You are below an elementary familiarity with anthropology. (What human societies have you seen? Have any of them been pre-modern?) Review the basic literature on hunter-gather societies and social heirarchies. I recommend starting with the work of Pierre van den Berghe, who is even a sociobiologist, yet recognizes the absence of social stratification in hunter-gather societies.
There is substantial literature on this, you should avail yourself of it before promoting generalized observations as truth about human nature. I would also point out your own.sig in this regard....
You mistake role for function, and you have yet to hear of any pre-kingship hunter-gatherer societies. Executive function - which may be dynamic or situational - is different from status. Very, very different.
But I know people who read Charles Stross. They include some of the smartest game designers I've ever met. Influencing one smart person may be more meaningful than being beloved by 1000 mediocre ones.
If you think egalitarian (as in, lacking social striaitions) behavior is "against" human nature, I suggest you look at the actual anthropology of hunter-gather societies. You are attributing many things which are contingent to the innate, and then over-interpreting them as being stable. There is a massive - *massive* - difference between foraging for berries and shopping for clothes, and the latter is completely unrecognizable to people who participate in the former. You also risk producing "just-so stories" in your appeal to human nature for things with specific histories.
There are low-level features to humans as we know them, yes. But by the time those features manifest as behaviors, they have been profoundly mediated by background and environment. The expressions exist at several removes from those features.
Well, the thing is, "human nature" gets redefined as whatever *hasn't* changed. It's a moving target. Slavery used to be considered part of "human nature." So was hunting and gathering. Egalitarian societies were also thought of as "human nature" by the people who lived in them (and the people who idealized them) - but then social hierarchies are called "human nature" by people who haven't experienced anything but. Violence is often described as part of "human nature," yet many people in many times have lived lives without violence.
Actually, I think your thought exercise makes my point more clearly than you know. The automobile has radically transformed human culture - transportation technologies are partially to blame for the erosion of extended families, for the dominance of the nuclear family, for the distinctive separation between living places and work places, etc. The entire landscape in America has been transformed by the car and the road.
If you look at how people used to respond to disease before contemporary medicine, and even to mortality itself - how the family has been profoundly transformed by the rarity of death-in-childbirth, that's also a profound change.
That is why good historical narratives are almost like science-fiction in reverse.
One reason to critique stupid media is that it contributes to a culture of stupidity. When people who congratulate themselves on their intelligence are often devoted to work that fails on so many levels, it's symptomatic of other problems.
I think that your "leave it alone, it's just entertainment" is also myopic, in that I bet you don't feel any compunctions about feeling superior to those who like professional wrestling and monster truck rallies.
The problem isn't the weakness of the science, actually. It's the weakness of the sociology! It's inconceivable to me that a creation like the transporter wouldn't radically transform human culture and society into something unrecognizable. There are technologies of bio-technological intervention that get trotted out regularly, yet we still are told that people would be quite satisfied with a 100-year life span, more or less. I won't even mention time-travel.
An interesting speculation about an improbable or even impossible technology is more compelling to me than cliches and failures of conjecture wrapped around sound technologies.
Millions of people are wrong. Or, at least, stupid. I don't need to Godwinize this thread to explain how that might be so.
Stross is right about this. Of course, it is flamebait at an epic scale to attack not just the biggest of fan franchises, but the very logic upon which fan franchises are based: massive narcissistic projection. If SF on TV actually reflected on how our humanity itself would become unrecognizable in the wake of technological change, then fans wouldn't have easy heroes to identify with.
The idea that adaptive difficulty "rewards mediocrity" reveals a huge crate full of bad thinking - as if videogames are a meritocracy meant to reward the skilled few and cull the weak from the herd! To me, that's a sentiment that would come from a very game-obsessed 7th grader, whose Xbox achievements meant more to him than anything else the world could possibly offer. It earns and gets derision all around.
More importantly, it is trivially easy to create challenges that are insurmountable. Pretty much all computer-based challenges are handicapped to give players a chance.
