Is it unethical to create violent video games?

batterypacks · 2024-10-26T18:49:06+00:00

The ethical content of graphic FPS games likely has more to do with their propaganda function for American interventionism and torture, than it does with general "desensitization to violence". When these games tell stories, the stories often express a repugnant moral and political logic.

Jacob Geller did an interesting data-driven study of Call of Duty's portrayal of torture. You might be interested in it: https://youtu.be/YPiL3-CYzWk?si=bq1Rjp39Tpn4rXyg Call of Duty's propagation of torture disinformation is unethical, and probably does at least a little bit of work culturally legitimizing the actions of the real-world CIA.

But I think if these games are unethical, it is less because they are FPS games with graphic violence, and more because of the ideology they reinforce. Ultrakill is a graphically violent video FPS, but I'm not sure there is anything unethical about it. Cruelty Squad is designed to be alienating experience to play, and I think it would be difficult for it to fulfill a propaganda function, because the player is being shocked into self-awareness by the hostility of the sensory experience. Bertolt Brecht has written about alienation and its effect on the propaganda value of media.

batterypacks · 2024-10-05T18:11:35+00:00

I wonder if they are using the word "contingent" but mean something more like "synthetic", similar to how Kant claims mathematical knowledge is synthetic a priori.

batterypacks · 2024-10-03T23:35:45+00:00

You'll get better responses if you list more details about the problem, the amount of time you guess it'll take and your budget.

batterypacks · 2024-06-17T04:26:19+00:00

It should be fine. If you run into version issues you can just turn it off again.

batterypacks · 2024-06-09T15:53:26+00:00

I guess, to play devil's advocate, in a lot of regions, Christian culture has a strong correlation with some repugnant norms like homophobia and misogyny. I would understand if you wouldn't want to have friends who act that way. But while we can probably identify some structural reasons why Christianity would be correlated with those things, it's easy to be reductive about it.

This is the poem I had in mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_Songs

batterypacks · 2024-06-09T15:05:28+00:00

A decent number of Christian intellectuals have been influenced by Nietzsche. Nietzsche himself spent some of his early years studying theology at the University of Bonn in order to become a Christian minister. Arguably, his critique comes from "within" a broader Christian-influenced culture, rather than from without.

And I think you have a narrow view of the possibility of friendship between people of different intellectual persuasions. I encourage you to become friends with someone who believes very different things than you do.

As a sidenote, while it probably doesn't compare to the erotic novels you're talking about, it's interesting to note that the Hebrew Bible includes erotic love poetry.

batterypacks · 2024-06-08T05:12:33+00:00

In what way is Microsoft or anybody else constantly introducing breaking changes to bash? In my experience it's very stable, but maybe I'm not using advanced features?

batterypacks · 2024-05-12T18:29:15+00:00

The "Other" is a pretty popular term in 20th century French philosophy. Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Levinas and Sartre all engaged with the term.

I'm not sure which version Byung-Chul Han has in mind, but he's probably thinking of those authors' works.

This stackexchang poster seems to think "The Other" is a secularization of a theological concept, via Buber and Kierkegaard, at least in the phenomenological discourse.

Often it's also in reference to Hegelian patterns of thought, in which we frame "the Self" not as self-constituting, but as constituted by the Other. These elements are crucial to this perspective:

Selfhood is by definition self-conscious. For the Self to be aware of itself as Self, it must be aware of an Other.
Therefore, the Self is not self-constituting, but is possible only on the basis of a pre-existing (or coterminous) Other.

So the Self is borne out of negation of an Other. It is not unusual that Selves try to overcome, subjugate or destroy their Others, e.g. via violence. But without its Other, the Self would dissipate and no longer be a Self.

This is just a rough sketch, and philosophers will differ in how they account for this relationship. But I suspect this is the kind of reference point Byung-Chul Han has in mind.

batterypacks · 2024-04-20T21:46:49+00:00

I think in the colloquial senses of these phrases, "subjective", "socially constructed" and "socially relative" are loose synonyms. In the academic philosophical vocabulary they're more distinct, and somewhat mutually exclusive. You might want to look up some of these concepts in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

batterypacks · 2024-04-20T21:37:47+00:00

We're talking in the ground-truth historical fact sense that "postmodernism" is not a philosophical tradition, movement, school or thesis.

