This is a common misconception. The content is for all levels.
While technically that's true:
1. It was there at a lower level too, hence the claim that only top-levels get catered for, is false.
2. So basically a variant of the common fanboy defense, "well, you could go and do <insert pointless thing> or do it again and again, and that ought to count as more hours the game has." It's been floating around about various games since at least the 90's.
What's worse, the content that BC came out with was LARGELY level 70 content. 1%? How do you come to that figure? The multiple subsections of zones devoted to 70-only (Skywing quests, comes immediately to mind) and specific holiday events. The entire zones geared for level 70s? No less than a dozen instances. Shattered Halls, Steam Vaults, Shadow Labryinth, Caverns of Time, The Arcatraz, Mount Hyjal, Serpentshrine Caverns, Tempest Keep, Black Temple, and EVERY Heroic version of the 5-mans? People see what they want to see.
I'm talking in hours. Take the time needed to do _all_ the quests and dungeons that don't need level 70 and/or epic gear. All the quests starting with hunting boars in the Orc newbie area _and_ wolves in Northshire, all the gathering cactus apples _and_ Milly's grapes, and all the instances starting with the Deadmines _and_ RFC. That total is your first number of hours. Then take that dozen instances and measure how much time you spend inside them from start to finish. Once each, because on the second run you don't see that much new content. There are a couple of exceptions, but not that much. I haven't done the exact maths, but as gut feelings go, I'll stick with that 1%.
A common personality type wont use any content that doesn't measureably increase their usefulness at the highest tier. I submit you feel there is nothing gained from trying to solo Uldaman at level 70 or speed level or any of the non-traditional achievements that any person can imagine other than getting a sword that's +12 instead of +11. This personality type helped codify "a repetitive grind". In the asian markets, this does not exist (which is interesting from a sociological standpoint). If repetition was the problem with enjoyment, there would be a much higher suicide rate.
I have stated, many times, that the type of personality that does well with MMORPGs is not the exact same market that is assumed. Teenaged boys are tempermental, have shifting expectations, and are bored easily. You'll find the people that do well over years, are middle-aged and employed or otherwise fulfilled outside of game accomplishments.
Oh, spare me the bullshit armchair-shrink gig. You don't know anything about my age, personality, or how I play the game. Yes, I _am_ a middle aged guy _and_ employed _and_ have other accomplishments. And that is exactly _why_ I couldn't care less about a grinding to willy-wave about another piece of gear at the end. I have better things to willy-wave about than "yay, I finally got some virtual boots." Yes, I have RL accomplishments instead. And given that my whole point is that it's the road not the destination, and that I _don't_ want to grind for my top tier gear, you couldn't be more wrong anyway. But that won't stop you from doing... an ego-masturbation gig in which you pretend to know what's wrong with anyone whose tastes differ in the slightest from yours. Geeze, dude, do you even listen to yourself?
You presume to submit how _I_ feel... Heh... How about: I actually feel that I've already done Uldaman at the right level, and feel no need to solo it again at 70? It's still the same instance. I've already _seen_ those halls. But nah, that wouldn't be as good as a strawman that supports your preconceived conclusion, would it? Sorry about that.
Get over yourself. Some people can just have different styles without having some "personality problem" or being impatient kids. You're not the platinum stan
That's my problem with MMOs. Too much concentration on the top players leaving a rather boring middle. It's kind of like society. The rich and famous are looked after, cared for, etc while the middle class has to foot the bill and pay for the servers while not getting half the game.
Heh. On WoW about 99% of the content is for levels 1 to 69, and all there is to do at level 70 is a repetitive grind to give you _something_ to do until the next expansion pack comes. It used to be the same at 60, before Burning Crusade.
The same applies to virtually any game out there.
E.g., on COH you still don't even _have_ a proper endgame grind, and it used to have none at all. (Unless you count the bad joke that the Hamidon "raid" used to be. Think: get 50 controllers to spam holds, and the rest of the gang does nothing at all to not get aggro.) Nor any perspective to get further than that, because the game had 50 levels since Issue 1 and just isn't supposed to ever have more than 50 levels.
E.g., on EQ2 much the same applies as on WoW. You hit level 80, you get stuck doing a dungeon 100 times, and then move on to the tier 2 grind and do it another 100 times, and somewhere past the point where you're bored out of your freaking mind, you finally get some of your epic gear.
E.g., on SWG, there didn't even use to be an endgame at all. The grind to Jedi was mostly repeatedly nuking your old "class" (ok, skill combination) and playing another "class" from zero to max. That was it: repeating the normal game again, with whichever class you got told to use this time. And then you got a Jedi to play the game with, from zero to max again.
Etc.
How the _fuck_ does that count as catering more to the top players? Those have 1% of the content, the low and middle guys get 99%.
On virtually any game out there, it's pretty much the illustration of this absurdist joke: "Q: Why does an elephant have a tail? A: So it doesn't end abruptly." That's it. What you get at top level is the elephant's tail, and the rest of the folks get the rest of the elephant.
But of course it doesn't prevent people from imagining that there's some grand and fabulous Shangri-La at the end. That they'll suddenly have 10x more fun, angels will give them blowjobs around the clock, heralds with trumpets will announce their every move, and that a thousand Blood Elf virgins will beg to have their baby. Basically, especially if they don't find the mid-game that much fun, that there must be _some_ grand reward at the end, or people wouldn't do it.
Boy, are they going to be disappointed. What people actually get at the end is... well, look at all the disgruntled WoW bashers and all the people swearing that <NEXT GAME> will bury WoW alive, and their whole raiding guild is swearing off WoW as soon as <NEXT GAME> comes out. That's how great they're catered for at the top.
It's still the same basic game, only more repetitive. If you find the middle boring, you're going to find the top even more so. Oh, it'll be something new to be in a raid for the first time. The second time too. But by the time you've went through it a dozen times, all using the same 1-2 buttons, it starts being a heck of a lot less fun. And if you still didn't get the hint that you've finished the game and might as well move on or start an alt, you're going to keep doing it more and more and enjoying it less and less. Well past the point where that enjoyment dropped below the "watching pait dry" mark. Until one more straw breaks the camels back. And then you join the great mass of burned-out, disgruntled ex-WoW-ers. Or ex-EQ2-ers. Or whatever.
And depending on the game, you might also get asked to respec your character into something you don't like. (See all the "but I wanted to be a Shadow spec priest" whines.) Or you might discover that your class isn't even needed by anyone at the top, at all. (See, again, everyone who wasn't a controller, in the Hamidon "raid" on COH.)
Did you actually play it to the top on those MMOs you have a problem with, or are you just judging them based on what you imagine about the top?
Well, yes, but that's a silly example, because basically you're talking about data with very little worth. You probably don't play most of those 5 year old games, and even if you did, the worst that can happen is that you have to look inside the DVD case of the serial number or look for the manual (which is usually also inside the DVD case.)
So basically you're saying that even an unreliable storage is good enough if it's free... for silly data that's not worth that much.
I think RMS's argument isn't about that kind of data. E.g.,
- When a bank's computer goes nuts, the costs can be in the range of millions per hour. (See the guys who tried to repair a broken database without taking it down.)
- When a major manufacturer's data goes missing, whole factories can end up not working and again the costs are hideous.
Etc.
Stuff that _has_ happened, like Amazon's cloud (or a chunk thereof) going missing for a day or two, it won't affect you much for your serial numbers, but it can be deadly for a company. You want to have your own servers as backup, and your own guys you can call on a Saturday and tell them to fucking switch to the other server or otherwise fix it _now_. You don't want to just twiddle your thumbs until Amazon or Google come and say, "heh, oops, we did a booboo. But now it's back online, so quit acting as if we owe you anything."
Second, let's talk about privacy. Especially Google's track record is pretty scary there, and they've been known expose various bits and pieces of other people's data and act like they don't even see what's wrong.
If your list of serial numbers gets leaked, what's the worst that can happen? That some other kid can play a 5 year old game too? You're not going to lose much sleep over that, are you?
But if someone's research were to be leaked to a competitor, the consequences can be a _lot_ worse. Think of even just the fact that someone, seeing that you're working on coupling a gizmotron with a whirlygig to solve problem X, can just go and preemptively patent using a gizmondotron with a whirlygig, or even some blanket patent like solving problem X at all. You can end up paying _big_ royalties to use your own damned invention.
But even lists of customers, contract data, etc, can be deadly if leaked to a competitor. Heck, even the plan for your upcoming ad campaign can give your competitors a narrow time window to come up with something that steals your thunder.
We're talking about a dog-eat-dog world, where whole market segments scrape by on a couple of percent profit margin. It doesn't take all that much extra burden on one competitor to sink it.
Yes, well, but the GP post was along the lines of, "yay for Gmail because it would be more inconvenient to backup that data locally." Your argument that you can back it up locally is completely defeating that reasoning. If you're going to back it up locally, you can just write the serial numbers in a text file and back that up with a lot less fuss.
So, no, it's not a strawman at all. _You_ learn to read.
Well, in a lot of kinds of poker, the way you can guarantee a win is by controlling, say, 3 out of the 4 players at the table. Even if nothing else, you can know that you're not going to get that 4'th ace, because your other player has it. And neither can your opponent have an ace, for that matter. It makes calculating probabilities a lot easier.
It also allows you to stage your own little shows, like 3-card monte charlatans always have an accomplice who wins to get the crowd confident. Except here you don't even need an accomplice.
Or if all else fails, you find some bug like these guys did, and exploit it.
So some gullible sap sits down at the table, and gets cleaned up before even knowing what hit him or that the other 3 guys were basically looking into each other's hands. Well, gee, how'd they know I didn't have a royal flush? Because someone knew that between them, they have some key cards you'd need for that.
