Well, it's true for almost any competitive video game too.
E.g., take a l33t zerg rusher from Starcraft and put him in a situation where he can't mechanically repeat the same rush, and watch him proclaim that the map is crap.
E.g., I once had the mis-fortune of working with a complete CS-head, and made the mistake of listening to him at first, which made it nigh impossible to shake him off when he got boring. Well, actually, I am a gamer, and at first it was just another talk about just another game, so it was interesting.
Then it got massively boring as I quickly realized that he was playing the exact same map, and did the exact same thing, every bloody day. Several hours per evening. He'd buy the same bloody weapon and a grenade, run behind the same warehouse, climb the same ladder, drop through the same vent in the roof, crawled through the same duct, dropped in the same room, and shot the guy camping in the corner, if one was there.
I guess that's the thing that got him the best score, or something, and he repeated it religiously. (And somehow thought it's worth talking about again, every day. But I digress.)
One time I'm dumb enough to say "yes" when he wants to show me how cool CS is and how great he is, after hours. (We were pretty much free to install what we wanted to on the company computers, and a multiplayer round in the lunch break or occasionally after hours was pretty much a sacred tradition for most people.) So he finds a server with that map, and he's even on defense this time, so it promises to be different.
He buys a weapon and runs and starts jumping in place in front of a vent. Some guy drops into that duct from the roof, my co-worker shoots him, and keeps on jumping. Next round, the same. Next round, you guessed, he's jumping in front of the same vent again like he's got mad kangaroo disease. Repeat for two bloody hours O.o
So I'm standing there dumbfounded, mostly out of sheer morbid curiosity. I mean, it was painfully boring even for me to watch that repetitive _work_. I expected him to go, "ah, screw this, lemme show you something else" any time now. Nope. For two bloody hours he repeated the exact same sequence and hopped in place in front of the same vent.
Well, it depends on the scope of the mod, actually. Not everything is a total conversion, like the summary seems to assume.
I could be remembering wrong, but I think the smallest mod I've seen that did anything useful and got downloaded, was a 1 line change to a Creatures 3 script. Admittedly, there was obviously some time involved in reading and understanding the scripts, but I still can't imagine anyone needing to set time aside over long periods for that.
Also, a lot of games allow a more modular approach to mods and personally that's the kind of mods I'd like to see more. I do realize that it's not applicable to all games, and it does pose problems in multiplayer. But I kinda like more the kind of small mods that I can mix and match, like, say, most Oblivion mods, instead of one big chunk that changes everything. Or in X2: The Threat, my favourite "mod", was again a collection of smaller scripts, ships and other small changes, that I had put together for myself out of such small pieces that other people made and were available for download separately.
At any rate, again, I doubt that most of those plugins had to be a second job to get done.
Well, there _is_ a lot of bullshit in evolutionary psychology. But in this case, well, IMHO it's not as much psychology as just common sense. That's what any animal does: learn empiric cause-effect pairs.
After all, that's what Pavlov called a reflex. The dog learns that after hearing the bell, food comes. He hears the bell, starts salivating already.
Or someone else mentioned an experiment where cats were zapped when they got too close to a certain object. So they quickly start avoiding objects of that type.
Heck, speaking of cats again, apparently _some_ brands of cat food include caffeine, apparently just to be able to make that claim that cats like their brand. Caffeine can be very addictive and cause some major headaches as withdrawal syndrome. So the cats quickly learn that food which smells that way cures the headache, and start prefering it.
It's not hard to believe that we're pre-programmed to learn out of whatever few data is available.
Well, I was just talking about passing one's genes on. Whether it's good for society _now_, that's a whole other question. Damn good one, too.
And the rest of us are supposed to act like that's perfectly OK.
Now _that_ is what worries me more. The fucked up idea that all opinions are equally valuable and we should respect them all equally, and science is just such an opinion.
It's not even just religion or superstition that worry me there. Corporate PR trying to masquerade as science, or rewrite science, is doing far more damage. Someone who believes in the beardie-in-the-sky or wears a funky crystal as a luck charm, can still reconcile that with a scientific view of the world. (And lots of christians do, for example. It's only a minority of protestant bible-thumper, not even a majority of protestants or christians, who has a problem with science.) PR on the other hand, is undermining the very image and respect for science. John Doe is caught in an avalanche of headlines to the effect of:
"Scientists (funded by Mars) discover that chocolate is good for you!"
"Scientists say: no, it ain't, mate. Take it in moderation."
"Scientists (funded by Budweiser) prove that beer drinkers live longer!!!"
"Scientists (funded by a wine makers' association) say: yeah, well, wine is even better!!!"
"Scientists (funded by a coffee maker) say: forget wine and beer, coffee is better than both!"
"This just in: antibiotics cause autism!!! Use natural cures instead!!"
"Scientist calculates the perfect day to take a vacation!" (Except it adds different units and generally is a meaningless mockery.)
Half of those weren't even written by a real scientist, but by a PR agency. Then it fished around for someone with a Prof, Dr or Ph.D. title that'll sign it for 30 silvers, and sure enough they found someone who has nothing to lose, he has no good name to lose, and will sign anything for a price. Then it goes to the press as a "scients discover X" story.
But John Doe doesn't know that. He only sees a mess of conflicting "scientific" statements. One day beer is good for you, the next day it's bad, and next week it's good for you again. And a press which tells him that everything is a controversy. And is left with the impression that "science" just means a bunch of arse-clowns making wild claims of authority, but who really are no more knowledgeable than the local snake oil peddler.
And _that_ attack on science might one day bite us all in the arse worse than all other superstitions _combined_.
At the risk of repeating myself, that wasn't always so.
E.g., if you took your children to a doctor in the middle ages, there were basically 3 kinds that you could choose between:
- the barber-surgeon, which, as the title implies, was the town barber and also did a bit of surgery on the side. Often with the same instruments. And don't think they knew how to sterilize them. The _only_ treatment they knew was to draw a pint of blood.
(Or the other flavour of it, the smith-dentist. If you needed an abcessed tooth pulled out, well, the village smith already had tongs.)
- The alchemist. This guy had a single placebo: Aqua Vitae. (Which gave us the Swedish Aquavit.) Yep, it was distilled alcohol. They prescribed it so generously for everything, that the Black Death outbreaks also helped spread alcoholism in Europe. Needless to say, small children don't deal well with alcohol, and can be killed by doses which would barely get an adult to feel slightly warm.
Later the alchemists somewhat improved their repertory, to include treatments with mercury and other toxic stuff.
- The village witch, if the Inquisition didn't get her first. This one was rather hit and miss too, and most of the potions and spells fell squarely into the "toxic" and/or "placebo" categories too.
So basically praying instead of taking your kids to either of the first two, was usually the better choice. The third was a toss between getting something no better than praying, and getting something at least as toxic as the alchemist's concoctions. So maybe being superstitious actually got one _better_ chances of passing on their genes.
Sure, _nowadays_ superstition like that is bad, but nowadays natural selection and survival of the fittest pretty much stopped. Chances are you _will_ survive enough to reproduce (if you want to reproduce), no matter how genetically unfit you are.
Even if you don't take your children to a doctor, even just the better nourishment and sanitation give them more chances of survival than they'd have in the middle ages. Even in royal families it wasn't entirely uncommon to lose 3 or even 4 children out of every 5. Nowadays even if you're not just a dumbass, but the dumbest-possible-ass, they'll still have better chances than that. And you'll live enough to try again, if your first or second died while you were praying for them.
As I was saying, nowadays natural selection all but stopped, so it doesn't matter.
But back when it mattered, well, the superstitious ones might have actually had better chances.
What if they tried this test using ugly light skinned avitars and @#$%ing hot dark skinned avitars?
Actually, I seem to recall reading a column a long time ago, in a galaxy far aw... err... on The Register. Apparently the author had made a light-skinned female avatar on Second Life, and got hit on all the time. Then he/she/it made a decent looking black girl, and pretty much disappeared off most people's radars. If I remember the screenshot right, there wasn't nothing fundamentally wrong with her. Not beauty queen material, mind you, but certainly not worse than avatars which do get hit on.
So apparently the standards for "@#$%ing hot" are a bit different when you're playing a black girl.
I dunno... when you get God to actually come down and have a face to face talk with you, _then_ you'll need an analogy with a partner in religion.
Of course, the guy is playing hard to get. Even Moses couldn't get a talk to him in person. It's the "for the day thou see my face thou shalt die" guy, ya know? So I don't think that both atheists and theists won't need to stretch that analogy any time soon.
Aye, I know what you mean about really believing in something and then having someone shatter it for you.
