the other humans, in a nutshell. It's sorta like being the only human, in a world of unimportant, dumb, expendable NPCs. They don't matter, their feelings don't matter, they're just there to be manipulated, deceived, hurt, even killed, if it keeps you entertained and you can get away with it. (I.e., you might still postpone it, if you suspect the other NPCs would show up with pitchforks and torches at your door.)
The test is, sorta, if push came to shove and you had to pull the trigger, if it still came as natural as "well, duh, it's what humans _do_" or you had to get past an "omfg, I can't do it" reflex, and if you could look yourself in the mirror the next day without going "omfg, what have I done."
We humans have a nasty side, yes, and can even kill each other naturally in a fit of rage. Getting us to commit premeditated murder, though, is a much harder proposition. Which is why we had to invent all those mechanisms to help get over that natural reflex.
I must confess that I'm no expert on gorillas, so that's fascinating. Can you please provide a link or something?
I know other animals fight for territory, but they tend to keep it non-lethal and stop when one of them gives up. E.g., cats have the natural weapons to take each other apart if they wanted to, but tend to not even escalate it to the level of serious wounds unless everything else failed. (Typically a human put them together in the same room, so the loser has really nowhere to go.)
I'm not aware of any animal waging war, or anything even remotely similar to human war. There is plenty of metaphor and people anthropomorphising animals by giving them human motives and pretending that they have human behaviours, but I'm not aware of any case where "war" among animals was more than a metaphor by humans for humans.
But, as I was saying, I'm not an expert on gorillas by any reckoning, so I'm not ruling it out a priori. I'm genuinely curious.
Re:I kinda doubt it
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Explosives Camp
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· Score: 2, Interesting
In a nutshell, because the 3% who don't have the scruples, at some point managed to manipulate everyone else into going to death for the greater glory of those 3%.
It also seems to have started with (A) religion, and (B) missile weapons. Whatever prehistoric record (fossils, cave paintings, etc) we have seems to be mostly about hunting animals, until the bow is invented. Then we start having paintings of groups of archers, led by some shamen with some relics/totems/etc, shooting at each other.
I don't think either of the two was accidental.
Missile weapons are the easiest: they allow reasonable denial. When you're one of 300 guys shooting arrows, you never know for sure if it's your arrow that killed that other guy. Basically you need a lot less ideology, training and indoctrination to get people to use a ranged weapon without sights.
(Incidentally, that would persist for an awfully long time. As late as the US independence war, the British muskets didn't have iron sights, precisely because it allowed every soldier to think maybe _he_ didn't kill anyone. A lot of the brits were appalled by the minutemen with their sights on their rifled guns, and thought of them as premeditated murderers.)
Religion was also easy, since it was the earliest form of indoctrination and offered a very easy answer to "well, why should we kill those other guys?" Duh, because the gods want to, because the gods proclaimed those other guys to be unworthy to live or even be called humans, and will exact much revenge on our tribe if we don't do as they command. You wouldn't want to have the death of your tribesmen on your hands because you refused to obey the gods' will, would you?
Helped get the groupthink ball rolling too, which made it easier from there.
The easiest way to make a person, let's call him Joe Average, to do something dumb and which he despises, is to put him in a group of 1000 people who chest-thump _for_ doing that thing. You know, Joe doesn't want to go kill the guys in the next tribe, and his self-preservation instinct says, "dude, you'll probably get killed, and you don't have anything to gain even if you don't. All you can 'gain' in that war is to come back alive." But Joe thinks that his tribe will shun him and maybe even cast him out if he doesn't look as brave, fearless, war-like and patriotic as everyone else. Watch Joe too start chest-thumping and sabre-rattling for war, and proclaiming that only a coward and a traitor would try to weasel himself out.
In reality, the other 999 people think exactly as Joe does, but none of them will admit it. If Joe came out and said, "duh, that's dumb, count me out", each of those 999 people actually think the same deep down inside, but can't admit it either. Often not even to themselves. (Denial often works like that.) So they _will_ boo at Joe, shun Joe, and maybe even cast Joe out of the tribe, rather than admit that they were thinking the same thing even for a moment. Because now you're back to square 1: a group of 999 people, each trying to not look like he condones that kind of cowardice in front of the other 998.
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Once the immune system gets the upper hand, yes. But sometimes the immune system never gets the upper hand in those aborted treatments, or not completely. For example, Staphylococcus Aureus often just gets more or less isolated in a pus bag, and the immune system can't finish it off, or it takes a long time to finish it off. What could look like an abcess finally healing, could well be just reducing its size and having a recurring infection later.
Well, then you're still including folks like Uri Geller in the unethical category then.
1. Uri Geller himself claims that he has been employed by some companies to dowse for minerals or oil, though none actually admitted it. I'm sorry, but if that's true, that's _exactly_ fraud. He's taken some money for a service he can't provide, and based on some qualifications which are bogus.
2. There is a lot of damage done even indirectly in claiming to actually have psychic powers or being able to see into the future, for example by convincing people to lose their money on predictions and courses of action which don't work.
E.g., Uri Geller himself often tells people on what sports teams to bet, but it turns out most of the time his picks lose. E.g., dowsing, in addition to the money actually taken for providing that bogus service, usually results in a company wasting a lot of money to actually drill there. The whole buying the rights, hauling the equipment there, salaries, etc, adds up to a fair sum.
