[Non-political] News that makes you Laugh/Cry/Both...

[Username17]

There are lots of tasks that take less than 10,000 hours to master. There are only 3 Tic-Tac-Toe openings, and there are only between 2 and 5 meaningfully different second moves. You could exhaustively learn every possible iteration of the game and never lose again in your life with just a few hours of study. I think you could achieve maximum skill in Chutes and Ladders by studying the board for 20 minutes. McDonalds believes that people become sufficiently skilled at fry cookery in about 40 hours, and I have no reason to doubt the research from Hamburger University. While there are demonstrably genetic and cultural dispositions to various tasks, some tasks really aren't that hard.

On the flip side, you also have shit like American Football, where you will literally never be a competitor at all, no matter how much you practice, unless you are genetically disposed to growing big and strong and also heavily supplement your diet with chemicals designed to make you grow even bigger and stronger.

The 10,000 hour rule is such a gross and obvious simplification that it's hard to really engage with it.

-Username17

[Longes]

Florida Schools Forced to Allow Satanic Church Access to its Young Students

[Pixels]

There are lots of tasks that take less than 10,000 hours to master. There are only 3 Tic-Tac-Toe openings, and there are only between 2 and 5 meaningfully different second moves.

Actually only 1-3. The corner play only has 1 answer that doesn't immediately lose. The center play has 4 answers, but they are all rotationally symmetric. The side play also has 4 answers, but 2 of them are reflectively symmetric.

[name_here]

Apparently people treating the Ebola patient in Dallas didn't wear the appropriate protective gear until after the test results came back

I guess that answers the question of how they got infected.

[tussock]

Except, did random chess playing kid have 10k hours of practice?

Yes, at least. Probably much more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Carlsen

Carlsen developed his early chess skills by playing alone for hours at a time—moving the pieces around the chessboard, searching for combinations, and replaying games and positions shown to him by his father.

Which is to say, from when he was taught chess at 5 years old, and when he first played tournaments at 7 years old, he probably already had a couple thousand hours practice. As a 12 year old he took a year off school to fly around Europe participating in endless chess tournaments, after finding the previous three years of constant chess tournaments and demonstrations a little bit distracting to his home schooling (only managed 3 hours a day for school, the rest was chess, and Donald Duck comics).

He became world #1 at 19, but he'd been playing in chess tournaments almost non-stop for ten years, and spending most of his free time studying chess. Chess "prodigies" in history are all like that, they find it young, get taught by someone who knows the game well, and then have enormous exposure to skilled chess players for many years, and stick at it without going insane or finding something bouncier to play with.


10,000 hours doesn't say you'll be good if you work for that long, it says the people that get respect for doing things well have almost all worked that long. If anything, it's a statement of which skills earn you respect, and that's not being a fry cook or mastering tic-tac-toe.

[erik]

Another way to phrase 10k hours is an obsessive devotion over a long duration. Say like during childhood.

Spending a few hours a day throughout entire childhood development comes out to about 10,000 hours. Surprise surprise. I am not sure how helpful this number is since it just means that when our brains are most able to learn, people who are good at something spent a lot of time focusing on it.

It would be really weird to find prodigies who didn't spend a lot of time focusing on their schtick during childhood. Bottom line 10k hours doesn't give any useful predictive output. Unlike say a more useful observation that people learn best when they are enjoying themselves/creating dopamine so if you want to be good a X you should find an X that you enjoy or a way to make it fun.

[Kaelik]

Except, did random chess playing kid have 10k hours of practice?

Yes, at least. Probably much more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Carlsen

Carlsen developed his early chess skills by playing alone for hours at a time—moving the pieces around the chessboard, searching for combinations, and replaying games and positions shown to him by his father.

Which is to say, from when he was taught chess at 5 years old, and when he first played tournaments at 7 years old, he probably already had a couple thousand hours practice. As a 12 year old he took a year off school to fly around Europe participating in endless chess tournaments, after finding the previous three years of constant chess tournaments and demonstrations a little bit distracting to his home schooling (only managed 3 hours a day for school, the rest was chess, and Donald Duck comics).

He became world #1 at 19, but he'd been playing in chess tournaments almost non-stop for ten years, and spending most of his free time studying chess. Chess "prodigies" in history are all like that, they find it young, get taught by someone who knows the game well, and then have enormous exposure to skilled chess players for many years, and stick at it without going insane or finding something bouncier to play with.


10,000 hours doesn't say you'll be good if you work for that long, it says the people that get respect for doing things well have almost all worked that long. If anything, it's a statement of which skills earn you respect, and that's not being a fry cook or mastering tic-tac-toe.

