I mean, a lot of it does depend on a guild-to-guild basis. It sounds like your organization was better than ours was. My only point is that the activity is built such that it demands more structure from the players than do many other leisure activities, which can make the scheduling aspect a less rewarding experience -- enough so that, in my opinion, it's a substantially different type of activity than other hobbies. (I'm not trying to jump down your throat or belittle your point here, which was generally a good one. There are times I'm trying to be a dick, but this wasn't one of them.)
It is technically true, yes, I have to manage/schedule my time. However, with WoW, if I'm in a guild that wants to raid 25-man content, then my ability to schedule my time is dependent on 24 other people managing their time effectively, showing up on time, and not bailing at the last minute. And if any of them do, then my scheduled time is now wasted. I'm willing to take that risk when it's four people I'm in a band with; I'm not willing to when it's 24 quasi-strangers on the Internet, because it rapidly becomes my "scheduled dicking around waiting for people to show up then logging off with nothing done" time. Raiding in WoW is fundamentally different from other leisure activities because of the extent to which you're beholden to the schedules of others, with no good fallback when they're unreliable.
(And yes, I understand that higher levels of guild discipline would somewhat ameliorate this problem; but discipline is a two-edged sword, and disciplined guilds feel just like a second job, rather than fun.)
Having it be much easier to get the gear later on means that the time the player spent WORKING is now worth LESS.
And that's the core of it. There's a huge cognitive dissonance going on here -- people have spent years of their lives working these second jobs to satisfy this compulsive need for improvement that isn't being validated in the rest of their lives. Now somebody else is getting paid MORE for LESS work! ZOMGWTFBBQLMAOZEDONG! That cannot be, if I went through all this suffering for my reward, then they must, too! Of course the real message of all this is that people don't play the game for the fun experience itself; they play the game for the compulsive factor and the ego boost of being superior to others. Me, I quit WoW when I realized that Civ was more interesting from a skill perspective and that if I wanted a second job, I'd find one that gave me money instead of costing it.
The difference is your bowling league doesn't have twenty-five people, with the whole night a bust if two of them don't show up. Or a hard limit that only ten people can be in it, and if you have three other friends who want to come along, they're shut out in the cold.
Signage differs in different places, and in some places it SUCKS. Like in New Jersey, freeway exits seem to be always behind the actual exit, so they really ought to read "You just missed exit 8!" And Atherton, CA, has street names painted vertically in black on white posts. Not to mention that I was once totally lost at the corner of Selby and Selby (when I was really looking for a third, entirely different, Selby).
I'm willing to believe it's possible, with a caveat. In many artistic disciplines, the master may die without imparting all his knowledge to a student. When the student becomes the new master, he too later dies without passing on everything he knows. Thus, the knowledge base eventually dwindles.
This is one theory of knowledge transmission, and it deserves to be taken seriously; however, we're at the head of a four-thousand-year-long counterexample in our current technological progress. Many students learn things that their masters never knew, and the overall state of the art advances. So while I think it's possible that Stradivarius knew more about violin-making than his students, it also seems very unlikely to me that we've never recovered his knowledge.
If the difference is in materials (as is usually claimed), well that's certainly more plausible.
Not to mention that if someone were really concerned with good music, he'd want everyone to play on the best instruments possible. How would the world be any less rich if it were full of more beautiful sounds?
the suggestion that the federal government would be motivated to spend less is... naive.
On the contrary. Medicare is one of the best-managed, most efficient (in terms of care for dollar) health systems anywhere. So much so that a lot of doctors dislike it, because it pays them less than private plans.
That's a really good point (and one that argues in favor of finding an alternate method for hospital funding, other than on a fees-for-services-rendered basis, which I also find intriguing). I think there's a sense in which hospitals wouldn't have to carry so much OR capacity if more people had outpatient surgeries in lighter-weight surgical facilities, but "lowered aggregate demand" doesn't really take away from your point in my mind.