And while in this case it just boils down to money and faceless corporations, so I can imagine some people wouldn't feel much empathy there, but other quacks cause a lot more damage to normal people like you and me. E.g., psychic healers and the like routinely tell people to stop taking medicine, and are responsible for quite a few deaths. There have been even cases where some psychic or "holistic" healer quack told even people with _cancer_ to not have an operation, not take medicine, and ffs not even take the pain killers. So the they effectively have on their conscience (that is, if they had a conscience) causing someone to die in horrible pain over several months. How's that for damage done?
Way I see it, even if it's not done for money, convincing people to do harm to themselves is still morally wrong. And society as a whole already decided that the worst cases of it should be illegal. E.g., entrapment is not just morally wrong, but legally wrong too. E.g., claiming to be a medical doctor without a diploma is illegal in most places. Etc.
I don't have a problem there with those who admit they're just doing entertainment tricks, because then the audience knows it's just entertainment and won't base their RL decisions on it. E.g., not many people go and stake someone because they just saw a vampire movie. But claiming such powers to be real and giving people advice from a position of knowledgeable authority is an entirely different thing.
3. A lot of the charlatans claiming powers and secret knowledge are busy overtly attacking science and the scientific method, to make it easier for themselves to get their credentials accepted. This causes society as a whole a lot more harm than you'd think. If nothing else, by making more people susceptible to be harmed by the con artists from points 1 and 2.
But then that's the happy case, if only that was the damage done. It often causes people in positions of power and responsibility to put their funding and support in the quack camp, instead of doing some real science. When I hear stuff like corporations using numerology to thin the candidates pool, or using dowsing to find out where to drill next, that's not just directly X money which could be used on a more scientific approach and maybe discover something. That's also indication of a state of mind of trusting quacks over scientists, and I just don't see that company investing in scientific research the rest of the time.
To get back to Uri Geller, again, that's what he actively does all the time. To establish his credentials as the uber-psychic, he _has_ to attack the normal science, and that he does plenty.
So basically, to wrap this long rant up, there is no such thing as merely "hard" and "soft" psychics. "Hard" in that case invariably means a con artist who, directly or indirectly, does actual harm and is morally reprehensible in doing so. The question isn't just whether they bluff about their actual talents, but what actual harm they do based on that claim, or to support that claim.
Actually I'll disagree about people being unable to think logically or analytically, seein' as basically it's a built in mechanism.
That's how even learn to speak or function in the first years of your life. A baby has to, pretty much, reverse engineer speech and their own larynx and facial muscles, and do a lot of trial and error experimentation, to even start to speak.
Ok, let's say maybe that's a subconscious process, but then so is a lot of what we call "intuition" or, basically, how "Eureka!" moments work. There's a lot of processing in there that's really analytical thought, even if it doesn't happen in words.
At any rate, even later, logical and analytical thought are a part of your every day life. I've yet to meet anyone who was literally unable of it. You'd know them, because they'd be the guys who can't figure out how to work a lot of the every day items around them without being explained how to, every time they forgot or meet a new one. (Though it must be also said that it seems to be a somewhat common female syndrome to _pretend_ to be unable to do even the most trivial tasks, so the male knight in shiny armour has to come to the rescue. Think of it as trolling for attention, though, not as being genuinely unable to figure out where the USB cable from the camera goes.) And if someone was unable to follow simple "cause => consequence" logic, which is what some of the more illogical beliefs boil to, then they'd also be unable to solve such problems as "how do I turn the light on?"
Yes, there are _some_ such people, but they're a tiny minority. They're called retards. We're not even talking "less than average intelligence", we're talking the ones who get to be adults and (due to some brain disease or defect) still stuck at the mental level of a 2 year old or even worse.
Everyone else _is_ doing logical and analytical thought every day, even if they don't know fancy words for it. Believe it or not, you don't _need_ fancy lessons to do logic and solve problems in your head. Formal logic didn't teach people how to do it, it just reverse-engineered something that people were doing all the time anyway.
When people do appear illogical or unable of problem-solving is when, basically, they're not sincere (often even to themselves) about what problem they solve or about what axioms they use. They start from what they really want, solve that, then solve the extra problem of what acceptable excuse to use. When you see people string a bunch of fallacies to reach some utterly illogical conclusion, that's your clue that that's what's really at work: they're not telling you the _real_ problem they're trying to solve, or the _real_ criteria they're applying there.
People solve problems every day like "I want to have some power over you", "I want a status symbol", "I want to feel like I'm smarter than you all" (a nerd favourite), "I'm lazy and I want to work less" or "I want a bigger slice of the pie, fairness be damned." So they arrive at something that solves that problem, like, say "ok, so I'm buying a car with a wing, and you can freakin' keep taking the bus." But they can't tell you the real reason, or sometimes they can't even tell themselves the real reason. So now they have to work backwards to some reason why they objectively need an expensive car with a wing. If there is no real logic (that they can admit) that will reach the pre-defined "I need an expensive car with a wing" conclusion, then they'll have to string some fallacies to get there.
That's, in a nutshell, how people manage to look illogical, in spite of having a brain wired for logic.
