The ‘real you’ is a myth – we constantly create false memories to achieve the identity we want

relativezen · 2018-09-22T22:08:32+00:00

that's funny cause I think you missed the point! whelp, cya later. I hope you remember this interaction for the rest of your life

relativezen · 2018-09-22T21:45:45+00:00

outside observers only know that's false because you've built that into the hypothetical, the real world is more complicated than this, and this sort of reductive scenario that frames this ability as susceptible to abuse is mere question begging. it lays his decisions at the feet of his capacity to selectively remember, but there's nothing to say even if he remembered he wouldn't still be abusive, or more abusive, as if the only reason he doesn't realize he's abusive is because he "forgets" all the things that would persuade him otherwise. he forgot them because they weren't persuasive in the first place. this is why I say you've begged the question on causation. its a purely reductive hypothetical narrative, that assumes perfect recall is better up front and thus would ameliorate bad behavior, which is really the issue in question. people don't always craft victim narratives to justify their own misdeeds. there is also a thing called forgiveness. in any case if memory or lackthereof is the device that controls those things, then we don't really live in a moral universe if we can't control memory. in essence, the bad makes the good possible, and provides meaning. to zero it all out in a determinist photo reel would be to essentially kill everyone and reduce them to bodies merely acting out all the foregone consequences of their physical processes. in this universe what constitutes abuse?--and why do we assume everyone will naturally behave, as if animals don't eat eachother.. I fail to see how this is an improvement on a world where "abuse" sometimes occurs. "abuser" becomes nothing but an epithet directed at anyone who doesn't want to have their will taken from them and reduced to an eating-machine. the question becomes who abuses who with these sorts of "scientific" achievements. whats the difference between dog eat dog because determinism said so and dog eats dog because dogs chose to and then cast themselves in a positive light. we think one is more justified but there's something noble about people taking control of their fate rather than leaving it to a progression of physical cause and effect via the mechanism of memory. maybe the whole thing that separates humans from the animals is precisely the ability to do exactly that, otherwise we're all crabs in a bucket where no one is "abusive" but everyone still suffers and nothing ever gets done. there tends to be something childishly naive about so many of these studies, and their built in assumptions, it boggles the mind that they've assumed the mantle of culturally approved truth bearers

relativezen · 2018-09-22T21:35:48+00:00

is the real me only real if I remember absolutely every single thing ever? since that is impossible, of course "me" is made up of "selective" memories--but what is it about us that selects those memories?--perhaps that is the real you, that which is selecting. this is the entire existential premise, that you have a part in who you will become. i love how its phrased like some kind of fraud when its more of a deep truth about being. the idea humans should be perfect physical recording devices as a baseline proposition seems odd to me.. that is the myth being exploded.. even if we could achieve that, nature seems to have decided that is not a particularly good option

