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[KittyTac]

If you start with the assumption that your favored result is right, ignore evidence to the contrary, and you are doing bad science. If you presuppose "I am right", and only seek to ask "why are people who disagree with me wrong" you will not learn anything from an experiment!

Why would video games cause violence be anyone's favored result?

People who believe they do believe they do because they have reasons, people who don't may or may have reasons but at core they simply like video games.  I play video games (obviously), so why is this going to be my 'favoured result'?

Ask yourself. We don't know why, but as you do actually believe in video games causing violence, you should.

[Dorsidwarf]

[ ✓ ] When questioned on the existence of cyptids, claims that it is societal prejudice that most people don't believe in them and that nobody who said "they don't exist" has ever reallylooked into the matter

[ ✓ ] Doesn't understand the concept of the null hypothesis

[ ✓ ] Makes claims then says that the burden of proof is on other people to disprove the claims

[ ✓ ] Goes on a tangent rant that experts are conspiring against non-experts by pretending to know more

Are we on Bay12, or Ufoproof.com here.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

To bring in a previous topic, you’ve used the word “winning” a lot. I could just point out that this game has the official motto of “Losing is Fun,” but I’ll try to be a bit more general, as one example could just be an exception to the rule. (Of course, this particular exception means that this particular game might be able to handle Winning Requires Oppression...)

What do you mean by “winning”? Can you describe it without using the word itself or any synonyms? In other words, winning by what metric?
In a nutshell, my response to your most recent post: Think Probabilistically. Not null hypotheses but priors. Not “it exists” or “it does not exist” but “I estimate an X% chance that it exists.”

To elaborate, you start with a prior. As you receive information, you use it to adjust your estimate. This is called “updating”. The weight of each update is proportional to the strength of the information. The strength of the information is the ratio of the likelihood of the information given its truth to the likelihood of the information given its falsehood.

Applying this to the tiger: someone seeing a tiger is strong evidence for the existence of a tiger, since hallucinations are not common. Someone seeing no tiger is weak evidence against the existence of a tiger, since people don’t always notice things. But what’s important here is the ratio of the strengths - how more uncommon are hallucinations(/lying/paranoia/bribes/etc.) compared to people missing the tiger(/lying/bribes). If false positives are more than 99 times less probable than false negatives, then the overall evidence is for the tiger existing. If not, the overall evidence is against the tiger existing.

Then you update based on this evidence. It shifts your estimate. Your prior and the update are combined together to give you the estimate. If tigers are known to be common in the area, then that should also influence your estimate, ferex.

(You may note that I mentioned liars and bribes in both the false positive and false negative sections. Shouldn’t they cancel out? With mathematics, we can show this is not the case. Combining possible explanations for something is roughly additive while the update depends on the ratio. Adding something to both sides of a ratio brings the ratio closer to 1:1. Interpreted, this means that bringing in liars etc. worsens our overall ability to discern the truth, which lines up with our intuitions about liars.)

This is Bayes’ Law, the heart of Reasoning Under Uncertainty. (Technically, it’s the odds ratio form of Bayes’ Law, since we don’t care about the absolute probabilities for updating, only the relative probabilities of foo and !foo.)

[Foo is a metasyntactic variable, also known as a placeholder. !foo means not-foo.]

[Bumber]

What do you mean by “winning”? Can you describe it without using the word itself or any synonyms? In other words, winning by what metric?

Pretty sure GC implied it meant advancing the plot. E.g., local townsfolk wanted the player to acquire an amulet and slay a dragon.

[thompson]

The idea a player character in a game should be subject to extreme realistic interactions in a world where nothing at all is even remotely realistic is absurd.

Also, note that the player is the only person in the df universe with a brain. Well, my players anyway.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

What do you mean by “winning”? Can you describe it without using the word itself or any synonyms? In other words, winning by what metric?

Pretty sure GC implied it meant advancing the plot. E.g., local townsfolk wanted the player to acquire an amulet and slay a dragon.