Block-headed religiousness is just a particular case of that. People start from, basically, "death is scary and I need some way to think it won't _really_ happen" or "it's too depressing to think all this is my responsibility and fault, I need someone else who's responsible for my life" or even "dammit, I'm an insignificant loser, I wish I could feel like I'm someone really important, like saving the whole world
Well, AFAIK because
1. It gives it more time to exchange genes with the other 500 million bacteria.
2. Because the immune system also has a lot more other targets and might miss it long enough to get coughed/sneezed/whatever out.
Heh. Actually, if anyone takes _that_ as their master trick question, they might be surprised how many valid responses there are to that, that _don't_ boil down to being ashamed of one's own body or having any reason to hide it. Now I'm actually all for privacy, but a question like that almost begs one to take the piss and play the devil's advocate:
- because I don't want to catch a cold,
- because, as it happens, I don't tan even if I spend two weeks on the beach (yes, it's not just because the monitor doesn't tan), and I'd rather not get burnt or even a cancer (UV tends to occasionally have that effect) just to make a silly point,
- because there are laws against that. (There are no laws about talking to your friends on the phone, though, so then why still insist that you need privacy there?)
- because when I sit on my computer chair on a warm day, I'd rather sweat my shirt and undershirt than get the chair itself wet and greasy (no matter how you are built, your skin does produce at least a bit of grease.)
- because when I'm outside and sit on a bench or better yet, on a rock, I'd rather get my pants a little dirty than get dirt and god knows what bacteria on my own skin. I'd also rather have dirty splinters and whatnot scrape against by pants than scratch my skin. (A lot of bacteria and viruses, e.g., herpes, can only get in through scratches and wounds.)
- because, frankly, I'd rather not see most _other_ people do the same. Let's face it, there are plenty of people out there I'd rather see clothed. Just go to any nudist beach and you'll notice the problem with lack of quality control. 'Nuff said.
- because clothes do offer some degree of protection against insects. Even a fly landing on your skin can be more distracting than one landing on your jacket.
- because clothes can serve as some degree of decoration, if you care about your image.
- because even if you're going for an erotic effect, sex appeal is only 10% what you have, and 90% what you leave to imagination. _Almost_ undressed, even if it's at the level of sexy lingerie, can actually be a bigger turn on than actually completely undressed.
Etc.
That's generally the problem with that kind of The Big Question to drop on non-believers and make them realize the error of their ways. It tends to actually have, no offense, of an "OMG, I'm enlightened now! I must give up everything I thought and join your cause!" effect than people imagine when they come up with it.
Now I'm not a doctor, but it seems to me that (as is usually the case) it's not that simple. Among the things that come to mind:
1. Drug resistant bacteria aren't as much caused by taking too many antibiotics, but by taking too little of an antibiotic. People take the antibiotic for 2-3 days, then they feel better, and figure out "why bother taking the rest?" Or they take an antibiotic, it makes them feel worse, skip the rest of the treatment because they know better than the doctor. Etc.
Problem is, they have a shitload of bacteria left at that point.
Will someone decide to skip their bone loss drugs too? Probably, but I'd assume somewhat fewer.
2. The fact that it's already widely used to treat bone loss, should probably tell us that if it was that easy to develop resistance to it, it would have happened already. Not saying it's impossible to, but it might just take a lot more time.
3. The relatively fast development of resistance is massively aided by the fact that bacteria can exchange genes. (Hence the jab about inhibiting their sex life.) So basically once one develops resistance, it can pass that around.
Something that attacks that very mechanism, might slow down the rate of developing and spreading resistance a lot.
... The Sims, IIRC including expanison packs, 22 million units sold in the fiscal year 2007 alone (which is actually a bit misleading, since it's the one that ended in 2006), and every single one of them around the price of a full new game. The thing to look at there isn't just the number of copies sold, but the fact that they were all sold at full price, a couple of year after the launch. By the time other games were, basically, going "yay, we've sold the millionth copy at the bargain bin for $10 and the retailer took $8 of that", The Sims and its expansion packs were still going at full price.
The Sims 2 Pets: 5.6 million copies sold in the same one year. Correct me if I'm wrong, but according to some quick mental maths that's more than Call Of Duty, Lost Planet and Dead Rising _combined_, going by your numbers.
Also not a flame, but that's a non-violent franchise that outsold any violent franchise I can think of.
World Of Warcraft, ok, technically it has violence, but it's ultra-mild by the standards of Manhunt and the like. As violent games go, this one is among the last that would come to mind as "violent". It has IIRC somewhere around 10 million active subscribers. There you go, the game with less blood and guts sold more and made (hideously much) more money.
I'll aggree that indeed someone _will_ jump in to make yet another "all we have new is more blood and guts" game, because, as I was saying, it's easy to make one of those. I'm just disaggreeing with the assessment that it's as simple as, "One with more blood and guts will sell more."
You mean like The Sims outsold any FPS ever, even without counting the expansion packs? Don't mistake your own preferences for the One True Blockbuster. There were a _lot_ of games that sold very well in spite (or maybe because) of having little or no violence.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against violence as such. But if you're going to make claims about what sells, it would be, you know, nice, to actually look at some sales numbers and not just extrapolate based on what _you_ have bought. Not everyone is a clone of yourself.
