The Gamer's Quarter

[dhex]

it's a bbc doc mentioned here. it sounds interesting, if filled to the brim with naturalistic fallacy and all sorts of stuff i don't think i'd agree with.

[ryan]

[dhex]

it's not quite loose change bad, but there are so many interesting things you can do about the IRS that going off into la la land ("if you read this like this and stand on your head taxes are illegal, so long as you pretend that judicial review doesn't exist and that the IRS doesn't have guns")

i should rip a copy of that and host it somewhere, if it's not already up on the web.
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[Dracko]

Here you go, dhex:

The Trap, Fuck You, Buddy
The Trap, The Lonely Robot
The Trap, We Will Force You to be Free: Part 1, part 2 and part 3.

Watching now.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dhex]

uh, i take it you didn't care for this?
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[Dracko]

Not really, from what I heard.

But now I admit I'm intrigued, if only by the Prisoner's Dilemma reference.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dhex]

to be fair, recent surveys show that 89.7 percent of all references to the prisoners' dilemma reference it incorrectly.

i generally get nervous when anyone, even myself, references a "natural" position. it is "natural" for us to eat undercooked meat, fuck barely post-pubescent adolescents and die of infections at age 30. "natural" in the modern imagination tends to ignore "tool-using" and other modifications of what it means to be "natural" or for a product, service, environment, lifestyle, political or social configuration, etc. all of these things fight against the body, or "prey" on the body and its desires, or whatever you want to put it - none of them are "natural" in the terms of the public imagination. "natural" is great if you want to sell boutique food products to the superstitious, but less useful if you're interested in brass tacks.

but this is what we get for skimping on the science, i guess. nah, not even. i've met mechanical engineers who were fucking idiots about this stuff too. if everyone would just say "not natural according to the limits of my value system" we might be a bit closer, but even that's not necessarily taking into account just how far biology can be stretched. this doesn't mean that things won't be corrected by chemistry, as it were (i.e. abstinence programs, with one caveat) but even with our broad base of rules there's a lot of variation. it's "naturalness" is like arguing over what color ethical behavior is or what a moral decision smells like. it's imposing an unimportant and unrelated signifier over otherwise quantifiable behavior.

* that one caveat? if the abstinence program is student led and peer controlled, and the students are popular, their long-term district rates are far higher. needless to say this bit of information is ignored by everyone. or maybe its a conspiracy!

** another "natural" behavior is infanticide (pre-natal testing being a recent invention). if the baby was born defective, or retarded, or just not strong enough, the "natural" recourse was exposure or smothering. the history of birth control is dotted with all sorts of chemical agents, effective or not, that would no doubt today be marketed as a "holistic solution" or "natural cleansing agent" or whatever. actually, it would be fun to work on a lot of the dietary supplement ad campaigns, since whether they're just half lying, quarter lying, fully lying or only fibbing a bit here and there but largely telling the truth, you're still selling to the same audience; a wide cross section of americans, from the traditionally religious to folks without decent healthcare to the dull and superstitious to your organic co-op types. there's plenty of value overlap in these seemingly disparate groups, in terms of semantic value markers.

"natural" being the most obvious one of all...
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[simplicio]

[dhex]

well, it seems to be true. basically, if the tastemakers for a social group aren't into something, the group participants better well be on board.

social sanctioning is smooth like that. talk to someone who has been drummed out of a church group or a political group or whatever, and you see a similar mechanism at work.
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[Scratchmonkey]

This thread reminds me that I need to read "Natural Law: Or Don't Put a Rubber on Your Willy".

[dizzyjosh]

as a nerd who firmly believes that biology explains a hell of a lot about our deal as ppl and belives that hugging is a firm, warm sign of mammalian awesomeness, i still also hate on the naturalistic fallacy!


srsly though what the hell is up with british ppl saying anything about freedom ever? they can't have bowel movements without something recording it.


prisoner's dilemma is really interesting. i forget what happens when you run it with humans over and over again, but I know remember hearing that in some programming competition a while ago, the program with the winning strategy behaved more or less randomly. have any of you ever heard of hofstadter's idea of superrationality, where everyone acts knowing that everyone else will behave with the same kind of rational thinking?


the people in this trap flick, though,they're wrong about the prisoner's dilemma! they leave out the situation about what happens when BOTH PLAYERS DEFECT, which is that they both get penalized to some degree.

[Dracko]

Done watching the entire thing. I remain unconvinced. The documentary doesn't manage to define what an appropriate definition of freedom is, nor does it manage to explain which sort of revolution, in its view, would be for the better.

In other words, it doesn't deliver on what it sets out to do.

And God, how monotonous and repetitive it was.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dhex]

scratch send me addy and book you may receive! (it's pretty great as a turn of the century pamphlet style screed, a la benjamin tucker, a wilsonian hero if there ever was one.)

[The Soviet Onion]

Oh no! Numbers! (spooky music plays).

The BBC has well and truly stopped pretending to be anything other than a propaganda organ.

[Scratchmonkey]