That makes no sense in the context of DF. DF is a very open-ended game. The plot could be “conquer the goblins” or “slay the beast” or “explore the wilderness” or “build an outpost” or “become the best bard” or even “steal the tongues of every human child”.

Yes, “work with people who are more powerful than you” is an instrumental convergent goal, but that’s just a summary. If your particular goals aren’t achieved by working with the oppressive system, then... don’t do that. Yes, it’ll be harder to achieve your goals if there are large and powerful systems that oppose your goals. But you know what else is a large and powerful system that opposes your goals? Goblins, in the ideal case and without bugs preventing them from attacking you. And what do we see on these forums? People complaining that the goblins don’t oppose them enough.

[GoblinCookie]

Ask yourself. We don't know why, but as you do actually believe in video games causing violence, you should.

I don't believe it because I want to believe in it, I believe it because as far as I can tell both logical inference *and* scientific evidence support this conclusion.  It's like with global warming, we know from evidence that is happening and we know from logical inference (it can't be proven experimentally) that humans are responsible. 

People don't want to believe in global warming, but they know it's real.  But some people who also *want* global warming not to be real still manage to deny global warming is real.  In this case, the people who play violent video games (including myself to a certain extent) have an interest in video games not promoting aggression.  So in more or less the same fashion, we can expect people to deny video games effect behaviour, regardless of whether it is a sound claim or not.

To put things backwards, if you don't have any reason they perceive to be sound, to believe that video games cause violence, nobody has any reason to claim there is. 

[ ✓ ] When questioned on the existence of cyptids, claims that it is societal prejudice that most people don't believe in them and that nobody who said "they don't exist" has ever reallylooked into the matter

[ ✓ ] Doesn't understand the concept of the null hypothesis

[ ✓ ] Makes claims then says that the burden of proof is on other people to disprove the claims

[ ✓ ] Goes on a tangent rant that experts are conspiring against non-experts by pretending to know more

Are we on Bay12, or Ufoproof.com here.

A null hypothesis has to be falsifiable.  The hypothesis "cryptids don't exist because people don't see them and people who see them are hallucinating" is the very definition of an unfalsifiable hypothesis.  If I see one that does not prove they exist but if I fail to see them it proves they don't exist. 

To bring in a previous topic, you’ve used the word “winning” a lot. I could just point out that this game has the official motto of “Losing is Fun,” but I’ll try to be a bit more general, as one example could just be an exception to the rule. (Of course, this particular exception means that this particular game might be able to handle Winning Requires Oppression...)

What do you mean by “winning”? Can you describe it without using the word itself or any synonyms? In other words, winning by what metric?

By winning I mean moving the plot of the characters or the fortress forward in a direction that is desirable to the player.  The problem with oppressive systems is they tend to respond to individual people who threaten with them by Reassignment to Antartica.  Thus reassigned, the player is rendered unable to win, even if winning means challenging the society's oppressive regime rather than furthering personal goals. 

In a nutshell, my response to your most recent post: Think Probabilistically. Not null hypotheses but priors. Not “it exists” or “it does not exist” but “I estimate an X% chance that it exists.”

To elaborate, you start with a prior. As you receive information, you use it to adjust your estimate. This is called “updating”. The weight of each update is proportional to the strength of the information. The strength of the information is the ratio of the likelihood of the information given its truth to the likelihood of the information given its falsehood.

That makes sense, but ultimately we have to act on the precautionary principle.  If there a substantial probability that something is harmful, we should act as though it is rather than using the uncertainty as an excuse for inaction.

Applying this to the tiger: someone seeing a tiger is strong evidence for the existence of a tiger, since hallucinations are not common. Someone seeing no tiger is weak evidence against the existence of a tiger, since people don’t always notice things. But what’s important here is the ratio of the strengths - how more uncommon are hallucinations(/lying/paranoia/bribes/etc.) compared to people missing the tiger(/lying/bribes). If false positives are more than 99 times less probable than false negatives, then the overall evidence is for the tiger existing. If not, the overall evidence is against the tiger existing.

It seems you beat me too it, I was going to say that to someone but you got there first.