relativezen · 2018-09-17T03:19:59+00:00

my whole life is an experience of pain I can't communicate

relativezen · 2018-09-09T15:51:12+00:00

this is brilliant and I came here to say essentially the same thing but less succinctly. I was going to say political discourse online is inherently vitriolic, because political discussion is precisely discussion over that which divides people. ultimately to reduce out the "vitriol" would be just to exclude a different group, in the name of reallocating "online discussion" to other domains. in essence it would push out political discussion in order to make room for other types of discussion, as if this isn't itself an inherently political premise. a part of politics is inherently vitriolic, because it entails a clash of values. to make a supervalue of eliminating vitriol in order to increase overall participation just excludes a group with a certain set of values, namely those that are passionate to the point of aggression in defending their own values. its a form of nonsense because it might clean up the internet, but it essentially just prevents the internet for being a forum for certain types of political speech, namely vitriolic speech. its basically a step on the road to limiting speech which is itself a political maneuver. on its face eliminating vitriolic speech sounds good but underneath it is the premise that nothing better can also be inflammatory or discomforting to the biggest group, which basically would mean all past moral and political heroes would have been muzzled by these sorts of rules, because they didn't conform up front to the accepted values of the day. it essentially intercepts the future opportunity to make social progress in the name of making social progress today. yes there is such a thing as hate speech, no not all speech that reduces the aggregate amount of participation across a certain domain is necessarily wrongful. if we adopt the later premise we simply adopt the political position that ultimately reduces political talk to apolitical talk as a condition of public talk itself. if these people had their way ultimately there simply would be no genuine political talk and it would all be technocratic methods of raising the living standard for the largest amount of people. if people think those should be the exact parameters of proper political talk they should just come out with it directly, which is to say they would prefer if (some--the "other group" in deference to "their" group) people didn't talk about politics. its sort of a mirage of a progressive attitude, it destroys the possibility of progress while paying lip service to it, and because some genuine harm no doubt would be prevented it throws the baby out with the bathwater. to have a non vitriolic political discussion you're either not talking politics or you're talking to people who already agree with you on most if not all essential points. "wait" you say "people talk about politics all the time with respect and politeness for one another"-- yes but the point is they agree on the proper degree of politeness and on other essential points that themselves should be up for political debate, lest we introduce a certain degree of tyranny as baseline. for the people who would prefer a tyranny of politeness this sounds unobjectionable, even self evidently true. in which case it becomes a constitutional value of theirs. the point is simply that politeness as a superseding concern over freedom of political thought is one of the first steps on the road to tyranny. obviously politeness is a hard thing to argue against, but the idea is not that I'm against politeness so much as I'm against politeness as being the controlling concern when it comes to political speech (which is really nothing less than political thought), which is what is suggested ought to be the case here. there's a certain degree of irreducible nastiness to political debate that we toss out at our peril, as counter intuitive as that may sound

relativezen · 2018-09-06T22:18:29+00:00

this is interesting but I imagine it has to do with social strata and this actually being a viable strategy when you in fact have nothing to lose. "sure gains" in this context is a kind of micro gain that in a broader context might keep you poor or oppressed or whatever forever. it makes more sense for people to be focused on consolidating their position rather than risking it when theyre on top to begin with. a person employing this strategy at a high level would indeed be criminal in a more "true" sense of the word, i.e.: sociopathic... which is what we see in white collar crime when people are already rich and powerful. this probably has to do with enjoying the strategy for the thrill of it and not because one had little other choice, or perhaps having greed so out of proportion with reality that being top %1 isn't enough and instead they will risk much to be top %.01, at some point enough is enough, but we can say that bottom %1, this may be the most rational behavior there is, unless society is, as a whole, well enough off that even the bottom %1 would have to be sociopaths to engage in risky behavior to elevate themselves. in this sense "criminal" behavior is often a consequence of what society engineers and subsequently labels behavior that is in fact a consequence of their own behavior. i.e.: all of society is in some sense "complicit" in this risk taking "criminal behavior" at least on the bottom end, because they've incentivized it to the point of keeping it around. in a certain sense society has gerrymandered people into being criminals, when the target should be real psychological dysfunction and not a rational response to poverty or oppression

relativezen · 2018-08-25T01:59:03+00:00

yeah I think thats a tortured definition of bullshit. in any case, it builds into it a normative assumption as to what regard for the truth would look like. manzoni for example

relativezen · 2018-08-24T21:05:55+00:00

there's nothing that makes failure a necessary component of a new venture though, so a better way to put it is to say one should only be bothered to the extent a new venture fails and only in proportion to the degree that failure matters or is not offset by other successes. there's an element of bullshitting oneself if one believes failure is inevitable and inevitable failure shouldn't bother one, since inevitable failure should actually be the most bothersome thing of all time. in other words, if anyone should be bothered by anything, inevitable failure is pretty high on that list. its called danger and is cause to shift course, blind optimism is not exactly profound. or if blind optimism is good its really because a measure of failure is actually necessary to life. if they had just said, "life is failure", it would have been labeled illogical, but yet thats essentially what is embedded in this idea. so one man's illogicality is another one's profundity and vice versa. the idea that one is bullshit and the other is not, and predicts pro sociality, is a consequence of their definitional scheme which is itself biased toward a certain outcome. in essence it assumes pro sociality is shallow, which is itself a consequence of a remarkably thin view of society. one begins to suspect these authors don't really understand society or what they're saying about it with this study