RL poker has a lot more to do with psychology and being able to control your reactions. Hence the term, "poker face." Once you remove that, there's a lot more averaging, as everyone except complete dolts can get a list of rules that say when to hold 'em, when to fold 'em, when to walk away, and when to run.
So, while I wouldn't say _everyone_, my instinctive bet would be that a lot of those who are supposedly that good as to make a living off online poker, are actually plain old cheating.
Plus, if I had to place that bet, I'd hedge it with a side bet on "whole lotta money laundering going on." I mean, if you had to transfer a bunch of drug-deal money to Joey The Butcher, or just pay your illegal imigrant workers their wage, it's easier to pretend you played a round of high stakes poker with them and you're that bad at poker, than to go and withdraw tens of thousands from some bank and hand it around in unmarked envelopes. Darn, lost again this month. Who's going to prove that you aren't that much of a sucker?
1. Sometimes you just don't get a second chance to make a first impression. Cruel, maybe, but it just means that some of us have a working memory. If I put my finger into the flame once as a kid, I don't try it again. I don't go thinking, "well, maybe fire changed in the meantime." And if I got burned by a company once, maybe I won't give them a second chance either. Deal with it. They shouldn't have been dumbasses in the first place, if they can't take the consquences later.
It's not just some discrimination against Real. If Anarchy Online was a festering pile of crap at launch, I don't go and reactivate my account every other month to see if they finally fixed it. I'm just not interested any more. There are alternatives. They had their one chance at my money, I don't owe them a second one. Etc. Same with Real. Plain and simple.
And in the end, I find nothing wrong with that. If you could just completely erase _all_ consequences of past asshole behaviour, there would be no incentive to not be an asshole in the first place. If a company can try to be evil in one year, then just proclaim itself reformed and suffer no further inconvenience. It would, in fact, be outright stupid to _not_ try something evil, if it doesn't harm you more than a couple of months worth of sales. You try it and if it works, you strike it big, and if you don't, you just proclaim yourself reformed and good. I don't like that prospect. I quite like it that pissing off your customers can haunt you long term. Keeps other fucktards from trying to be evil.
2. I don't buy the whole "suddenly they're non-evil" crap anyway. Hello? We're talking about yet another company pushing a crap DRM.
And in this particular case I have no sympathy for them either. If they had offered a non-DRM-ed way to rip your movies to, say, MPEG, I'd even be on their side. Yay for whoever sticks it to MPAA. But they're just trying to replace one crap DRM with their own crap DRM, and an expensive one at that. It's not even _instead_ of the MPAA DRM. Now I pay the DVD tax once when I buy the DVD, and have to pay Real extra to play my backup on any other machine. Hello? Even skipping the financial aspect, it's a more retardedly draconian DRM than what it replaces. A DVD doesn't forbid me from taking it out of one computer and playing it on another.
But that financial aspect is what bothers me the most, actually, because that's where they lose any moral high ground imaginable. They're adding their own DRM crap to someone else's work, and extorting some money to be able to play it. I see it no different morally from the guy selling burned DVDs to profit from someone else's work. It's not some great strike for freedom, it's yet another sleazeball trying to add his own shackles on that chain and milk it too.
So basically I don't see them as really changed at all. It's the same sleazeballs trying another angle at still being sleazeballs.
And sometimes supporting Linux doesn't make everything else right. E.g., if I used Linux to empty your bank account, it would still be a crime. And some evil sleazeballs who support Linux are still evil and sleazeballs. Sometimes the enemy of my enemy still isn't my friend.
And sometimes "90% open source" is just the sweetener for the other 10% which are a DRM as evil as anyone else's. And in this case they're strapping it on someone else's work.
Well, it's actually the flip side that worries me more: the willingness to ignore such possibilities and try anyway.
I mean, in the case of the LHC, ok, science as we know it says nothing evil can happen. I'm not worried much about that one.
But in the case of the atomic bombs tests, even some of the scientists working on them believed that there might be a chance it'll ignite the atmosphere and, basically, extinguish all life on Earth except maybe anaerobic bacteria at the bottom of the ocean. Turning the whole atmosphere into nitrous oxide wouldn't just suffocate all aerobic life, including in the oceans, but also drop the temperature because the brown atmosphere shields off the sun, and remove the UV shielding completely so anything above earth or in less than 2m or so of water gets deep fried by UV.
So, you know, then they went and detonated three of them anyway. You know, that 15% chance isn't all that exciting, so let's tripple it. (Ok, ok, I know it actually works out to only 39%. Which is still freaking scary, as odds for complete life extinction. You wouldn't play russian roulette with two chambers loaded, would you?)
It's that kind of irresponsibility as a species that worries me.
Maybe that's why we don't find space faring life out there. Maybe out of the billions of years a planet gets, it has only a few hundred years between discovering the radio and wiping itself out. And probably most don't even go out with an "eat hot fiery death, infidel!" but with a "hey, y'all, watch this!":P
They simply apply the logic that someone qualified and competent will expect more money.
Also, there's usually a problem with that kind of generalizations. I mean, by the same logic, someone who's a man will like women, but you'd be awfully wrong about 10% of the population there.
At any rate, as I was saying, they _can_ just give the guy a test, so why is it even necessary to reach for lame generalizations and guesswork there? Instead of guessing whether a guy is competent based on his previous job, star sign, numerology score, racial profile, or any other BS, how about just asking and seeing for yourself? I mean:
- if he's going for programmer, ask him to write a quick FizzBizz
- if he claims to be an architect guru, ask him when he _wouldn't_ use patterns X, Y and Z. Weeds out the Cargo Cult architects like a charm.
- if he's going for DBA, ask him, say, about the auto-tuning since Oracle 10g or whatever apropriate
- if he's going for WebSphere admin, ask him about configuring a cluster and, say, how do you configure an EJB as singleton in the high-availability manager
Etc.
And I'm not just saying that because some ex-L1 monkey could actually be competent (greater miracles have been known to happen), but also because someone coming from some great job could be a Wally. There are entirely too many places where you can keep a job by just having a butt to fill a chair, and even more where a little social engineering is all that's needed. There are people who keep their job by pretending to be the boss's best friend, or the best friend of some nerd who'll then write his programs too, etc.
According to one article I've seen, about 3 out of 4 programmers can't actually program worth beans and actually do more harm than good to the projects they're in. According to another study, a bit over 2 out of 3 didn't know the language they're paid to program in. That bad.
So hiring someone just because he had a job like that, seems stupid.
I could understand it, if guesswork was the only choice. But when you can put the guy in front of a cloned computer and ask him to demonstrate those l33t skillz, why not do just that? You can even have a laptop and a stack of pre-cloned HDDs (e.g., with the same mis-tuned database if you hire a DBA), and just swap them between interviews.
Isn't it the same people, though, who later whine about young 'uns these days lacking loyalty, when they run to another job for an extra buck per hour? So you'd think that someone possibly being dumb enough to work for too little money for their skills, would actually be a bonus in the long run;)
1. Most important of all, you can give the guy a test, you know? _If_ he spews the usual stuff that spells "idiot monkey who couldn't even understand that list right" -- like that rebooting solves most problems, and activating FSAA is a fix for graphics problems (hey, rendering glitches are called artefacts too, and FSAA solves rendering artefacts. Genuine piece of "advice" I've heard.) -- then, by all means, don't hire him. But _if_ he happens to know his stuff, why does it matter what job he had before?
Especially because...
2. In that race to scrape the bottom of the proverbial barrel to save costs, since at least the 90's I've seen less qualified people in all sorts of IT and programming jobs. Some places will not only hire a summmarily retrained burger flipper if he asks for less money, they'll _prefer_ one.
So, you know, wtf? They'd hire someone who worked at McDonalds and lied about having taken a "Java for dummies" course, but they won't even listen to someone who's worked in tech suppport? Something seems amiss there.
3. Don't get me wrong. Yes, probably 90% of the L1 tech support guys are just the cheapest monkeys who can use a phone and read a list. Badly. I'm not saying all are smart and competent, or anything equally silly. But I'm saying there is a variation in competence in any job, ya know? The trouble is the other 10% who just happened to need a job and nothing else was available. E.g., if said person was still in college, I don't see that awfully many other jobs who overlap well with that. You're not really going to take a game dev job and pull 80 hour weeks, for example, when you _also_ have to learn at the same time.
Heck, even as job descriptions go, it varies substantially between companies. You can't paint them all with the same brush. E.g., as ISP tech support goes, I've seen mine go recently from abysmal to guys who can actually solve simple problems without going through that canned list. I know, it's the first sign of the Apocalypse;)
Even getting a promotion isn't necessarily a given, if all you have is two years. A _lot_ of support and generally IT jobs have been offshored in the last years, so in some places you'd be just happy to keep your job for two years. Because everything above you is also getting reduced faster than normal attrition. Plus, there's just plain old statistical flukes. I've worked (as a programmer) for a small company where the tech support guys just had no path to advance any higher, for example. The only job above L1 support were us the programmers, and as statistical flukes happen with small numbers of people, past a point no more programmers were hired, no more managers were needed either to promote some, and nobody quit for some 3 years at a point.
Well, I don't know about him, but I _have_ been stuck in a line while someone is arguing with the cashier what the price should be.
E.g., I wanted to buy some computer component at some point, so I go to a local small computer store. What do you know? Both guys behind the counter are stuck respectively with:
1. Someone who couldn't decide if she wants her new computer without a power supply or without the CD-ROM drive, because she apparently didn't have the money for the complete sum. So she's standing there debating the merits of getting a computer that won't start, vs a computer she can't install stuff on.
