Underlying your claim is the belief that, deep down inside, we all want the same thing.
We don't. The partisanship reflects real rifts in values, culture, experiences, and interests.
I'm pretty much on the left, in a fiscally-sane and let-the-locals-run-themselves kind of way. Civil liberties issues are more important to me than most others, though: in theory, I should be able to hang out well with libertarians of various stripes. In practice, most libertarian-conservatives are more interested in protecting gun ownership - which strikes me as, honestly, silly and irrelevant - while what are the major issues for me are lifestyle ones: gay marriage and drug decriminalization. The litmus for me is the former right now - I'm not gay, but many of my friends are, and some are in international relationships.
This means major visa problems if they want to live with their loved ones in the US. It's a problem which affects a minority of people, but it strikes me as an essential question of fairness. It doesn't even appear on the radar of so-called libertarians who are part of traditional culture here, just like gun ownership doesn't appear on mine.
How does this link to your post? Well, because that's what determines who the "They" that wins every time is. "They" are people who can exploit these gaps in cultural experience and carve out a majority, and do so without any regard for any kind of moral compass. Overcoming apathy wouldn't help: it would make the demagoguery worse. The only chance I see for the fair thing happening is a bit more apathy about gay marriage on the part of people who have been riled up in opposition to it.
At this point, I think the UK is a de facto republic: British citizens are, in fact, citizens and not subjects now, contrary to popular belief. (Check your UK passport if you have one.) The non-republican elements are vestigial.
Aesthetics is not just the practice of making things more "pleasing." Consider the origin of the term - and its relationship to the word "anaesthetic." It is about the effect of an artifact or of the environment on the person en toto, not just whether it "looks nice." It is as much a question of the qualia of life - the very feeling of things - as one of representations and formal relations.
Feng shui and such are couched in metaphysics that are pre-modern, but they survive because they are a working model of aesthetic experience.
My qualms about such findings: due to the nature of human subject research, we know a great deal about the psychology of college sophomores. We make nativist or universalist claims about the human species from such data at great risk. I'm not a complete anti-nativist - the Berlin/Kay color research was persuasive to me, and based on a clear physiological model (i.e., that the human experience of color primacy is based on the structure of the human visual system at the cellular level - although there is a slight variance between genders.) But higher-level claims about color and affect strike me as about as only a little better than claims based on astrology.
Re:Shouldn't there be a foot icon?
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Well, there's this thing that most nerds are really bad at. Even - perhaps especially - when they think they're being good at it (e.g., "skins".) It's called aesthetics.
Feng shui and vastu and the like are, at least partially, non-western models for something that could generally be called aesthetic experience. There are also western models for aesthetics. One could even concieve of usability research as a kind of scientification of a subset of aesthetics.
This begs the question: if you can tell whether a claim is true or not, then you probably don't need to refer to WP for the information (excluding gross logical contradictions, etc.)
Many of us want more granularity in degrees and kinds of scepticism than a simple "grain of salt."
That's the big cognitive gap, there: fans are only vaguely aware that the objects of their affections are, essentially, commodities. I view such fandom as a close relation of the Stockholm Syndrome.
See, I don't see any point in attacking anyone's taste, or anyone's disinterest in music. What I do find ridiculous are claims that there is "no good music out there," that people won't buy CDs because "the music sucks."
I see LPs, CDs, and tapes all as "records" as well. They are the product of some sort of recording. What is implicit is, of course, that they are all audio/music records.
What may be more archaic than the "record" in the term "record label" is the term "label." A "record service" may be more appropriate.
This claim that there is no "music worth buying" line rings false. There is so much music, in so many genres, being produced right now, that I just can't believe that no one, anywhere, is producing CDs of music you would like.
I have outre tastes in music, and still I despair of hearing even a fraction of the music that I'd enjoy: any visit to a CD store of any breadth (Amoeba Music being the pinnacle of them, but there are many) reveals just how much more there is to hear out there.
What I think this shows up is the simplicity of people who think that globalization in any way makes the nation-state obsolete. The fact that we cross national borders more often, in the context of globalization and everything that makes globalization possible, reinforces the jurisdiction of the nation-state over people. Globalization, as currently practiced, really relies on the modern state in order to function, and enhances the position of that state.
That's the one I was thinking of. That link was great, too: reminded my just how technical the consumer PC market was back then. Could you imagine such specifity in an advertisement today? More than just the technology has changed: the nature of the markets have, too.