However, one big part of the cost in my particular example was that the hospital setting required the surgery to be done under general anesthesia, which in turn required an anesthesiologist to be involved (well, two, when you consider that I also got a consult from an intern). If I'd done it at the pod's office, it would've been local and could've been administered by him. That part is a variable cost (though again, I don't think it detracts).
Essentially, hospital care is expensive, so they are compelled to use surgeries as a profit center to offset the cost centers of their other departments. But with every little thing being so expensive (sheet rentals at hundreds of dollars an hour??) I wonder where the money goes...
No, really, it's everywhere. A few years back, I had to have an operation on my foot. The doctor said he could do the operation in his office under local anesthetic and the whole thing would cost a couple thousand bucks (memory's fuzzy), or we could do it in a hospital where it'd be 5x more expensive. The catch? My insurance would cover the hospital outpatient surgery, but not his office (which was also a fully licensed and certified surgical center, just not attached to a hospital). So I did it in the hospital, of course; I was between contracts and couldn't afford to do otherwise even if I had felt noble enough to do it for the good of the health care system.
Misguided incentives like this are all over health insurance--just look at the varying coverage rates for preventive care vs. corrective care (like diabetes maintenance vs. amputations). If you can put off the treatment until later, there's a reasonable chance that some other insurance company will pick up the more expensive tab, and "patient outcomes? What's that?"
It's one of the strongest arguments for a single-payer healthcare system: the chance to remove loopholes that lead to these bad incentives.
Oh, I'm familiar with Sokal, and also with those French twins with the loony physics that got itself published... I think it's pretty clear that even peer-reviewed publications can be scammed in the right circumstances. (Or non-peer-reviewed, in Sokal's case).
I'm kind of surprised I got modded up above when I'm not even sure whether I was serious or not. Generally I think postmodernism contains some interesting and useful ideas, which tend to be stretched beyond their actual insightfulness and couched in pompous and ridiculously flowery language by professors who are under tremendous pressure to appear brilliant in order to get tenure. But then, the libarts side of my background was in history and historiography, not literary theory (which I generally have little use for, and in any event wouldn't dream of claiming has relevance outside talking about books).
I'm sure you support this for a cause you think is just (and hey, I would too), but what if the government is quashing a petition that you don't agree with, that you think is wrong? What if the petition seeks to outlaw homosexuality, say, or any form of sexual deviance? Surely the Second Amendment isn't meant to give us the right to storm Washington to make Congress lock up those filthy people who practice oral sex or deviant positions...
What degree of responsiveness to petitions is appropriate? Supposing a couple million yahoos got together and signed a petition to re-instate chattel slavery of some group (let's say immigrants, it's hot right now) -- the government would be right to archive that one in the Round FIle.
You can't guarantee government that's responsive to an impassioned minority without making it subject to unjust manipulation. (Not that responding to the majority's will is necessarily that much better. Government is hard -- particularly when justice and power are not always on the same side, and doubly so when there's profit on the line.)
Oh, agreed. Management makes entirely too many boneheaded decisions based on if-only-the-world-were-this-way thinking; technical staff are entirely too undervalued in the usual decision-making processes.
As everyone seems to be saying, the "best" candidate is neither of the extremes, but somebody who's both personal and competent. In other words, a real human being. So, as the article goes, move along, nothing to see here...
Why is it that so many writers understand this stuff, while so many IT management organizations do not?
Because IT management organizations have to get things done in a larger world, where narrow focus on technical solutions is not the sole factor under consideration.
Want to work in a business environment? That means that sales is king. You may support sales, you may even support your customers, but driving business through the door is the most privileged role. Those customers won't, for the most part, want an arrogant prick who's always right; they'll want an accommodating, amiable fellow who's right more than half the time.
avoiding the things that humans suffer from that animals generally don't: Anxiety, depression, psychosis.