2. A couple which wanted to buy some TV decoder card. But they had a price list from another shop, for another product, and were prepared to argue all evening why the product in this shop should cost the same. The talk went roughly like this:
Buyer: "But your competitors sell the same thing for less!" Clerk: "Well, it's not the same thing in the first place. That model is from another manufacturer and does less." Buyer: "But they sell it cheaper! Why can't you match their price?" Clerk: "Because it's a different product and has a different price. See, this one also has <insert list of features>, and the manufacturer sells it for more." Buyer: "But I don't care much about those features, so for me they're the same. And those other guys sell it cheaper." Clerk: "So buy it that model from them, then." Buyer: "But I want this one..." Clerk: "Well, ok, that'll be X euros then." Buyer: "Why do I have to pay that, when your competitors sell the same thing for less?" Clerk: "Because it's not the same thing."
That conversation ran around in circles like a broken record for half a fucking hour. Well, probably more, because it was already going when I arrived, and it was still going when I just left the shop half an hour later. There's a huge line of people inside the shop, people getting fed up and leaving all the time, but the idiot just won't give up. He wants product X at the price of product Y, 'cause they're in the same category.
I can just see this kind of thing happening with a camera phone just as well. Only now the idiots don't even have to get the price list of the other shop first. They can now do it on the fly.
1. the inquisition worked quite a bit differently than most people seem to assume.
For a start it _only_ had jurisdiction over Christians, and only over faith matters. So if you had declared yourself a Jew or a Muslim, the Inquisition could kiss your ass.
The Inquisition only had a problem with (A) people who were gaming the system by declaring themselves Christians to gain the secular privileges those had in Spain, and then went and prayed to Allah or whatever, (B) clergy who did all sorts of crap from selling church favours to fucking boys, and (C) protestants. Ok, out of the three groups you noted, if you were a protestant, you were well and properly fucked.
So technically, no, not even the Spanish Inquisition applied those verses. They were bad people, no doubt, but even they weren't out to kill you for merely not being a Christian. To even fall under their jurisdiction at all, you had to have declared yourself a Christian in the first place.
2. You do notice that you had to qualify that as "Spanish", right? There was _one_ group which did excesses in the name of the bible. Hardly representative for christianity as a whole, eh? Im the same period, I don't think there were that many unbelievers persecuted by, say, the Swedish Inquisition. Did they even have one? They had people praying to the old Norse gods for _centuries_ after they had theoretically become a christian nation. Or I don't think I've heard of a Polish Inquisition.
Even then, it wouldn't have been quite fair to paint the whole Christianity with the same brush as the Spanish Inquisition.
3. And that goes doubly so for nowadays. We don't still burn heretics, you know?
Same with the Muslims, you know? Yes, there are a few sub-groups of one sect, which take that religion to ridiculous extremes. I don't think it's fair to paint the whole Islam with the same brush as Al Qaeda.
There is always at least a kernal or truth to every bigoted joke, whether you PC types want to admit it or not.
Honestly, I'm not a muslim (to paraphrase George Carlin, I used to be a christian until I reached the age of reason;), but I haven't found that much war-mongering in the Quran. Or at least in the translated copy of it that I still own. It seemed not much better or worse than the Bible, to be honest. I wish more people would actually read the damned thing before going on a mindless bashing spree based on rumours they heard from some idiot on TV... and which also hasn't actually read it.
Yes, it contains a few things which can be taken out of context and used as justification for blowing shit up. Same as our Bible does too. You can find inciting to slavery, war crimes, rape, murder, and almost anything else if you want to take certain verses from the Bible literally as God's commandment as to what you should do.
I mean, just as a random example, in Numbers, the Lord through Moses commands no less than complete genocide (including killing the women and children of the Midianites), with the exception being the virgin women... to be taken basically as slaves and distributed to the jewish men. I.e., way I understand it, nice way to add rape to slavery. You know, 'cause if you started the list with mass-murdering civillians, killing children and slavery, it would be a shame to not add rape to it too. They go well together, ya know?
That's the kind of punishment a loving and kind Lord wishes upon those of another religion, who end up spreading their religion to the Lord's flock. The "sin" of the Midianites was merely that some Jews married their women, and some of those Jews ended up converting to their wives' religion. And for causing that "corruption", every single man and non-virgin woman, even "among the little ones" had to be put to the sword. In fact, Moses is annoyed that the soldiers didn't kill the midian women and chidren in the first place. I mean, duh, it should have been obvious.
I could go on and give more examples, but let's just say: that's the kind of thing that's right there in the Bible. So if you want to split hairs and go "see, religion X incites to violence", you have equally good verses in the Bible. That's your kernel of truth.
But do christians or christianity as a whole actually act that way? No, I don't think I've seen any people who think we should, say, go mass-murder India because some Christians joined a new-age Guru and converted to some eastern tantric stuff. I mean, it'd the direct equivalent of what the people of Midian did in the Bible, no? We don't actually do what those verses say. Most people don't even think about them.
Same with the Quran, way I see it. Yes, it contains _some_ verses which can be considered an incitation to violence. And a few groups of nutters actually do. Most of the Muslims don't.
Well, nobody said it will be good for _you_. You're just supposed to believe that it'll be good for the economy -- in the same way, say, telemarketing calls or companies selling your private data are -- and saves the company some money, and _of_ _course_ they'll pass the savings on to you, the consumer.
If I'm to go by what other companies think it's a clearly affirmative accepting a contract, it'll probably go like this: somewhere in the fine print of their contract, or maybe in an EULA on their router/modem config page, will be something like "I agree to be tracked, and the company can do whatever it wishes with my data." And if you don't agree, then you can't use their service. Bonus points if:
A) you only find that out after you bougt the service and,
Whether or not its fair, fundamentalists are seen as representative of Christians for a reason, and that reason is difficult to understand from within a Christian perspective.
Actually, I don't think they're seen as representative by anyone in, say, Western Europe. If you started foaming at the mouth about how "teaching the controversy" (about evolution,) or putting bible studies back into secular schools, or persecuting homosexuals because "God" told you so, here in Germany (and, I _think_, at least in France too) everyone would look funnily at you and wonder what mental institution did you escape from. The impression even among relatively religious people about the lunacies coming from America in the name of religion, isn't as much, "man, those are real christians, we should be like them", but rather along the lines of, "where did America go wrong?"
The last time any kind of fundamentalist bible thumping had any kind of street cred in Europe was during the Counter-Enlightenment of the late 18'th and early 19'th century.
The funny thing is that even, say, the Catholic Church, much as a lot of Americans like to think it must be like their own born-again zealots, actually went a very long time ago through what was called the "counter-reformation" to try to stop the tide of protestantism. They learned to be a lot more laissez-faire about, say, science and even sponsored such orders as the Jesuits. Which were and still are primarily an academic order within the church. Those guys actually run universities and research labs. From the very start, Ignatius de Loyola insisted on an academic education to high standards before one could join the order, in a stark contrast to the stereotype of ignorant and poorly educated clergy of the time.
At any rate, positions like ID or young earth are as foreign to catholicism as it gets. And that's just one of the denominations which, by and large, just looks funny at the bible-thumping puritans from across the oceans and think at best, "Lord, what have we done to you, to be lumped into the same category as _those_?";)
So, no, the USA fundamentalists aren't seen as representative by any christian except themselves. Just as they're not representative for the larger and more moderate mass of US citizens, I think. (Or hope.) Just because a group is loud and vocal, doesn't mean they represent anyone else but themselves.
And if anyone else decides to judge, say, the largely secular Europe by what the bible-thumpers in America say or do... well, I guess some things can't be helped. Some people are ignorant and ill educated everywhere, and if they want to believe something that hasn't been true for two centuries, it's not my problem.
Actually, it wasn't a game as such. See, one of the Saudi princes got taunted about his 3DMark scores once too often, by someone with an overclocked compressor-cooled 2x6 core Dual Xeon 7460 system with 3x nVidia GTX 280 SLI.
And as everyone(*) knows, your 3DMark score is not just the measure of your worth, but verily an accurate measure of penis size. In fact, they're in a feedback loop. It's true. If you fall out of the top 10, your Y chromosomes will spread their legs and go, "fuck, we were X all along". And the Penis Police will show up at your door with a rusty hedge scissors and revoke your right to pee standing. It's no laughing matter.
And, well, the royal family represents the whole country and people. The collective penis of the whole Saudi Arabia could be at stake, because someone didn't upgrade their machine to beat the best score. And the last thing you want as a ruling dynasty is to wake up one morning and find a mob of former men in front of the palace gates, wanting to beat you up with their handbags for what junior's lame machine did to them. You really don't want to go down in history as that kind of a ruling family.
So, anyway, it started kinda innocent enough. You know, _quad_ 6-core Xeons, liquid nitrogen cooling, stuff like that. But then they hired a consultant for the rest of the spec and it kinda snowballed from there;)
(*)... who wastes their time willy-waving about their system on those boards
That the choice of picking door A inhibits the signal for door B, is one thing. But humans often then feel anxious or depressed about the former choice to pick door A, and work backwards towards some bullshit reason why. And then that fairy tale they just invented, is stored in that network as a fact. Essentially it's controlled schizophrenia: an imaginary thing we just invented, gets fed back into the thing as an actual input or rather as a memory of an actual input.
We might invent things like that Door A was the morally right / elite / whatever choice and only evil people / idiots / whatever pick Door B. (Wth? It's just a door.) We might invent that there was something bad or foreboding about Door B. We might even retroactively redefine it as it not having been Door A at all. I chose Door B and everyone saying otherwise is a liar, dammit.
It doesn't stop at "ok, door A worked for me before, I'll keep picking door A." We go and build a better scaffolding than that all the time, and often it's just fiction.