Oh look, Tussock is practicing hit and run tactics against sane conversation. First off... wholly fuck no. 10,000 hours has fucking nothing to do with a statement of which skills earn respect. Literally nothing. That is not what the goddam book is about or even tangentially related to. It is, unsurprisingly, about how 10,000 hours is the magic number at which people count as an expert at things.

And according to you, the kid was flying around participating in Chess tournaments at 7, with less than 10,000, and looked a lot like an expert, and then played the best two in the world to a win and a draw at 12 with at least 20,000 hours, and definitely not 10,000 hours.

[RobbyPants]

I think you could achieve maximum skill in Chutes and Ladders by studying the board for 20 minutes.

Anyone capable of flicking the little spinner and counting squares (the minimum prerequisites for playing) has already achieved maximum skill in Chutes and Ladders. Like Candy Land, there is no human decision involved in the game play.

[Username17]

I think you could achieve maximum skill in Chutes and Ladders by studying the board for 20 minutes.

Anyone capable of flicking the little spinner and counting squares (the minimum prerequisites for playing) has already achieved maximum skill in Chutes and Ladders. Like Candy Land, there is no human decision involved in the game play.

No. That is the minimum skill required. People who have achieved maximum skill can move their marker without counting squares.

-Username17

[Shatner]

Fox News' Shep Smith offers a frank and reasonable rejoinder to "irresponsible" ebola coverage. Really.

[ACOS]

Dude, Shep Smith is a straight shooter. Not everybody on that channel is Sean "dumber-than-dog-shit" Hannity.

[Omegonthesane]

https://storify.com/EffNOVideoGames/sto ... een-a-spin

[Longes]

https://storify.com/EffNOVideoGames/sto ... een-a-spin

I'm suddenly glad that I don't read any videogame 'media' outlets. Very very glad.

[Chamomile]

https://storify.com/EffNOVideoGames/sto ... een-a-spin

It's weird how these people keep putting the evidence against their claims in the same post as the claims themselves. Images of misogynistic rage are posted side-by-side as images encouraging people to focus on corruption. This is supposed to be proof that the corruption is a "smokescreen," when in truth what it's proof of is that different people have different opinions on the subject. They also try to spin Eron Gjoni's efforts to maximize the reach of his story, of his exposure of the corrupt and abusive nature of a woman idolized as heroic by thousands, as though taking effort to be effective with your exposure means you're automatically lying. Efforts to destroy Gjoni's character when the evidence he has amassed against Zoe Quinn as an emotionally abusive person is so thorough and has (to the best of my knowledge) not once been called out as false by Zoe herself are very straightforwardly victim blaming, and it will always be victim blaming unless you have some kind of reason to believe he's made some or all of it up.

This debacle is also proof that mass censorship campaigns are a terrible way to respond to allegations of misconduct, even if it's gossipy bullshit (which the whole Zoe Post blow-up mostly was before the censorship campaigns ruffled some more reasonable people's feathers). By pushing the discussion out of reasonable arenas they did not end the discussion, they spread it further, farther, and faster with the Streisand Effect, and guaranteed that places like /r9k/ and /pol/ (which are containment boards for rampant sexism and racism, respectively) would be where the discussion took place, that those communities would get to dictate the tone. It's unsurprising that a lot of atrocious hate was mixed in during the early days before refugees from places like Reddit and NeoGAF started coming in and changing that tone.

In any case, that post bluntly contradicts what's going on in hotbeds of the actual movement and has been going on since the #GamerGate hashtag first actually came into existence. Efforts to give any attention whatsoever to Zoe Quinn (along with a handful of other people believed to be trying to use the movement to further their careers, principally Anita Sarkeesian and her boyfriend Jonathan McIntosh, now believed to be the mastermind behind Feminist Frequency) are strongly discouraged. The list of people considered villains starts with people like Kyle Orland, Ben Kuchera, and Leigh Alexander, a list which, you will note, contains both males and females on it. The narratives #GamerGate cleaves to, the propaganda they pass around to try and improve morale, i.e. the things they say to one another and which are therefore presumably indicative of what they're about, contain very little misogyny whatsoever. Anyone who tries to make it about Zoe or women or anything like that is assumed to be a shill (and the labeling of all dissent as the work of shills has actually become something of a problem).