Um, if you think non-human animals don't suffer from those things, you don't have enough experience with them. Humans are not that different from other animals; perhaps we have a bit more emotional nuance, and certainly a larger vocabulary than other animals, but it's absolutely true that many types of mammals show signs of anxiety and depression under the right circumstances. And while it's unlikely that they hear voices, they can certainly become insane.
I've let myself get sidetracked. "Negotiation with terrorists" isn't what I'm suggesting -- for one thing, on principle, who do you negotiate with? The main point I've been trying to make is that even strong nations have to pay attention to public opinion and their reputations in order to avoid violent resistance. You have to be seen as benevolent, or at least tolerably even-handed. You cannot expect military strength to keep a population cowed, especially a foreign one on its own land.
With regard specifically to Islamic terrorism, you're painting a picture that's both bleaker and more simplistic than reality. Of course fanaticism exists. Yes, the 9/11 hijackers were fanatics on a suicide mission. But someone sent them on that specific mission. There's a reason they attacked the US and not, say, Sweden. Part of it is anti-Americanism, sure, but then you have to look at the root of that anti-Americanism; it's not like all of Middle Eastern society has hated the US since 1776. There are specific, historically based reasons for the development of anti-American sentiment in the Middle East, most of them having to do with political and cultural imperialism within the last 70ish years, and those reasons can be addressed. Maybe it is too late for the current generation, but the next? And I think you'll find there is a vast gulf between what MEerners generally think about America, and what they think about Americans. In any event, "they're incomprehensibly hostile fanatics, kill 'em all" isn't a viable answer. If there's anything religious fanaticism is resilient to, it's being destroyed by force... And the "incomprehensible implacable foes" attitude, as it's been used by American politicians, is just a crutch to avoid having to make any changes in our policy. Even fanaticism has its logic.
If you think that Osama and his ilk would be happy with controlling only the middle east, you really ARE naive, and you obviously haven't been listening to them.
If you think they'll be able to come even close to pulling it off, you're the naive one. Sure, they want to rule the world; but they'll start in their own back yard, where the local governments will kill them so we won't have to. But anyway, say he won -- now we have Osama sitting in the capital of the New Caliphate, where he's a lot easier to find than in some mountain cave... see where I'm going?
why in the world would we WANT to abandon the middle east to such thugs? What gave them the RIGHT to dictate our actions?
It's not abandoning the ME to the terrorists; it's recognizing that the terrorists get substantial popular support when they try to kick the US out. Grant the non-terrorist population their legitimate demands (it *is* their land), in order to isolate the true terrorists. Rehabilitate the US' reputation so the people are no longer willing to fund and cover up the real terrorists. Make it so they *aren't* fighting for something popular.
It wasn't "appeasement" when the British left India, and it wouldn't be "appeasement" if the US gave up its Saudi and Qatari military bases. And it is neither appeasement nor cowardice to pay attention to public opinion and respect local populations. But I've belabored this point long enough.
As an aside,
Yeah, those dumb Jews don't want to accept becoming a Muslim state.
If by "become a Muslim state" you mean "recognize internationally accepted borders to create a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel" then yes, you'd be right. You don't know what you're talking about here. The PLO (not PLA; acronym mix-up earlier) has always been a secular organization. Hamas got elected in '06 because Fatah (the PLO's politics branch, basically) hasn't been able to ever get Israel to agree to anything. Hamas is officially an Islamic party, but they aren't the Taliban; and even they (whatever the rhetoric) would accept a two-state solution with long-term assurances of security for Israel. In any event, if you actually think the rest of the world would stand by and let Israel lose a war with a Palestinian state, you're smoking something.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, a lot of it does depend on a guild-to-guild basis. It sounds like your organization was better than ours was. My only point is that the activity is built such that it demands more structure from the players than do many other leisure activities, which can make the scheduling aspect a less rewarding experience -- enough so that, in my opinion, it's a substantially different type of activity than other hobbies.
(I'm not trying to jump down your throat or belittle your point here, which was generally a good one. There are times I'm trying to be a dick, but this wasn't one of them.)
until we can understand conclusively how life began here, it's all just masturbation.