Whole edifices of fiction can be invented in the blink of an eye, and get described as some moment of enlightenment or revelation. Though it probably will only go into long term memory in the next REM sleep cycle. We essentially just stuffed a whole bunch of fiction in our input buffer, stamped with a retroactive date.
I'm not even sure how I'd code a neural network to work like that, even if I explicitly wanted to.
That said, about pathways, well real biological neurons do tend to organize themselves into pathways and lobes. There are, basically, subnets which don't just happen to contain the paths for the same memory, but really organize themselves to have one function only. Or just take over a function if the previous group got destroyed and that didn't kill you. E.g., when you go into anxiety or fight-or-flight mode, that's very well delimited groups of neurons which, essentially, organized themselves to be the ones who decide if you should be affraid and if you need an adrenalin shot. You can see them firing on an MRI scan. I wouldn't know if the memory / reason parts do that too, but it wouldn't be a huge surprise either. It _could_ be that there's a certain group which starts that simulation job at night and/or compares the results. Or maybe not. We're not that far with understanding the brain.
Yes, _we_ all have our cognitive dissonances, and bullshit ways to resolve them. But the funny thing is that none of us is aware of our _own_.
If anyone can think "well, actually I like the agenda of Party X more, but I'm still pissed off at their candidate in the last elections, so I'll vote against them anyway", that's _not_ the result of a cognitive dissonance. And if I'm aware that I'm doing something awfully wrong, or have done something awfully wrong, then I haven't bullshitted myself yet. Etc.
The mental model is basically the sum of all the things each of us "knows" to be right. Whether we're even consciously aware of them or not. Every think that we take for granted, every thing that is "common sense", everything that we instinctively apply, and everything thing that just is so. Like that the Sun rises in the east, moss grows on the north side of trees, and I'm the Nicest Guy In The World And By All Rights Women Should Queue Up To Have My Baby (popular piece of model with us nerds;)
If I can think "well, that's actually false, but I'll use it anyway because I like that thought more, and lets me apply a couple of choice fallacies to support some other of my preconceived notions", then it's not really a piece of my model. I already know it to be false and not the way the world works.
The ones that are in the model are the things that I know to be true. Even if for everyone else they're so much bullshit that you could fertilize a good sized farm with them.
Those guys in the classic experiment who've shafted someone for a dollar? They too didn't think they're bending reality to support that. If you asked them before, if they'd bullshit someone for a dollar, they'd have said "no." And if you asked them afterwards, they had already bullshitted themselves that it wasn't really a lie, it was a great job, and they actually did the sucker a big favour by convincing him to take it. So they'd still have answered "no" in all honesty. They too weren't aware that they actually have a flaw in their model.
In that aspect, we're all like the ugly guy in a world without mirrors. We don't see our own problems.
So, yes, it's easy to think that everyone else is broken. Their BS doesn't match my model. Mine does, so it must be the truth. I don't see the many times I must have done something bad, and bent reality to still think I'm a Nice Guy. All I remember is me doing the right thing, thus I really am a Nice Guy. And that sucker in university? I did him a favour by convincing him to take that job, if you really must know;)
Actually, my own impression is that you're the rule rather than the exception. Most atheists do mind their own business, and so do most theists for that matter. The majority of the population is really in between those two sides of the coin.
But, anyway, if you don't go around trying to save perfect strangers from their ignorance, you're not what I'd call a "christian-baiting troll." I'm rather talking about those who act like the atheist version of Jehova's Witnesses. They're not just content with having had the big revelation, they have to save your soul too.
But generally the phenomenon of bullshit mental models reforming the other way around, is more general than religion. As a rule of thumb, look out for phrases like, "and then I was enlightened", or "then I realized I had been living a lie", and other such expressions to that same effect: that "Eureka!" moment. That sudden lightning flash where everything became clear, the path ahead was suddenly visible, and you only need to teach The Truth to everyone else.
Or, much as I'm not going to gain many friends by picking on a guy who's dead and was smart and funny, a perfect illustration would be George Carlin's, "I was a catholic until I reached the age of reason." He repeated it in several shows. Well, he probably just said it because it was funny, so I'm not really picking on him. But it serves well as a quote to illustrate the point. There are people who genuinely have that kind of an experience. A moment where it's suddenly clear that all you've done or believed in, was dumb and stupid, and you're now teh enlightened guy for realizing the exact opposite.
It's also known by the less flattering name of "brainwashing".
That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. And that's the moment when a crashed mental model was hastily replaced with an even more bullshit one, only the other way around. The stress and discomfort of a broken model were suddenly lifted, hence that wonderful sensation of having suddenly discovered The Truth. And it has to be The Truth, because everything seems to make perfect sense now. (Having been padded with enough bullshit redefinitions of reality, until it does internally make sense.)
Again, it's not just about religion. It could just as well be the guy who was a rabid Linux zealot, and suddenly was enlightened that Linux is sellout crap for idots and BSD is The One True Way. (I've actually known someone like that.) It could be the nerdy gal who believed all her life that people are fundamentally good and you have to do The Right Thing, then suddenly was enlightened that only stupid people do good, and you have to care only about yourself. (Ditto.) It could be, like in somebody else's example, the moment when someone switches from actively campaigning for smokers' rights, to campaigning against smoking. Etc.
Yes, that was metaphorically speaking, and using the term "wiring" rather inexact.
The actual "wiring", as you noted, is largely the data. That's how we learn.
The metaphorical "wiring" I'm talking about is actually in the DNA and proteins encoded by it. It's how the neurons themselves are built to work. They don't rewire the network randomly, they have a bit of code in the DNA that says how they should work. The BIOS and bootstrap code of that neural network, so to speak. That's really what I'm talking about when I say "wired".
I hope it didn't cause too much confusion to anyone.
As for how would you check for consistency, I dunno, by running a proof through it and seeing if you get two contradicting results? There's even a conjecture that that's what dreams are: the night job that runs simulations through that data.
But in truth I doubt that there's anyone who can tell you exactly how the brain works, and which pathway belongs to the consistency checking job. If we knew that, we'd already have a working AI.
We can however look at it from the outside, like at a black box, and notice some things it does. And there is strong evidence that it does that kind of a model consistency check and cleanup. Even if we don't know exactly how it works, we can see what goes in and what comes out, and it looks that way.
Same as I can look at a plane and say it tries to keep its altitude constant, even if I have no fucking clue which control surfaces are used for that, and even less clue what the code running on its computers is.
Well, in the end, the scientific method is just a way to _avoid_ clinging to some dogma and building cognitive dissonances to support it. There is no immovable "truth", or rather, we don't know it yet. Your pet theory is likely to be not quite the whole "truth" yet. There will eventually be some data which require it to be refined even further. Be honest to yourself and admit that you could have only an incomplete understanding of the universe, and that way we can all continue to learn more.
Anyone who sees science as some immutable dogma, or as some choice between this dogma and that one, isn't doing science in the first place. That's religion. It's the exact opposite of science. And, yes, it's funny to see people rant against religion, while using science as a dogma. That's not science vs religion, that's religion vs religion. One of them uses pseudo-science trappings, but it's used as a religion nevertheless.
I don't see how you can qualify the real thing as, basically, self-delusional, or conversely claim that only sticking to a bullshit fairy-tale as The Truth is the only non-self-delusional behaviour. Science is all about avoiding that kind of absolute truths and abandoning any pretense that you know everything. This is the data we have. This is the theory that explains that data. When we'll have more data, we'll refine the theory some more. If some of those axioms don't fit the data, we'll discard the axioms. It's just about as intellectually honest as it gets.
So, pray tell, in which way is that kind of admission that we don't know everything "self-delusional"?
Male brain, female brain, monkey brain, whatever. In a recent experient, monkeys too were shown to build (at least the symptoms of a) cognitive dissonance.
It makes sense, if you think about it. You can't really do much with a mental model where simultaneously "all grass is green" and "all grass is red" are true. You must discard or fix one of the statements, or maybe go for some compromise like "most grass is green, but some species are red" or maybe admit "I have no bloddy clue what colour grass is, that still needs to be determined."
The only bad dissonances happen when one just can't let go of one of the ideas, so the other one _has_ to be false, all evidence be damned. As someone else correctly noted, most often when one's beliefs and actions are irreconcileable with each other. If you're not able to let go of the beliefs, you redefine the actions.
A broken model is actually a source of stress and discomfort until it's somehow fixed, so virtually everyone will do something to fix it.
We could go into who builds the worst dissonances. (Though I'm not aware of any data saying that women build worse resolutions than the men, or viceversa.) But the basic issue of needing a consistent model isn't gender specific, or as far as we know even species specific. Your cat tries to keep its little mental model just as consistent as you do with yours.
Well, not everyone goes for lying to themselves. So I don't doubt that some people will do just like you said. But look around you. Do you really doubt that half of your co-workers would try to sucker someone, even just to be on the boss's good side?:P
That said, not that I'm accusing you or anything, but having very strong and immutable ideas about what you'd do or wouldn't do, is what causes such dissonances to go wrong in the first place. People start with immutable ideas like "_I_ wouldn't ever do X", and when somehow they find themselves doing it, well, if that idea is immutable, the other one has to go. It becomes, "yeah, well, what I did doesn't _really_ qualify as X." That's when and how such lying to oneself happens.
So keeping a more open mind about your options could actually help.
But again, I don't know you enough to make a definitive pronouncement there. Maybe you have the will power to actually stick to your principles, no matter what. Most people have the principles, but not the will to stick to them. So they end up warping reality to be still able to think that they do have those principles.