A mistake many people make is assuming, basically, "there are so many violent FPSs, because everyone wants to play a violent FPS." Actually, wrong. The rise of the FPS was based on the fact that what counts isn't the raw sales, but sales minus expenses, a.k.a. profit. At the time when FPS was rising and, say, Adventure games skirted with extinction, actually adventures were a growing market and routinely outsold FPS. But the costs of making a modern adventure were rising faster, whereas an FPS was damn cheap to make. A FPS could make a bigger profit even if it sold half the number of copies. _That's_ why everyone rushed to make an FPS.
Violent games as a more global category, are a vaguely similar case.
Coming up with an idea like Sim City or The Sims or Civilization or Tetris, is something that requires someone to come up with a brand new idea. And it turns out that there's a severe shortage of people with ideas that are (A) genuinely new, and (B) not crap. And there's a lot of risk involved, since basically you're not sure of point B until you actually launch the game. You're betting a huge bunch of money on something that you don't know how many people will like. Being a new idea, the marketting department can at best take a guess.
By comparison, it's a no-brainer to make a violent game. Wop-de-freakin'-do, so this time it's with more damage textures and more death animations. That's sooo creative. Not. And you already have a good idea of the market too. You just need to look at how many people bought last year's game, and you can have a pretty informed guess as to how many will buy the remake in higher (and gorrier) res.
So the fact that everyone and their grandma does a violent game, isn't because it's the only thing that sells. Quite on the contrary, the other category outsells it quite often. They do violent games, because it's the simple, cheap, no-risks way out.
Ya know, there was a time when, like half the little boys out there, I dreamed of being an astronaut when I grow up. Reading such things about drinking filtered sewage and such, I'm suddenly very happy I didn't become an astronaut. (Or, depending on who you choose to believe, that I never grew up;) I have a lot more respect for the brave folks doing this for the benefit of us all, but, ugh, I'm very happy to be the little coward who lets someone else brave the risks of space and beta-test the piss filter.
Exactly. Maybe the fact that a perfectly usable and popular tool scores badly on their new metrics, _and_ there's no imaginable gain whatsoever if it changed itself needlessly to fit the new metric, should only tell them that their new metric needs some more work.
More likely Google doesn't give a shit whether or not some Web 2.0 metric gives it a pat on the shoulder or not. Google:
1. Makes its money out of serving ads, not out of being the site where you spend an hour on the same page. If you came, searched and looked at their ads, that's it.
2. Google's secret sauce is the brand name and search algorithm, not its Nielsen rating. People go to Google because they have something to search, and gets new users by word of mouth and by the deals it has with the likes of Mozilla to make their site the default home page. It's not like users start with Nielsen's Top X page and find out about Google there.
In other words, it seems... surrealistic to read the title and summary that Nielsen's ratings will hurt Google. Google doesn't get any income or users out of what rating it has, so the amount of "hurt" will be anywhere between insignificant and none whatsoever.
3. It seems to me like a flawed rating anyway, _especially_ coming from a usability expert. Google's search is a tool. Being able to just do what you needed done, quickly and with a minimum of useless fluff, is what a lot of us would call a good tool.
And the need for such tools won't go away just because some other sites work in a different way. Just because Ebay existed (as an example of a site where users spend a lot of time in a row), didn't make Google obsolete before, so why would it now?
4. Why the heck does it even matter, other than techno-fetishism, in Google's case, whether it's page refreshes or some AJAX kind of thing that fetches the results in the same page? No, seriously. Each search produces a different list, so essentially it _is_ a different "document". The browser is already perfectly able to display a new document. Why would anyone sane want to try to, basically, reinvent the page refresh in Javascript instead of using the browser's existing mechanism? No, seriously.
AJAX and the like make sense when you can actually have most of the data and the processing client-side, and you can actually offer some purely client-side functionality. In Google's case that's not even possible. You can't transfer the whole search database to the browser as XML and let the user tinker with the search expression locally, in the same document. So it's going to involve a round trip to the server and displaying a new result list anyway. So why not just let the browser display the new page?
Nielsen is generally a smart guy, but maybe there is no One True Metric to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. For some things it is a usability advantage to do more client side and not refresh the page, while for other things it makes no sense whatsoever. The focus should be on how well and intuitively is the user served by the site, not on promoting one arbitrary metric like time spent, taken out of context, for everything.
The problem is, how do you know someone's answer is a lie just because it doesn't match your One True Answer(TM)?
I know people who don't drink coffee at all for example, and, yes, they work in IT. Honestly, until I was in the late 20's, I didn't either. I'm naturally hyperexcitable, and coffee really doesn't help with that. Other people have blood pressure problems, heart problems, god knows what else that doesn't go well with caffeine.
Just having a nerdy job doesn't mean it's predestined that you skip sleep and are a zombie in the morning. If you can't answer anything but, "Mmmmmpph? Grrrrrrumph. Mrphythuber kurbendurby! Mrffff" before you had your coffee -- and that's at least one hour after you woke up, since you had to at least eat, dress and drive to work, even if you skipped shower -- it just means you skipped entirely too much sleep lately, nothing more. It just means you're the kind who can't plan your time well even at home, so, if I'm to be mean, as far as fitness for IT goes, why should anyone trust you to estimate your projects and better?
