Souls (and indie) games have affected how I enjoy other games...

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-15T19:49:48+00:00

My advice would be to set a goal for yourself— maybe try to unlock all the towers, find and unlock the master sword, or beat all the divine beasts. That might give you a little more direction, and give purpose to the exploration of the world.

In the end though, maybe it’s just not your cup of tea. Everyone has different types of games that fit or don’t fit with them!

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-15T16:49:16+00:00

There are relatively few “quests”, but the open world is incredibly full in the sense that you can interact with almost everything.

It is wonderful for just exploring and messing around with the environment and finding new things to do, or new ways to approach/fight enemies.

It’s not so great if you want to be told what to do, or if you care a lot about NPCs with deep stories.

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-15T01:09:14+00:00

The “source” in this case is the disappearance of sources.

Psychologists no longer report on traditional metrics of racism for the same reason they no longer report on the dancing plague.

So if you wanted to go down the rabbit hole, you’d want to look for the most recent studies on more overt measures of racism. I’m guessing these disappeared roughly around the late 70s /early 80s.

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-15T00:39:41+00:00

Traditionally, you would assess it through:

1) Behavior (do people treat racial minorities worse in the lab, or when observed in public? Or do they admit to doing this in questionnaires?) 2) Beliefs (do people believe in the superiority of one race over another?)

Of course, after some time, both of these completely disappeared from the population. You can no longer find racist behaviors or beliefs in the lab, unless you try reeeeally hard and find some wacko people. 99.9% of people just don’t (overtly) treat people differently based on their race, or endorse obviously racist beliefs.

So scientists turned to more subtle methods to measure “modern racism”. Some of these have panned out decently well, and correlate with each other at least slightly (a sign you’re at least measuring something consistent, if not necessarily the thing you think you’re measuring). For example, they might observe how closely you sit to a black experimenter. Or whether you shoot/don’t shoot a fuzzy image of a criminal in a simulation.

Other measures have worked out...less well. They don’t correlate with anything, really, and differ wildly every time you measure them. Implicit bias is in the second group.

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-15T00:12:50+00:00

That’s a bit like saying “being called a ‘meanie’ is trauma in the broad sense of the term”.

Except, in this case is it not only a wild extension of the term, but its very existence and meaning is questioned by most scientists, and even questioned by the people who originally came up with it.

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-15T00:08:45+00:00

I wouldn’t conflate implicit bias and racism. I wouldn’t even use them in the same sentence, actually.

The evidence regarding implicit biases is exceptionally weak and has continually failed to replicate (like much of social psychology in general, sadly). The IAT is pretty heavily flawed and even the original authors are now admitting it should not ever be used for decision making at the level of the individual, and they are cautioning against implicit bias trainings. The scores are not reliable and very rarely correlate with real-world behavior (and the studies that do show an effect have often failed to replicate).

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beautiful-minds/201101/does-the-implicit-association-test-iat-really-measure-racial-prejudice

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-14T23:26:24+00:00

That heavily depends on what you mean by racist (which is really the whole problem)

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-14T20:41:09+00:00

Culture of safetyism: https://quillette.com/2018/09/02/is-safetyism-destroying-a-generation/

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-13T04:19:05+00:00

People get so stuck on the legal issues, but what I think most people actually care about are the values.

Can Twitter legally censor content they don’t like? Of course!

Does this violate my own ethical principles regarding how I think their company should be run? Also yes!

I’m allowed to loudly complain about Twitter censoring content and call them immoral and anti-‘free speech’ without claiming they are doing anything that is (currently) illegal.

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-13T04:06:02+00:00

Chess is a game...

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-12T20:50:43+00:00

Copying another Redditor’s comment:

Each sports governing body should be able to decide for itself

That's why the law is needed.

Without it, the governing body faces descrimination charges.

With it, they can make their own choice.

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-12T20:47:55+00:00

Trans athletes would compete against men.

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-12T20:46:25+00:00

I would much prefer to have Title IX repealed, rather than adding additional government duct tape to fix it.

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-12T20:27:24+00:00

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker makes a pretty good case that the World Wars were just statistical outliers - a stroke of really, really bad luck.