A more interesting question is whether and when multiplayer games should provide positive and negative feedback loops: when you're winning, should the game get harder for you and easier for your opponents (Mario Kart?) Or should it race to its conclusion, letting a won-game be won and allowing for the next one to start quickly (Risk?) There are advantages to either design concept, and playtesting is the best way to figure out which works for your game.
Neither party is intending to create equal outcomes for all individuals: the democratic party is content with a meritocracy, as well. Both are dedicated to some version of capitalism with an array of government programs to aid and abet it.
The Republicans are less interested, however, in leveling the playing field. an "environment where equal opportunity exists for all" would mean a lot of social engineering to make sure that all children had the same level of educational opportunities, equivalent health care, safety at home and in public, safe and affordable housing, etc. These all sound like Democratic planks to me (and from the leftward side of the Democratic party, too.) The traditional (or rather, contemporary) version of Republicanism thinks that "equal opportunity" just means that everyone can submit resumes for any job, and little more.
Wait a sec, have the goal posts moved again? It was about weapons of mass destruction, then it was about bringing democracy to masses yearning for it, then it was about protecting the Sunnis from the Shiite forces that we kind of, um, unleashed on them, and now it's payback for the Kurds?
I think the real motivation was to revive the corpse of Gilgamesh and create a new race of super-warriors, but that's just my theory.
"Order" and "disorder" are human perceptions, not states of matter and energy. Sometimes we perceive more order when there are clear differences in energy states, sometimes we perceive less
To you, which is more ordered: a bowl of cherries next to a glass of water, or a completely smooth blend of all of them? The latter is more entropic. In the case of the room, replace the garbage bin with an incinerator, and the "empty" room (plus the stuff that used to be in it) is now in a more entropic state. The fact that you personally find it tidier isn't relevant. Assuming that you might have actually needed some of the stuff that we just burned, too, you might find it a rather poor solution to the problem of a messy room.
You can guarantee that the real wages (in terms of actual purchasing power) won't go down in the medium term? Looks like you should have taken at least that one accounting class, instead of spending all your money at my dad's shop.
First, it's not just profiling that's an issue. It's the entire visa process. If you haven't seen it, you have know idea.
Second, profiling on (seeming) ethnic appearance breaks everything for thousands of reasons. False negatives, false positives, simple unfairness.
Last, the rest of the world seems to have no trouble letting the Pakistani IOC member come into their countries without making him feel like a pariah. Maybe it's US border policy that should "take one for the team."
It is an unpleasant experience if you are lucky enough to have it all. I live in the US, my relatives are from Latin America, and whether they can get a tourist visa at all is hit-or-miss. And they are all college-educated professionals with perfectly clean records.
That they would choose Rio as the destination - in the country that has strict reciprocality with visa requirements - sends the message out loud and clear.
I participate in an international organization that has conferences in Asia, Europe and the Americas. It now chooses Canada regularly for its international conferences in the Americas, for the reasons described in the article.
There are always other places to go that are as cool or cooler, and with less hassle. With the US economy in the raft it's in, with no real signs of improvement, ever (until it depresses wages enough to reboot its manufacturing base), it really is the US' loss, too.
No, they don't cover the problem. Because by the time someone is plowing through the center lane, killing other motorists and passengers, a citation no longer acts as a disincentive.
People, left to their own devices, are poor estimators of risk. Too often, they think that they can drink and drive and be alright, or that they aren't really that distracted when texting. I agree that enforcement of some of the existing driving regulations is lax and inconsistent, but that isn't a problem of the laws; it is a problem of enforcement budgets, etc. (Your complaint has a contradiction in it: if traffic police are just being "revenue clerks," all those existing infractions would be ticketed all the more.) That makes it all the more important to create restrictions against risk-increasing behaviors for when you *do* see them.
19th and early 20th century Ireland is a much more fantastic and mysterious place than anything any fantasy writer made up.
Funny, how in Slashdot anti-intellectualism is OK if it doesn't refer to tech topics, but someone who brags about how they don't like math or physics would get scorned.