Efforts to paint GamerGate as misogynists is a lot like trying to paint the Ferguson protests as looters. Yes, there is technically overlap between the two groups, but an examination of what's actually going on at the ground level reveals that the scary black man photographed hurling some kind of projectile weapon was actually trying to get rid of a tear gas canister fired into the crowd.

EDIT: And I have just learned that 8chan, the new home of GamerGate after Poole kicked them off of 4chan, had a new board made which posted Zoe Quinn's dox. Because boards can be created by anyone on 8chan (like subreddits) and are only moderated by people with the board password, only the admin can delete the board and he was asleep at the time. GamerGate responded by flooding the board with noise in an effort to make the dox as difficult to locate as possible and ultimately succeeded in pushing them off the board completely, at which point they were deleted because 8chan does not have an archive. Since reposting the doxx is much easier than posting the ~100 empty threads it takes to push it off the board completely, an army of GamerGate supporters was called in to help from Twitter, to ensure an endless stream of forum-sliding posts that would consistently bury and then destroy the doxx.

That's how much GamerGate hates Zoe Quinn: They dedicated time and effort to protecting her personal information.

[Longes]

Anita Sarkeesian and her boyfriend Jonathan McIntosh, now believed to be the mastermind behind Feminist Frequency) are strongly discouraged. The list of people considered villains starts with people like Kyle Orland, Ben Kuchera, and Leigh Alexander

I know I'm going to regret this. But who are these people?

[DSMatticus]

https://storify.com/EffNOVideoGames/sto ... een-a-spin

So, I could plainly tell say that "adding entertainment value" and "going for a tone that would conform to cringe-worthy breakup stories" in no way implies dishonesty, manipulation, deceit, or even exaggeration. It is quite obviously true to anyone who would bother to think about it for more than a few seconds that the tone of an article implies nothing about the factual accuracy of its content. But in the interests of illustrating my point...

What kind of dumbass fucknugget reads "I wanted more people to read my content so I made it entertaining" and thinks "you liar!"

Here's a little history on #GamerGate from before Adam Baldwin gave it that stupid fucking name: Zoe Quinn launched an unethical and in at least one instance illegal censorship campaign across the internet which vastly overstepped the line from protecting her personal information and stopping threats against her into "make people stop talking abouting me." A lot of very sane, very not-misogynistic people took issue with this, because censorship is not okay and abusing the DMCA to have youtube videos taken down is fucking illegal - people like TotalBiscuit, who made a twitlonger post boiling down to "censorship bad." The response by the journalist and developer community supporting Zoe Quinn was to go after TotalBiscuit with a lynch mob and begin publishing articles calling Quinn's detractors misogynistic straight white men and exclusively publicize the most extreme examples of misogyny and harassment they could find (much of which is likely being done by underage x-box live tier trolls, because this is the fucking internet and it's time to learn how it works, grandma). Examples which are, in context, constantly shouted down by actual supporters. These are facts.

The thing about #GamerGate that is actually fucking horrifying is how its moderate and progressive supporters have just been fucking disappeared by both sides. The videogame journalists only want to talk about the misogynists, because they are attempting to spin a narrative that makes the movement easy to dismiss. The conservatives like Baldwin only want to ride it as an excuse to bash feminism, because they are actual fucking misogynists. And so people like TotalBiscuit and those he represented have just been completely memory holed. TotalBiscuit was literally the first significant public figure to take any stance on the matter and virtually no one fucking knows or cares about that or anything he said. There are people involved in #GamerGate right now who are upset at the community of journalists because they were labelled misogynistic for criticizing censorship. And they have been there longer than Adam Baldwin or whatever crazy conservative fuck people think "represents" the movement.

Now, I've basically stopped touching the #GamerGate fiasco (though to be honest, I was never particularly involved), because the journalists won. Mainstream media is publishing articles about #GamerGate, and the only thing those articles talk about is twitter death threats. They repeated their narrative so often and so loudly that it hit critical mass and has become the historical truth. People like me never really had a chance to get their voices credibly represented in public discourse (because in this instance, the people we are nominally aligned with and whose causes we support are the ones attacking us), and so we were nonpersonned as a matter of political convenience. It was an interesting and profoundly disempowering experience, I can say that for fucking sure. But there's very little I can do about it other than fume and tell people who post their bullshit that they're stupid assholes for helping them do it.

You are, by the way, a stupid asshole.

[Stahlseele]

And it's far from over . . she is now demanding that developers and publishers take position against harassment of women in the industry.
Which, in itself is a good thing, but with her attached to it, will raise quite a ruckus again.

