2021-12-25
Readings
I neither entirely endorse nor reject this analysis from “People Make Games” in their analysis of ethical issues with Roblox’s economy; some of the harms they describe seem to me to be relatively low-harm learning experiences. Some things are real concerns, and with many of their critiques I don’t see a way of addressing them even when I see the harms described as real. I don’t play Roblox (never have), but it’s interesting to learn about these issues; some are very familiar from my experiences with other popular game platforms I’ve used.
Nice coverage of cosmic expansion and associated issues:
It’s strange and worrying to see Covid19 in other species but bats and humans, as that will be a population reservoir that we may not be able to control (although given how willful and stupid a certain percentage of humans have been, the comparison may not be worth worrying about). Like the original SARS, it may persist in other species after it ceases to travel in humans (assuming that ever happens). The spread to deer is surprising though. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12-covid-infection-deer-ohio.html
Hopes are high for the James Webb Telescope, and this is a nice summary of what it hopefully will bring: https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-science-overview
Healthy to see some criticism of a (fairly stupid) paper about quantum entanglement and tardigrades. https://phys.org/news/2021-12-peers-dispute-tardigrades-entangled-qubits.html
It’s nice to see an increasing catalogue of rogue planets; hopefully we’ll continue to find new ways to detect them; I wonder if we’re likely to miss out on variants of them based on the detection methods: https://phys.org/news/2021-12-eso-telescopes-uncover-largest-group.html
Writings
I wrote up my intuitions for how to evaluate national land claims and borders: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pALNkYbbufVoxk0Z--EDbyzVhXVleBUdnJ-lHGgFx4o/
Unprompted Thoughts
I just saw some programming advice on LinkedIn (which generally is a “meh” place for programming advice) on Javascript, suggesting people use hashes of function pointers rather than if/then blocks or switches. My advice is more-or-less exactly the opposite; prefer to use programming language features that are common to many languages unless some more language-specific feature is amazing (ignore language style guides if they advise otherwise) or there’s some other really good reason. It’s good to be able to code in a lot of languages, but it’s usually a waste of time and a bad idea to follow each language’s features out to the least common looking code.
Has Stanley Fish won? Decades ago I read “The Trouble with Principle”; I didn’t understand it fully on my first read, but found it troubling; it treated things I regard as principles for decency - goals - as mere items on a treaty between the powers that be. At least as aspiration, this is both uninspiring and dangerous; my view on principles and virtue is not that we should be absolutist on either over all periods of history, but rather that we should attempt to continually raise neutral principles higher over generations (while still pursuing more particular goals in ways compliant with them), and that this slow process will let us pursue, as individuals and society, higher virtue. If we are to break those rules (once established) it would be a self-preserving response to a dramatic and surprising fall in social trust, or perhaps as a reminder that we have power “so get back to the rules please”, not something we only do because we have a certain power and want our ends met. I worry that the mentality Fish pushes has won in recent decades, and that the center has fallen. If it is this is a tragedy; pluralist societies lose a lot of good function when they devolve to power games, and the timelines for recovering from bad moments are generational; longer than decades. Falling is fast, easy, and painful.
There are times in life where I see people’s policies and behaviour and think that they’re either operating with a different set of restrictions and information than I’d think, or they’re incompetent. It’s unfortunate that it’s so hard to tell the difference; expertise and information change us. In workplaces, in politics. Reasonable evaluation is difficult. I wonder if it has to be.
The genetic fallacy is a close cousin to the ad hominem; both are about focusing about the speaker or origin of an idea rather than its merit. They’re also both situational; while if we’re sure we want to have a discussion (certainly in a debate) they’re wise to avoid, practically our time/attention/energy is limited, and we’re wise to limit our time-spend with bad actors - people who show up with a huge bag of ideas they barely believe in. Fallacies are not universal in their applicability to public discourse (nor are they a sure bulwark against Schopenhauer’s catalogue of trolldom). This is challenging for those of us who want to use lists of fallacies to help nudge people away from certain bad practice; their being situational adds nuance that needs to be explained, and bad actors use them too.
Humans have a lot of specialised brain hardware (particularly the Fusiform Gyrus) to differentiate and parse faces. I’m thinking back to a childhood incident where my family brought the wrong chocolate lab home from a commercial petsitter; they were both bulky female chocolate labs, and it took us awhile to notice that she wasn’t acting weird just because we had been away. Dogs recognise each other by scent, but I wonder if they also have different enough faces that, if our brain hardware were better attuned to their faces, we could more easily tell them apart (there are identical twins in my family and the rest of us could tell them apart based on very subtle differences, which was hard for non-family; I don’t imagine the effect is entirely species-based, but it probably significantly is)
Current Events
The US made it harder for products made in Xinjiang, known for use of Uighur prison labour in factories, to be sold in the US; predictably, China is more infuriated by the loss of face than the economics and has announced retaliatory sanctions. I think it’s healthy to press China both on human rights issues and on its aggression towards Taiwan; unfortunately it looks like we may either see war with Russia and China (separately) in the next 20 years (bad), or we may stand by and let them attack their neighbours (worse). Rising tensions are visible; I find it bizarre that some Trumpist conservatives turn a blind eye to Russia’s aggression.