I, for example, used to really believe in having another beer. Then some arsehole of a scientist type (a doctor, to be precise) showed me an echogram of my liver. Shattered that faith right there. Bastards the lot of them;)
Well, I must sort of wonder about the first scenario. Turning it into basically just "how helpful you see yourself as" seems to me a bit of a simplification.
Basically the base objection is that i see myself as a helpful guy generally, not as "helpful towards Bryan's char". From there, this is modified further more by how I see _them_, than by how I see myself.
Assuming it was a perfect stranger and thus doesn't start with any other "modifier" to my reaction towards them: from my experience with other online worlds, it would depend more (or at least as much) on how they performed during that first request. Someone who was nice, polite and said "thanks" is likely to just get filed under "nice acquaintances" by yours truly, and that raises the chance of getting any help again by itself. It has IMHO more to do with him essentially fitting himself under a more favourable category than "complete stranger."
On the other hand, someone who acted like an arsehole during that first help round, or was a source of stress, will be unlikely to get any help from me ever again. In effect, he helped file himself under a category _worse_ than "complete stranger." The fact that I've seen myself helping him once, won't get him any favours.
In effect, it's IMHO more of an "us vs them" situation. That initial contact just gives you a chance to file that guy as closer to "us" or to "them". That new position will influence further interactions.
And just as further support to the idea that it's a sort of "us vs them" thing, on WoW:
- I've played a paladin lots. Any paladin asking for help is _very_ likely to receive assistance. A paladin needing a run through those 3 instances for Verigan's Fist, will almost invariably get me to drop whatever I was doing and help him. (Except if he manages to be an arsehole about it.)
- I've actually played a hunter more, but I've had some very bad experiences when grouped with noob hunters (and I really mean "noob", not "newbie".) It seems that a lot of them can make it to level 70 without getting even the most minimal clue about how to work in a group. My initial reaction will be a lot more circumspect around a hunter.
- I haven't played warriors higher than the 20's or so, because, frankly they die too easily when soloing. And in a group you're like Jesus, you die for other people's sins. So funnily enough I find that I'm very inclined to help a warrior on their level 20 armour quest, because I know how hard it can be to get all the required parts, but I'd probably be disinclined to run him through, say, Gnomeregan instead.
- People in the same guild, even if I haven't seen them before, and have no idea who recruited them or whose alt they are, are a lot more likely to get help from me. They're, after all, one of "us."
Etc.
Basically there are a lot of modifiers there which really all depend on how I see that guy, and how close he is to the "us" group, and not much on how I see myself in relation to him.
E.g., antibiotics exist only since the 1930's. So only since then you have choices like, basically, "do I trust the doctor and take these pills, or do I trust the shaman and take this extract of Aqua Clara?"
If you go back, say, 5 centuries, already the choices were a lot more like:
A. "Do I trust the alchemist and drink the Aqua Vitae, or do I trust the barber-doctor and let him draw a pint of blood, do I trust the priest and pray real hard to God?" All three were wrong, and actually the first two were _worse_. The alchemists only had distilled alcohol as a cure-all placebo, and drawing blood tended to be worse in the vast majority of cases than doing nothing. So blind faith and superstition might actually have been the better choice in a lot of cases.
B. "Do I trust the superstition that storing pots and dishes with the opening downwards repels evil spirits, or am I an enlightened renaissance man and laugh at such superstitions?" Again, actually the superstition had a point. Dust setting into pots was harmful, and even if nobody had seen a microbe, some people did figure out a correlation between how you store your empty pottery and how often you get sick.
Heck, as late as the 19'th century, during the cholera outbreaks, the superstitious folks had better chances of survival. Mortality in the homeopathic hospitals was actually lower than in the proper medical establishment ones. Of course, homeopathy was still bullshit, but the doctors also bled you dry as the only treatment method they knew, while the homeopaths merely gave you harmless water to drink. (Or rather, solutions of something or another, but so dilluted that they were effectively just water.) The homeopathic solution didn't help, while the other actually caused extra harm to someone already dehydrated and weakened.
Likewise, in the 90'th century, some 50% of the women who gave birth with a doctor would die of septicemic shock, whereas among those who trusted a midwife mortality was a _lot_ lower. Some people actually proposed that doctors wash their hands after performing autopsies on corpses, and before operating or helping people give birth, but that was discounted as a ridiculous superstition. Well, what do you know? The superstitious guys killed a lot less patients. There actually were some nasty germs which the rest got off corpses, and just helped transplant them into previously healthy people.
Etc.
And if you go even further back in time, to when the brain evolved to jump to conclusions and make such hasty generalizations from too little data, the choice was even simple. "I tried to go through this thorny bush, and it hurt for a week. Do I (A) generalize and avoid this kind of bush, or (B) think you can't learn anything from a sample of one, and try again with a dozen other bushes like this?" Or like, "I ate that spotty mushroom and threw up my immortal soul, and was sick for a week. Do I (A) hastily generalize that there's something evil about them, and avoid them, or (B) think it was just a statistically insignifficant coincidence, and try again?"
Simply put, option A was the _safer_ one. Sure, it was sometimes wrong. Sometimes it wasn't the bush, it was the patch of poison ivy it was in. Sometimes it wasn't the mushroom, it was simply an illness which happened at the wrong time. But there was no way to know better anyway. Getting some quick empirical cause-effect rules was the best you could do.
Option B wasn't that safe at all. A lot of time trying something harmful again, just to see if you got the cause right, would outright get you killed.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not against science or medicine or anything. Sure, _nowadays_ that's a better choice than superstition and empirical generalizations. Very much so. But the interval where we even had that choice at all is infinitesimal, at evolution scales. We had medicine for less than 100 years, the human species alone is 200,000 years old.
He got caught after 40 weeks, or almost 10 months of it. During which he spent 15/40 = 37.5% of his time talking to sex lines.
So maybe the question "why didn't he get caught?" is technically wrong, it practically begs for the question, "why did it take them so long?"
I mean, seriously, is stuff like, "hur hur hur, I want to pull down your panties and stick it in your ass" something you'd normally hear around the office when people are talking on the phone? Well, I guess I've had worse tech support before, but never that explicit;)
An ecosystem. Doesn't need to have full-featured critters like in Spore or Creatures; just make the monsters eat each other, reproduce, and compete for resources in the obvious way. Come on, it's not difficult.
[...]
Allow player actions to affect the world. If I kill all predators from an area I expect the ecology to be ruined. If you donâ(TM)t want players ruining the ecology, make it difficult to genocide.
UO launched with that failed model, and it quickly degenerated in just that: a bunch of people worked real hard and made it their goal in life to get whole species extinct.
The problem is that it's a one-time stunt. You give _one_ player per server the satisfaction of being the one who got the last wolf extinct. (Ok, maybe two.) Then another one who got the bears extinct, and so on, so maybe you made a dozen players happy. Total. You have tens of thousand of players on that server now who have nothing more to hunt. Congrats, that was the dumbest possible idea in gaming history.
UO tried the same with the economy, btw. There'd be a finite amount of ore in the world, and more would be generated when old swords and armours are destroyed or sold. But then some players took it upon themselves to ruing the economy, e.g., by hoarding as many items as possible, to keep the ore from respawning. Not to corner the market or otherwise make a profit, but just for the sake of fucking up the game for someone else.
Needless to say, that was another model that was discarded very quickly.
So be careful what you wish for, it might not be what you expected. Stop thinking that it would be _you_ who's the big cheese and who'd leave your mark upon the world. You'd most likely be the victim of someone else who left his mark on the world by making your life shitty. E.g., by making sure there are no more wild animals in the world, so leatherworkers are shafted, and so is any hunter who needed a pet, and all hunting quests become impossible.
For some people, being annoying to many, is the only glory they can hope for in their pathetic little lives.
Well, I see his point, though. The mammalian brain didn't evolve to make scientific reproductible experiments and calculate the error bar. Any given creature wouldn't have enough data or the chance to perform some meaningful experiment. So learning some cause-effect pairs, no matter how flawed, is all that was available and better than nothing.
E.g., if you're a goat and trying to eat one kind of bush gives you some nasty thorn wounds, you just remember that and move on. From now on, you avoid that bush if you can. You don't have the luxury to sample enough such bushes and enough such goats, divided neatly into two groups for a proper double-blind test, to see if you have a good sample. (And probably wouldn't live long if you did.) In practice, maybe that bush was growing through a barbed wire fence, but you wouldn't know that.
The same would apply to the early humans too. If cousing Urgh and aunt Graah ate the funny spotted mushrooms and died, you avoid those mushrooms. You don't divide the tribe in two halves and do a double blind experiment to see if it was really the mushrooms.
So they're not the same, but one of them was all that was available. And we're built to jump to conclusions, basically.