Microsoft began making designing, producing, and selling mice in 1983 (playing catch-up to Apple, I believe, and designing Word to take advantage of the mouse.) Many years before Sony was even in the video game business, and two years before Nintendo shipped the first Famicom/NES (they has already been making arcade games for 8 years.)
I recall Microsoft having designed some specialized cards for early PCs, too, but I don't recall their name.
I'm a fan of Nick Yee's work (and other MMO theorists), but I still hold by my "pseudo" characterization. If MMO interaction is a subset of the interactions within a group, then it can be said to a component in a non-pseudo sociality. From the perspective of the broad psychological rewards of social interaction, however, I think that the disembodied nature of MMO interaction, its confinement to an ultimately fictional set of stimuli and rewards, the observed phenomenon of people who leave play being essentially "dropped" from circles of "friends," etc. (like bar-buddies drop a friend who goes into recovery), tells me that the sociality of MMOs are like "empty calories" - it meets some of the needs so well, that the player ignores how other needs are getting completely starved.
It is, I think, disingenuous to simply state that any entertainment practice is equivalent to any other in terms of its affordances for addictive behavior. We aren't just talking about escapism pure and simple - one can escape into a novel, after all. We're talking about spiralling patterns of avoidant behavior, and most of us have seen it played out.
I'd put that into a sub-category of "generic procrastination." I know I seem to be making an arbitrary distinction - claiming that MMOs are addictive based on their structure, while casual games are simply appealing not-work things to do (just like making little origami cranes instead of doing one's work might be... or even posting on Slashdot.) But I think there's an essential difference between short-term procrastination, even if repeated, and immersion into a game (or other addictive behavior) with an ongoing, spiralling detachment from other goals and values. If there is an overlap zone, it might be depression - a profoundly depressed person could, indeed, sit at home and play Freecell for hours on end, but I am fairly sure that they will have already detached themsleves from daily life long before doing so, while the MMO player can slip into addictive behavior without being depressed, even when there are still many rewards and goals that could be achieved in their real lives.
I see this over and over. "Blame vs. taking responsibility."
It's a facile opposition. It is anemical to the kind of thoughtfulness about interdependencies and network effects that really lie at the core of most interesting human behaviors. It is an anti-scientific characterization, drawn from a kind of legalistic way of thinking that should really be constrained to legal discourse.
At this point, to me, it is the intellectual equivalent of eating with one's mouth open, or scratching a blackboard with your fingernails.
Different "substances" (alcohol, nicotine, gambling, MMOs) can hook different people, because the reward systems vary. There are alcoholics (recovering or otherwise) who can play MMOs without negative consequences, and many MMO addicts don't become alcoholics. Nicotine is addictive for just about everyone who smokes enough.
The object of addiction isn't completely arbitrary, either. It's not as if there are serious Bejeweled addicts. An MMO is addictive in its ongoing promise of another reward, because of its surrogate (I would say "pseudo-") sociality, because it offers a straightforward path of action that can be very appealing to people who lack one in their real lives.
Mac OS X does not have a straightfoward AutoRun function, but that is beside the point. (Safari does, and apparently there are ways to do the equivalent of Autorun in Mac OS X, but I don't know what it is, so we'll leave that aside.)
The distinction is irrelevant. If, on a Mac, you get an application on a CD from a trusted vendor and that application asks for administrative rights, you'll do it - just like a Windows user will trust the AutoRun (or at least the Setup.exe) from a trusted vendor. If that vendor screws the pooch, it is not the OS' fault.
No. There is no defense against an executable installed by a trusted vendor. If a virus gets installed due to user action - connecting an iPod, for example - and the user agrees to whatever official-looking prompts the installation creates, there is no reasonable security model on earth that can prevent the malicious code from running.
The "rm -rf/" example above is a straightfoward example.
Apple is completely, unilaterally responsible, just like Sony was responsible for the CD rootkit cock-up.
I used to say almost exactly the things you are saying now. Then I actually learned what the extent of the genetic modification of foods really was: it includes things like introducing gene sequences from insects and animals into foods. It isn't just selective breeding 2.0.
My position on GMO has changed, very much, in the past 2 years. I suggest you get past the thought-experiment phase and look at the actual data.
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Underlying your claim is the belief that, deep down inside, we all want the same thing.
We don't. The partisanship reflects real rifts in values, culture, experiences, and interests.