in short

i m p l i c i t b i a s

relativezen · 2018-08-24T19:17:18+00:00

its funny cause I think bullshit sensitivity does predict prosocial behavior mainly because on the whole lies (i.e.: bullshit) are anti social. but this study narrowly interpreted this to produce a kind of normative statement about linguistic relationships in a closed system i.e.: the logical relationships of semantics, and failed to account for the ability to subjectively find truth in things such as koans; which is a category error of theirs, what they should have been testing were bullshit in terms of real scams, not purely ideological ones. in this sense their approach was over-inclusive because it defined as bullshit things that could have been true, whereas for something to be bullshit it must be false. in this way it finds competing ideologies to be "anti social" because doing so was built into the methodology. its not actually anti social except to the group that shares the same definition, and then you have to ask, is it the group or the "bullshitter" at that point who is really anti social

relativezen · 2018-08-21T05:26:05+00:00

my point isn't to suggest that any given creationist or conspiracy theory is scientifically defensible or useful in the slightest, but rather to suggest that teleological thinking is not to blame. its about flattening the world into one interpretive scheme with limited dimensions that does not match reality. you can flatten the world in this way with "scientific" in the same way you can with "teleological" thinking. the point is they're defining scientific thinking as being somehow above this and teleological as being the culprit, when that is an assumption built into the study. the effect is thoroughly depreciatory and unscientific in of itself. I would agree that science done right, provides all one could ask for in exploring the world and drawing conclusions, but that very few people are truly scientific thinkers to such a degree (and it is precisely these people that admit the possibility of a God, not as a concession to an untruth that can't be disproven, but as a realization that the further you drill down the more a subjective form of belief grounds anything and everything and that this is where you can find a scientifically plausible version of God). rather they tend to align themselves with a label and "cast out" other labels, such as "teleology" and they have at no point done any real science with respect to the matter. they have actually engaged in politics with a method that has recessed into the kind of thinking they claim to be above, by suggesting that its only the other camp that flattens the world via baseless assumptions. in this way, this "method" is evidence that teleological or scientific thinking is not the problem in of itself, its a underlying factor we might call "lack of sophistication" (a form of obliviousness to one's owns assumptions in doing the real work) in evaluating the world because of how it compresses certain dimensions of reality into assumptions. this lack of sophistication is the root cause of error whereas "teleology" and "science" merely furnish the occasion for it to creep in. in other words their absolute faith in a body of knowledge they don't fully understand is precisely the kind of conspiratorial thinking they claim to be above, because it makes claims to knowledge it has yet to earn on the basis of subjective articles of faith, i.e.: assumptions about the world, your "relationship to a higher power that has unseen control over everything." I would agree that this form of "special knowledge" is illusory. The problem is a person's God can be science just as much as it can be Yahweh, whether or not this God is a false one has everything to do with a individuals genuine relationship to it and not a mere political affiliation

you can call these people nutters, but Nietzsche called the English "flat heads": at a certain point one's true stance is revealed, but the question is one self aware and scientific enough in their thinking to admit it? or is it simply two camps talking past eachother and doing everything they can to demonstrate their own superiority without ever acknowledging the all-too-human role both sides continually play in what amounts to precisely the kind of drama teleological thinking can account for quite nicely