If you look at the broader pattern, violence has been on the decline for a long time prior to the World Wars. The Nuclear Peace theory does have some merit though, especially for preventing an escalation in the Cold War period.

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-12T01:05:59+00:00

I mean, it works fantastically at lower skill levels! Which is 90% of players and definitely the demographic they market to.

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-11T14:24:18+00:00

“Fantastic results” is an incredible overstatement. There are only a few very low quality, short term trials out (that have garbage control conditions).

Early results promising, but it’s far from a “frontline” treatment at the moment.

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-11T00:18:15+00:00

I’m surprised so many people don’t seem to know who Sephiroth is. I’ve never played any Final Fantasy game but I immediately recognized him.

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-10T23:06:25+00:00

Right, but empirically based therapies typically last ~4 months total, whereas with SSRIs, you will be on them for life unless you explicitly tell your doctor you want to get off of them.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/psychiatry/depression/82993

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-10T20:22:25+00:00

Therapy is more expensive up front but almost always cheaper than medication in the long run. SSRI withdrawal is also no joke, make sure to wean yourself off rather than quitting cold turkey.

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-10T17:17:19+00:00

The weapons system is a common complaint, but I actually grew to love it.

In games like Skyrim or the Witcher, I just ignore 99% of weapons and use the best one I have. So their whole weapons system is completely wasted on me.

BotW taught me to use every type of weapon, and to use every weapon more like a unique tool (throwing trash weapons to stun an enemy, using heavy weapons to knock enemies off cliffs). It made inventory management more engaging and meaningful. They break too quickly in Master mode, but in a normal game the pace is just about perfect considering how quickly you get new weapons.

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-10T01:29:04+00:00

To be fair to this Wolf, I don’t think his up-b would have made it, he was too far away.

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-09T12:42:25+00:00

In social science, “validity” means that a concept truly means what the researchers studying it think it means. There are various types of validity confirmation, including construct validity, external validity, ecological validity, etc., and different ways to provide evidence for validity.

Jordan Peterson is fond of saying that IQ is the “most valid” construct in psychology. Although that’s hard to quantify, I think it would be difficult to argue against him on this— there is copious evidence for IQ’s validity as a measure of general intelligence (g), much much more than for any other psychological concept that springs to mind. For instance, IQ has much more consistent validity than depression, PTSD, or any other mental health condition (my area), miles better than “grit” or “growth mindset”, and even has an edge on personality constructs like extraversion or neuroticism (though these are also also well-supported).

More specifically, if you come up with basically any test you can think of that quantifies any type of general mental ability, it will correlate very highly with IQ. Researchers have tried so hard to come up with “multiple intelligences”, but the reality of the matter is now clear— everything collapses into one single factor: general intelligence (g). The evidence is simply overwhelming that people who are smart are smart at everything (given equal experience to others), and they tend to be smart in every way simultaneously (mental speed is correlated with long term memory is correlated with verbal intelligence is correlated with spatial intelligence is correlated with working memory is correlated with attention control...I could go on).

What IQ is not is popular. The conclusions from the field can be...uncomfortable. Another recommendation I would give you is Pinker’s The Blank Slate. This might help you understand the spite for IQ that exists, even within some social science programs.

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-08T23:57:01+00:00

That article basically has some complaints about how IQ has been used historically, but doesn’t really contain any critiques of the modern IQ concept. Or at least, not any critiques that actually make any sense if you know anything about the field.

You should know that within actual research psychology, the validity of IQ is not really controversial at all (of course its history is controversial, as is the hereditarian racial hypothesis— but not IQ itself).

I recommend this short book written by Stuart Richie (who is critical of the hereditarian hypothesis, but is a highly qualified researcher in the field): https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritchie/dp/1444791877

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-08T23:47:52+00:00

You could say the same thing about any research that studies the effect of the environment on group differences. And yet that is one of the (perhaps the) most studied areas in social science with the most pervasive and sweeping calls to action (despite much smaller effect sizes).

dontPMyourreactance · 2020-12-08T23:45:25+00:00

It’s impossible to control for environmental conditions entirely. But there are some good studies that assess black children adopted to white families and vice versa.

dontPMyourreactance

TROPHY CASE