Seeing no tiger is only weak evidence against the existence of tigers *if* the person can actually see tigers in general.  If we are talking about blind people, then any number of people failing to see the tiger fails as evidence against the existence of tigers. 

In the case of some scientific studies detecting something while other studies fail to detect something, the studies failing to detect something are blind men.  That is because different studies have different methodology (or they would produce the same result) and since that is the case we have a problem.  We don't know which methodology used by the various studies is the correct methodology to detect the thing we are looking for, so in effect the only way to prove the methodology is correct is to detect what you are looking for. 

In effect it is not like the people not seeing the tiger by chance, those who did not see the tiger were confirmed to be blind since we didn't know who could 'see' to begin with.  Seeing is defined here as "able to detect the positive result" IF there is one. 

Then you update based on this evidence. It shifts your estimate. Your prior and the update are combined together to give you the estimate. If tigers are known to be common in the area, then that should also influence your estimate, ferex.

(You may note that I mentioned liars and bribes in both the false positive and false negative sections. Shouldn’t they cancel out? With mathematics, we can show this is not the case. Combining possible explanations for something is roughly additive while the update depends on the ratio. Adding something to both sides of a ratio brings the ratio closer to 1:1. Interpreted, this means that bringing in liars etc. worsens our overall ability to discern the truth, which lines up with our intuitions about liars.)

This is Bayes’ Law, the heart of Reasoning Under Uncertainty. (Technically, it’s the odds ratio form of Bayes’ Law, since we don’t care about the absolute probabilities for updating, only the relative probabilities of foo and !foo.)

[Foo is a metasyntactic variable, also known as a placeholder. !foo means not-foo.]

The problem is that if someone does not want someone to find something out they can purposely replicate the methodology of studies that failed to prove the affirmative in order to bring down the probability by sheer weight of numbers.

An extra problem is that detecting things often needs good instruments which are expensive, by using cheap instruments the nay-sayer can replicate null-hypothesis studies at a far lower cost than is needed to actually confirm the hypothesis. 

The idea a player character in a game should be subject to extreme realistic interactions in a world where nothing at all is even remotely realistic is absurd.

Also, note that the player is the only person in the df universe with a brain. Well, my players anyway.

The blade you are wielding bites both ways.  If we are not required to be realistic, then also we can't argue that oppression should exist because it is realistic for it to exist in a given context. 

[KittyTac]

The idea a player character in a game should be subject to extreme realistic interactions in a world where nothing at all is even remotely realistic is absurd.

Also, note that the player is the only person in the df universe with a brain. Well, my players anyway.

The blade you are wielding bites both ways.  If we are not required to be realistic, then also we can't argue that oppression should exist because it is realistic for it to exist in a given context.

Instead, we can argue for it to be implemented just because players want it. And we are not required to be either completely unrealistic or completely realistic. We can allow a mix of the two.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Seeing is indeed the ability to see things that exists, and only those things that exist. Not only do we not know which methodology is the correct one to detect the phenomenon if it exists, we don’t know which is the correct one to fail to detect it if it doesn’t exist.

In other words, in one possible world there’s one seeing man and ninety-nine blind men. In another possible world, there’s one hallucinating man and ninety-nine sane men. You are assuming that the first world is the one we’re in. This Proves Too Much in that it can be used to argue for the existence of anything regardless of its existence. A better method is to say “a negative result establishes that EITHER the phenomenon isn’t real and this methodology is sound OR the phenomenon is real and this methodology is unsound.”

For “fake replication by not adding noise”, that can still be represented. If two observations are not independent, they do not add as much information together. In the simplified version where somebody just physically reconstructs the original study down to the atom, this gives no additional information than the original study (barring quantum randomness playing a role).

You are correct that “cryptid-seers are hallucinating because cryptids aren’t real” relies on the assumption that cryptids aren’t real, and so can’t be used as an argument against cryptids being real. But I haven’t seen anyone make that argument.

The precautionary principle is a rough approximation to optimal decision-making. Effort/cost should be expended to prevent a negative outcome to a degree proportional to both the weight of the outcome and the probability of the outcome.