Well, it essentially boils down to psychology, I guess. If all people without jobs died over night, then half the people _with_ jobs would get the idea, "hey, where are you going to get a replacement if you fire me?" So now they'd get a lot more "balls" to ask for a raise.
Or another way to look at it is in terms of supply and demand. Essentially there is a supply of workers, and a demand for it, and the prices reflect that. The current wages and the inflation are the result of a certain ratio between the two. If all the people without jobs died over night, would change that ratio.
It used to be rather difficult to produce inflation, back before we switched to a fiat money system. I don't believe that most people were jobless back then.
Really? I thought the very fact that gold kept being mined out of the ground, caused a steady inflation. Except it was uncontrollable and unpredictable.
Then you had stuff like the discovery of gold and silver mines by the Spanish in America, caused some uncontrollable bursts and fits of hyper-inflation in Spain. Paradoxically, that gold and silver influx actually caused Spain to go bankrupt. Twice. In a row. Because the economy had just become unpredictable and a budget was impossible to plan.
Also most countries steadily devalued their coins, or they were devalued by counterfeiting and people removing small amounts of gold from the coins. Or you had big bursts of it, like when the Romans devalued the solidus. But even without such big events, what do you think happened when, say, Trajan came with a buttload of gold and silver from Dacia, or Odoacer had the mints running full time to keep his Goths on his side?
Or read a bit about the Black Death outbreaks. Unemployment practically disappeared, as there were not enough peasants and craftsmen for the nobles to employ. Prices shot up. There was some _massive_ inflation in the 14'th and 15'th centuries. (Which also provides some early illustration for that curve at work.)
So, nope, it's not a new thing, it happened _long_ before fiat money.
That page says "In the 1970s, many countries experienced high levels of both inflation and unemployment also known as stagflation. Theories based on the Phillips curve suggested that this could not happen, and... The idea that there was a simple, predictable, and persistent relationship between inflation and unemployment was abandoned by most if not all macroeconomists.".
_Partially_ true. Nobody believes any more that those two are the _only_ variables in that equation, yes. But when all else is equal, the relationship between the two holds.
At any rate, heck, your government (assuming you're in a western country) still applies that curve quite successfuly. Again, that's how and why we all control inflation. But, at the very least, there you go, most governments still didn't abandon it at all.
They couldn't just say "you will now work at the wrench factory on the other side of town"? I'd thought they replaced markets ("the wrench factory will pay me twice as much") with centralized command, but it sounds like they just got rid of markets without replacing them with anything?
That was a hypothetical example. More realistic examples would be something like wrenches and computers. It's a bit harder to shift people between radically different jobs without having a pool of qualified unemployed people as, basically, a suspension to absorb the shocks.
Also bear in mind that the USSR wasn't quite chattel slavery, or at least not after Stalin. They had mechanisms to guide people at certain points, like assigning them a job after college. But after that, they didn't go to someone and say, "you! pack your things, we're making you a truck driver starting tomorrow!" The only way to shift someone to a new job is if they asked for a transfer and it got approved. Otherwise, you could _usually_ die of old age in the same job you got after college or high school. Even if that job was no longer needed, or you were totally incompetent at it.
Otherwise, if you needed more jobs for a factory, you really had to wait until enough graduates get churned out and assigned there. In short, their economy turned slower than a battleship.
In a sense, yes, they got rid of certain markets (like the employment market) and the replacements were non-existent or dysfunctional.
Actually, it would come from loans. The way to manipulate inflation and unemployment is to change the loan rate. The way that works is that, well, a company judges investing in new stuff against that rate. If you pay 10% interest, then an idea which promises 11% return is worth taking a loan for, one which promises only 9% return is no reason to take a loan to implement. So by varying that you can essentially make sure that only things promising very high returns get done, at one end of it, or anyone with a 0.5% margin idea gets to make a company and hire people, at the other end.
The inflation, if you increase that to reduce unemployment, essentially comes from (A) the former margins, and (B) essentially devaluing your coin.
Basically if banks can take cheap loans, and thus give cheap loans to anyone with even the least profitable idea, you're essentially creating money. This creates jobs, but those people soon get the idea that they can ask for a raise. If enough people do that, and you can't motivate your workers with "be glad you still have a job" talks, then your only choice is to also raise prices.
That's really the mechanism that causes inflation. You _don't_ take that money from either the CEO's pay, or the R&D budget. You just raise prices proportionally. Except everyone does that. Next round of negotiations, they want even more money, prices rise again too. Lather, rinse, repeat,
Well, it's not "secret" in that you can't find out about it. Obviously you can, quite easily.
I mean, "secret", as in, no politician will tell you about it. I've yet to even hear about any campaign along the lines of, "ok, we'll create more jobs, but you'll pay them for them out of your savings, which will depreciate quite a bit faster." Nor, "ok, this inflation sucks, we'll must fix it! Oh, by the way, a bunch of you will lose your job for that.";)
1. A dirty little secret of all governments, the USA included, is that they _can't_ get rid of unemployment or inflation, and they're actually trying to keep both where they want them. There's this funny little hyperbolic-looking curve called the Phillips Curve, which ties inflation to unemployment. If you even tried to push one to zero, the other rises sky-high.
So the best any government can do is to keep both at a point they can live with. Exactly what that point is, that's a matter of political debate and position, but everyone tries to do that. A mean most used is the interest rate. That's what the federal reserve does in the USA, but other countries have their own similar institutions.
(The corolary being that any politician which harps on unemployment and inflation as proof that his opponents are evil, or worse yet, promises to really solve either or both, is himself a liar and has no scruples telling you lies to gain power.)
So, yes, a bunch of people without jobs _are_ what makes the economy work. (A capitalist economy included.) Because without those, you'd get a hyperinflation comparable to interwar Germany. (Just as a comparison point, not saying that that's the same cause.) And conversely, if anyone actually managed to eliminate inflation, like some idiots demand, most of you would be out of job.
2. Well, actually, the reluctance to make people change jobs was arguably one of the (several) reasons the Soviet economy colapsed. They were very reluctant to kick people out of a job, since the whole theory was that everyone should be given a job in communism. So if they made a hammer manufacturing company, and 20 years later there would be more of a need for wrenches, they'd still keep a bunch of people there making hammers, just so they don't kick them out and tell them to find another job. It's not the only factor, of course, but worth thinking about.
Or seen at another level, they wanted to eliminate both the unemployment _and_ inflation (via price controls) which had the same devastating results as when it had been attempted before. If both can't take their natural positions on that curve, something else has to give. In their case, productivity went down instead, and corruption went out of hand. Which effectively is another way to get inflation, only in a much more destructive way.
3. The whole thing about capitalism and the free market is that it's an optimization algorithm. It's really a genetic algorithm, based on semi-uninformed trial and error. The "genes" (processes, ideas, products) which are closer to optimal survive and are copied by others, and the process repeats, moving it all closer to the optimum. The genes which lost, and the companies which bet on them, die. Sometimes spectacularly, leaving a bunch of people temporarily unemployed.
That's how it's supposed to work. Bit wasteful, no doubt, and stressful for those who end up looking for a new job. Scott Adams of Dilbert fame (who, I might add, is actually trained as an economist, so he might understand these things) claimed in a blog post that it's "harnessing the power of stupidity" and that at any given moment, 80% of society's resources are pushed off a cliff by idiots. But somehow it seems to work better than anything else we've tried. Trying to prevent that optimization cycle from happening, deviates from optimum very quickly, and produces even worse results.
Unfortunately, that's only ADHD talking, and I have been guilty of it too. I too used to essentially divide the world into, essentially,
A) stuff i would have learned on myself anyway, and
B) stuff which, OMG, is so unimportant and only some oppressive way to waste my time.
Even if you don't explicitly do that dichotomy in your message, I think that _must_ be the underlying aspect of it. Or are you telling me that you would have also learned Geography, History, Chemistry, Biology and read the classics of literature on your own?
Unfortunately there's a lot of stuff you might (or might not) end up needing later, but you don't know that yet.
As a trivial example, someone who thoroughly understands maths, will have the upper hand in a lot of programming domains, over someone whose only learning was teaching himself (the worst habits of) programming on his dad's C64. I'm not even saying I'm the best example there, because honestly maths was outside my focus of interest at the time, but I grudgingly learned it anyway because even I realized I needed it for physics, which was my main interest in school. But anyway, later I stumbled into programming 3D graphics stuff, and suddenly that maths was actually useful. Just telling someone stuff like "imagine a line in six dimensions" when explaining texturing, and watching him go cross eyed because he lacks the mathematical understanding even for that, is the kind of thing I'm talking about.