I'm pretty much on the left, in a fiscally-sane and let-the-locals-run-themselves kind of way. Civil liberties issues are more important to me than most others, though: in theory, I should be able to hang out well with libertarians of various stripes. In practice, most libertarian-conservatives are more interested in protecting gun ownership - which strikes me as, honestly, silly and irrelevant - while what are the major issues for me are lifestyle ones: gay marriage and drug decriminalization. The litmus for me is the former right now - I'm not gay, but many of my friends are, and some are in international relationships.
This means major visa problems if they want to live with their loved ones in the US. It's a problem which affects a minority of people, but it strikes me as an essential question of fairness. It doesn't even appear on the radar of so-called libertarians who are part of traditional culture here, just like gun ownership doesn't appear on mine.
How does this link to your post? Well, because that's what determines who the "They" that wins every time is. "They" are people who can exploit these gaps in cultural experience and carve out a majority, and do so without any regard for any kind of moral compass. Overcoming apathy wouldn't help: it would make the demagoguery worse. The only chance I see for the fair thing happening is a bit more apathy about gay marriage on the part of people who have been riled up in opposition to it.
At this point, I think the UK is a de facto republic: British citizens are, in fact, citizens and not subjects now, contrary to popular belief. (Check your UK passport if you have one.) The non-republican elements are vestigial.
Aesthetics is not just the practice of making things more "pleasing." Consider the origin of the term - and its relationship to the word "anaesthetic." It is about the effect of an artifact or of the environment on the person en toto, not just whether it "looks nice." It is as much a question of the qualia of life - the very feeling of things - as one of representations and formal relations.
Feng shui and such are couched in metaphysics that are pre-modern, but they survive because they are a working model of aesthetic experience.
My qualms about such findings: due to the nature of human subject research, we know a great deal about the psychology of college sophomores. We make nativist or universalist claims about the human species from such data at great risk. I'm not a complete anti-nativist - the Berlin/Kay color research was persuasive to me, and based on a clear physiological model (i.e., that the human experience of color primacy is based on the structure of the human visual system at the cellular level - although there is a slight variance between genders.) But higher-level claims about color and affect strike me as about as only a little better than claims based on astrology.
Well, there's this thing that most nerds are really bad at. Even - perhaps especially - when they think they're being good at it (e.g., "skins".) It's called aesthetics.
Feng shui and vastu and the like are, at least partially, non-western models for something that could generally be called aesthetic experience. There are also western models for aesthetics. One could even concieve of usability research as a kind of scientification of a subset of aesthetics.
This begs the question: if you can tell whether a claim is true or not, then you probably don't need to refer to WP for the information (excluding gross logical contradictions, etc.)
Many of us want more granularity in degrees and kinds of scepticism than a simple "grain of salt."
That's the big cognitive gap, there: fans are only vaguely aware that the objects of their affections are, essentially, commodities. I view such fandom as a close relation of the Stockholm Syndrome.
See, I don't see any point in attacking anyone's taste, or anyone's disinterest in music. What I do find ridiculous are claims that there is "no good music out there," that people won't buy CDs because "the music sucks."
I see LPs, CDs, and tapes all as "records" as well. They are the product of some sort of recording. What is implicit is, of course, that they are all audio/music records.
What may be more archaic than the "record" in the term "record label" is the term "label." A "record service" may be more appropriate.
This claim that there is no "music worth buying" line rings false. There is so much music, in so many genres, being produced right now, that I just can't believe that no one, anywhere, is producing CDs of music you would like.
I have outre tastes in music, and still I despair of hearing even a fraction of the music that I'd enjoy: any visit to a CD store of any breadth (Amoeba Music being the pinnacle of them, but there are many) reveals just how much more there is to hear out there.
What I think this shows up is the simplicity of people who think that globalization in any way makes the nation-state obsolete. The fact that we cross national borders more often, in the context of globalization and everything that makes globalization possible, reinforces the jurisdiction of the nation-state over people. Globalization, as currently practiced, really relies on the modern state in order to function, and enhances the position of that state.
That's the one I was thinking of. That link was great, too: reminded my just how technical the consumer PC market was back then. Could you imagine such specifity in an advertisement today? More than just the technology has changed: the nature of the markets have, too.
Microsoft began making designing, producing, and selling mice in 1983 (playing catch-up to Apple, I believe, and designing Word to take advantage of the mouse.) Many years before Sony was even in the video game business, and two years before Nintendo shipped the first Famicom/NES (they has already been making arcade games for 8 years.)