As for Antarctica, that’s Maximally Realistic. Part of oppression in fictional games includes the ability to meaningfully combat it. Is that unrealistic? Yes, because single people rarely have a disproportionate impact on history compared to the Vast Formless Things. But this is just the same unrealism underlying role-playing games in general. (My argument, in general, is that the “problems” you’re pointing out are not specific to oppression.)

[Bumber]

Looks like the thread's been pulled into another GC tangent.

We're not going to accomplish anything here by debating the scientific method. Might as well drop the subject.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

...good point, scientific methodology is largely irrelevant to whether we should include oppression (which is at least moderately related to the OP). I’ll drop it.

[GoblinCookie]

Instead, we can argue for it to be implemented just because players want it. And we are not required to be either completely unrealistic or completely realistic. We can allow a mix of the two.

Why do you want it?  The appeal to popularity fallacy is not a valid argument KittyTac. 

As for Antarctica, that’s Maximally Realistic. Part of oppression in fictional games includes the ability to meaningfully combat it. Is that unrealistic? Yes, because single people rarely have a disproportionate impact on history compared to the Vast Formless Things. But this is just the same unrealism underlying role-playing games in general. (My argument, in general, is that the “problems” you’re pointing out are not specific to oppression.)

The tricky part is having the means to meaningfully combat it while still having 15th Granite 250 as an ordinary day.  Most narratives don't have this problem because they can fit the hero to the time-frame so that the hero can make a difference.  Dwarf Fortress on the other hand does not develop the plot around the player's agency, all the events don't happen in World-Gen so that when the world is finished a certain specific state of affairs exists. 

The difference with societal oppression's is that generally speaking the game society punishes you for doing the wrong thing and rewards you for doing the right thing, at least from the POV of the game society's interests.  An oppressive society on the other hand gives you rewards for doing the wrong thing and punishes you for doing the right thing.  That is quite a problematic inversion of the normal logic of computer game rpg societies; but as you said it is also quite realistic.

The distinction between Vast Formless Things and the single person is pretty much a false dichotomy.  That is because the player's treatment and agency (or lack thereof) is very much part of a Vast Formless Thing.  The ostracising of individual players adds up in the end to something big when we add up all the instances where this occurs we get the following story.

• There is an oppressive society.
• The oppressive society is threatened by influential and talented individuals that disagree with it's beliefs.
• The oppressive society responds by finding ways to remove the influence of said individuals.
• The oppressive society loses the benefit of those individuals talents.
• The oppressive society becomes dominated by imbeciles and card-carrying villains.
• The oppressive society becomes beset with problems.
• The oppressive society's problems force them to question their ways.
• The oppressive society becomes willing to entertain influential and talented individuals that disagree with it's beliefs.
• These individuals remove the imbeciles and card-carrying villains from power.
• Because they now know they cannot continue in the old way under old leadership, the oppressive society is force to allow the influence of these individuals to grow since they perceive only they can solve the problems.
• The individuals are able to change the society without facing overwhelming opposition.
• The oppressive society ceases to be an oppressive society.

This 12 step list is where the problem of having an RPG with an oppressive society is a problematic.  If the player-hero manages to kill all the dragons (problems) while officially being Reassigned to Antartica this interferes with Stage 6, because the player solved all the problems *for* the society that does not appreciate them or their ideas, the consequence is that Stage 7 does not come about and we revert to Stage 5.  This is different from if they arrive at Stages 8-10, if they arrive at that point their dragon-slaying is actually a good thing. 

[KittyTac]

Instead, we can argue for it to be implemented just because players want it. And we are not required to be either completely unrealistic or completely realistic. We can allow a mix of the two.

Why do you want it?  The appeal to popularity fallacy is not a valid argument KittyTac. 

There's something cathartic about causing mayhem in video games. Stuff you have the moral conscience not to do in real life. Think of it as the Greater Internet F**kwad Theory, but applied to video games instead of the Internet.