Cognitive dissonance is just what happens when you have two conflicting ideas, and basically have to choose one. It happens just as well when reality came and rang the door bell, but it's the same mechanism that was at work when that delusion rang the bell and you let it in. You have two options and you can't have both. You choose one. Whether it was the right one or you sank deeper into delusional behaviour, is rather irrelevant for the mechanism at work. Choosing the wrong one is nevertheless just the same mechanism at work.
Basically I don't disagree with you when you call those behaviours names, or anything. I'm just saying that the term "cognitive dissonance" is used to mean a very specific mechanism, and how, yes, such self-delusional behaviours come to be.
The dissonance itself is just the fact that (temporarily) two pieces of your mental model are at odds with each other. You have to solve that somehow, because your brain is wired to need one consistent model and try to solve such conflicts. But, at any rate, that's the dissonance: propositions X and Y can't both be true. How you solve that, is already one step further. You can go with the truth, or manufacture a lie, but the dissonance was just the same.
Slashdot Mirror
While technically that's true:
1. It was there at a lower level too, hence the claim that only top-levels get catered for, is false.
2. So basically a variant of the common fanboy defense, "well, you could go and do <insert pointless thing> or do it again and again, and that ought to count as more hours the game has." It's been floating around about various games since at least the 90's.
I'm talking in hours. Take the time needed to do _all_ the quests and dungeons that don't need level 70 and/or epic gear. All the quests starting with hunting boars in the Orc newbie area _and_ wolves in Northshire, all the gathering cactus apples _and_ Milly's grapes, and all the instances starting with the Deadmines _and_ RFC. That total is your first number of hours. Then take that dozen instances and measure how much time you spend inside them from start to finish. Once each, because on the second run you don't see that much new content. There are a couple of exceptions, but not that much. I haven't done the exact maths, but as gut feelings go, I'll stick with that 1%.
Oh, spare me the bullshit armchair-shrink gig. You don't know anything about my age, personality, or how I play the game. Yes, I _am_ a middle aged guy _and_ employed _and_ have other accomplishments. And that is exactly _why_ I couldn't care less about a grinding to willy-wave about another piece of gear at the end. I have better things to willy-wave about than "yay, I finally got some virtual boots." Yes, I have RL accomplishments instead. And given that my whole point is that it's the road not the destination, and that I _don't_ want to grind for my top tier gear, you couldn't be more wrong anyway. But that won't stop you from doing... an ego-masturbation gig in which you pretend to know what's wrong with anyone whose tastes differ in the slightest from yours. Geeze, dude, do you even listen to yourself?
You presume to submit how _I_ feel... Heh... How about: I actually feel that I've already done Uldaman at the right level, and feel no need to solo it again at 70? It's still the same instance. I've already _seen_ those halls. But nah, that wouldn't be as good as a strawman that supports your preconceived conclusion, would it? Sorry about that.
Get over yourself. Some people can just have different styles without having some "personality problem" or being impatient kids. You're not the platinum stan
Heh. On WoW about 99% of the content is for levels 1 to 69, and all there is to do at level 70 is a repetitive grind to give you _something_ to do until the next expansion pack comes. It used to be the same at 60, before Burning Crusade.
The same applies to virtually any game out there.
E.g., on COH you still don't even _have_ a proper endgame grind, and it used to have none at all. (Unless you count the bad joke that the Hamidon "raid" used to be. Think: get 50 controllers to spam holds, and the rest of the gang does nothing at all to not get aggro.) Nor any perspective to get further than that, because the game had 50 levels since Issue 1 and just isn't supposed to ever have more than 50 levels.
E.g., on EQ2 much the same applies as on WoW. You hit level 80, you get stuck doing a dungeon 100 times, and then move on to the tier 2 grind and do it another 100 times, and somewhere past the point where you're bored out of your freaking mind, you finally get some of your epic gear.
E.g., on SWG, there didn't even use to be an endgame at all. The grind to Jedi was mostly repeatedly nuking your old "class" (ok, skill combination) and playing another "class" from zero to max. That was it: repeating the normal game again, with whichever class you got told to use this time. And then you got a Jedi to play the game with, from zero to max again.
Etc.
How the _fuck_ does that count as catering more to the top players? Those have 1% of the content, the low and middle guys get 99%.
On virtually any game out there, it's pretty much the illustration of this absurdist joke: "Q: Why does an elephant have a tail? A: So it doesn't end abruptly." That's it. What you get at top level is the elephant's tail, and the rest of the folks get the rest of the elephant.
But of course it doesn't prevent people from imagining that there's some grand and fabulous Shangri-La at the end. That they'll suddenly have 10x more fun, angels will give them blowjobs around the clock, heralds with trumpets will announce their every move, and that a thousand Blood Elf virgins will beg to have their baby. Basically, especially if they don't find the mid-game that much fun, that there must be _some_ grand reward at the end, or people wouldn't do it.
Boy, are they going to be disappointed. What people actually get at the end is... well, look at all the disgruntled WoW bashers and all the people swearing that <NEXT GAME> will bury WoW alive, and their whole raiding guild is swearing off WoW as soon as <NEXT GAME> comes out. That's how great they're catered for at the top.
It's still the same basic game, only more repetitive. If you find the middle boring, you're going to find the top even more so. Oh, it'll be something new to be in a raid for the first time. The second time too. But by the time you've went through it a dozen times, all using the same 1-2 buttons, it starts being a heck of a lot less fun. And if you still didn't get the hint that you've finished the game and might as well move on or start an alt, you're going to keep doing it more and more and enjoying it less and less. Well past the point where that enjoyment dropped below the "watching pait dry" mark. Until one more straw breaks the camels back. And then you join the great mass of burned-out, disgruntled ex-WoW-ers. Or ex-EQ2-ers. Or whatever.
And depending on the game, you might also get asked to respec your character into something you don't like. (See all the "but I wanted to be a Shadow spec priest" whines.) Or you might discover that your class isn't even needed by anyone at the top, at all. (See, again, everyone who wasn't a controller, in the Hamidon "raid" on COH.)
Did you actually play it to the top on those MMOs you have a problem with, or are you just judging them based on what you imagine about the top?
Well, yes, but that's a silly example, because basically you're talking about data with very little worth. You probably don't play most of those 5 year old games, and even if you did, the worst that can happen is that you have to look inside the DVD case of the serial number or look for the manual (which is usually also inside the DVD case.)
So basically you're saying that even an unreliable storage is good enough if it's free... for silly data that's not worth that much.
I think RMS's argument isn't about that kind of data. E.g.,
- When a bank's computer goes nuts, the costs can be in the range of millions per hour. (See the guys who tried to repair a broken database without taking it down.)
- When a major manufacturer's data goes missing, whole factories can end up not working and again the costs are hideous.
Etc.
Stuff that _has_ happened, like Amazon's cloud (or a chunk thereof) going missing for a day or two, it won't affect you much for your serial numbers, but it can be deadly for a company. You want to have your own servers as backup, and your own guys you can call on a Saturday and tell them to fucking switch to the other server or otherwise fix it _now_. You don't want to just twiddle your thumbs until Amazon or Google come and say, "heh, oops, we did a booboo. But now it's back online, so quit acting as if we owe you anything."
Second, let's talk about privacy. Especially Google's track record is pretty scary there, and they've been known expose various bits and pieces of other people's data and act like they don't even see what's wrong.
If your list of serial numbers gets leaked, what's the worst that can happen? That some other kid can play a 5 year old game too? You're not going to lose much sleep over that, are you?
But if someone's research were to be leaked to a competitor, the consequences can be a _lot_ worse. Think of even just the fact that someone, seeing that you're working on coupling a gizmotron with a whirlygig to solve problem X, can just go and preemptively patent using a gizmondotron with a whirlygig, or even some blanket patent like solving problem X at all. You can end up paying _big_ royalties to use your own damned invention.
But even lists of customers, contract data, etc, can be deadly if leaked to a competitor. Heck, even the plan for your upcoming ad campaign can give your competitors a narrow time window to come up with something that steals your thunder.
We're talking about a dog-eat-dog world, where whole market segments scrape by on a couple of percent profit margin. It doesn't take all that much extra burden on one competitor to sink it.
Yes, well, but the GP post was along the lines of, "yay for Gmail because it would be more inconvenient to backup that data locally." Your argument that you can back it up locally is completely defeating that reasoning. If you're going to back it up locally, you can just write the serial numbers in a text file and back that up with a lot less fuss.
So, no, it's not a strawman at all. _You_ learn to read.
Well, in a lot of kinds of poker, the way you can guarantee a win is by controlling, say, 3 out of the 4 players at the table. Even if nothing else, you can know that you're not going to get that 4'th ace, because your other player has it. And neither can your opponent have an ace, for that matter. It makes calculating probabilities a lot easier.
It also allows you to stage your own little shows, like 3-card monte charlatans always have an accomplice who wins to get the crowd confident. Except here you don't even need an accomplice.
Or if all else fails, you find some bug like these guys did, and exploit it.
So some gullible sap sits down at the table, and gets cleaned up before even knowing what hit him or that the other 3 guys were basically looking into each other's hands. Well, gee, how'd they know I didn't have a royal flush? Because someone knew that between them, they have some key cards you'd need for that.
RL poker has a lot more to do with psychology and being able to control your reactions. Hence the term, "poker face." Once you remove that, there's a lot more averaging, as everyone except complete dolts can get a list of rules that say when to hold 'em, when to fold 'em, when to walk away, and when to run.
So, while I wouldn't say _everyone_, my instinctive bet would be that a lot of those who are supposedly that good as to make a living off online poker, are actually plain old cheating.
Plus, if I had to place that bet, I'd hedge it with a side bet on "whole lotta money laundering going on." I mean, if you had to transfer a bunch of drug-deal money to Joey The Butcher, or just pay your illegal imigrant workers their wage, it's easier to pretend you played a round of high stakes poker with them and you're that bad at poker, than to go and withdraw tens of thousands from some bank and hand it around in unmarked envelopes. Darn, lost again this month. Who's going to prove that you aren't that much of a sucker?