Or I see people all the time (and often am brought as a consultant to polish their turd) who spend inordinate amounts of time debuging Java's HashMap, and going "OMG, Java is broken! It replaced my old value with a new one whose key has the same hash value!" and maybe even coding comically absurd "workaround" that are trivial to prove that they can't possibly work. When in reality Java just added a new node to the front of the linked list for that bucket. But they don't really know how a hash table or even a linked list actually work. They too thought they don't need a college teaching them that, and when it bites them in the arse, they just don't know what's happening there.
Or I see people who don't even understand the O notation, and why their O(n*n) algorithm may work well on their 10 records test case, but is going to grind to a halt when fed the two billion records of their production database. (And that's actually a pretty small one.) Or I've spent an hour in a meeting explaining to someone (he's been promoted to architech nowadays, btw;) that, yes, in a table of key/value pairs you can store more than two values. Yes, that table has only two columns (ok, three including the parent ID), but you can still store more than two values in there. He obviously wasn't mentally equipped to deal with key/value pairs.
Now I'm not saying that you're of the same calibre. Some people did learn those concepts on their own. But a lot didn't.
That's basically my point. The attitude that you can just teach yourself everything by just banging on your dad's computer's keyboard, might actually leave holes that you're not even aware of. For some people, it's even the basics of the job they end up in. For others, it's just something which would have come in handy later. The ones who'd really learn everything they need on their own, are, in my experience, far and few in between.
Well, here's partially why: because a lot (most?) news outfits are all about journalistic impartiality. Which is a good thing... until you realize that their definition of it is slightly more perverse than yours.
When covering most subjects the idea of impartiality is to present two opposite points of view, without taking sides. Same as impartiality in politics would mean presenting the Democrat and Republican view about any issue, without telling you that one is good and the other is evil. Whether it's about some debatable budget issue or torture and human rights violations, they're not going to tell you which side to take. (Partisan newspapers will still do that, but non-aligned newspapers generally avoid blatantly telling you which side is right. They might tell you one is wrong when it's about China, or serves as willy-waving... err... flag-waving against some foreign nation, but not when it's about domestic politics.)
Unfortunately science isn't politics. But it's treated as such by the media anyway. It's presented as if it is mostly just a matter of opinion, and largely some controversy where there is no objective right and wrong and where everyone's guess is just as good.
At any rate, they _need_ to have two sides of the issue, even if one is proven bogus. If they run a column about, say, global warming, they have to have a side which says "we're doomed" and one side which says "no, it's not even happening." If someone took upon themselves to run a column about gravity, they would _have_ to also have one or two guys (with a degree in gardening, bought from a diploma mill in East Bumfuckistan which also made a cat and two dogs Ph.D.) saying something like, "nah, that's all wrong, there is no gravity, we're just on the inside of a rotating sphere!" And if they run a column where some astrophysicist says something like, "nah, don't be silly, Jupiter is just a giant gas ball, if anyone blew a 'chunk' of hydrogen out of it, it would just dissipate in space", they _have_ to present the opposite point of view too. Even if they have to scratch the bottom of the proverbial barrel for someone who'll go, "no! that's wrong!! it'll shatter Jupiter to pieces and rain fiery asteroid deat upon us all!!!"
And of course they can only present that as perfectly equal and no better or worse than the scientists. Because telling you that one of them is bogus, or that he doesn't have the qualifications or peer-reviewed work, would violate that impartiality.
Additionally that works in reverse too. The media thrives on a good controversy, so the pairing can (and usually is) initiated from the other end. Some nutjob makes some ridiculous claim, the press pairs him with some real scientist saying, "that's bull", as perfect equals, and the "impartial" story is complete.
So, in a nutshell, that's how such nutjobs get disproportionately more coverage than they deserve. Because the press needs them to meet its own fucked-up definition of "impartiality".
Unfortunately, that may be doing us all more harm than the Inquisition and Counter-Enlightenment combined. We have a generation or two already who grew up on a distorted view where everything is a controversy, and any opinion about science is equal to all other opinions. We have people who believe that Newton's laws of mechanics would be different if they were written by, say, a woman. Because that's how much of a matter of only personal opinion they see science. We have PR hacks and the PHBs or lobbyists who employ them, who don't even understand the damage they're doing. They're, after all, just spreading their own opinion about science, which they've been taught that is just another opinion and no less valuable than that of Einstein. Etc.
And there seems to be no end in sight. I'm guessing it will eventually bite us all in the arse worse than we think.
Well, that any sane person would interpret you like you did, is fairly obvious. Now try telling it to some of the bible-belt bible-thumpers. Last I've read some of their arguments, it boiled down to exactly that:
- evolution can't possibly happen, a dog will never evolve into a cat
- life is too complicated to have appeared by chance, it's only God / The Intelligent Designer who could have made it
- certain organs are too complicated to have appeared by random mutations and natural selection, only God / The Intelligent Designer who could have made them
Etc.
Heck, there even was this recent experiment where a bacteria culture held on a citrate substrate, which it originally couldn't metabolize, eventually evolved the proteins to take it apart and feed on it. A certain group of bible thumpers outright accused him of fraud.
Again, I'm not saying that _all_ christians are like that, or that the bible is like that. But there _are_ people who interpret it just like that: _only_ God could have created life.
Actually, nope, they're quite distinct cases, regardless of the "god" option. Something having a beginning does not automatically imply that it was "created" by something whatsoever.
E.g., there's a rainbow outside. It wasn't "created" by anything. It's just the interaction between a bunch of droplets of water, and the sunlight coming in at the right angle. Both are quite random things, and it seems funny to ascribe the power of creation to them. It's an ephemereal phenomenon.
E.g., the formation of the Earth and solar system that that. It's just a bunch of atoms and mollecules which collapsed under their own combined gravity, and happened to settle in this configuration. Some of them first accreted into smaller bits of stone and ice, but nevertheless it's just physics at work. It wasn't "created" by anything whatsoever. It was just a cloud which re-settled in another, more compact, shape under its own gravity. At best you could say that the solar system "created" itself.
Plus, as was already said, you're already postulating that time itself must have existed before the "beginning", which isn't necessarily a given. It's just another axis of the time-space of this universe. Just because we can mentally extrapolate beyond point zero, it doesn't mean it actually existed.
E.g., I can mentally extrapolate going a billion miles west of here. I mean, I can walk a mile or two in that direction, why not a billion? In reality, there is _no_ point that's a billion miles west of here, on this spheroid we call Earth. It wraps around.
E.g., heck, in the Universe itself, I can easily extrapolate something like "a trillion light years in that direction". In reality, there is no such point because the universe itself is finite.
E.g., I can come up with a mental extrapolation like "the 42'th planet around the Sun." I mean, their distancs and periods are just a number series. There's nothing in it that would prevent you from calculatin how far a 42'th planet would be, and what period it would have around the sun. But there is none. Just because you can calculate something it doesn't mean it actually exists.
Ditto here. Just because our intuition can extrapolate something, it doesn't mean it necessarily existed.
Heck, it may even be inaccurate to extrapolate to infinity in the _future_. There is at least one hypothesis based on string theory that there is no acceleration of the expansion of space, it's the time itself that is actually slowing down. And will eventually stop completely. So there might be a point T, past which there is no more future. Much as you can mentally extrapolate past it.
Etc.
Basically don't let your perceptions and intuitions run your model of the universe. Said perceptions and intuition were made to work at small distances, over limited times, and generally with small numbers. There are phenomena which happen too fast or too slow or over too large distances, to bear any relevance to how the mammal brain evolved to deal with or to even resemble anything that your first hand experience includes.
Actually, while I'm not on the WoW forums at all, I can tell you that in some games they _are_ doing proper science.
The scientific method isn't about publishing in the sanctified journals and getting grants. It merely says that you have to make falsifiable predictions, and go with the theory that, in this order, (A) better explains the available data, and (B) if they're equal in the former aspect, pick the simplest.
And a lot of reverse engineering a game does just that: it devises experiments, measures some data, and makes falsifiable predictions. And in all cases I've seen, the simplest theory _is_ the one picked.
One example was COH before the game devs decided to actually show you the numbers. People did devise experiments to basically measure a lot of data, and solved the equations to come to the endurance (mana) costs of powers. And made falsifiable predictions.
E.g., one such experiment was to figure out a mix of powers which drains your endurance to zero, measure over how much time. Given enough such equations (at least one per variable), you can calculate the costs of each. And you can make the predictions for another set of powers. Or in reverse, how long it takes to recharge X points of mana, if you have powers A, B and C turned on. And again, the experiments were done, and available to everyone, to try to falsify the theory based on those predictions.
The theory also passed Occam's Razor with flying colours, in that it assumed the minimum possible: that each power only has a given cost per second, without any other interdependencies. E.g., if power A costs 0.21 endurance/sec, it always does so, regardless of whether you have powers B and C also active, and regardless of who you are or what you're doing. And again, even that assumption was falsifiable and supported by experimental data.