Slashdot Mirror
You are below an elementary familiarity with anthropology. (What human societies have you seen? Have any of them been pre-modern?) Review the basic literature on hunter-gather societies and social heirarchies. I recommend starting with the work of Pierre van den Berghe, who is even a sociobiologist, yet recognizes the absence of social stratification in hunter-gather societies.
There is substantial literature on this, you should avail yourself of it before promoting generalized observations as truth about human nature. I would also point out your own .sig in this regard....
You mistake role for function, and you have yet to hear of any pre-kingship hunter-gatherer societies. Executive function - which may be dynamic or situational - is different from status. Very, very different.
But I know people who read Charles Stross. They include some of the smartest game designers I've ever met. Influencing one smart person may be more meaningful than being beloved by 1000 mediocre ones.
If you think egalitarian (as in, lacking social striaitions) behavior is "against" human nature, I suggest you look at the actual anthropology of hunter-gather societies. You are attributing many things which are contingent to the innate, and then over-interpreting them as being stable. There is a massive - *massive* - difference between foraging for berries and shopping for clothes, and the latter is completely unrecognizable to people who participate in the former. You also risk producing "just-so stories" in your appeal to human nature for things with specific histories.
There are low-level features to humans as we know them, yes. But by the time those features manifest as behaviors, they have been profoundly mediated by background and environment. The expressions exist at several removes from those features.
Well, the thing is, "human nature" gets redefined as whatever *hasn't* changed. It's a moving target. Slavery used to be considered part of "human nature." So was hunting and gathering. Egalitarian societies were also thought of as "human nature" by the people who lived in them (and the people who idealized them) - but then social hierarchies are called "human nature" by people who haven't experienced anything but. Violence is often described as part of "human nature," yet many people in many times have lived lives without violence.
Actually, I think your thought exercise makes my point more clearly than you know. The automobile has radically transformed human culture - transportation technologies are partially to blame for the erosion of extended families, for the dominance of the nuclear family, for the distinctive separation between living places and work places, etc. The entire landscape in America has been transformed by the car and the road.
If you look at how people used to respond to disease before contemporary medicine, and even to mortality itself - how the family has been profoundly transformed by the rarity of death-in-childbirth, that's also a profound change.
That is why good historical narratives are almost like science-fiction in reverse.
Oh, Jesus. That was actually an episode? I remembered that story, but attributed it acute food poisoning and hallucinations.
One reason to critique stupid media is that it contributes to a culture of stupidity. When people who congratulate themselves on their intelligence are often devoted to work that fails on so many levels, it's symptomatic of other problems.
I think that your "leave it alone, it's just entertainment" is also myopic, in that I bet you don't feel any compunctions about feeling superior to those who like professional wrestling and monster truck rallies.
The problem isn't the weakness of the science, actually. It's the weakness of the sociology! It's inconceivable to me that a creation like the transporter wouldn't radically transform human culture and society into something unrecognizable. There are technologies of bio-technological intervention that get trotted out regularly, yet we still are told that people would be quite satisfied with a 100-year life span, more or less. I won't even mention time-travel.
An interesting speculation about an improbable or even impossible technology is more compelling to me than cliches and failures of conjecture wrapped around sound technologies.
Millions of people are wrong. Or, at least, stupid. I don't need to Godwinize this thread to explain how that might be so.
Stross is right about this. Of course, it is flamebait at an epic scale to attack not just the biggest of fan franchises, but the very logic upon which fan franchises are based: massive narcissistic projection. If SF on TV actually reflected on how our humanity itself would become unrecognizable in the wake of technological change, then fans wouldn't have easy heroes to identify with.
The idea that adaptive difficulty "rewards mediocrity" reveals a huge crate full of bad thinking - as if videogames are a meritocracy meant to reward the skilled few and cull the weak from the herd! To me, that's a sentiment that would come from a very game-obsessed 7th grader, whose Xbox achievements meant more to him than anything else the world could possibly offer. It earns and gets derision all around.
More importantly, it is trivially easy to create challenges that are insurmountable. Pretty much all computer-based challenges are handicapped to give players a chance.