It may be a somewhat more common syndrome among nerds, but that's as far as I can tell just a consequence of the general attitude of "I'm right by definition, everyone else is wrong" (including the doctors who say you need 8 hours of sleep) and "I'm fundamentally different from everyone else, I'm a sort of superman". Whereas the "lowlier" people will just accept their fate and go to sleep, the nerd knows he's such a complete genius, that he's obviously right in every idea he has, including "I'll just play one more Civ 4 turn"... at 4 AM.
Or what about people who understood it as "the first job-related thing you do in the morning?" I mean, otherwise, the honest first thing would have been "I hit the alarm clock" or "i get out of bed".
At any rate, that's the problem I have with bullshit "let's see who's honest" questions at job interviews. More often than not they don't measure whether you lied or not, but whether you picked one of the acceptable lies.
E.g., in your example of measuring "sincerity", someone who doesn't drink coffee would have more chances of passing your interview by telling a _lie_. "Oh, yes, I drink a coffee like everyone else in IT." You're not measuring whether someone lies or not, you're actually applying a flawed stereotype and requiring people to lie that they're the embodiment of that flawed stereotype.
To illustrate it with another popular bullshit question, the "what's your biggest deffect?" used to be all the rage, and probably still is in a lot of places. So people starting getting rejected as liars when everyone started saying "I'm a perfectionist." It must be a lie, right?
Well, that's good and fine, but what about people who are genuinely OCPD cases? It's actually a somewhat common personality disorder among nerds, and you just need to witness some of the flamewars or threads on Slashdot to see that some (but, of course, not all) genuinely lack shades of grey between white and black. Of course, most would fail to see anything wrong with it. They'll be convinced that they're the ones who have the right, high-enough standards, and everyone else is just an underachiever with lax standards. But many have been told "you're too much of a perfectionist" often enough to at least be aware that by the faulty standards of everyone else it's perceived as a defect.
So what happens when someone is actually honest when they put that on the form? Right, they'll get rejected as a liar, because that's not one of the acceptable answers. In effect, paradoxically, they'd have had their chance to pass for a honest guy, if they thought up some creative lie.
Could be genetic, or it could be just education. No idea. Mom is pretty much the living D&D Paladin stereotype, so it's not entirely surprising either way.
To my partial defense, it was only the second time I ever had to call 1st level tech support in my life, and the first time I had just needed some quick info. Nowadays, yeah, I'd be a lot more annoying after the first 2-3 tries, but at the time I still had a head full of stupid ideas, like that _one_ of those guys would finally do his job, since they only had to click a couple of times to do it. Or, you know, freakin' _say_ it if something's wrong or they need more proof that I'm me. You know, not the most challenging or exhausting task, since I'm already on the phone with them.
I can't say I even had the excuse of being young and dumb, so obviously it's just dumb.
At any rate, that's not important. I'm... me. I can't take myself back to the factory and demand a refund, so I guess I'll have to live with myself as I am
The important part is: could it be that at least _some_ of the people in TFA are in the same situation? As they say, "if you're one in a million, there are six thousand just like you." And most personality disorders or education mistakes tend to be more frequent than one in a million. So I can't be the only one. Can it be that some people were just trying to be trusting and nice, above and beyond the call of duty, and for their effort they just got demonized as "lookit the evil guys calling 25 times a month to waste our resources?" Just a thought.
Ah, right, I should learn to read the title too. I only saw "telco and isp, why?", which left me kinda guessing what's meant there. My bad.
Well, because it wasn't meant to be a "name and shame" kind of post. But, on second thought, I don't really feel a need to protect the idiots, either. So, here we go: I'm talking about the Deutsche Telekom and their daughter company T-Online.
To their "defense", they used to be the state-owned monopoly, and it partially still shows.
Because these guys split their ISP department as a daughter company. Don't ask me why. So although you have to get your landline through the telco (telephone company) to get DSL from the daughter company, you still have to deal with two companies, both just as inept.
Well, it doesn't really make a difference to the story, I guess. It just sorta felt natural at the time to phrase it like that, since it's a telco and an ISP.
Or did you mean something else with that question?
Well, in retrospect, it would have made sense. To my defense, though, we're in Europe, where most people are a bit less trigger-happy about using lawyers to solve a consumer issue. Lawyers are sorta more the last resort, than the warning shot ;)
Just to make it clear: my awful experience wasn't with Sprint, but with a different telco and isp.
1. So at one point I decided to change my password for my email account. Their web-site had a brain-fart and changed my internet login password too, and, here's the fun part: neither the old one nor the new one worked. But, ok, let's say I somehow screwed up myself, that's not the issue. Read on.
So I call tech support. The guy makes me try both passwords, with and without caps lock, etc, none works. Asks for my invoice number. I receive the invoice together with the phone invoice, he assures me that's the number he needs. I read it to him. "Ok, all's right, you'll receive the new password by post in 1-2 days." Ok, I wait for a week, nothing happens.
I try again. I get asked for the invoice number. "Sure, we'll send you the new password by post. You'll get it in 1-2 days." Nothing happens. Some 3 days later, I try again. "Sure, we'll send you the new password by post. You'll get it in 1-2 days." Repeat.