[Koumei]

Yeah, video gaming is one of those industries where you don't want to be female, and it's worth doing something about the problem there. Except her being attached to it does the whole thing a lot of harm and it might be worth waiting for her to stop being noteworthy before people try tackling it.

[Shrapnel]

Holy fucking hell, this Zoe Quinn shit is still a thing? Not even Peter Holm lasted this long.

[Omegonthesane]

You are, by the way, a stupid asshole.

I'd object to that first one, but for a moment I *did* buy it, even having seen your earlier takedowns of pro-Quinn fanatics (earlier this thread?) and how anyone who couldn't condemn both Quinn and misogynistic trolls was no use in any debate over anything with any nuance at all (or words to that effect). So, empirically, I was behaving in a manner consistent with being stupid at the time of the post.

I'd object to that second one, but this is the Gaming Den, it comes with the territory.

EDIT: The fact that this is the first I've heard of TotalBiscuit weighing in at fucking all rather demonstrates your point.

[Longes]

Yeah, video gaming is one of those industries where you don't want to be female, and it's worth doing something about the problem there. Except her being attached to it does the whole thing a lot of harm and it might be worth waiting for her to stop being noteworthy before people try tackling it.

I assume that when people say "video game industry", they mean game designers and not artists, programmers, writers, etc.?

[Whipstitch]

There isn't much point in making a distinction. It's enormously useful if you're tech savvy enough to use debugging tools and to hash out rough examples of how you want shit to work but it's not unheard of for people to rise from web design or testing to the big chair.

[Starmaker]

Now, I've basically stopped touching the #GamerGate fiasco (though to be honest, I was never particularly involved), because the journalists won. Mainstream media is publishing articles about #GamerGate, and the only thing those articles talk about is twitter death threats.

That's because the campaign never was about journalistic integrity or anything of the sort. It has always been, from the start to where it's now, yet another attack on "feminazis", supported by conservatards like Baldwin and Deadbart. No one cares about TotalBiscuit because no one cares about journalistic integrity, which was and still is his cause. The anti-corruption people are basically like people who signed up to campaign for women's health and ended up at an abortion clinic boycott.

And honestly, having seen media shitstorms in development, it's good for internet freedom that reports don't mention Zoe Quinn abusing DMCA. Because the way media works, it'd have presented DMCA abuse as a good thing -- see, it helps fight sexism! Holy shit David A. fucking Hill Jr., whom you might remember from Holocaust Ghostbusters, is now an avowed feminist.

[Chamomile]

Anita Sarkeesian and her boyfriend Jonathan McIntosh, now believed to be the mastermind behind Feminist Frequency) are strongly discouraged. The list of people considered villains starts with people like Kyle Orland, Ben Kuchera, and Leigh Alexander

I know I'm going to regret this. But who are these people?

I get the feeling I'm going to regret answering this question since it's you asking it, but I have a difficult time ignoring direct questions, so fine, here we go.

Anita Sarkeesian is the gaming critic the industry deserves, which is to say that she raises important issues and then manages to spend upwards of half an hour failing to say even a single insightful or interesting thing about them, gets basic facts wrong, and coats it in buzzwords that make her popular with people who want to believe they're heroes for cheering whenever the blue applause light comes on and booing whenever the red applause light comes on. Some digging by someone named Devi Ever revealed that Jonathan Mcintosh appears to be the source of Anita's ideological bent. Both of them had a web presence predating their meeting with one another, Sarkeesian showed absolutely no interest in social or political issues at all, but Mcintosh was already pushing the message the two of them would eventually push together. Also, Sarkeesian did not and appears to still not have any interest in video games, but Mcintosh does.

Kyle Orland started the GameJournoPros Google group, a secret club for game journalists to talk to each other. Humans being humans, it ultimately morphed into an echo chamber where aggressive voices persuaded and in some cases outright shamed people into writing the kind of articles they wanted to see, turning all involved game journalist outlets into basically the same entity despite the fact that they were theoretically separate. Ben Kuchera is one of those aggressive voices ultimately responsible for using the tactics of a petty bully in the GameJournoPros group to influence writers on other sites, including openly advocating for censorship.

Leigh Alexander writes for Gamasutra and started the rash of "gamers are dead" articles, a series of hit pieces targeting gamers as misogynist man-children in an effort to silence the growing controversies surrounding corrupt journalism and censorship campaigns reaching far further than anyone would have guessed possible. Since these articles hit back in late August, that clearly hasn't worked out well, Leigh has responded with open belligerence and threats against the careers or reputations of people who disagree with her, and as a result Gamasutra is bleeding off advertisers like crazy. Naturally, this is painted as advertisers buckling to "misogynist bullying" rather than their getting their brand the Hell away from websites stupid enough to bluntly insult the demographics those advertisers are trying to appeal to. Turns out there is such a thing as bad publicity.

