Shun offensive things: always, never, sometimes?
Suppose that taking offense is something that you do in response to something that you think lowers the status of either you, your group, or something that you hold dear. Now there are two extremes as to how to respond to possibly offensive things, both of them wrong:
1. Shun anything that could cause offense to anyone. This is wrong because it would unreasonably restrict communication, because people can perceive something to lower their status when it doesn’t, and it would allow status grabs where groups decide what you’re allowed to say by arbitrarily defining things they don’t like as “offensive”.
2. Say that being offended is your own fault, and maintain that anyone should be free to say anything they like, regardless of whether it offends someone. This is wrong because some words or expressions, when used in certain contexts, do genuinely attack people or groups by lowering their perceived status. Social norms that were offense-blind would strenghten existing status differences.
The challenge is finding social norms that are balanced between these two. E.g. slurs against a genuinely high-status group are more acceptable than slurs against a low-status group, but the status of a social group is constantly changing and different people have different ideas of a social group’s status.
Suppose that person X says something that offends person Y, but X thinks what she said was fine. This could be because of two reasons:
A. X does think that her words might lower the status of Y’s group, but Y’s group does deserve to be taken down a notch.
B. X genuinely did not intend her words to lower the status of Y’s group, and thinks that most listeners wouldn’t think that she did.
In the case of e.g. offensive drawings of Mohammed, either or both reasons could be true. X might think that all religions should be mocked because religion is for idiots (A). Alternatively, X might think that all religions get mocked but that doesn’t make them less valuable and important (B). Or X might think that yes, this does take lower a religion’s status, but only because that religion’s adherents have given it such a high status to start with. If they didn’t (in X’s mind) unreasonably privilege their own beliefs, they’d have no reason to be offended by an assertion that their religion is of no higher status than any other belief (A&B).
Online, it often seems to be the case that people fall prey to the illusion of transparency. If you’re with a group of friends who know you well, then it can be safe to say potentially offensive things, since your friends either share your opinion of the other group’s status, or know that you don’t mean any harm. But if you speak online, where not everybody does know you or your friends, then they cannot know what your intentions were.
People who go with the general strategy of shunning anything offensive tend to presume that reason A is always (or most often) the only right one, while people who think everyone should be free to say anything tend to presume that reason B is always (or most often) the only right one. I don’t think either assumption is right.
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Kaj Sotala:
So in theory, CRPGs should be a perfect platform for having crunchy, complicated rules systems: your ruleset can be as complicated and intricate as you want to, but with the computer doing all of the calculations and table lookups, the player can focus on just enjoying it.
But at least in my experience, it doesn't quite work that well. At least not if you also want your game to have real-time combat; turn-based games don't seem to have as much of a problem with this.
The advantage of doing all of that stuff by hand is discernability. If you manually add a +2 to all of your die rolls, and then you're the one who compares each roll against a target number, you get a very clear understanding of what the effect of all those bonuses and modifiers is. You're always aware of which of your bonuses helped you out, and why and how (well, unless you forget to apply them, of course*).
Whereas I'm now playing Pillars of Eternity, and even though I had previously beat Tyranny which used a similar combat system, I still had basically no clue of how the system works when I started playing. Now I have some clue, but my guys are all at level 7 and I still don't know what the practical effect of the various abilities that I choose for them are. This ability gives +5 deflection defense and this other one gives +5 accuracy, which one should I pick? My priest has like two dozen spells I can choose from, many of which either hinder enemies or boost my characters, which ones should I cast when?
I dunno, because during combat there are like 5 attack rolls added to the combat log each second, and sure I could hover over each of them and see the detailed attack breakdown and do a bit of mental arithmetic to figure out which of the talents helped... but eh, if I have to pause the combat every two seconds and spend a minute figuring out what exactly has been happening, that kinda defeats the point of having a real-time combat in the first place. I'd rather just play the game.
And so I do, remaining ignorant of how anything works, and playing at a sufficiently low difficulty level that my tactical genius of "what exactly is the benefit of this spell/talent/enchantment? no idea, I'll just cast/pick/enchant something, it probably does something that ends up helping me somehow! better than doing nothing, right?" is sufficient to keep the game moving.
(*: http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0034.html )
Kaj Sotala:
The Soviet Union had an active and large-scale bioweapons program going on in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention; they had the capability to produce industrial quantities of biological agents, and had genetically engineered them to resist heat, cold, and antibiotics. The current status of these programs and facilities is unknown.
> In April, 1979, an incident occurred in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) in the Soviet Union which appeared to be an accidental aerosol release of Bacillus anthracis spores from a Soviet military microbiology facility: Compound 19. At least 77 residents living downwind from this compound developed high fever and had difficulty breathing; at least 66 cases died. The Soviet Ministry of Health blamed the deaths on the consumption of contaminated meat, and for years, controversy raged in the press over the actual cause of the outbreak. All evidence available to the US Government indicated a release of aerosolized B. anthracis spores.
> In the summer of 1992, US intelligence officials were proven correct when the new Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, acknowledged that the Sverdlovsk incident was in fact related to activities at a BW production facility. In 1994, Harvard Professor Mathew Meselson and colleagues published an in-depth analysis of the incident.. They documented that all of the cases occurred within a narrow zone extending 4 kilometers downwind in a southeasterly direction from Compound 19. A more recently reported incident from the Soviet Union revealed that in 1971, a field test of smallpox biological weapon near Aralsk, Kazakhstan caused an outbreak of at least 10 cases and one death. In both Sverdlovsk and Aralsk, a massive intervention by public health authorities greatly helped to lower potential disease spread and deaths.
> Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, something of the enormous size of Russia's former BW program, which had its origins in the 1920s, has become apparent. By 1960, numerous BW research facilities existed throughout the country; after 1973, they were coordinated by an agency known as Biopreparat. These programs became immense — the largest of any country in history — and at their peak were conducted at 52 clandestine research and production sites employing over 50,000 people. Annualized production capacity for weaponized smallpox, for example, was 90 to 100 tons. Yeltsin stated that he would put an end to further offensive BW research; however, the degree to which the program was scaled back is not known. Revelations from Colonel Kanatzhan Alibekov (Ken Alibek), a senior biowarfare program manager who defected from Russia in 1992, outlined a still remarkably robust BW program, which included active research into genetic engineering, binary bio-agents and chimeras, and capacity to produce industrial quantities of agents. It is now known that, in the 1980s and `90s, many of these agents were genetically altered to resist heat, cold, and antibiotics. In September 1992, an agreement was signed with the US and UK promising to end BW programs and convert facilities to benevolent purposes, but compliance with the agreement — and the fate of the former Soviet bio-agents and facilities — is still mostly undocumented. (In a particularly dispiriting development, and despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Russian President Vladimir Putin has asserted that the USSR never pursued an offensive BW program in violation of the BWC.)
web.archive.org/web/20161123225314/http://www.usamriid.army.mil/education/bluebookpdf/USAMRIID%20BlueBook%208th%20Edition%20-%20Sep%202014.pdf
Kaj Sotala:
Parents not watching their kids' YouTube usage and just assuming that if it looks vaguely kid-ish, it must be child-safe, reminds me of stories of violent/pornographic anime getting sorted to the children's section because "obviously cartoons are for children". Of course, that wasn't intentional, whereas this looks to be. I guess it makes business sense: if you only care about maximizing the amount of views for your videos, hiding distrubing and creepy videos among children's videos might get the kids to watch your videos over and over, even as they are freaked out each time. That's what you get when you let loose optimization processes - like the markets - with no intrinsic interest in human values...
(Whereas the more abusive videos, I would guess, are there for the sake of sadistic adults who just enjoy seeing children in pain.)
> Toddlers know how to launch YouTube, play videos and even navigate to other “recommended videos”. This keeps children silent and entertained for long periods of time – a luxury that busy parents greatly appreciate.
> While most parents hear the children’s music playing in the background, they rarely watch the videos played by their children. When they do glimpse at the screen, they see a character such as Spiderman or Princess Elsa and assume that everything is cool. But everything is not cool. There is something terribly wrong with some children’s YouTube videos and, often, those who create them do not have the best of intentions.
> A great deal of these videos contains weird, disturbing, violent and even traumatizing content. They are insidiously mixed with other children’s videos, causing them to appear as “recommended videos” by YouTube and, therefore, easily accessible to children. [...] I am talking about channels that cumulate billions of views. [...]
> Many videos clearly exploit children’s visceral fear and repulsion of certain things such as blood, syringes, cutting skin, tarentulas, evil clowns attacking them, etc. Children are horrified by what they are watching yet they cannot look away because the content is engrossing. [...] Several YouTube channels star young children in all kinds of bizarre situations. Other than the fact that these children might be forced to appear in hundreds of videos for profit, they are also often made to enact traumatic situations. [...]
> ... the true aim of this article is not about YouTube moderation, it is about vigilance: Keep an eye on the videos watched by children. Analyze their contents. It only takes a few taps on a touchscreen for children to end up watching videos custom-made to poison their minds and shock their very core. And don’t be surprised if some of these video channels are linked to actual child abuse systems.
Something is Terribly Wrong With Many "Kids" Videos on YouTube - The Vigilant Citizen
Kaj Sotala:
Fascinating how people talked about computer games before the concept of a "computer game" really existed; the June 1979 issue of SoftSide magazine published an “Engagement Announcement” between the TRS-80 (a computer popular at the time) and “Fantasy”:
> The staff of SoftSide is eagerly anticipating the birth of a new art form as a result of this match. We feel that one of the most creative art forms of the future will be the participation novel, in which you assume the role of a character and alter the direction of the story by your own actions, instead of simply reading what the original author conceived and wrote.
> Right now, creative people who’ve been writing elaborate simulation games are working on computer adaptations. The progress they’re making is exciting, with greater things to come! In our December issue, we presented Santa Paravia en Fiumaccio, breaking new ground in simulations on computer. [...] In May we presented you with Dog Star, bringing us one step closer to the electronic novel. We foresee the time when elaborate simulations of high literary and artistic quality will captivate the leisure hours the way television does today, in much the same manner that television replaced radio drama, and radio drama led to a decline in reading for pleasure.
> In March, SoftSide was contacted by the publisher of The Dungeoneer and Judges Guild Journal, two magazines specializing in the simulation game Dungeons and Dragons. In a copy of The Dungeoneer we were surprised to find a list of sixty-one other magazines also specializing in fantasy, war and simulation games. We also discovered that many of these people are starting to use the TRS-80. [...] Once the creative work they’re doing is suitably married to the computer, the electronic novel will be born! We’re certain the day is not far off, and we intend to be part of it!
» 2011 » July » 12 The Digital Antiquarian
Kaj Sotala:
"The World Taekwondo Federation (WTF) has changed its name to World Taekwondo because of the "negative connotations" associated with its initials."
World Taekwondo Federation changes name over 'negative connotations'