...but if there's one thing people all over seem to be pretty interested in...
Or more simply, "any environment which contains another organism becomes hostile." ...man, no wonder I never had any friends in kindergarten.
Um, I'm arguing against this assertion:
this is the case for ANY organized activity
It is technically true, yes, I have to manage/schedule my time. However, with WoW, if I'm in a guild that wants to raid 25-man content, then my ability to schedule my time is dependent on 24 other people managing their time effectively, showing up on time, and not bailing at the last minute. And if any of them do, then my scheduled time is now wasted. I'm willing to take that risk when it's four people I'm in a band with; I'm not willing to when it's 24 quasi-strangers on the Internet, because it rapidly becomes my "scheduled dicking around waiting for people to show up then logging off with nothing done" time.
Raiding in WoW is fundamentally different from other leisure activities because of the extent to which you're beholden to the schedules of others, with no good fallback when they're unreliable.
(And yes, I understand that higher levels of guild discipline would somewhat ameliorate this problem; but discipline is a two-edged sword, and disciplined guilds feel just like a second job, rather than fun.)
Having it be much easier to get the gear later on means that the time the player spent WORKING is now worth LESS.
And that's the core of it. There's a huge cognitive dissonance going on here -- people have spent years of their lives working these second jobs to satisfy this compulsive need for improvement that isn't being validated in the rest of their lives.
Now somebody else is getting paid MORE for LESS work! ZOMGWTFBBQLMAOZEDONG! That cannot be, if I went through all this suffering for my reward, then they must, too!
Of course the real message of all this is that people don't play the game for the fun experience itself; they play the game for the compulsive factor and the ego boost of being superior to others. Me, I quit WoW when I realized that Civ was more interesting from a skill perspective and that if I wanted a second job, I'd find one that gave me money instead of costing it.
The difference is your bowling league doesn't have twenty-five people, with the whole night a bust if two of them don't show up. Or a hard limit that only ten people can be in it, and if you have three other friends who want to come along, they're shut out in the cold.
Signage differs in different places, and in some places it SUCKS.
Like in New Jersey, freeway exits seem to be always behind the actual exit, so they really ought to read "You just missed exit 8!"
And Atherton, CA, has street names painted vertically in black on white posts. Not to mention that I was once totally lost at the corner of Selby and Selby (when I was really looking for a third, entirely different, Selby).
I'm willing to believe it's possible, with a caveat. In many artistic disciplines, the master may die without imparting all his knowledge to a student. When the student becomes the new master, he too later dies without passing on everything he knows. Thus, the knowledge base eventually dwindles.
This is one theory of knowledge transmission, and it deserves to be taken seriously; however, we're at the head of a four-thousand-year-long counterexample in our current technological progress. Many students learn things that their masters never knew, and the overall state of the art advances. So while I think it's possible that Stradivarius knew more about violin-making than his students, it also seems very unlikely to me that we've never recovered his knowledge.
If the difference is in materials (as is usually claimed), well that's certainly more plausible.
Not to mention that if someone were really concerned with good music, he'd want everyone to play on the best instruments possible. How would the world be any less rich if it were full of more beautiful sounds?
when I found that classical had the same-- if not better-- calming effect on my brain that some kinds of metal music had.
I suspect that many people who don't listen to much metal would not find this statement surprising. (That's their oversight, of course.)
the suggestion that the federal government would be motivated to spend less is... naive.
On the contrary. Medicare is one of the best-managed, most efficient (in terms of care for dollar) health systems anywhere. So much so that a lot of doctors dislike it, because it pays them less than private plans.
That's a really good point (and one that argues in favor of finding an alternate method for hospital funding, other than on a fees-for-services-rendered basis, which I also find intriguing). I think there's a sense in which hospitals wouldn't have to carry so much OR capacity if more people had outpatient surgeries in lighter-weight surgical facilities, but "lowered aggregate demand" doesn't really take away from your point in my mind.