[Rowanas]

Instead, we can argue for it to be implemented just because players want it. And we are not required to be either completely unrealistic or completely realistic. We can allow a mix of the two.

Why do you want it?  The appeal to popularity fallacy is not a valid argument KittyTac. 

There's something cathartic about causing mayhem in video games. Stuff you have the moral conscience not to do in real life.

Also, when arguing about a thing whose purpose is to entertain the people, appeal to the masses -is- a valid point, because it's the most important feature of the thing.

GC, are you familiar with the Neitzschean Will to Power?  The Ubermensch does not allow and indeed, explicitly defies cultural and moral conventions that would keep him from exerting his will.  It is exactly in situations where culture is not ready for change that the Ubermensch arises, because if culture was ready for change, he would only be a tool of that change, and thus, not really an Ubermensch.

[GoblinCookie]

There's something cathartic about causing mayhem in video games. Stuff you have the moral conscience not to do in real life. Think of it as the Greater Internet F**kwad Theory, but applied to video games instead of the Internet.

Catharsis is quite discredited as a model for how the brain works.  The brain works unsurprisingly rather like the muscles or the bones (think of how astronauts bones weaken in Zero-G so that when they come back to earth they can't walk) or most body parts that aren't the teeth, the more exercise the brain gets in a certain area the more that area develops and it does so in a zero-sum sense (for adults) because the brain itself does not grow bigger once you are grown-up. 

You are not using up the trapped the inner demon by causing virtual mayhem, the inner demon is happy to fed, gets bigger and then demands even more mayhem to satisfy it's ever-growing appetite.  What's more it's share of your total brain matter increases, to the effect that it's strength against the strength of whatever it restraining it increases.  Self-control is actually another element of the brain, not something outside of the brain but you won't use your self-control against your inner demon if you are not *really* doing any harm so there is in effect an unnatural harmony created between the two things but only the inner demon is growing any stronger in this harmony and it does not exist in real-life. 

What's interesting however is that if you are constantly offered the temptation to cause virtual mayhem but choose not to, the effect would actually be benign because self-control would grow stronger rather than the inner demon.

Also, when arguing about a thing whose purpose is to entertain the people, appeal to the masses -is- a valid point, because it's the most important feature of the thing.

GC, are you familiar with the Neitzschean Will to Power?  The Ubermensch does not allow and indeed, explicitly defies cultural and moral conventions that would keep him from exerting his will.  It is exactly in situations where culture is not ready for change that the Ubermensch arises, because if culture was ready for change, he would only be a tool of that change, and thus, not really an Ubermensch.

From the perspective of a mercenary dev it may, but it is not a valid argument to the player to make since for us is basically pretending to say something. 

I am quite familiar with the Nietzschean theories, but they have a fundamental contradiction that seem borne of how Nietzsche did not really have great familiarity with politics or politicians and in effect created a fantasy ruler borne of his own political ignorance in the form of the Ubermensch.  Anyone who has paid attention to actual rulers finds them to be the most enslaved to the cultural and moral conventions of all, they have in effect signed a devil's bargain with some society by which they unerringly conform to it's standards but in return are allowed to exercise their will to power. 

Basically the Ubermensh is a have-your-cake-eat-it-too fantasy; there is a choice to make and a price to pay but this being .  The will-to-power is how you are controlled because the punishments society uses are typically directed *at* that will to power.  If I care nothing if I am imprisoned, humiliated, mutilated, exiled or even killed (that is I do not care at all for my power to control the world) then society has no power over me.  I get to sit in my cage and curse the whole human race to no audience and no avail; it's all pointless but I don't care because I have no will-to-power. 

The closest you can ever get in real-life to an Ubermensh is the lucky ruler that is elevated precisely to do the thing to mentioned in your post, to be a tool of the society's own change.  He wants to exist at a point where society doesn't know what is true or good or right or valuable.  Then he can tell them what those things are and they will not be able to punish his will-to-power because they have no convictions to offend.  But this situation is temporary, for once he has spoken he is once again the prisoner of his own answer; so the only way to maintain this situation is to give no answers.