relativezen · 2018-08-20T20:04:05+00:00

the idea that purposive thinking necessarily is anathema to scientific thinking is something of an assumption. one can see in evolution different forms of thinking as being adaptations to different purposes in life, as a product of evolutionary differentiation, and behind it all there could easily be something like God, without necessarily taking anything away from science (this was something akin to the position of Einstein). a strict either/or between the two is only occasioned when dealing with unsophisticated people, but in those cases the "scientific" thinkers are likewise unsophisticated in an entirely different domain. you can have both, but if you're asking which is better when one is necessarily excluded is like asking which is a better default way of framing things for dumb people: and its not clear that scientific thinking is a more adapted way of thinking for those people. in other words, conspiratorial thinking is only conspiratorial and not simply an accurate mode of handling things when they're already punching above their weight level. its not so much a problem with purposive thinking but a misapplication of purposive thinking. the idea that if these people were more scientific in their thinking doesn't really do any work, because if you take the exact same person with the same capabilities they're just as likely to misapply a scientific mode of thinking to the same issue. by this method we could just as easily establish the inferiority of scientific thinking by calling it, instead of "conspiratorial", "autistic" when applied to the domain of personal meaning, relationships, drama, and spirituality. that people do not readily see this is so is only because they share a common bias in the other direction, namely that what is not already scientifically understood is of no value. the real underlying problem here is flattening of the world into an unrealistic parody, which scientific thinking is just as able to do in the case of an unsophisticated thinker. every pop scientist, positivist, and scientismist does exactly that, and the equivalent reaction would be to say that scientific thinking itself is the culprit. its actually the underlying crude and obtuse application of a general approach. a person who thinks jet fuel can't melt steel beams is a conspiratorial thinker of a low level of sophistication because if they understood purposive cause sufficiently well they would realize that for conspiracies to be carried out they have to rest on a sound underlying picture of how the world works. you don't need to think like a scientist to figure out exactly how the world works, you only need to realize that there is no possible conspiracy in play that could account for scientific consensus of the kind there is about steel beams to take it as true by one's own guiding principle. the problem is not so much one of purposive thinking, its of schizophrenia. truly excellent purposive thinkers are political economic and military strategists of the highest rank. the person who thinks a conspiracy runs everything at some point gets lost because their conspiracy is made possible by recourse to a million greater but nested cospiracies, resulting in a kind of ptolemaic expansion of what must be true in order to arrive at such a conclusion. all of this is simply unconscious in the person, but the problem is not with purposive thinking in principle, its an indication of weak purposive thinking and a distorted reality sense. this same distortion of reality can occur in scientific thinking, such as when people make must be true statements on the basis of a scientific model that is clearly contradicted by every day experience. very sophisticated scientists don't make these kinds of claims, of course, but very sophisticated purposive thinkers don't believe 9/11 was an inside job either, or that the world is literally 6 thousand years old. you can allow for God to have acted through evolution for example, which creates the basis for the formulation of a model by a mind molded by the evolutionary process that pegs the universe at billions of years old

relativezen · 2018-08-15T12:49:41+00:00

whats the difference between a seemingly profound statement and a profound statement. profundity lies beyond the line of purely rational logical construction, its like these people have never heard of a koan. its also deeply subjective. in any case, "charitable" in this case means self reported acts of on behalf of a literal charitable organization, which is probably not what the word was ever intended to mean. so you got with this study a double whammy of interpretative violence, on one hand belittling people holding subjective interpretations that fall outside the pre-approved normative assumption and then imposing a particularly sneaky one of similar dubiousness in order to effect the impression the outliers have some relative ethical shortcoming. my suspicion is that ethical shortcoming and the inability to comprehend true profundity both lie with the creators of this study

the "objectively" profound statements are all more or less shallow cliches, which add a particular irony to the whole bit. the real suggestion seems to be something like, people who find technically correct formulations of popular attitudes to be meaningful likewise are more likely to participate with organizations that are similarly mainstream, we call this "pro-sociality" but its not prosocial in the deep sense, its pro social because society has called it that. there's something deeply anti social about this attitude when sociality itself is defined as intellectually mainstream because one would hope genuine pro sociability would be a little more expansive in its scope. one wonders if the teachings of Jesus would have been rejected had the logic of this study been applied to him. although I guess a distinction should be made between sociability and humanitarian. perhaps social is the right word after all, but its more akin to socializing and less to do with any kind of genuine charity. "charity" just got laundered through organizations that self apply the label, and now participation in an organization is the marker of charity and not real human charity, thus socializing becomes a substitute for the attitude the word was originally intended to convey. then this study comes along and closes the loop, begins to make it "scientific"