A more interesting question is whether and when multiplayer games should provide positive and negative feedback loops: when you're winning, should the game get harder for you and easier for your opponents (Mario Kart?) Or should it race to its conclusion, letting a won-game be won and allowing for the next one to start quickly (Risk?) There are advantages to either design concept, and playtesting is the best way to figure out which works for your game.
Yes, you get it.
He has kids.
Those of you who don't have kids, won't get it.
Neither party is intending to create equal outcomes for all individuals: the democratic party is content with a meritocracy, as well. Both are dedicated to some version of capitalism with an array of government programs to aid and abet it.
The Republicans are less interested, however, in leveling the playing field. an "environment where equal opportunity exists for all" would mean a lot of social engineering to make sure that all children had the same level of educational opportunities, equivalent health care, safety at home and in public, safe and affordable housing, etc. These all sound like Democratic planks to me (and from the leftward side of the Democratic party, too.) The traditional (or rather, contemporary) version of Republicanism thinks that "equal opportunity" just means that everyone can submit resumes for any job, and little more.
Ahem.
Wait a sec, have the goal posts moved again? It was about weapons of mass destruction, then it was about bringing democracy to masses yearning for it, then it was about protecting the Sunnis from the Shiite forces that we kind of, um, unleashed on them, and now it's payback for the Kurds?
I think the real motivation was to revive the corpse of Gilgamesh and create a new race of super-warriors, but that's just my theory.
"Order" and "disorder" are human perceptions, not states of matter and energy. Sometimes we perceive more order when there are clear differences in energy states, sometimes we perceive less
To you, which is more ordered: a bowl of cherries next to a glass of water, or a completely smooth blend of all of them? The latter is more entropic. In the case of the room, replace the garbage bin with an incinerator, and the "empty" room (plus the stuff that used to be in it) is now in a more entropic state. The fact that you personally find it tidier isn't relevant. Assuming that you might have actually needed some of the stuff that we just burned, too, you might find it a rather poor solution to the problem of a messy room.
You can guarantee that the real wages (in terms of actual purchasing power) won't go down in the medium term? Looks like you should have taken at least that one accounting class, instead of spending all your money at my dad's shop.
First, it's not just profiling that's an issue. It's the entire visa process. If you haven't seen it, you have know idea.
Second, profiling on (seeming) ethnic appearance breaks everything for thousands of reasons. False negatives, false positives, simple unfairness.
Last, the rest of the world seems to have no trouble letting the Pakistani IOC member come into their countries without making him feel like a pariah. Maybe it's US border policy that should "take one for the team."
Living up to your handle, I see.
It is an unpleasant experience if you are lucky enough to have it all. I live in the US, my relatives are from Latin America, and whether they can get a tourist visa at all is hit-or-miss. And they are all college-educated professionals with perfectly clean records.
That they would choose Rio as the destination - in the country that has strict reciprocality with visa requirements - sends the message out loud and clear.
I participate in an international organization that has conferences in Asia, Europe and the Americas. It now chooses Canada regularly for its international conferences in the Americas, for the reasons described in the article.
There are always other places to go that are as cool or cooler, and with less hassle. With the US economy in the raft it's in, with no real signs of improvement, ever (until it depresses wages enough to reboot its manufacturing base), it really is the US' loss, too.
Books are not commodities. One book is not equivalent to another.
No, they don't cover the problem. Because by the time someone is plowing through the center lane, killing other motorists and passengers, a citation no longer acts as a disincentive.
People, left to their own devices, are poor estimators of risk. Too often, they think that they can drink and drive and be alright, or that they aren't really that distracted when texting. I agree that enforcement of some of the existing driving regulations is lax and inconsistent, but that isn't a problem of the laws; it is a problem of enforcement budgets, etc. (Your complaint has a contradiction in it: if traffic police are just being "revenue clerks," all those existing infractions would be ticketed all the more.) That makes it all the more important to create restrictions against risk-increasing behaviors for when you *do* see them.
19th and early 20th century Ireland is a much more fantastic and mysterious place than anything any fantasy writer made up.
Funny, how in Slashdot anti-intellectualism is OK if it doesn't refer to tech topics, but someone who brags about how they don't like math or physics would get scorned.