Now someone may argue that reverse-engineering a game is hardly a _serious_ scientific domain, or that it doesn't exactly benefit humanity in the same way as the LHC's reverse-engineering hadrons does. Fairy 'nuff. But nevertheless the scientific method was applied. Quite literally.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it's true for almost any competitive video game too.
E.g., take a l33t zerg rusher from Starcraft and put him in a situation where he can't mechanically repeat the same rush, and watch him proclaim that the map is crap.
E.g., I once had the mis-fortune of working with a complete CS-head, and made the mistake of listening to him at first, which made it nigh impossible to shake him off when he got boring. Well, actually, I am a gamer, and at first it was just another talk about just another game, so it was interesting.
Then it got massively boring as I quickly realized that he was playing the exact same map, and did the exact same thing, every bloody day. Several hours per evening. He'd buy the same bloody weapon and a grenade, run behind the same warehouse, climb the same ladder, drop through the same vent in the roof, crawled through the same duct, dropped in the same room, and shot the guy camping in the corner, if one was there.
I guess that's the thing that got him the best score, or something, and he repeated it religiously. (And somehow thought it's worth talking about again, every day. But I digress.)
One time I'm dumb enough to say "yes" when he wants to show me how cool CS is and how great he is, after hours. (We were pretty much free to install what we wanted to on the company computers, and a multiplayer round in the lunch break or occasionally after hours was pretty much a sacred tradition for most people.) So he finds a server with that map, and he's even on defense this time, so it promises to be different.
He buys a weapon and runs and starts jumping in place in front of a vent. Some guy drops into that duct from the roof, my co-worker shoots him, and keeps on jumping. Next round, the same. Next round, you guessed, he's jumping in front of the same vent again like he's got mad kangaroo disease. Repeat for two bloody hours O.o
So I'm standing there dumbfounded, mostly out of sheer morbid curiosity. I mean, it was painfully boring even for me to watch that repetitive _work_. I expected him to go, "ah, screw this, lemme show you something else" any time now. Nope. For two bloody hours he repeated the exact same sequence and hopped in place in front of the same vent.
Well, it depends on the scope of the mod, actually. Not everything is a total conversion, like the summary seems to assume.
I could be remembering wrong, but I think the smallest mod I've seen that did anything useful and got downloaded, was a 1 line change to a Creatures 3 script. Admittedly, there was obviously some time involved in reading and understanding the scripts, but I still can't imagine anyone needing to set time aside over long periods for that.
Also, a lot of games allow a more modular approach to mods and personally that's the kind of mods I'd like to see more. I do realize that it's not applicable to all games, and it does pose problems in multiplayer. But I kinda like more the kind of small mods that I can mix and match, like, say, most Oblivion mods, instead of one big chunk that changes everything. Or in X2: The Threat, my favourite "mod", was again a collection of smaller scripts, ships and other small changes, that I had put together for myself out of such small pieces that other people made and were available for download separately.
At any rate, again, I doubt that most of those plugins had to be a second job to get done.
Well, there _is_ a lot of bullshit in evolutionary psychology. But in this case, well, IMHO it's not as much psychology as just common sense. That's what any animal does: learn empiric cause-effect pairs.
After all, that's what Pavlov called a reflex. The dog learns that after hearing the bell, food comes. He hears the bell, starts salivating already.
Or someone else mentioned an experiment where cats were zapped when they got too close to a certain object. So they quickly start avoiding objects of that type.
Heck, speaking of cats again, apparently _some_ brands of cat food include caffeine, apparently just to be able to make that claim that cats like their brand. Caffeine can be very addictive and cause some major headaches as withdrawal syndrome. So the cats quickly learn that food which smells that way cures the headache, and start prefering it.
It's not hard to believe that we're pre-programmed to learn out of whatever few data is available.
Well, I was just talking about passing one's genes on. Whether it's good for society _now_, that's a whole other question. Damn good one, too.
Now _that_ is what worries me more. The fucked up idea that all opinions are equally valuable and we should respect them all equally, and science is just such an opinion.
It's not even just religion or superstition that worry me there. Corporate PR trying to masquerade as science, or rewrite science, is doing far more damage. Someone who believes in the beardie-in-the-sky or wears a funky crystal as a luck charm, can still reconcile that with a scientific view of the world. (And lots of christians do, for example. It's only a minority of protestant bible-thumper, not even a majority of protestants or christians, who has a problem with science.) PR on the other hand, is undermining the very image and respect for science. John Doe is caught in an avalanche of headlines to the effect of:
"Scientists (funded by Mars) discover that chocolate is good for you!"
"Scientists say: no, it ain't, mate. Take it in moderation."
"Scientists (funded by Budweiser) prove that beer drinkers live longer!!!"
"Scientists (funded by a wine makers' association) say: yeah, well, wine is even better!!!"
"Scientists (funded by a coffee maker) say: forget wine and beer, coffee is better than both!"
"This just in: antibiotics cause autism!!! Use natural cures instead!!"
"Scientist calculates the perfect day to take a vacation!" (Except it adds different units and generally is a meaningless mockery.)
Half of those weren't even written by a real scientist, but by a PR agency. Then it fished around for someone with a Prof, Dr or Ph.D. title that'll sign it for 30 silvers, and sure enough they found someone who has nothing to lose, he has no good name to lose, and will sign anything for a price. Then it goes to the press as a "scients discover X" story.
But John Doe doesn't know that. He only sees a mess of conflicting "scientific" statements. One day beer is good for you, the next day it's bad, and next week it's good for you again. And a press which tells him that everything is a controversy. And is left with the impression that "science" just means a bunch of arse-clowns making wild claims of authority, but who really are no more knowledgeable than the local snake oil peddler.
And _that_ attack on science might one day bite us all in the arse worse than all other superstitions _combined_.
At the risk of repeating myself, that wasn't always so.
E.g., if you took your children to a doctor in the middle ages, there were basically 3 kinds that you could choose between:
- the barber-surgeon, which, as the title implies, was the town barber and also did a bit of surgery on the side. Often with the same instruments. And don't think they knew how to sterilize them. The _only_ treatment they knew was to draw a pint of blood.
(Or the other flavour of it, the smith-dentist. If you needed an abcessed tooth pulled out, well, the village smith already had tongs.)
- The alchemist. This guy had a single placebo: Aqua Vitae. (Which gave us the Swedish Aquavit.) Yep, it was distilled alcohol. They prescribed it so generously for everything, that the Black Death outbreaks also helped spread alcoholism in Europe. Needless to say, small children don't deal well with alcohol, and can be killed by doses which would barely get an adult to feel slightly warm.
Later the alchemists somewhat improved their repertory, to include treatments with mercury and other toxic stuff.
- The village witch, if the Inquisition didn't get her first. This one was rather hit and miss too, and most of the potions and spells fell squarely into the "toxic" and/or "placebo" categories too.
So basically praying instead of taking your kids to either of the first two, was usually the better choice. The third was a toss between getting something no better than praying, and getting something at least as toxic as the alchemist's concoctions. So maybe being superstitious actually got one _better_ chances of passing on their genes.
Sure, _nowadays_ superstition like that is bad, but nowadays natural selection and survival of the fittest pretty much stopped. Chances are you _will_ survive enough to reproduce (if you want to reproduce), no matter how genetically unfit you are.
Even if you don't take your children to a doctor, even just the better nourishment and sanitation give them more chances of survival than they'd have in the middle ages. Even in royal families it wasn't entirely uncommon to lose 3 or even 4 children out of every 5. Nowadays even if you're not just a dumbass, but the dumbest-possible-ass, they'll still have better chances than that. And you'll live enough to try again, if your first or second died while you were praying for them.
As I was saying, nowadays natural selection all but stopped, so it doesn't matter.
But back when it mattered, well, the superstitious ones might have actually had better chances.
Actually, I seem to recall reading a column a long time ago, in a galaxy far aw... err... on The Register. Apparently the author had made a light-skinned female avatar on Second Life, and got hit on all the time. Then he/she/it made a decent looking black girl, and pretty much disappeared off most people's radars. If I remember the screenshot right, there wasn't nothing fundamentally wrong with her. Not beauty queen material, mind you, but certainly not worse than avatars which do get hit on.
So apparently the standards for "@#$%ing hot" are a bit different when you're playing a black girl.
What? Really? I thought... I mean there was this cute anthro-kitten girl and she said she was a cat IRL... You mean... Damn, now I feel used ;)
I dunno... when you get God to actually come down and have a face to face talk with you, _then_ you'll need an analogy with a partner in religion.