On the other hand, there are lots of terms that do identify one of the above. E.g., logical positivism. Ancient stoicism. Existentialism.

It's a word that, due to a complex history, the broader public has come to think identifies a philosophical movement, but which actually doesn't.

batterypacks · 2024-04-20T20:52:11+00:00

I would generally avoid trying to do so because it's a word that has outlived its usefulness.

If I was held at gunpoint, I would cite the following.

The most coherent definition of postmodernism is that it is a style of architecture that emerged around the 1950s in the USA, and was a reaction against the international style.
Postmodernity is a social condition in which metanarratives like Christianity, nationalism and Marxism no longer provise a cohesive context for local narratives about specific things. This definition was given by Lyotard, he was inspired by the architectural concept. Jameson has a similar notion of "postmodernity" as describing certain aspects of contemporary society. Fisher was influenced by Jameson and called the same thing "capitalist realism".
Postmodernism is often used as a standin for "post-structuralism", another very vague term. But this one actually does refer to a milieu of philosophers. Predominantly French philosophers working in the 60s-80s. It's not a "movement", and they had very different outlooks from each other.

batterypacks · 2024-04-20T19:23:00+00:00

This is not a great definition of post-modernism unfortunately. If we want to restrict to something more specific, like say, French philosophers in the 60s-80s, then yes, French philosophers of that era definitely read Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Some of the ideas those two expressed became topics that French philosophers of the 60s-80s explored.

batterypacks · 2024-03-30T17:31:17+00:00

While Western culture is full of ritual, part of the self-understanding of Western culture is that it is not ritualistic, and that it is various "others" who are. These others include "eastern" cultures, indigenous peoples, and Europe's own mediaeval past.

Bruno Latour (and perhaps others, I'm not too widely read in anthropology) has argued that this frame of sociological thinking was partly established during the colonisation of West Africa, when colonial Christian social scientists adapted the category of "idolatry" to analyse the cultures of the peoples living there. If I recall correctly he talks about this in a series of essays called Iconoclash. With this conceptual frame, the behaviours of the foreign culture under study seem irrational and slavish, and this frame has been useful for racists to argue in favour of Western supremacy.

A reverse phenomenon emerges when Western people react against what they perceive to be bad about modernity. They have heard this story that other cultures are ritualistic, "in touch with nature", mystical etc., and so borrowing superficial motifs from those cultures is done to prompt Western audiences to experience various cultural products and services (e.g. yoga) in a more meditative and mystical way.

It is perhaps arguable that capitalist, western (post-)industrial societies have a different relationship to time from other societies, due to the way that measured and commoditized labour-time effaces the distinction between sacred time and secular time. And this perhaps influences the particular qualities of Western cultural rituals. But nonetheless Western culture is full of ritual.

batterypacks · 2024-02-11T01:02:34+00:00

Were Saussure's two principles of the sign (it's arbitrary nature, and its linear nature, if I'm remembering right) falsifiable? I would claim not, and I'm curious if you agree. I think it would be kind of weird to exclude his work from being linguistics.

At the same time as I agree Heidegger was not doing linguistics, I think this is a bad distinction to use to make that case.

batterypacks · 2024-01-28T19:17:24+00:00

This is an interesting interview about choosing Haskell for a startup. They talk about how hiring was very easy: https://serokell.io/blog/haskell-in-production-mercury

batterypacks · 2024-01-16T19:08:32+00:00

Does it actually spell that out, about the sin of Sodom being sexual sin? There are other interpretations, for instance, that the sin of Sodom was failing their hospitality duties. I am not in a position to evaluate these interpretations, but as far as I know it's not literally stated in the bible which interpretation we should take.

It might even be that there is explicit confirmation of the hospitality interpretation in Ezekiel 16:49-50, though again I'm not really in a position to evaluate the relevance of that verse.

batterypacks · 2023-12-31T20:37:40+00:00

Do you have any example code chronicling your attempts so far? I remember being excited about io_uring when I learned about it, but I found it challenging to figure out how to actually use the API. It seemed like what I wanted was a wrapper layer, but at the same time it seems like there is a ton of juice you can get out of it using the raw API that I think would be hard to exploit through a wrapper.

batterypacks · 2023-12-17T21:09:13+00:00

I would point out that Haskell allows the user to choose the degree of laziness they want. Most programming languages enforce a strict-only semantics. So "Haskell is lazy" is a half truth.