Follow the money, basically.
1. Sometimes you just don't get a second chance to make a first impression. Cruel, maybe, but it just means that some of us have a working memory. If I put my finger into the flame once as a kid, I don't try it again. I don't go thinking, "well, maybe fire changed in the meantime." And if I got burned by a company once, maybe I won't give them a second chance either. Deal with it. They shouldn't have been dumbasses in the first place, if they can't take the consquences later.
It's not just some discrimination against Real. If Anarchy Online was a festering pile of crap at launch, I don't go and reactivate my account every other month to see if they finally fixed it. I'm just not interested any more. There are alternatives. They had their one chance at my money, I don't owe them a second one. Etc. Same with Real. Plain and simple.
And in the end, I find nothing wrong with that. If you could just completely erase _all_ consequences of past asshole behaviour, there would be no incentive to not be an asshole in the first place. If a company can try to be evil in one year, then just proclaim itself reformed and suffer no further inconvenience. It would, in fact, be outright stupid to _not_ try something evil, if it doesn't harm you more than a couple of months worth of sales. You try it and if it works, you strike it big, and if you don't, you just proclaim yourself reformed and good. I don't like that prospect. I quite like it that pissing off your customers can haunt you long term. Keeps other fucktards from trying to be evil.
2. I don't buy the whole "suddenly they're non-evil" crap anyway. Hello? We're talking about yet another company pushing a crap DRM.
And in this particular case I have no sympathy for them either. If they had offered a non-DRM-ed way to rip your movies to, say, MPEG, I'd even be on their side. Yay for whoever sticks it to MPAA. But they're just trying to replace one crap DRM with their own crap DRM, and an expensive one at that. It's not even _instead_ of the MPAA DRM. Now I pay the DVD tax once when I buy the DVD, and have to pay Real extra to play my backup on any other machine. Hello? Even skipping the financial aspect, it's a more retardedly draconian DRM than what it replaces. A DVD doesn't forbid me from taking it out of one computer and playing it on another.
But that financial aspect is what bothers me the most, actually, because that's where they lose any moral high ground imaginable. They're adding their own DRM crap to someone else's work, and extorting some money to be able to play it. I see it no different morally from the guy selling burned DVDs to profit from someone else's work. It's not some great strike for freedom, it's yet another sleazeball trying to add his own shackles on that chain and milk it too.
So basically I don't see them as really changed at all. It's the same sleazeballs trying another angle at still being sleazeballs.
And sometimes supporting Linux doesn't make everything else right. E.g., if I used Linux to empty your bank account, it would still be a crime. And some evil sleazeballs who support Linux are still evil and sleazeballs. Sometimes the enemy of my enemy still isn't my friend.
And sometimes "90% open source" is just the sweetener for the other 10% which are a DRM as evil as anyone else's. And in this case they're strapping it on someone else's work.
Well, it's actually the flip side that worries me more: the willingness to ignore such possibilities and try anyway.
I mean, in the case of the LHC, ok, science as we know it says nothing evil can happen. I'm not worried much about that one.
But in the case of the atomic bombs tests, even some of the scientists working on them believed that there might be a chance it'll ignite the atmosphere and, basically, extinguish all life on Earth except maybe anaerobic bacteria at the bottom of the ocean. Turning the whole atmosphere into nitrous oxide wouldn't just suffocate all aerobic life, including in the oceans, but also drop the temperature because the brown atmosphere shields off the sun, and remove the UV shielding completely so anything above earth or in less than 2m or so of water gets deep fried by UV.
So, you know, then they went and detonated three of them anyway. You know, that 15% chance isn't all that exciting, so let's tripple it. (Ok, ok, I know it actually works out to only 39%. Which is still freaking scary, as odds for complete life extinction. You wouldn't play russian roulette with two chambers loaded, would you?)
It's that kind of irresponsibility as a species that worries me.
Maybe that's why we don't find space faring life out there. Maybe out of the billions of years a planet gets, it has only a few hundred years between discovering the radio and wiping itself out. And probably most don't even go out with an "eat hot fiery death, infidel!" but with a "hey, y'all, watch this!" :P
Also, there's usually a problem with that kind of generalizations. I mean, by the same logic, someone who's a man will like women, but you'd be awfully wrong about 10% of the population there.
At any rate, as I was saying, they _can_ just give the guy a test, so why is it even necessary to reach for lame generalizations and guesswork there? Instead of guessing whether a guy is competent based on his previous job, star sign, numerology score, racial profile, or any other BS, how about just asking and seeing for yourself? I mean:
- if he's going for programmer, ask him to write a quick FizzBizz
- if he claims to be an architect guru, ask him when he _wouldn't_ use patterns X, Y and Z. Weeds out the Cargo Cult architects like a charm.
- if he's going for DBA, ask him, say, about the auto-tuning since Oracle 10g or whatever apropriate
- if he's going for WebSphere admin, ask him about configuring a cluster and, say, how do you configure an EJB as singleton in the high-availability manager
Etc.
And I'm not just saying that because some ex-L1 monkey could actually be competent (greater miracles have been known to happen), but also because someone coming from some great job could be a Wally. There are entirely too many places where you can keep a job by just having a butt to fill a chair, and even more where a little social engineering is all that's needed. There are people who keep their job by pretending to be the boss's best friend, or the best friend of some nerd who'll then write his programs too, etc.
According to one article I've seen, about 3 out of 4 programmers can't actually program worth beans and actually do more harm than good to the projects they're in. According to another study, a bit over 2 out of 3 didn't know the language they're paid to program in. That bad.
So hiring someone just because he had a job like that, seems stupid.
I could understand it, if guesswork was the only choice. But when you can put the guy in front of a cloned computer and ask him to demonstrate those l33t skillz, why not do just that? You can even have a laptop and a stack of pre-cloned HDDs (e.g., with the same mis-tuned database if you hire a DBA), and just swap them between interviews.
Isn't it the same people, though, who later whine about young 'uns these days lacking loyalty, when they run to another job for an extra buck per hour? So you'd think that someone possibly being dumb enough to work for too little money for their skills, would actually be a bonus in the long run ;)
To be fair, though, why should it matter?
1. Most important of all, you can give the guy a test, you know? _If_ he spews the usual stuff that spells "idiot monkey who couldn't even understand that list right" -- like that rebooting solves most problems, and activating FSAA is a fix for graphics problems (hey, rendering glitches are called artefacts too, and FSAA solves rendering artefacts. Genuine piece of "advice" I've heard.) -- then, by all means, don't hire him. But _if_ he happens to know his stuff, why does it matter what job he had before?
Especially because...
2. In that race to scrape the bottom of the proverbial barrel to save costs, since at least the 90's I've seen less qualified people in all sorts of IT and programming jobs. Some places will not only hire a summmarily retrained burger flipper if he asks for less money, they'll _prefer_ one.
So, you know, wtf? They'd hire someone who worked at McDonalds and lied about having taken a "Java for dummies" course, but they won't even listen to someone who's worked in tech suppport? Something seems amiss there.
3. Don't get me wrong. Yes, probably 90% of the L1 tech support guys are just the cheapest monkeys who can use a phone and read a list. Badly. I'm not saying all are smart and competent, or anything equally silly. But I'm saying there is a variation in competence in any job, ya know? The trouble is the other 10% who just happened to need a job and nothing else was available. E.g., if said person was still in college, I don't see that awfully many other jobs who overlap well with that. You're not really going to take a game dev job and pull 80 hour weeks, for example, when you _also_ have to learn at the same time.
Heck, even as job descriptions go, it varies substantially between companies. You can't paint them all with the same brush. E.g., as ISP tech support goes, I've seen mine go recently from abysmal to guys who can actually solve simple problems without going through that canned list. I know, it's the first sign of the Apocalypse ;)
Even getting a promotion isn't necessarily a given, if all you have is two years. A _lot_ of support and generally IT jobs have been offshored in the last years, so in some places you'd be just happy to keep your job for two years. Because everything above you is also getting reduced faster than normal attrition. Plus, there's just plain old statistical flukes. I've worked (as a programmer) for a small company where the tech support guys just had no path to advance any higher, for example. The only job above L1 support were us the programmers, and as statistical flukes happen with small numbers of people, past a point no more programmers were hired, no more managers were needed either to promote some, and nobody quit for some 3 years at a point.
Well, I don't know about him, but I _have_ been stuck in a line while someone is arguing with the cashier what the price should be.
E.g., I wanted to buy some computer component at some point, so I go to a local small computer store. What do you know? Both guys behind the counter are stuck respectively with:
1. Someone who couldn't decide if she wants her new computer without a power supply or without the CD-ROM drive, because she apparently didn't have the money for the complete sum. So she's standing there debating the merits of getting a computer that won't start, vs a computer she can't install stuff on.
2. A couple which wanted to buy some TV decoder card. But they had a price list from another shop, for another product, and were prepared to argue all evening why the product in this shop should cost the same. The talk went roughly like this:
Buyer: "But your competitors sell the same thing for less!"
Clerk: "Well, it's not the same thing in the first place. That model is from another manufacturer and does less."
Buyer: "But they sell it cheaper! Why can't you match their price?"
Clerk: "Because it's a different product and has a different price. See, this one also has <insert list of features>, and the manufacturer sells it for more."
Buyer: "But I don't care much about those features, so for me they're the same. And those other guys sell it cheaper."
Clerk: "So buy it that model from them, then."
Buyer: "But I want this one..."
Clerk: "Well, ok, that'll be X euros then."