Of course, the guy is playing hard to get. Even Moses couldn't get a talk to him in person. It's the "for the day thou see my face thou shalt die" guy, ya know? So I don't think that both atheists and theists won't need to stretch that analogy any time soon.
Aye, I know what you mean about really believing in something and then having someone shatter it for you.
I, for example, used to really believe in having another beer. Then some arsehole of a scientist type (a doctor, to be precise) showed me an echogram of my liver. Shattered that faith right there. Bastards the lot of them ;)
Well, I must sort of wonder about the first scenario. Turning it into basically just "how helpful you see yourself as" seems to me a bit of a simplification.
Basically the base objection is that i see myself as a helpful guy generally, not as "helpful towards Bryan's char". From there, this is modified further more by how I see _them_, than by how I see myself.
Assuming it was a perfect stranger and thus doesn't start with any other "modifier" to my reaction towards them: from my experience with other online worlds, it would depend more (or at least as much) on how they performed during that first request. Someone who was nice, polite and said "thanks" is likely to just get filed under "nice acquaintances" by yours truly, and that raises the chance of getting any help again by itself. It has IMHO more to do with him essentially fitting himself under a more favourable category than "complete stranger."
On the other hand, someone who acted like an arsehole during that first help round, or was a source of stress, will be unlikely to get any help from me ever again. In effect, he helped file himself under a category _worse_ than "complete stranger." The fact that I've seen myself helping him once, won't get him any favours.
In effect, it's IMHO more of an "us vs them" situation. That initial contact just gives you a chance to file that guy as closer to "us" or to "them". That new position will influence further interactions.
And just as further support to the idea that it's a sort of "us vs them" thing, on WoW:
- I've played a paladin lots. Any paladin asking for help is _very_ likely to receive assistance. A paladin needing a run through those 3 instances for Verigan's Fist, will almost invariably get me to drop whatever I was doing and help him. (Except if he manages to be an arsehole about it.)
- I've actually played a hunter more, but I've had some very bad experiences when grouped with noob hunters (and I really mean "noob", not "newbie".) It seems that a lot of them can make it to level 70 without getting even the most minimal clue about how to work in a group. My initial reaction will be a lot more circumspect around a hunter.
- I haven't played warriors higher than the 20's or so, because, frankly they die too easily when soloing. And in a group you're like Jesus, you die for other people's sins. So funnily enough I find that I'm very inclined to help a warrior on their level 20 armour quest, because I know how hard it can be to get all the required parts, but I'd probably be disinclined to run him through, say, Gnomeregan instead.
- People in the same guild, even if I haven't seen them before, and have no idea who recruited them or whose alt they are, are a lot more likely to get help from me. They're, after all, one of "us."
Etc.
Basically there are a lot of modifiers there which really all depend on how I see that guy, and how close he is to the "us" group, and not much on how I see myself in relation to him.
Well, that's a recent thing though.
E.g., antibiotics exist only since the 1930's. So only since then you have choices like, basically, "do I trust the doctor and take these pills, or do I trust the shaman and take this extract of Aqua Clara?"
If you go back, say, 5 centuries, already the choices were a lot more like:
A. "Do I trust the alchemist and drink the Aqua Vitae, or do I trust the barber-doctor and let him draw a pint of blood, do I trust the priest and pray real hard to God?" All three were wrong, and actually the first two were _worse_. The alchemists only had distilled alcohol as a cure-all placebo, and drawing blood tended to be worse in the vast majority of cases than doing nothing. So blind faith and superstition might actually have been the better choice in a lot of cases.
B. "Do I trust the superstition that storing pots and dishes with the opening downwards repels evil spirits, or am I an enlightened renaissance man and laugh at such superstitions?" Again, actually the superstition had a point. Dust setting into pots was harmful, and even if nobody had seen a microbe, some people did figure out a correlation between how you store your empty pottery and how often you get sick.
Heck, as late as the 19'th century, during the cholera outbreaks, the superstitious folks had better chances of survival. Mortality in the homeopathic hospitals was actually lower than in the proper medical establishment ones. Of course, homeopathy was still bullshit, but the doctors also bled you dry as the only treatment method they knew, while the homeopaths merely gave you harmless water to drink. (Or rather, solutions of something or another, but so dilluted that they were effectively just water.) The homeopathic solution didn't help, while the other actually caused extra harm to someone already dehydrated and weakened.
Likewise, in the 90'th century, some 50% of the women who gave birth with a doctor would die of septicemic shock, whereas among those who trusted a midwife mortality was a _lot_ lower. Some people actually proposed that doctors wash their hands after performing autopsies on corpses, and before operating or helping people give birth, but that was discounted as a ridiculous superstition. Well, what do you know? The superstitious guys killed a lot less patients. There actually were some nasty germs which the rest got off corpses, and just helped transplant them into previously healthy people.
Etc.
And if you go even further back in time, to when the brain evolved to jump to conclusions and make such hasty generalizations from too little data, the choice was even simple. "I tried to go through this thorny bush, and it hurt for a week. Do I (A) generalize and avoid this kind of bush, or (B) think you can't learn anything from a sample of one, and try again with a dozen other bushes like this?" Or like, "I ate that spotty mushroom and threw up my immortal soul, and was sick for a week. Do I (A) hastily generalize that there's something evil about them, and avoid them, or (B) think it was just a statistically insignifficant coincidence, and try again?"
Simply put, option A was the _safer_ one. Sure, it was sometimes wrong. Sometimes it wasn't the bush, it was the patch of poison ivy it was in. Sometimes it wasn't the mushroom, it was simply an illness which happened at the wrong time. But there was no way to know better anyway. Getting some quick empirical cause-effect rules was the best you could do.
Option B wasn't that safe at all. A lot of time trying something harmful again, just to see if you got the cause right, would outright get you killed.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not against science or medicine or anything. Sure, _nowadays_ that's a better choice than superstition and empirical generalizations. Very much so. But the interval where we even had that choice at all is infinitesimal, at evolution scales. We had medicine for less than 100 years, the human species alone is 200,000 years old.
He got caught after 40 weeks, or almost 10 months of it. During which he spent 15/40 = 37.5% of his time talking to sex lines.
So maybe the question "why didn't he get caught?" is technically wrong, it practically begs for the question, "why did it take them so long?"
I mean, seriously, is stuff like, "hur hur hur, I want to pull down your panties and stick it in your ass" something you'd normally hear around the office when people are talking on the phone? Well, I guess I've had worse tech support before, but never that explicit ;)
UO launched with that failed model, and it quickly degenerated in just that: a bunch of people worked real hard and made it their goal in life to get whole species extinct.
The problem is that it's a one-time stunt. You give _one_ player per server the satisfaction of being the one who got the last wolf extinct. (Ok, maybe two.) Then another one who got the bears extinct, and so on, so maybe you made a dozen players happy. Total. You have tens of thousand of players on that server now who have nothing more to hunt. Congrats, that was the dumbest possible idea in gaming history.
UO tried the same with the economy, btw. There'd be a finite amount of ore in the world, and more would be generated when old swords and armours are destroyed or sold. But then some players took it upon themselves to ruing the economy, e.g., by hoarding as many items as possible, to keep the ore from respawning. Not to corner the market or otherwise make a profit, but just for the sake of fucking up the game for someone else.
Needless to say, that was another model that was discarded very quickly.
So be careful what you wish for, it might not be what you expected. Stop thinking that it would be _you_ who's the big cheese and who'd leave your mark upon the world. You'd most likely be the victim of someone else who left his mark on the world by making your life shitty. E.g., by making sure there are no more wild animals in the world, so leatherworkers are shafted, and so is any hunter who needed a pet, and all hunting quests become impossible.
For some people, being annoying to many, is the only glory they can hope for in their pathetic little lives.
Well, I see his point, though. The mammalian brain didn't evolve to make scientific reproductible experiments and calculate the error bar. Any given creature wouldn't have enough data or the chance to perform some meaningful experiment. So learning some cause-effect pairs, no matter how flawed, is all that was available and better than nothing.
E.g., if you're a goat and trying to eat one kind of bush gives you some nasty thorn wounds, you just remember that and move on. From now on, you avoid that bush if you can. You don't have the luxury to sample enough such bushes and enough such goats, divided neatly into two groups for a proper double-blind test, to see if you have a good sample. (And probably wouldn't live long if you did.) In practice, maybe that bush was growing through a barbed wire fence, but you wouldn't know that.
The same would apply to the early humans too. If cousing Urgh and aunt Graah ate the funny spotted mushrooms and died, you avoid those mushrooms. You don't divide the tribe in two halves and do a double blind experiment to see if it was really the mushrooms.
So they're not the same, but one of them was all that was available. And we're built to jump to conclusions, basically.