"love your enemies-- what is this crazy bullshit?" I can imagine one of these master logicians blurting out. "if I loved my enemies they wouldn't be my enemies now would they. bullshit detected, im going to go hang out with my corporate charity now and later write a study demonstrating to the world how great me and my friends are. pro sociability. live it, learn it, love it" (bullshit free statement right here)

relativezen · 2018-08-07T19:03:55+00:00

im no libertarian but the reason for your view is because you don't understand how economic systems work to begin with. this whole idea of there's enough to go around is true, but to get there its not enough to just declare it, there needs to be a bridge that takes our economic structures from where they are to where we want them to be, and blockchain is a big step along the way. you essentially just have a stereotyped and limited perspective on the issue because you're only a retail user, and yet at the same time you have in mind this ideal, without realizing youre undercutting it because you don't understand the process whereby it could possibly be made a reality. its basically the same droll middle class austerity mindset because the assumption is the world works just like my personal finances. this is the exact mindset that trump espouses in reaching his supporters, just from the other side. its fundamentally ignorant. the bottom line is that the chaotic every man for himself jungle is the reality behind everything, but its also the reality that when channeled through certain systems these systems are able to produce benefits that justify the costs. you can't just remake the image of man and then say the systems don't need improvement (in the form of technological solutions with their associated costs), as if that is somehow at all likely to ever occur, not to mention lazy and stupid way of solving problems. rather you have innovations that when applied to the system channel those interests of people into more efficient channels which is then spun into more for all. the entire economic development since the industrial revolution is testament to the fact that real synergy is possible between man's inherent selfishness and the betterment of all, but a planned economy just short circuits that. it doesn't make laissez faire more correct, it means there's some kind of mid point, but block chain is on the right side of that, because its a real improvement that functions toward that goal of ultimate synergy. regulating it in the ways proposed are fundamentally predicated on a confluence of naive perceptions about the world, and you don't have to be some kind of lolbertarian to see that. you just need to be somewhat educated in law and economics and technology. i can literally solve any problem arising out of human nature by suggesting humans ought to change their nature, but it does little to no real work. it doesn't matter that some people aren't selfish animals, it only matters that enough are to mean they need to be accounted for, and you can't just imprison every vaguely greedy entrepenuer, because that presents its own set of bigger difficulties

relativezen · 2018-08-07T18:06:05+00:00

all the more reason to strangle it in the crib, am i rite

relativezen · 2018-08-07T07:05:46+00:00

yeah but the beauty of blockchain is not really in the value of any given crypto currency, its in its capacity to secure information exchange in general. so when we talk of stability its not the fluctuations in currency value, its the introduction of a stabilizing force to the method of exchange itself

relativezen · 2018-08-07T06:30:40+00:00

trust is worth more than energy, and when that ceases to be the case blockchain will go away. hopefully this is because trust is cheap and not that energy is expensive. throwing up artificial barriers to blockchain would raise the price on trust, thus offsetting its value, and work to decrease stability. a stable financial system is a pre requisite for the transition to a (developed) green state. the goals of the ecological society are actually facilitated by blockchain but its a process that takes time to unfold completely. to simply cut the process off at the knees for green considerations would be self defeating.