Buyer: "Why do I have to pay that, when your competitors sell the same thing for less?"
Clerk: "Because it's not the same thing."
That conversation ran around in circles like a broken record for half a fucking hour. Well, probably more, because it was already going when I arrived, and it was still going when I just left the shop half an hour later. There's a huge line of people inside the shop, people getting fed up and leaving all the time, but the idiot just won't give up. He wants product X at the price of product Y, 'cause they're in the same category.
I can just see this kind of thing happening with a camera phone just as well. Only now the idiots don't even have to get the price list of the other shop first. They can now do it on the fly.
Well,
1. the inquisition worked quite a bit differently than most people seem to assume.
For a start it _only_ had jurisdiction over Christians, and only over faith matters. So if you had declared yourself a Jew or a Muslim, the Inquisition could kiss your ass.
The Inquisition only had a problem with (A) people who were gaming the system by declaring themselves Christians to gain the secular privileges those had in Spain, and then went and prayed to Allah or whatever, (B) clergy who did all sorts of crap from selling church favours to fucking boys, and (C) protestants. Ok, out of the three groups you noted, if you were a protestant, you were well and properly fucked.
So technically, no, not even the Spanish Inquisition applied those verses. They were bad people, no doubt, but even they weren't out to kill you for merely not being a Christian. To even fall under their jurisdiction at all, you had to have declared yourself a Christian in the first place.
2. You do notice that you had to qualify that as "Spanish", right? There was _one_ group which did excesses in the name of the bible. Hardly representative for christianity as a whole, eh? Im the same period, I don't think there were that many unbelievers persecuted by, say, the Swedish Inquisition. Did they even have one? They had people praying to the old Norse gods for _centuries_ after they had theoretically become a christian nation. Or I don't think I've heard of a Polish Inquisition.
Even then, it wouldn't have been quite fair to paint the whole Christianity with the same brush as the Spanish Inquisition.
3. And that goes doubly so for nowadays. We don't still burn heretics, you know?
Same with the Muslims, you know? Yes, there are a few sub-groups of one sect, which take that religion to ridiculous extremes. I don't think it's fair to paint the whole Islam with the same brush as Al Qaeda.
Honestly, I'm not a muslim (to paraphrase George Carlin, I used to be a christian until I reached the age of reason;), but I haven't found that much war-mongering in the Quran. Or at least in the translated copy of it that I still own. It seemed not much better or worse than the Bible, to be honest. I wish more people would actually read the damned thing before going on a mindless bashing spree based on rumours they heard from some idiot on TV... and which also hasn't actually read it.
Yes, it contains a few things which can be taken out of context and used as justification for blowing shit up. Same as our Bible does too. You can find inciting to slavery, war crimes, rape, murder, and almost anything else if you want to take certain verses from the Bible literally as God's commandment as to what you should do.
I mean, just as a random example, in Numbers, the Lord through Moses commands no less than complete genocide (including killing the women and children of the Midianites), with the exception being the virgin women... to be taken basically as slaves and distributed to the jewish men. I.e., way I understand it, nice way to add rape to slavery. You know, 'cause if you started the list with mass-murdering civillians, killing children and slavery, it would be a shame to not add rape to it too. They go well together, ya know?
That's the kind of punishment a loving and kind Lord wishes upon those of another religion, who end up spreading their religion to the Lord's flock. The "sin" of the Midianites was merely that some Jews married their women, and some of those Jews ended up converting to their wives' religion. And for causing that "corruption", every single man and non-virgin woman, even "among the little ones" had to be put to the sword. In fact, Moses is annoyed that the soldiers didn't kill the midian women and chidren in the first place. I mean, duh, it should have been obvious.
I could go on and give more examples, but let's just say: that's the kind of thing that's right there in the Bible. So if you want to split hairs and go "see, religion X incites to violence", you have equally good verses in the Bible. That's your kernel of truth.
But do christians or christianity as a whole actually act that way? No, I don't think I've seen any people who think we should, say, go mass-murder India because some Christians joined a new-age Guru and converted to some eastern tantric stuff. I mean, it'd the direct equivalent of what the people of Midian did in the Bible, no? We don't actually do what those verses say. Most people don't even think about them.
Same with the Quran, way I see it. Yes, it contains _some_ verses which can be considered an incitation to violence. And a few groups of nutters actually do. Most of the Muslims don't.
Well, nobody said it will be good for _you_. You're just supposed to believe that it'll be good for the economy -- in the same way, say, telemarketing calls or companies selling your private data are -- and saves the company some money, and _of_ _course_ they'll pass the savings on to you, the consumer.
If I'm to go by what other companies think it's a clearly affirmative accepting a contract, it'll probably go like this: somewhere in the fine print of their contract, or maybe in an EULA on their router/modem config page, will be something like "I agree to be tracked, and the company can do whatever it wishes with my data." And if you don't agree, then you can't use their service. Bonus points if:
A) you only find that out after you bougt the service and,
B) they're the only choice you have.
Hey, it worked for software EULAs, didn't it?
Actually, I don't think they're seen as representative by anyone in, say, Western Europe. If you started foaming at the mouth about how "teaching the controversy" (about evolution,) or putting bible studies back into secular schools, or persecuting homosexuals because "God" told you so, here in Germany (and, I _think_, at least in France too) everyone would look funnily at you and wonder what mental institution did you escape from. The impression even among relatively religious people about the lunacies coming from America in the name of religion, isn't as much, "man, those are real christians, we should be like them", but rather along the lines of, "where did America go wrong?"
The last time any kind of fundamentalist bible thumping had any kind of street cred in Europe was during the Counter-Enlightenment of the late 18'th and early 19'th century.
The funny thing is that even, say, the Catholic Church, much as a lot of Americans like to think it must be like their own born-again zealots, actually went a very long time ago through what was called the "counter-reformation" to try to stop the tide of protestantism. They learned to be a lot more laissez-faire about, say, science and even sponsored such orders as the Jesuits. Which were and still are primarily an academic order within the church. Those guys actually run universities and research labs. From the very start, Ignatius de Loyola insisted on an academic education to high standards before one could join the order, in a stark contrast to the stereotype of ignorant and poorly educated clergy of the time.
At any rate, positions like ID or young earth are as foreign to catholicism as it gets. And that's just one of the denominations which, by and large, just looks funny at the bible-thumping puritans from across the oceans and think at best, "Lord, what have we done to you, to be lumped into the same category as _those_?" ;)
So, no, the USA fundamentalists aren't seen as representative by any christian except themselves. Just as they're not representative for the larger and more moderate mass of US citizens, I think. (Or hope.) Just because a group is loud and vocal, doesn't mean they represent anyone else but themselves.
And if anyone else decides to judge, say, the largely secular Europe by what the bible-thumpers in America say or do... well, I guess some things can't be helped. Some people are ignorant and ill educated everywhere, and if they want to believe something that hasn't been true for two centuries, it's not my problem.
Actually, it wasn't a game as such. See, one of the Saudi princes got taunted about his 3DMark scores once too often, by someone with an overclocked compressor-cooled 2x6 core Dual Xeon 7460 system with 3x nVidia GTX 280 SLI.
And as everyone(*) knows, your 3DMark score is not just the measure of your worth, but verily an accurate measure of penis size. In fact, they're in a feedback loop. It's true. If you fall out of the top 10, your Y chromosomes will spread their legs and go, "fuck, we were X all along". And the Penis Police will show up at your door with a rusty hedge scissors and revoke your right to pee standing. It's no laughing matter.
And, well, the royal family represents the whole country and people. The collective penis of the whole Saudi Arabia could be at stake, because someone didn't upgrade their machine to beat the best score. And the last thing you want as a ruling dynasty is to wake up one morning and find a mob of former men in front of the palace gates, wanting to beat you up with their handbags for what junior's lame machine did to them. You really don't want to go down in history as that kind of a ruling family.
So, anyway, it started kinda innocent enough. You know, _quad_ 6-core Xeons, liquid nitrogen cooling, stuff like that. But then they hired a consultant for the rest of the spec and it kinda snowballed from there ;)
(*) ... who wastes their time willy-waving about their system on those boards
That the choice of picking door A inhibits the signal for door B, is one thing. But humans often then feel anxious or depressed about the former choice to pick door A, and work backwards towards some bullshit reason why. And then that fairy tale they just invented, is stored in that network as a fact. Essentially it's controlled schizophrenia: an imaginary thing we just invented, gets fed back into the thing as an actual input or rather as a memory of an actual input.
We might invent things like that Door A was the morally right / elite / whatever choice and only evil people / idiots / whatever pick Door B. (Wth? It's just a door.) We might invent that there was something bad or foreboding about Door B. We might even retroactively redefine it as it not having been Door A at all. I chose Door B and everyone saying otherwise is a liar, dammit.
It doesn't stop at "ok, door A worked for me before, I'll keep picking door A." We go and build a better scaffolding than that all the time, and often it's just fiction.
Whole edifices of fiction can be invented in the blink of an eye, and get described as some moment of enlightenment or revelation. Though it probably will only go into long term memory in the next REM sleep cycle. We essentially just stuffed a whole bunch of fiction in our input buffer, stamped with a retroactive date.
I'm not even sure how I'd code a neural network to work like that, even if I explicitly wanted to.
That said, about pathways, well real biological neurons do tend to organize themselves into pathways and lobes. There are, basically, subnets which don't just happen to contain the paths for the same memory, but really organize themselves to have one function only. Or just take over a function if the previous group got destroyed and that didn't kill you. E.g., when you go into anxiety or fight-or-flight mode, that's very well delimited groups of neurons which, essentially, organized themselves to be the ones who decide if you should be affraid and if you need an adrenalin shot. You can see them firing on an MRI scan. I wouldn't know if the memory / reason parts do that too, but it wouldn't be a huge surprise either. It _could_ be that there's a certain group which starts that simulation job at night and/or compares the results. Or maybe not. We're not that far with understanding the brain.