Well, it essentially boils down to psychology, I guess. If all people without jobs died over night, then half the people _with_ jobs would get the idea, "hey, where are you going to get a replacement if you fire me?" So now they'd get a lot more "balls" to ask for a raise.
Or another way to look at it is in terms of supply and demand. Essentially there is a supply of workers, and a demand for it, and the prices reflect that. The current wages and the inflation are the result of a certain ratio between the two. If all the people without jobs died over night, would change that ratio.
Actually, that's something the government does. All the time. If you think that it hardly even applies, well, hey, tell your senator about it :P
Really? I thought the very fact that gold kept being mined out of the ground, caused a steady inflation. Except it was uncontrollable and unpredictable.
Then you had stuff like the discovery of gold and silver mines by the Spanish in America, caused some uncontrollable bursts and fits of hyper-inflation in Spain. Paradoxically, that gold and silver influx actually caused Spain to go bankrupt. Twice. In a row. Because the economy had just become unpredictable and a budget was impossible to plan.
Also most countries steadily devalued their coins, or they were devalued by counterfeiting and people removing small amounts of gold from the coins. Or you had big bursts of it, like when the Romans devalued the solidus. But even without such big events, what do you think happened when, say, Trajan came with a buttload of gold and silver from Dacia, or Odoacer had the mints running full time to keep his Goths on his side?
Or read a bit about the Black Death outbreaks. Unemployment practically disappeared, as there were not enough peasants and craftsmen for the nobles to employ. Prices shot up. There was some _massive_ inflation in the 14'th and 15'th centuries. (Which also provides some early illustration for that curve at work.)
So, nope, it's not a new thing, it happened _long_ before fiat money.
_Partially_ true. Nobody believes any more that those two are the _only_ variables in that equation, yes. But when all else is equal, the relationship between the two holds.
At any rate, heck, your government (assuming you're in a western country) still applies that curve quite successfuly. Again, that's how and why we all control inflation. But, at the very least, there you go, most governments still didn't abandon it at all.
That was a hypothetical example. More realistic examples would be something like wrenches and computers. It's a bit harder to shift people between radically different jobs without having a pool of qualified unemployed people as, basically, a suspension to absorb the shocks.
Also bear in mind that the USSR wasn't quite chattel slavery, or at least not after Stalin. They had mechanisms to guide people at certain points, like assigning them a job after college. But after that, they didn't go to someone and say, "you! pack your things, we're making you a truck driver starting tomorrow!" The only way to shift someone to a new job is if they asked for a transfer and it got approved. Otherwise, you could _usually_ die of old age in the same job you got after college or high school. Even if that job was no longer needed, or you were totally incompetent at it.
Otherwise, if you needed more jobs for a factory, you really had to wait until enough graduates get churned out and assigned there. In short, their economy turned slower than a battleship.
In a sense, yes, they got rid of certain markets (like the employment market) and the replacements were non-existent or dysfunctional.
Actually, it would come from loans. The way to manipulate inflation and unemployment is to change the loan rate. The way that works is that, well, a company judges investing in new stuff against that rate. If you pay 10% interest, then an idea which promises 11% return is worth taking a loan for, one which promises only 9% return is no reason to take a loan to implement. So by varying that you can essentially make sure that only things promising very high returns get done, at one end of it, or anyone with a 0.5% margin idea gets to make a company and hire people, at the other end.
The inflation, if you increase that to reduce unemployment, essentially comes from (A) the former margins, and (B) essentially devaluing your coin.
Basically if banks can take cheap loans, and thus give cheap loans to anyone with even the least profitable idea, you're essentially creating money. This creates jobs, but those people soon get the idea that they can ask for a raise. If enough people do that, and you can't motivate your workers with "be glad you still have a job" talks, then your only choice is to also raise prices.
That's really the mechanism that causes inflation. You _don't_ take that money from either the CEO's pay, or the R&D budget. You just raise prices proportionally. Except everyone does that. Next round of negotiations, they want even more money, prices rise again too. Lather, rinse, repeat,
Well, it's not "secret" in that you can't find out about it. Obviously you can, quite easily.
I mean, "secret", as in, no politician will tell you about it. I've yet to even hear about any campaign along the lines of, "ok, we'll create more jobs, but you'll pay them for them out of your savings, which will depreciate quite a bit faster." Nor, "ok, this inflation sucks, we'll must fix it! Oh, by the way, a bunch of you will lose your job for that." ;)
1. A dirty little secret of all governments, the USA included, is that they _can't_ get rid of unemployment or inflation, and they're actually trying to keep both where they want them. There's this funny little hyperbolic-looking curve called the Phillips Curve, which ties inflation to unemployment. If you even tried to push one to zero, the other rises sky-high.
So the best any government can do is to keep both at a point they can live with. Exactly what that point is, that's a matter of political debate and position, but everyone tries to do that. A mean most used is the interest rate. That's what the federal reserve does in the USA, but other countries have their own similar institutions.
(The corolary being that any politician which harps on unemployment and inflation as proof that his opponents are evil, or worse yet, promises to really solve either or both, is himself a liar and has no scruples telling you lies to gain power.)
So, yes, a bunch of people without jobs _are_ what makes the economy work. (A capitalist economy included.) Because without those, you'd get a hyperinflation comparable to interwar Germany. (Just as a comparison point, not saying that that's the same cause.) And conversely, if anyone actually managed to eliminate inflation, like some idiots demand, most of you would be out of job.
2. Well, actually, the reluctance to make people change jobs was arguably one of the (several) reasons the Soviet economy colapsed. They were very reluctant to kick people out of a job, since the whole theory was that everyone should be given a job in communism. So if they made a hammer manufacturing company, and 20 years later there would be more of a need for wrenches, they'd still keep a bunch of people there making hammers, just so they don't kick them out and tell them to find another job. It's not the only factor, of course, but worth thinking about.
Or seen at another level, they wanted to eliminate both the unemployment _and_ inflation (via price controls) which had the same devastating results as when it had been attempted before. If both can't take their natural positions on that curve, something else has to give. In their case, productivity went down instead, and corruption went out of hand. Which effectively is another way to get inflation, only in a much more destructive way.
3. The whole thing about capitalism and the free market is that it's an optimization algorithm. It's really a genetic algorithm, based on semi-uninformed trial and error. The "genes" (processes, ideas, products) which are closer to optimal survive and are copied by others, and the process repeats, moving it all closer to the optimum. The genes which lost, and the companies which bet on them, die. Sometimes spectacularly, leaving a bunch of people temporarily unemployed.
That's how it's supposed to work. Bit wasteful, no doubt, and stressful for those who end up looking for a new job. Scott Adams of Dilbert fame (who, I might add, is actually trained as an economist, so he might understand these things) claimed in a blog post that it's "harnessing the power of stupidity" and that at any given moment, 80% of society's resources are pushed off a cliff by idiots. But somehow it seems to work better than anything else we've tried. Trying to prevent that optimization cycle from happening, deviates from optimum very quickly, and produces even worse results.
It _is_ what makes capitalism work.
Unfortunately, that's only ADHD talking, and I have been guilty of it too. I too used to essentially divide the world into, essentially,
A) stuff i would have learned on myself anyway, and
B) stuff which, OMG, is so unimportant and only some oppressive way to waste my time.
Even if you don't explicitly do that dichotomy in your message, I think that _must_ be the underlying aspect of it. Or are you telling me that you would have also learned Geography, History, Chemistry, Biology and read the classics of literature on your own?
Unfortunately there's a lot of stuff you might (or might not) end up needing later, but you don't know that yet.
As a trivial example, someone who thoroughly understands maths, will have the upper hand in a lot of programming domains, over someone whose only learning was teaching himself (the worst habits of) programming on his dad's C64. I'm not even saying I'm the best example there, because honestly maths was outside my focus of interest at the time, but I grudgingly learned it anyway because even I realized I needed it for physics, which was my main interest in school. But anyway, later I stumbled into programming 3D graphics stuff, and suddenly that maths was actually useful. Just telling someone stuff like "imagine a line in six dimensions" when explaining texturing, and watching him go cross eyed because he lacks the mathematical understanding even for that, is the kind of thing I'm talking about.
Or I see people all the time (and often am brought as a consultant to polish their turd) who spend inordinate amounts of time debuging Java's HashMap, and going "OMG, Java is broken! It replaced my old value with a new one whose key has the same hash value!" and maybe even coding comically absurd "workaround" that are trivial to prove that they can't possibly work. When in reality Java just added a new node to the front of the linked list for that bucket. But they don't really know how a hash table or even a linked list actually work. They too thought they don't need a college teaching them that, and when it bites them in the arse, they just don't know what's happening there.