I recall Microsoft having designed some specialized cards for early PCs, too, but I don't recall their name.
I'm a fan of Nick Yee's work (and other MMO theorists), but I still hold by my "pseudo" characterization. If MMO interaction is a subset of the interactions within a group, then it can be said to a component in a non-pseudo sociality. From the perspective of the broad psychological rewards of social interaction, however, I think that the disembodied nature of MMO interaction, its confinement to an ultimately fictional set of stimuli and rewards, the observed phenomenon of people who leave play being essentially "dropped" from circles of "friends," etc. (like bar-buddies drop a friend who goes into recovery), tells me that the sociality of MMOs are like "empty calories" - it meets some of the needs so well, that the player ignores how other needs are getting completely starved.
It is, I think, disingenuous to simply state that any entertainment practice is equivalent to any other in terms of its affordances for addictive behavior. We aren't just talking about escapism pure and simple - one can escape into a novel, after all. We're talking about spiralling patterns of avoidant behavior, and most of us have seen it played out.
Probably the better term would be au courant.
You must be bored. May I suggest knitting?
I was actually think that just as I hit the "submit" button, as I turned to the stack of work sitting next to me...
That stack is still there.
Time for Diner Dash.
I'd put that into a sub-category of "generic procrastination." I know I seem to be making an arbitrary distinction - claiming that MMOs are addictive based on their structure, while casual games are simply appealing not-work things to do (just like making little origami cranes instead of doing one's work might be... or even posting on Slashdot.) But I think there's an essential difference between short-term procrastination, even if repeated, and immersion into a game (or other addictive behavior) with an ongoing, spiralling detachment from other goals and values. If there is an overlap zone, it might be depression - a profoundly depressed person could, indeed, sit at home and play Freecell for hours on end, but I am fairly sure that they will have already detached themsleves from daily life long before doing so, while the MMO player can slip into addictive behavior without being depressed, even when there are still many rewards and goals that could be achieved in their real lives.
I see this over and over. "Blame vs. taking responsibility."
It's a facile opposition. It is anemical to the kind of thoughtfulness about interdependencies and network effects that really lie at the core of most interesting human behaviors. It is an anti-scientific characterization, drawn from a kind of legalistic way of thinking that should really be constrained to legal discourse.
At this point, to me, it is the intellectual equivalent of eating with one's mouth open, or scratching a blackboard with your fingernails.
I partially agree, but not completely.
Different "substances" (alcohol, nicotine, gambling, MMOs) can hook different people, because the reward systems vary. There are alcoholics (recovering or otherwise) who can play MMOs without negative consequences, and many MMO addicts don't become alcoholics. Nicotine is addictive for just about everyone who smokes enough.
The object of addiction isn't completely arbitrary, either. It's not as if there are serious Bejeweled addicts. An MMO is addictive in its ongoing promise of another reward, because of its surrogate (I would say "pseudo-") sociality, because it offers a straightforward path of action that can be very appealing to people who lack one in their real lives.
Athletes don't seek out other athletes as sexual partners. Instead, they seek out Posh Spice.
I remain skeptical.
Mac OS X does not have a straightfoward AutoRun function, but that is beside the point. (Safari does, and apparently there are ways to do the equivalent of Autorun in Mac OS X, but I don't know what it is, so we'll leave that aside.)
The distinction is irrelevant. If, on a Mac, you get an application on a CD from a trusted vendor and that application asks for administrative rights, you'll do it - just like a Windows user will trust the AutoRun (or at least the Setup.exe) from a trusted vendor. If that vendor screws the pooch, it is not the OS' fault.
No. There is no defense against an executable installed by a trusted vendor. If a virus gets installed due to user action - connecting an iPod, for example - and the user agrees to whatever official-looking prompts the installation creates, there is no reasonable security model on earth that can prevent the malicious code from running.
/" example above is a straightfoward example.
The "rm -rf
Apple is completely, unilaterally responsible, just like Sony was responsible for the CD rootkit cock-up.
I used to say almost exactly the things you are saying now. Then I actually learned what the extent of the genetic modification of foods really was: it includes things like introducing gene sequences from insects and animals into foods. It isn't just selective breeding 2.0.
My position on GMO has changed, very much, in the past 2 years. I suggest you get past the thought-experiment phase and look at the actual data.
It's literally out of control!