However, one big part of the cost in my particular example was that the hospital setting required the surgery to be done under general anesthesia, which in turn required an anesthesiologist to be involved (well, two, when you consider that I also got a consult from an intern). If I'd done it at the pod's office, it would've been local and could've been administered by him. That part is a variable cost (though again, I don't think it detracts).
Essentially, hospital care is expensive, so they are compelled to use surgeries as a profit center to offset the cost centers of their other departments. But with every little thing being so expensive (sheet rentals at hundreds of dollars an hour??) I wonder where the money goes...
No, really, it's everywhere.
A few years back, I had to have an operation on my foot. The doctor said he could do the operation in his office under local anesthetic and the whole thing would cost a couple thousand bucks (memory's fuzzy), or we could do it in a hospital where it'd be 5x more expensive. The catch? My insurance would cover the hospital outpatient surgery, but not his office (which was also a fully licensed and certified surgical center, just not attached to a hospital). So I did it in the hospital, of course; I was between contracts and couldn't afford to do otherwise even if I had felt noble enough to do it for the good of the health care system.
Misguided incentives like this are all over health insurance--just look at the varying coverage rates for preventive care vs. corrective care (like diabetes maintenance vs. amputations). If you can put off the treatment until later, there's a reasonable chance that some other insurance company will pick up the more expensive tab, and "patient outcomes? What's that?"
It's one of the strongest arguments for a single-payer healthcare system: the chance to remove loopholes that lead to these bad incentives.
...Funding?
you hope?
Oh, I'm familiar with Sokal, and also with those French twins with the loony physics that got itself published... I think it's pretty clear that even peer-reviewed publications can be scammed in the right circumstances. (Or non-peer-reviewed, in Sokal's case).
I'm kind of surprised I got modded up above when I'm not even sure whether I was serious or not. Generally I think postmodernism contains some interesting and useful ideas, which tend to be stretched beyond their actual insightfulness and couched in pompous and ridiculously flowery language by professors who are under tremendous pressure to appear brilliant in order to get tenure. But then, the libarts side of my background was in history and historiography, not literary theory (which I generally have little use for, and in any event wouldn't dream of claiming has relevance outside talking about books).
I'm sure you support this for a cause you think is just (and hey, I would too), but what if the government is quashing a petition that you don't agree with, that you think is wrong? What if the petition seeks to outlaw homosexuality, say, or any form of sexual deviance? Surely the Second Amendment isn't meant to give us the right to storm Washington to make Congress lock up those filthy people who practice oral sex or deviant positions...
What degree of responsiveness to petitions is appropriate? Supposing a couple million yahoos got together and signed a petition to re-instate chattel slavery of some group (let's say immigrants, it's hot right now) -- the government would be right to archive that one in the Round FIle.
You can't guarantee government that's responsive to an impassioned minority without making it subject to unjust manipulation. (Not that responding to the majority's will is necessarily that much better. Government is hard -- particularly when justice and power are not always on the same side, and doubly so when there's profit on the line.)
...so... humanities departments are basically a botnet executing a DDoS on the brains of unsuspecting undergraduates?
Oh, agreed. Management makes entirely too many boneheaded decisions based on if-only-the-world-were-this-way thinking; technical staff are entirely too undervalued in the usual decision-making processes.
As everyone seems to be saying, the "best" candidate is neither of the extremes, but somebody who's both personal and competent. In other words, a real human being. So, as the article goes, move along, nothing to see here...
Why is it that so many writers understand this stuff, while so many IT management organizations do not?
Because IT management organizations have to get things done in a larger world, where narrow focus on technical solutions is not the sole factor under consideration.
Want to work in a business environment? That means that sales is king. You may support sales, you may even support your customers, but driving business through the door is the most privileged role. Those customers won't, for the most part, want an arrogant prick who's always right; they'll want an accommodating, amiable fellow who's right more than half the time.
avoiding the things that humans suffer from that animals generally don't: Anxiety, depression, psychosis.