Or I see people who don't even understand the O notation, and why their O(n*n) algorithm may work well on their 10 records test case, but is going to grind to a halt when fed the two billion records of their production database. (And that's actually a pretty small one.) Or I've spent an hour in a meeting explaining to someone (he's been promoted to architech nowadays, btw;) that, yes, in a table of key/value pairs you can store more than two values. Yes, that table has only two columns (ok, three including the parent ID), but you can still store more than two values in there. He obviously wasn't mentally equipped to deal with key/value pairs.
Now I'm not saying that you're of the same calibre. Some people did learn those concepts on their own. But a lot didn't.
That's basically my point. The attitude that you can just teach yourself everything by just banging on your dad's computer's keyboard, might actually leave holes that you're not even aware of. For some people, it's even the basics of the job they end up in. For others, it's just something which would have come in handy later. The ones who'd really learn everything they need on their own, are, in my experience, far and few in between.
Well, here's partially why: because a lot (most?) news outfits are all about journalistic impartiality. Which is a good thing... until you realize that their definition of it is slightly more perverse than yours.
When covering most subjects the idea of impartiality is to present two opposite points of view, without taking sides. Same as impartiality in politics would mean presenting the Democrat and Republican view about any issue, without telling you that one is good and the other is evil. Whether it's about some debatable budget issue or torture and human rights violations, they're not going to tell you which side to take. (Partisan newspapers will still do that, but non-aligned newspapers generally avoid blatantly telling you which side is right. They might tell you one is wrong when it's about China, or serves as willy-waving... err... flag-waving against some foreign nation, but not when it's about domestic politics.)
Unfortunately science isn't politics. But it's treated as such by the media anyway. It's presented as if it is mostly just a matter of opinion, and largely some controversy where there is no objective right and wrong and where everyone's guess is just as good.
At any rate, they _need_ to have two sides of the issue, even if one is proven bogus. If they run a column about, say, global warming, they have to have a side which says "we're doomed" and one side which says "no, it's not even happening." If someone took upon themselves to run a column about gravity, they would _have_ to also have one or two guys (with a degree in gardening, bought from a diploma mill in East Bumfuckistan which also made a cat and two dogs Ph.D.) saying something like, "nah, that's all wrong, there is no gravity, we're just on the inside of a rotating sphere!" And if they run a column where some astrophysicist says something like, "nah, don't be silly, Jupiter is just a giant gas ball, if anyone blew a 'chunk' of hydrogen out of it, it would just dissipate in space", they _have_ to present the opposite point of view too. Even if they have to scratch the bottom of the proverbial barrel for someone who'll go, "no! that's wrong!! it'll shatter Jupiter to pieces and rain fiery asteroid deat upon us all!!!"
And of course they can only present that as perfectly equal and no better or worse than the scientists. Because telling you that one of them is bogus, or that he doesn't have the qualifications or peer-reviewed work, would violate that impartiality.
Additionally that works in reverse too. The media thrives on a good controversy, so the pairing can (and usually is) initiated from the other end. Some nutjob makes some ridiculous claim, the press pairs him with some real scientist saying, "that's bull", as perfect equals, and the "impartial" story is complete.
So, in a nutshell, that's how such nutjobs get disproportionately more coverage than they deserve. Because the press needs them to meet its own fucked-up definition of "impartiality".
Unfortunately, that may be doing us all more harm than the Inquisition and Counter-Enlightenment combined. We have a generation or two already who grew up on a distorted view where everything is a controversy, and any opinion about science is equal to all other opinions. We have people who believe that Newton's laws of mechanics would be different if they were written by, say, a woman. Because that's how much of a matter of only personal opinion they see science. We have PR hacks and the PHBs or lobbyists who employ them, who don't even understand the damage they're doing. They're, after all, just spreading their own opinion about science, which they've been taught that is just another opinion and no less valuable than that of Einstein. Etc.
And there seems to be no end in sight. I'm guessing it will eventually bite us all in the arse worse than we think.
Well, that any sane person would interpret you like you did, is fairly obvious. Now try telling it to some of the bible-belt bible-thumpers. Last I've read some of their arguments, it boiled down to exactly that:
- evolution can't possibly happen, a dog will never evolve into a cat
- life is too complicated to have appeared by chance, it's only God / The Intelligent Designer who could have made it
- certain organs are too complicated to have appeared by random mutations and natural selection, only God / The Intelligent Designer who could have made them
Etc.
Heck, there even was this recent experiment where a bacteria culture held on a citrate substrate, which it originally couldn't metabolize, eventually evolved the proteins to take it apart and feed on it. A certain group of bible thumpers outright accused him of fraud.
Again, I'm not saying that _all_ christians are like that, or that the bible is like that. But there _are_ people who interpret it just like that: _only_ God could have created life.
Actually, nope, they're quite distinct cases, regardless of the "god" option. Something having a beginning does not automatically imply that it was "created" by something whatsoever.
E.g., there's a rainbow outside. It wasn't "created" by anything. It's just the interaction between a bunch of droplets of water, and the sunlight coming in at the right angle. Both are quite random things, and it seems funny to ascribe the power of creation to them. It's an ephemereal phenomenon.
E.g., the formation of the Earth and solar system that that. It's just a bunch of atoms and mollecules which collapsed under their own combined gravity, and happened to settle in this configuration. Some of them first accreted into smaller bits of stone and ice, but nevertheless it's just physics at work. It wasn't "created" by anything whatsoever. It was just a cloud which re-settled in another, more compact, shape under its own gravity. At best you could say that the solar system "created" itself.
Plus, as was already said, you're already postulating that time itself must have existed before the "beginning", which isn't necessarily a given. It's just another axis of the time-space of this universe. Just because we can mentally extrapolate beyond point zero, it doesn't mean it actually existed.
E.g., I can mentally extrapolate going a billion miles west of here. I mean, I can walk a mile or two in that direction, why not a billion? In reality, there is _no_ point that's a billion miles west of here, on this spheroid we call Earth. It wraps around.
E.g., heck, in the Universe itself, I can easily extrapolate something like "a trillion light years in that direction". In reality, there is no such point because the universe itself is finite.
E.g., I can come up with a mental extrapolation like "the 42'th planet around the Sun." I mean, their distancs and periods are just a number series. There's nothing in it that would prevent you from calculatin how far a 42'th planet would be, and what period it would have around the sun. But there is none. Just because you can calculate something it doesn't mean it actually exists.
Ditto here. Just because our intuition can extrapolate something, it doesn't mean it necessarily existed.
Heck, it may even be inaccurate to extrapolate to infinity in the _future_. There is at least one hypothesis based on string theory that there is no acceleration of the expansion of space, it's the time itself that is actually slowing down. And will eventually stop completely. So there might be a point T, past which there is no more future. Much as you can mentally extrapolate past it.
Etc.
Basically don't let your perceptions and intuitions run your model of the universe. Said perceptions and intuition were made to work at small distances, over limited times, and generally with small numbers. There are phenomena which happen too fast or too slow or over too large distances, to bear any relevance to how the mammal brain evolved to deal with or to even resemble anything that your first hand experience includes.
Actually, while I'm not on the WoW forums at all, I can tell you that in some games they _are_ doing proper science.
The scientific method isn't about publishing in the sanctified journals and getting grants. It merely says that you have to make falsifiable predictions, and go with the theory that, in this order, (A) better explains the available data, and (B) if they're equal in the former aspect, pick the simplest.
And a lot of reverse engineering a game does just that: it devises experiments, measures some data, and makes falsifiable predictions. And in all cases I've seen, the simplest theory _is_ the one picked.
One example was COH before the game devs decided to actually show you the numbers. People did devise experiments to basically measure a lot of data, and solved the equations to come to the endurance (mana) costs of powers. And made falsifiable predictions.
E.g., one such experiment was to figure out a mix of powers which drains your endurance to zero, measure over how much time. Given enough such equations (at least one per variable), you can calculate the costs of each. And you can make the predictions for another set of powers. Or in reverse, how long it takes to recharge X points of mana, if you have powers A, B and C turned on. And again, the experiments were done, and available to everyone, to try to falsify the theory based on those predictions.
The theory also passed Occam's Razor with flying colours, in that it assumed the minimum possible: that each power only has a given cost per second, without any other interdependencies. E.g., if power A costs 0.21 endurance/sec, it always does so, regardless of whether you have powers B and C also active, and regardless of who you are or what you're doing. And again, even that assumption was falsifiable and supported by experimental data.
Now someone may argue that reverse-engineering a game is hardly a _serious_ scientific domain, or that it doesn't exactly benefit humanity in the same way as the LHC's reverse-engineering hadrons does. Fairy 'nuff. But nevertheless the scientific method was applied. Quite literally.