At some point I get majorly annoyed and start calling daily. "Ah, oops, it wasn't changed, you'll get the new one by post." The circus repeated verbatim for one and a half months. By then I had dug out an old ISDN card and was using a call-by-call paid-by-minute provider just to, you know, be able to read emails on my other account.
Eventually I get _really_ annoyed and escalate it to hell and back. That was a lot of phone calls in a burst. Turns out that when I moved, both the isp department and the telco gave me new invoice numbers. Different ones. The phone bill only contained the telco one. So the retarded ech support monkeys saw that the number doesn't match, and lied to me. For a whole fucking month and a half, none of them could just tell me "oi, it doesn't match, come with some ID at one of our offices". Nah, they fucking lied to me.
2. My brother buys a house and moves, gives the same retarded telco and ISP the new address, is assured he'll have the new connection within a week. Let me also add that we found out at some point that he's flagged as a sort of VIP customer in their database. (No idea why, maybe because both he and his wife are addicted to their mobile phones, and get a bigger phone bill than some small-ish companies.) So, you know, you'd expect some better treatment than Joe Average.
At any rate, nothing happens. He calls again, get told, "oops, true, nothing was started, we'll send someone ASAP." Nothing happens. Calls again, gets told the same story. I advised him to escalate ASAP, but he too is the kind of idiot who believes that everyone is nice and will actually do what they assured him they'll do. Just like I am. So he too gets to call increasingly often for a month and a half, until he gets in a burst asking to escalate.
The problem? Let's say his house number is 42B. (Not the actual number, but the B is the right one.) So some call centre monkey mis-typed it as 42S. You know, finger slipped. Of course, S doesn't exist there, so they did nothing. But from there noone actually told him what the bloody hell is wrong there, and why they don't activate his connection. They lied to him, again and again, for a whole freaking month and a half. "Oh, yes, we'll send someone tomorrow."
Idiots.
So, you know, sometimes you have to call more than 25 times in a month, because the guys at the other end are simply complete lying cretins, or are required to work by some retarded rules that require them to be complete lying cretins. Sometimes if you just call once and give it a rest, the problem doesn't even _start_ to be solved.
So before demonizing someone for calling 25 times in a month, based on that awful experience, I'll at least give them the benefit of the doubt.
The spear is close range, relatively, but it also requires less... thinking, if you will. Most spear formations were just a wall of spear points. It's not just that you need less training, it's that people getting "omg, I can't do this" ideas won't affect their aim. You don't actually need to aim much. They can even close their eyes if they can't take the violence, and as long as they hold on to that spear, it's ok.
With a sword, you have to think in real time where you want to slash at that guy. With a spear you just have to keep it pointed that-a-way.
Melee is a scary thing even for modern trained soldiers. I'm still hearing stories passed through generations in my family about (now dead) relatives who didn't know if they killed anyone in a bayonet charge, or if it was friend or foe, because they just closed their eyes and ran that-a-way. You can do that with a spear (or rifle with a bayonet), you can't quite do that with a sword.
It's melee, but a slightly different kind of melee, if you will.
Other than that, indeed, I'm only claiming that it might well have been what got warfare invented. From there, we found ways to organize ourselves for that.
But indeed, correlation doesn't imply causation, so until someone invents a time machine, alas, it will remain just a hypothesis.
To drag it back on topic, though: IIRC what got the brits with their panties in a knot about extreme porn, was a case where one deranged guy watched a bunch of snuff movies, then went and strangled a woman to death.
I'm sorry, but that's a completely different place to draw the border than "missionary position in marriage for procreation under the covers with the lights out". That's a fundamentally different point.
At that point we're not even talking about an aversion to sex, but about an aversion to _murder_. That's a fundamentally different thing.
I'm not a prude in any form or shape, and as far as porn itself goes, I couldn't care less if you watch people having sex. But if anyone's fantasy is _killing_ someone for sexual gratification, let me say I'd consider them dangerously disturbed. Or disturbingly dangerous. Regardless of whether it's triggered by movies or not, that's someone who's seriously messed up in the head.
We're not talking about anyone criminalizing you for masturbation, or for having a 69 instead of missionary position. We're talking a fantasy about murder. It's a freakin' fundamentally different activity than sex. We're not talking "slippery slope" kind of arguments from masturbation to murder, we're talking about someone who's turned on by murder and fantasizes about murder in the first place.
I don't even care if it's necessarily in a sex context or not, that someone better freakin' get some psychiatric help ASAP.
And much as I'm not necessarily about censorship as such, just to play the devil's advocate: I fail to see what good it does to provide movies for _that_ deranged minority. Again, I'm not talking about people having sex in a different position, not even BDSM between consenting adults, but people who are deranged enough to fantasize about murder. I don't want _those_ treated like yet another minority, or as, really, just a small deviation from missionary position, I want those in a freakin' mental hospital where they can't actually enact that fantasy.
Do movies trigger them to act on those fantasies? I don't know. But I'll say they're messed up in the head as it is. With or without movies, that's a disturbingly unbalanced person who gets an erection at the thought of taking a life.
And being that usually schizophrenia _is_ a slippery slope by itself, and it will often get worse over time if untreated, I'd rather have them treated before they get worse enough to actually start enacting those fantasies. I don't want them catered for and reassured that, really, they're no different than anyone else, and it's only bigotry and closed mindedness that gets people against them. I want them to go to a good psychiatrist ASAP. It's not bigotry, it's not closed mindedness, and it's not just some arbitrary religious dogma that makes people have an aversion to _murder_.