Um, if you think non-human animals don't suffer from those things, you don't have enough experience with them. Humans are not that different from other animals; perhaps we have a bit more emotional nuance, and certainly a larger vocabulary than other animals, but it's absolutely true that many types of mammals show signs of anxiety and depression under the right circumstances. And while it's unlikely that they hear voices, they can certainly become insane.
we'd end up with nothing more than a vast, mechanistic orgy of clanging parts, spilled lube, and wasted electricity.
...wait, where do I sign up?
They are set apart because their ancestors achieved power over others, and power is self-perpetuating.
To be fair, taking off your shoes isn't exactly dependent on some patented expensive technology, either.
I've let myself get sidetracked. "Negotiation with terrorists" isn't what I'm suggesting -- for one thing, on principle, who do you negotiate with? The main point I've been trying to make is that even strong nations have to pay attention to public opinion and their reputations in order to avoid violent resistance. You have to be seen as benevolent, or at least tolerably even-handed. You cannot expect military strength to keep a population cowed, especially a foreign one on its own land.
With regard specifically to Islamic terrorism, you're painting a picture that's both bleaker and more simplistic than reality. Of course fanaticism exists. Yes, the 9/11 hijackers were fanatics on a suicide mission. But someone sent them on that specific mission. There's a reason they attacked the US and not, say, Sweden. Part of it is anti-Americanism, sure, but then you have to look at the root of that anti-Americanism; it's not like all of Middle Eastern society has hated the US since 1776. There are specific, historically based reasons for the development of anti-American sentiment in the Middle East, most of them having to do with political and cultural imperialism within the last 70ish years, and those reasons can be addressed. Maybe it is too late for the current generation, but the next? And I think you'll find there is a vast gulf between what MEerners generally think about America, and what they think about Americans.
In any event, "they're incomprehensibly hostile fanatics, kill 'em all" isn't a viable answer. If there's anything religious fanaticism is resilient to, it's being destroyed by force... And the "incomprehensible implacable foes" attitude, as it's been used by American politicians, is just a crutch to avoid having to make any changes in our policy. Even fanaticism has its logic.
If you think that Osama and his ilk would be happy with controlling only the middle east, you really ARE naive, and you obviously haven't been listening to them.
If you think they'll be able to come even close to pulling it off, you're the naive one. Sure, they want to rule the world; but they'll start in their own back yard, where the local governments will kill them so we won't have to. But anyway, say he won -- now we have Osama sitting in the capital of the New Caliphate, where he's a lot easier to find than in some mountain cave... see where I'm going?
why in the world would we WANT to abandon the middle east to such thugs? What gave them the RIGHT to dictate our actions?
It's not abandoning the ME to the terrorists; it's recognizing that the terrorists get substantial popular support when they try to kick the US out. Grant the non-terrorist population their legitimate demands (it *is* their land), in order to isolate the true terrorists. Rehabilitate the US' reputation so the people are no longer willing to fund and cover up the real terrorists. Make it so they *aren't* fighting for something popular.
It wasn't "appeasement" when the British left India, and it wouldn't be "appeasement" if the US gave up its Saudi and Qatari military bases. And it is neither appeasement nor cowardice to pay attention to public opinion and respect local populations. But I've belabored this point long enough.
As an aside,
Yeah, those dumb Jews don't want to accept becoming a Muslim state.
If by "become a Muslim state" you mean "recognize internationally accepted borders to create a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel" then yes, you'd be right.
You don't know what you're talking about here. The PLO (not PLA; acronym mix-up earlier) has always been a secular organization. Hamas got elected in '06 because Fatah (the PLO's politics branch, basically) hasn't been able to ever get Israel to agree to anything. Hamas is officially an Islamic party, but they aren't the Taliban; and even they (whatever the rhetoric) would accept a two-state solution with long-term assurances of security for Israel.
In any event, if you actually think the rest of the world would stand by and let Israel lose a war with a Palestinian state, you're smoking something.