The Omicron surge appears to be hitting the US (and the rest of the world) fairly hard; fortunately it looks to be a bit milder than other variants. Unfortunately, the increased virulence means hospitals are still hit fairly hard in a lot of places; the two mechaisms we need to worry about are how full hospitals are and how much spread enables mutation. And of course everyone’s rather tired of all of this and wishes we could be done with it.
The trial of former police officer Kim Potter concluded with her having been found guilty of two counts of manslaughter. Dershowitz wrote a fairly ignorant opinion piece on it that mischaracterised American Law and seemed to push against the possibility of ever finding people guilty of negligence-based manslaughter. Recordings of the trial are available on Youtube, and important documents like the instructions to the Jury are also available online for people interested in digging in; I think it’s important we treat trials as being about the law rather than bigger narratives.
Reviewlets
Chernobylite (game) - This is set in an alternative sci-fi history around Chernobyl, and it has the sadly common weird/weak kind of game engine that a lot of otherwise-great games from Eastern European studios have (the “Metro” series strongly suffers from this). This particular one feels like a slightly worse version of the Bethesda’s Creation Engine. The theming and narrative are pretty good though; I’ve been playing it off-and-on for the last few months. It rarely holds my interest for long periods of time, but I keep coming back to it and I’m curious where it’s going. I wish games like his had better engines.
Waving Tides (game) - Very cute game that held my attention for about two hours; it’s an action-puzzle game with an interesting plot, good music, good voice acting, but it’s too easy to get lost and it doesn’t feel like there’s enough variety in the mechanics for me to want to return. I kickstarted this and I’m glad it was made, but I don’t see myself going back to it.
Eastward (game) - This seems to be written for older gamers on a time-budget who remember JRPGs pretty well. More allusion than substance of its own (Strong Chrono Trigger vibes), it’s still fun, and it thoughtfully suggests break points in the story for someone to put it down for tomorrow. It’s heavily character-centric too, and has little bits of clearly designated side-content for people with a bit more time. I like it. It’s not a meal, it’s a snack. But a good one.
Dough (gourmet donut place in NYC) - Dough has been an occasional treat for me for years; their Donuts are huge, more like cake than most, and their flavoured donuts are intense. I go less often than I used to because I’m trying to watch my weight, but they’re easy to recommend and a hit at social gatherings.
Amusements
I loved seeing this explainer for the references in Kung Fu Hustle, an entertaining Wuxia film I probably first saw in the late 2000s. There are a lot of things I got, but many more I missed.
It’s interesting to see Thailand has sponsored, as part of cultural diplomacy, Thai restaurants across the world. Unlike when governments sponsor news-media as diplomacy, I don’t see many issues with this; it could be bad if it makes it hard for independent restaurants to exist, but I think it would be quite difficult for the program to move up to that scale. We should be wary of some things about Thailand; it has lese majeste laws and otherwise is light on civil liberties, but it has delicious food and we should be glad to see that kind of thing spread.
I’ve come across lists like this many times. This list of the shoftest scientific papers ever published is a reminder that, particularly in certain fields, a strong result can be demonstrated without the expenditure of too many words. https://www.cantorsparadise.com/the-shortest-scientific-papers-ever-published-ffa2dcb6c958?gi=f2f4f20c345f
Recent Music
This week I’ve gone looking for a number of good background songs because I decided to learn how to make music resource packs for Minecraft; I can’t share the pack I made for copyright reasons, but it got me looking through my file-based music collection for the first time in awhile.
Breton’s “Got Well Soon” is a very painful song for me to listen to; it may be the highly disturbing music video, or it may be the tie to Life is Strange, a videogame that messed pretty heavily with my emotions to the extent that, despite loving it, I dread even thinking about it for too long and have avoided the sequels because it was too painful. It’s also a good song; the juxtapositions make hearing it strange, perhaps like the slow shattering of glass under pressure.
Vienna Teng has written a lot of vocal-focused intimate songs that I’ve liked over the years; “Gravity”, which has a nice music video, was (probably, I don’t recall for sure) my intro to her body of work.
Neuroticfish’s “Why Don’t You Hate Me” is a song I sometimes heard in goth-industrial clubs; it unfortunately takes awhile to get started up (could use some better editing) but it’s a great, very danceable song
Fruit Bats’ “Seaweed” is a nice, chill song for background listening.
“Here I Dreamt I was an Architect”, by the Decemberists, is the same, but with more of my normal mood (sad but chill)