Ah, yes, Milgram. I'm aware of it, and the objections to it are many. It could make a thread all by itself.
Let's just say, though, that:
1. That people can obey authority, isn't exactly new in and by itself. We have an army, don't we? Claiming that you can just turn people into an equivalent of Eichmann, though, is a whole other thing, and so much bullshit it could fertilize a few acres.
On one hand we have (A) people who were coaxed at every step, weren't face to face with the victim, in some versions were assured by 2 additional teachers that it's not dangerous, etc, and even so a lot were disoriented and even shocked after the experiment, vs (B) Eichmann who continued to send people to the concentration camps even after he was ordered not to. And knowing full well what happens there. I'm sorry, but other than as trolling, I can't see how anyone can put an equals sign between the two.
2. None of the participants were face to face with the victim, and essentially we don't know what they even thought or understood there. Did they really think "I'm killing someone" or maybe, "this has to be a joke?" I know I'd think the latter in such an incredible a setup. Being asked to administer someone unseen a 450 V shock, ranks up there with "press this button to have an invisible unicorn kick and invisible gnome."
The debriefing was superficial to the extreme, and even so, apart from a couple of people who claimed life-changing revelations, most seemed to not even have fully understood what they have done. The "omg, I had a revelation about myself" gang were actually extremely few, although quoted all over the place. The number of those who weren't even sure what the experiment did, if anything at all, outweighed them by far.
3. Even if you take his number at face value, obedience was by and large proportional to the number of figures of authority reassuring the subject that they're, not, in fact, doing anything dangerous. Even whether the experiment happened in an university (where you'd assume no mass killings would take place in broad daylight), or not, played a huge role and modified the percentage quite a bit.
When additional "professors" were involved, compliance varied between almost none, when the additional "professors" said it's dangerous to go any higher, to almost complete, when they said it's perfectly safe.
I don't know about you, but I can hardly put an equals sign between (A) someone doing something, even as bizarre as in the Milgram experiment, while reassured (directly or indirectly) by experts that it's safe, and (B) Eichmann and the like, who knew full well what they're doing. Unless you make an experiment that says, in a nutshell, "push this button to kill someone", I don't see how that equivalence can be argued in any form or shape. Here the reassurance from figures of authority was that you're _not_ actually doing anything dangerous. It's just not the same thing.
At most, what the Milgram experiment measures, is to what extent people would trust an expert against their common sense. But I suppose that wouldn't be as good for trolling for attention as, basically, "hey, looky, we can make people act like a famous (at the moment) war criminal". I mean, the former is just why you take medicine even if it makes you feel worse, while the later makes headlines.
4. Since that "it's not nearly as hard as you think" seems to be aimed at my claim that it's hard to turn a normal human into a premeditated murderer, I don't see anything suggesting premeditation in Milgram's experiment either. Even if you want to trust his conclusions to the letter, it's at best some people who were pressured to continue all the time, and at some point went with the flow because the authority figure next to them kept nagging them to continue. That's a freakin' huge difference between that, and, say, telling someone "the day after tomorrow you go and blow up a school." Most people gave up as soon as the authority figure wasn't in the same room (or wasn't perceived as enough of an authority figure, for that matter.)
Actually, it's the theory that fits the historical records we do have. Regardless of what you personally want or don't want to believe about humans, the earliest evidence for war we actually have, also suspiciously aligns with the first evidence for missile weapons. Maybe it's just coincidence, maybe we don't have all the pieces, but, really, that's the pieces we have so far.
Also, heh, please read some actual history, if you think the sword was anywhere _near_ the most common weapon. The sword was an expensive weapon of the elites. _The_ most common weapon by far was the _spear_, and more soldiers went into battle holding one than everything else combined. From the greek phalanx to the medieval pike formations, _that_ was the number one weapon.
Also note that I didn't say it's the _only_ way to have warfare, so I'm not exactly sure who you're arguing with there. I only said that it was the easiest way to get the ball rolling at a primitive point in human prehistory, when we didn't yet have all the groupthink indoctrination and everything else.
There _are_, yes, plenty of ways to get humans to pretend they're brave and fearless warriors, and use their own social instincts to make them do something antisocial. You'll notice I've listed some such mechanisms myself earlier in the thread.
I'll give you another one too: for a long time in ancient history and partially through the middle ages, society basically was split into warriors, clergy and peasants. We didn't have mass conscription until the French revolution. For most of history, if that's what you want to argue, society was split hard into those who can kill when ordered and those who won't be asked to. (Or won't be expected to do much good other than delaying the enemy a bit.) Armies were mostly made of a mix of warriors by caste (e.g., knights) and warriors by choice of profession (mercenaries).
That's why that combat with spears and swords worked: because you started with the people who can do it, and didn't really have to turn a peaceful peasant into a killing machine. Well, ok, you started with those who thought they can, and those who guessed wrong, wouldn't last long one way or another. Either they'd get killed/enslaved/whatever in the first battle, or they'd desert after the first battle.
Even for warriors by caste, there was always the way out of joining the clergy, if they didn't really have the stomach for combat. There were a lot of people who branched that way.