EDIT:

That's because the campaign never was about journalistic integrity or anything of the sort. It has always been, from the start to where it's now, yet another attack on "feminazis", supported by conservatards like Baldwin and Deadbart.

What you're implying here is that these are necessarily distinct things. Yes, obviously, when people wave the feminist flag to shield themselves from the consequences of their corruption that is an extremely good opening for conservatives to deal lots and lots of damage to feminism's reputation. And in fact, the parasites using feminism's goodwill to propagate their own selfish agendas have gotten thick enough that when someone declares themselves a feminist, my first reaction is skepticism as to whether they are genuine. This is an enormous problem and you should be extremely distressed that the GamerGate thing is looking at a reversal in favor of the GameJournoPros side. If the infection isn't cured now then sooner or later it will crop up again and give the conservatives an excuse to hack off another limb.

If you genuinely support feminism's actual goals and are not just a blind tribalist supporting anyone who uses the right buzzwords because they're your sort of people and therefore part of the master race, you have gotten the worst possible result. Lots of people saw self-proclaimed feminists committing disgusting acts of corruption, lots of goodwill has been expended defending people who are not actually furthering the cause at all, and worst of all they're going to get away with it and live to do it all again a few years down the line. Getting rid of these parasites is painful but it's something that's got to be done and the sooner the better.

[nockermensch]

Right, time to write something that has been in my mind for some time now, which can make some all of you hate me, but fuck that. It needs to be said:

The first point is that being oppressed and persecuted became something you can cash in for social currency points in today's World. While being generally a great concept, in almost every way superior to how humanity previously reacted to victimized people, the elevation of the status of victimhood to a badge of honor can be used as a shield if you happen to belong to a historically persecuted group and want to do bad things. I had noticed this first with regards to how some evil people at Israel can keep committing war crimes against the Palestinian people while successfully dodging criticisms with "oh, it's just anti-semitism again".

This became so bad during the last round of carnage that I became convinced that "LE HAPPY MERCHANT" has been co-opted by these very war criminals for their benefit. Because polite society has already internalized that racism is horrible and unacceptable, greedy jew caricatures have became literal FNORDS in the modern Internet discourse. By posting or alluding to them them in a discussion, you instantly change the mood of a reasonable reader to one of "Oh, this is not serious. And I'm on the wrong part of the Internet, again."

I don't think this is some kind of perfectly orchestrated conspiracy. I don't believe in shadowy councils of illuminati deciding everything, but I believe in smart people that want to remain in power paying eggheads to analyse new cultural developments memes and decide how to spin them. That's to say that while I believe Stormfront was not a false flag op and that those racist caricatures were made by actual, earnest racists, I also have little doubt that the ones actually benefiting the most from them today are Bibi and his gang. By three main reasons:

1) The fnord effect I already mentioned that works to keep neutral parties away from discussions. It goes like this: Somebody posts a article critical of Israel in a board or social media. Somebody on the comments posts LE HAPPY MERCHANT together with some racist phrase. The discussion is derailed. This makes at least some people who would be critical of Israel to keep quiet, because they don't want to be associated with racists.

2) It also works as a trap against people with legitimate grievances: When palestinians who had a lot of excellent reasons to hate Israelis end producing this. Benjamin Netanyahu must cream his pants: Because the people he wants to keep down just shot their own credibility in the foot head there. When the Protocols of the Elders of Zion keeps being published in the middle east, they keep at least part of the arabian world in a very low level of thinking, keeping them from seeing who the actual monsters are.

3) Finally, but not less important, having shit like that video and racist memes posted online helps to keep Israel's population in a constant siege mentality (something no doubt fanned by their local versions of Fox News and AM radio talk shows). If the israelis are afraid everybody else is out to get them, then they should keep voting on the hawkiest parties that talk tough "to keep them protected". Incidentally, Americans should find this story somewhat familiar.


Then I noticed the same pattern being used regarding GamerGate, only with Misogyny being used instead Racism. There's some actual bad things being done by a few unethical people in the indy games/game journalism industries, some of them seemingly even crossing the line into actual crimes. But we're in a stage of society's evolution where "my attackers just hate me for what I am!" still lacks a proper counter, so whoever thinks they can benefit from this defense of course resorts to it.

Well, that was it. Feel free to call me paranoid now.