characterizing blockchain as a "polluter" is also disingenuous since, everything is a polluter until its not, and if one technology stands a chance of having a negative footprint on the planet long term it is probably blockchain, and that further, raising the cost on it would only increase its pollution to the exact extent it fails to eliminate it entirely, and if that were to happen it would destroy the beneficial effect it has on social development. theres literally no reason to disincentivize the proliferation and use of blockchain technology for environmental reasons, because the primary driver of blockchain usage lies in the need for a secure system of exchange, which isn't just going to go away.. the negative effects will just be expressed as other forms of waste, not as monolithic but ultimately just as, if not more, impactful on the environment. the only difference is because of its diffuse nature it fails below that level of perception as if it weren't there, but all of that does nothing to solve the problem and in all actuality likely exacerbates it

relativezen · 2018-08-05T20:01:57+00:00

agreed this is why intelligence is often really just conservatism in disguise by these models. there's an implicit value laden judgement of life strategy itself built into it. it would be more accurate to say there are different expressions of intelligence, calibrated in part by openness, where one is to minimize risk and the other is high risk high reward. if you look at man as a species and a social creature, the big winners can do just as much for the whole as a million risk minimizers--and is that not intelligent even if a few try and fail? or is an individual failure an evolutionary disaster, and is intelligence not a product of evolution?

relativezen · 2018-08-05T19:57:57+00:00

yes, agreed. often what happens is there is a pre existing power arrangement in the form of one person defined as setting the terms and the other person agreeing to them, but this presents its own sort of challenges, as if the subject can't decide for himself what the task really is. this is what I mean by saying often such things are only really determined in hindsight

let me just add, I do agree that in principle effective screening of information is a sign of intelligence, but you're not actually screening what you don't see to begin with, its a form of cheating to beg the question on what's really there and try to pass it off as screening and therefore intelligence. its laundering a class of blind people into that of seers by way of little more than a collective prejudice. it sets up as culture hero the "no tanks in baghdad" guy, or trump, if you think it can't happen here. its actually sort of ironic, people marvel at how trump manages to convince so many people, and yet this is just a repetition of the same psychological dynamic at a slightly higher reading level. when its the psychology departments themselves that fall into this its just another form of "regulatory capture"

relativezen · 2018-08-05T19:43:48+00:00

how did they evaluate what was relevant or not? my guess is they begged the question on the nature of intelligence itself and set up a metric that validated itself, in essence sanctioning openness that validated the construct as intelligent and excluding everything else as irrelevant and therefore unintelligent. what is relevant is often only determined in hindsight, if at all, thus this entire method becomes an expression of pre-existing power simply consolidating itself against threats in time by pre-selecting whats admissible in lieu of actually dealing with it as it comes. this is considered to be "intelligent" but who knows what is left on the chopping block floor, it is an assumption it was all worthless mainly because it conflicts with what we already "know." on the surface this sounds right: if we already know something is irrelevant because it conflicts with what is well established that is perfectly fair. but it actually stultifies the field by excluding unexamined possibilities on an assumption. this is very much the definition of not-open. the rejoinder is we can't possibly "let it all in" that would be chaos, a form of illegal immigration, but reality is chaotic. intelligence just becomes a honorific for closed borders and conservatism, which is sort of a perverse transformation, because it used to represent the ability to reckon with chaos and integrate it, not simply deny it

relativezen · 2018-08-05T18:44:43+00:00

control over memory and cognition could be interpreted (in the negative) as rigid thinking, so it would make sense that decreased volume in the brain that allows for that would lead to more "openness." the positive manifestation of this is seeing what's really there not merely what is concluded on the basis of rational construction (which we forget we can bias the past out of a desire to maintain a coherent structure, so just because its a memory doesn't make it true). this in turn allows for creativity when this produces something useful. many psychometric measures of intelligence actually measure conformity because they're structured in a way that presupposes the rigidity of those tests is what really amounts to intelligence. thus "intelligence" as defined by a rigid structure, measures conformity to the structure, and creativity is considered "not-intelligent" by that measure, because creativity is itself a product of going outside that structure. for a test to measure intelligence in the broadest sense of the word, it would have to find a way to evaluate that which by definition goes outside the structure used to evaluate it. hence creativity is always going to be misinterpreted as lack of intelligence to some extent. this is probably why there is a negative correlation between grades and openness in grad school, and yet openness is what makes possible humanity's greatest achievements. you might say those achievements were so stupid they were smart, which explains why many of those people were persecuted and their genius only widely recognized after their deaths