But all that happened much later in history. Before you can have an army and a whole society and indoctrination centered around the warriors, you have to start having wars at all. (And a country of a size where you can make an army out of the fraction who are willing to kill. A 100 people tribe won't do much warfare with only 3 guys who like to kill, especially since probably 1 of them will end up some kind of leader.) And I'm guessing that having anonymous killing might have helped there a lot.
Just as a quick off-topic: unless you've either been diagnosed as a sociopath, or actually been in a situation to do someone a lot of harm and couldn't even think why you'd ever care about what they feel, you don't really know that. Maybe you are, maybe you aren't.
See, everyone is able to rationalize evil, whether as the logical course of action, or as the natural state and behaviour of the human species. Or both. That's why those 3% are accepted and even admired by many. They're the guys "tough enough to do what needs to be done", or similar excuses. It doesn't really make you one of them just because you can follow a logical argument, even one boiling down to "well, it's logical to kill someone to get their stuff if you need it". Everyone can follow such an argument, just because, well, we all have brains.
To actually be a sociopath, you'd need to not even understand why you'd care about that other guy, nor need to rationalize it to yourself in any form or shape. It's all about lack of a connection to the other humans, in a nutshell. It's sorta like being the only human, in a world of unimportant, dumb, expendable NPCs. They don't matter, their feelings don't matter, they're just there to be manipulated, deceived, hurt, even killed, if it keeps you entertained and you can get away with it. (I.e., you might still postpone it, if you suspect the other NPCs would show up with pitchforks and torches at your door.)
The test is, sorta, if push came to shove and you had to pull the trigger, if it still came as natural as "well, duh, it's what humans _do_" or you had to get past an "omfg, I can't do it" reflex, and if you could look yourself in the mirror the next day without going "omfg, what have I done."
We humans have a nasty side, yes, and can even kill each other naturally in a fit of rage. Getting us to commit premeditated murder, though, is a much harder proposition. Which is why we had to invent all those mechanisms to help get over that natural reflex.
I must confess that I'm no expert on gorillas, so that's fascinating. Can you please provide a link or something?
I know other animals fight for territory, but they tend to keep it non-lethal and stop when one of them gives up. E.g., cats have the natural weapons to take each other apart if they wanted to, but tend to not even escalate it to the level of serious wounds unless everything else failed. (Typically a human put them together in the same room, so the loser has really nowhere to go.)
I'm not aware of any animal waging war, or anything even remotely similar to human war. There is plenty of metaphor and people anthropomorphising animals by giving them human motives and pretending that they have human behaviours, but I'm not aware of any case where "war" among animals was more than a metaphor by humans for humans.
But, as I was saying, I'm not an expert on gorillas by any reckoning, so I'm not ruling it out a priori. I'm genuinely curious.
In a nutshell, because the 3% who don't have the scruples, at some point managed to manipulate everyone else into going to death for the greater glory of those 3%.
It also seems to have started with (A) religion, and (B) missile weapons. Whatever prehistoric record (fossils, cave paintings, etc) we have seems to be mostly about hunting animals, until the bow is invented. Then we start having paintings of groups of archers, led by some shamen with some relics/totems/etc, shooting at each other.
I don't think either of the two was accidental.
Missile weapons are the easiest: they allow reasonable denial. When you're one of 300 guys shooting arrows, you never know for sure if it's your arrow that killed that other guy. Basically you need a lot less ideology, training and indoctrination to get people to use a ranged weapon without sights.
(Incidentally, that would persist for an awfully long time. As late as the US independence war, the British muskets didn't have iron sights, precisely because it allowed every soldier to think maybe _he_ didn't kill anyone. A lot of the brits were appalled by the minutemen with their sights on their rifled guns, and thought of them as premeditated murderers.)
Religion was also easy, since it was the earliest form of indoctrination and offered a very easy answer to "well, why should we kill those other guys?" Duh, because the gods want to, because the gods proclaimed those other guys to be unworthy to live or even be called humans, and will exact much revenge on our tribe if we don't do as they command. You wouldn't want to have the death of your tribesmen on your hands because you refused to obey the gods' will, would you?
Helped get the groupthink ball rolling too, which made it easier from there.
The easiest way to make a person, let's call him Joe Average, to do something dumb and which he despises, is to put him in a group of 1000 people who chest-thump _for_ doing that thing. You know, Joe doesn't want to go kill the guys in the next tribe, and his self-preservation instinct says, "dude, you'll probably get killed, and you don't have anything to gain even if you don't. All you can 'gain' in that war is to come back alive." But Joe thinks that his tribe will shun him and maybe even cast him out if he doesn't look as brave, fearless, war-like and patriotic as everyone else. Watch Joe too start chest-thumping and sabre-rattling for war, and proclaiming that only a coward and a traitor would try to weasel himself out.
In reality, the other 999 people think exactly as Joe does, but none of them will admit it. If Joe came out and said, "duh, that's dumb, count me out", each of those 999 people actually think the same deep down inside, but can't admit it either. Often not even to themselves. (Denial often works like that.) So they _will_ boo at Joe, shun Joe, and maybe even cast Joe out of the tribe, rather than admit that they were thinking the same thing even for a moment. Because now you're back to square 1: a group of 999 people, each trying to not look like he condones that kind of cowardice in front of the other 998.