Yes, _we_ all have our cognitive dissonances, and bullshit ways to resolve them. But the funny thing is that none of us is aware of our _own_.
If anyone can think "well, actually I like the agenda of Party X more, but I'm still pissed off at their candidate in the last elections, so I'll vote against them anyway", that's _not_ the result of a cognitive dissonance. And if I'm aware that I'm doing something awfully wrong, or have done something awfully wrong, then I haven't bullshitted myself yet. Etc.
The mental model is basically the sum of all the things each of us "knows" to be right. Whether we're even consciously aware of them or not. Every think that we take for granted, every thing that is "common sense", everything that we instinctively apply, and everything thing that just is so. Like that the Sun rises in the east, moss grows on the north side of trees, and I'm the Nicest Guy In The World And By All Rights Women Should Queue Up To Have My Baby (popular piece of model with us nerds;)
If I can think "well, that's actually false, but I'll use it anyway because I like that thought more, and lets me apply a couple of choice fallacies to support some other of my preconceived notions", then it's not really a piece of my model. I already know it to be false and not the way the world works.
The ones that are in the model are the things that I know to be true. Even if for everyone else they're so much bullshit that you could fertilize a good sized farm with them.
Those guys in the classic experiment who've shafted someone for a dollar? They too didn't think they're bending reality to support that. If you asked them before, if they'd bullshit someone for a dollar, they'd have said "no." And if you asked them afterwards, they had already bullshitted themselves that it wasn't really a lie, it was a great job, and they actually did the sucker a big favour by convincing him to take it. So they'd still have answered "no" in all honesty. They too weren't aware that they actually have a flaw in their model.
In that aspect, we're all like the ugly guy in a world without mirrors. We don't see our own problems.
So, yes, it's easy to think that everyone else is broken. Their BS doesn't match my model. Mine does, so it must be the truth. I don't see the many times I must have done something bad, and bent reality to still think I'm a Nice Guy. All I remember is me doing the right thing, thus I really am a Nice Guy. And that sucker in university? I did him a favour by convincing him to take that job, if you really must know ;)
Actually, my own impression is that you're the rule rather than the exception. Most atheists do mind their own business, and so do most theists for that matter. The majority of the population is really in between those two sides of the coin.
But, anyway, if you don't go around trying to save perfect strangers from their ignorance, you're not what I'd call a "christian-baiting troll." I'm rather talking about those who act like the atheist version of Jehova's Witnesses. They're not just content with having had the big revelation, they have to save your soul too.
But generally the phenomenon of bullshit mental models reforming the other way around, is more general than religion. As a rule of thumb, look out for phrases like, "and then I was enlightened", or "then I realized I had been living a lie", and other such expressions to that same effect: that "Eureka!" moment. That sudden lightning flash where everything became clear, the path ahead was suddenly visible, and you only need to teach The Truth to everyone else.
Or, much as I'm not going to gain many friends by picking on a guy who's dead and was smart and funny, a perfect illustration would be George Carlin's, "I was a catholic until I reached the age of reason." He repeated it in several shows. Well, he probably just said it because it was funny, so I'm not really picking on him. But it serves well as a quote to illustrate the point. There are people who genuinely have that kind of an experience. A moment where it's suddenly clear that all you've done or believed in, was dumb and stupid, and you're now teh enlightened guy for realizing the exact opposite.
It's also known by the less flattering name of "brainwashing".
That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. And that's the moment when a crashed mental model was hastily replaced with an even more bullshit one, only the other way around. The stress and discomfort of a broken model were suddenly lifted, hence that wonderful sensation of having suddenly discovered The Truth. And it has to be The Truth, because everything seems to make perfect sense now. (Having been padded with enough bullshit redefinitions of reality, until it does internally make sense.)
Again, it's not just about religion. It could just as well be the guy who was a rabid Linux zealot, and suddenly was enlightened that Linux is sellout crap for idots and BSD is The One True Way. (I've actually known someone like that.) It could be the nerdy gal who believed all her life that people are fundamentally good and you have to do The Right Thing, then suddenly was enlightened that only stupid people do good, and you have to care only about yourself. (Ditto.) It could be, like in somebody else's example, the moment when someone switches from actively campaigning for smokers' rights, to campaigning against smoking. Etc.
Yes, that was metaphorically speaking, and using the term "wiring" rather inexact.
The actual "wiring", as you noted, is largely the data. That's how we learn.
The metaphorical "wiring" I'm talking about is actually in the DNA and proteins encoded by it. It's how the neurons themselves are built to work. They don't rewire the network randomly, they have a bit of code in the DNA that says how they should work. The BIOS and bootstrap code of that neural network, so to speak. That's really what I'm talking about when I say "wired".
I hope it didn't cause too much confusion to anyone.
As for how would you check for consistency, I dunno, by running a proof through it and seeing if you get two contradicting results? There's even a conjecture that that's what dreams are: the night job that runs simulations through that data.
But in truth I doubt that there's anyone who can tell you exactly how the brain works, and which pathway belongs to the consistency checking job. If we knew that, we'd already have a working AI.
We can however look at it from the outside, like at a black box, and notice some things it does. And there is strong evidence that it does that kind of a model consistency check and cleanup. Even if we don't know exactly how it works, we can see what goes in and what comes out, and it looks that way.
Same as I can look at a plane and say it tries to keep its altitude constant, even if I have no fucking clue which control surfaces are used for that, and even less clue what the code running on its computers is.
Well, in the end, the scientific method is just a way to _avoid_ clinging to some dogma and building cognitive dissonances to support it. There is no immovable "truth", or rather, we don't know it yet. Your pet theory is likely to be not quite the whole "truth" yet. There will eventually be some data which require it to be refined even further. Be honest to yourself and admit that you could have only an incomplete understanding of the universe, and that way we can all continue to learn more.
Anyone who sees science as some immutable dogma, or as some choice between this dogma and that one, isn't doing science in the first place. That's religion. It's the exact opposite of science. And, yes, it's funny to see people rant against religion, while using science as a dogma. That's not science vs religion, that's religion vs religion. One of them uses pseudo-science trappings, but it's used as a religion nevertheless.
I don't see how you can qualify the real thing as, basically, self-delusional, or conversely claim that only sticking to a bullshit fairy-tale as The Truth is the only non-self-delusional behaviour. Science is all about avoiding that kind of absolute truths and abandoning any pretense that you know everything. This is the data we have. This is the theory that explains that data. When we'll have more data, we'll refine the theory some more. If some of those axioms don't fit the data, we'll discard the axioms. It's just about as intellectually honest as it gets.
So, pray tell, in which way is that kind of admission that we don't know everything "self-delusional"?
Male brain, female brain, monkey brain, whatever. In a recent experient, monkeys too were shown to build (at least the symptoms of a) cognitive dissonance.
It makes sense, if you think about it. You can't really do much with a mental model where simultaneously "all grass is green" and "all grass is red" are true. You must discard or fix one of the statements, or maybe go for some compromise like "most grass is green, but some species are red" or maybe admit "I have no bloddy clue what colour grass is, that still needs to be determined."
The only bad dissonances happen when one just can't let go of one of the ideas, so the other one _has_ to be false, all evidence be damned. As someone else correctly noted, most often when one's beliefs and actions are irreconcileable with each other. If you're not able to let go of the beliefs, you redefine the actions.
A broken model is actually a source of stress and discomfort until it's somehow fixed, so virtually everyone will do something to fix it.
We could go into who builds the worst dissonances. (Though I'm not aware of any data saying that women build worse resolutions than the men, or viceversa.) But the basic issue of needing a consistent model isn't gender specific, or as far as we know even species specific. Your cat tries to keep its little mental model just as consistent as you do with yours.
Well, not everyone goes for lying to themselves. So I don't doubt that some people will do just like you said. But look around you. Do you really doubt that half of your co-workers would try to sucker someone, even just to be on the boss's good side? :P
That said, not that I'm accusing you or anything, but having very strong and immutable ideas about what you'd do or wouldn't do, is what causes such dissonances to go wrong in the first place. People start with immutable ideas like "_I_ wouldn't ever do X", and when somehow they find themselves doing it, well, if that idea is immutable, the other one has to go. It becomes, "yeah, well, what I did doesn't _really_ qualify as X." That's when and how such lying to oneself happens.
So keeping a more open mind about your options could actually help.
But again, I don't know you enough to make a definitive pronouncement there. Maybe you have the will power to actually stick to your principles, no matter what. Most people have the principles, but not the will to stick to them. So they end up warping reality to be still able to think that they do have those principles.
Cognitive dissonance is just what happens when you have two conflicting ideas, and basically have to choose one. It happens just as well when reality came and rang the door bell, but it's the same mechanism that was at work when that delusion rang the bell and you let it in. You have two options and you can't have both. You choose one. Whether it was the right one or you sank deeper into delusional behaviour, is rather irrelevant for the mechanism at work. Choosing the wrong one is nevertheless just the same mechanism at work.
Basically I don't disagree with you when you call those behaviours names, or anything. I'm just saying that the term "cognitive dissonance" is used to mean a very specific mechanism, and how, yes, such self-delusional behaviours come to be.
The dissonance itself is just the fact that (temporarily) two pieces of your mental model are at odds with each other. You have to solve that somehow, because your brain is wired to need one consistent model and try to solve such conflicts. But, at any rate, that's the dissonance: propositions X and Y can't both be true. How you solve that, is already one step further. You can go with the truth, or manufacture a lie, but the dissonance was just the same.