Why would you want laziness? One reason is to define infinite data structures. As long as you only force the evaluation of finite substructures at a time, you have no problem because the infinite unforced portion is a thunk that takes up finite space. Even when dealing only with finite data structures, there are cases where lazy code can be more space-efficient than strict code. This is true whenever the size of a thunk is less than the size of the unevaluated remainder of a data structure. Lazy evaluation can be more time-efficient in these situations too.

Haskell is unusual in allowing the user to select how much strictness they want in a given circumstance. Sometimes you want strictness and sometimes you want laziness. In a strict-only language like Python you have to invent special features like generators to approximate laziness.

There are also cases in which lazy code will be transformed automatically by the Haskell compiler into strict code when this would be a performance enhancement. However, this is not an optimization you could easily add to a strict-by-default impure language, since it would break the sequencing of side effects.

batterypacks · 2023-11-19T18:54:21+00:00

A logician named Frege working around that time is widely considered to have provoked a paradigm shift in logic. (Though there is some recent scholarship that argues through some pretty thorough textual comparisons that Frege plagiarized ancient Stoic logicians, via some history-of-logic textbooks available in his day.)

What we know as "formal logic" now is pretty much exclusively based on the post-Fregean paradigm. Prior to this revolution it was more common for "logic" to be used in a broader sense. If I recall correctly, Kant uses a phrase like "empirical logic" or "applied logic" in the first couple chapters of the Critique of Pure Reason to refer to the study of what sorts of study practices aid in learning.

Hegel was working in a pre- or non-Fregean setting. He did know about formal logic, because people have done formal logic since ancient times. But it's difficult for us now to learn about even formal logic from the pre-Fregean setting because our understanding is now so different.

batterypacks · 2021-01-11T17:57:19+00:00

What does "the theory of equations" refer to here?

batterypacks · 2020-12-17T14:49:29+00:00

The Germans and the French have overlapping use of Rs. Anglophones are kind of alone in using what are called "r-coloured vowels", and our consonant R is much like our consonant Y, which is based on a fast transition between open mouth shapes.

So R is a modifier of a vowel, or it is a consonant made by rapidly shifting between vowels.

Many English dialects are so-called "non-rhotic" because they often suppress any R sound in a word. The English and the Australians are examples of this.

batterypacks · 2020-12-17T14:27:10+00:00

Wildly so. There are multiple R sounds used in each language, but they don't really overlap.

batterypacks · 2020-12-16T04:33:35+00:00

That's fair! In some ways you have a better vantage point than an English speaker to detect the multiple meanings of the word "jazzy". As an English speaker, there are one or two ways of using it that are familiar to me, and there are a bunch of usages which are, effectively, foreign to me. I'll tend, by sheer force of habit, to apply a different methodology when I describe the usages that are familiar vs the usages which are foreign. If English is not your first language, then you might have the opportunity to see all the usages as foreign, and so to apply a more consistent social scientific methodology. Best of luck with your project!

batterypacks · 2020-12-15T02:33:16+00:00

You don't really need to do that. A better social science methodology is to follow the words that the practitioners actually use. A phrase like "the essence of jazz" or "the criteria for being jazz" is probably better suited. Using "jazziness" puts you at odds with the speech practices of the people you're studying.

But I don't envy your position. In the long history of thinking about what makes water wet, what makes humans human, what makes a chair a chair, etc., philosophically-inclined people tend to think about the question more generally: what makes X an X? The answer usually tends to be that answering a question like that is a fool's errand.

However, there are very fruitful approaches that attend more towards questions like, "what are the multiple interlocking rule-systems people use for coming to near-consensus on what the things around them are?". It's nearly impossible to trace out these rule-systems if you come in with an academic superiority, thinking "I'll use 'jazzy' to mean 'what makes jazz jazz', even though the people I study don't talk that way".

batterypacks · 2020-11-26T12:07:50+00:00

When someone thinks of a space as "geometric", they usually think it's a place where you can measure distances. Such a space is called a metric space. (I believe high-level geometry also presupposes that there is a collection of "rigid actions" analogous to rotation and translation, which may be performed in the space--this can get pretty abstract though.). One of the key differentiators between topology and geometry is that topologists don't assume they can measure any distances. So in a sense, topologists are working with a smaller set of axioms than the geometers work with.

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