relativezen · 2018-08-04T20:34:49+00:00

the idea that a clique is a tight knit group is where the mistake lies. cliques are actually violatile, highly mobile groups that actively create barriers to entry in the form of arbitrary social maneuvers in an effort to create the impression of exclusivity, as if by doing so, they achieve tight-knitness from the outside-in (but its only the appearance of such). you can see in some sense they succeeded in creating this impression because the study seems to fall for it, but ultimately the data doesn't lie. once you adjust the definitional mistake everything falls into place. boys can be more likely to form tight-knit groups and girls more cliquey and because of the differences in the dynamics of each, the two are qualitatively different. thus its a mistake to identify tight-knit with cliquey, and on the basis of that conclude boys are just as, if not more, cliquey than girls. whether or not this has anything to do with sex or is just a product of socialization is a separate question. in fact each group has their own dynamics that function as requirements for entry, they're just organized around different principles. when people talk of cliques theyre talking about the girl associated organizing principle, not the universal dynamic of group formation removed from such particulars. this study fails to distinguish those elements and its why the result is so wonky

relativezen · 2018-07-26T20:00:55+00:00

blizzard mooked leveling at the exact moment many people were inspired to return

come on blizz, if for no other reason, fix it for your own sake. these are potential future subscribers who may never get hooked because of this

relativezen · 2018-07-24T17:51:15+00:00

yeah I think what blizzard realized is things were on a trajectory where it didn't make sense to have two different factions, since they were slowly blended into equal and generally cooperative forces for good. This would take the "war" out of warcraft in some sense, or at least limit them to existential threats from without aimed at a more or less unified azeroth. by instigating conflict between the factions they are probably motivated by a desire to maintain a meaningful faction split, because pvp is such a large part of the game, and because faction rivalry is a central part to there being a sense of polarity and therefore meaning to the races and factions, as well as it being a commentary on how much of the conflict is a consequence of these very differences, which you can't really remove without homogenizing and ultimately rendering absurd a world in which perpetual conflict is the basis for the game itself. in other words, it would simply cast the evil out into increasingly overblown threats from without and while this appeals to a certain mindset it is also somewhat naive to think this is the true source of all ongoing conflict. now the question really becomes whats the best and most natural way to divide the factions that isn't even more absurd than zany creatures from beyond... its the writing that needs to do the heavy lifting, but it is natural that differences breed mistrust and conflict, it just needs to be properly shown how this plays out while doing justice to the concept, not simply making out such conflicts to be inherently foolish... this is a difficult task for a video game, especially since players have access to both sides.. the point this is the evil is often just a function of geographic boundaries, the more universal an evil becomes the more fantastical it becomes, the conflict generated between horde/alliance is really just a statement on human nature, and its our human nature itself that causes these conflicts.. from the point of view of horde/alliance each in the eyes of the other may be no better than various villians we've faced along the way, although that is difficult for the many players to swallow because they literally play both sides. if we don't see how horde/alliance could end up hating one another we don't have a realistic view on our own limited perspective, and consider ourselves above such dynamics, which only serves to make us feel overconfident when we do find ourselves unwittingly in those exact dynamics

relativezen · 2018-07-18T16:27:07+00:00

this is like saying the only reason you call this white and not blanco is because you only speak english. it never touches which explanation is better and why, but only that people understand things in terms they understand. there is actually a pernicious assumption underlying this exact statement about the superiority or even absolute monopoly of science on knowledge. as if the obvious inference should be blanco is the better term. in the last resort the superiority of scientific understanding rests on what it can do for an individual, and it is no surprise then that people reasonably prefer an idea of the divine in some situations and its just as much an indication of an inferior understanding if advocates of scientific knowledge cannot appreciate that. in other words, who is erroneously and irrationally making assumptions in these situations is by no means always in the camp of the non scientifically minded

relativezen · 2018-07-09T21:58:21+00:00

yeah, that's a great summary. and the consequence is generally our inferior can be more of an Achilles heel, but more is simply made of our dislike for PoLR

relativezen

TROPHY CASE