Down

Which is why direct democracy (i.e. everyone decides on everything) is not really practicable in societies the size and complexity of ours. Which makes the question of how to run things very complicated. What I see though is that representative democracy is mostly failing aside from the political stability part (which is already quite a lot though) because it's, well not actually really democratic. Propositions like liquid democracy (a sort of mix between representative and direct democracy) are attempts to find a solution of actual democracy. Of course maybe clinging on to democracy is not the right way to go. Maybe we should go for one form or another of communism, or one form or another of anarchism, etc, etc... I don't have the perfect form of governing there in my bag.

Heh. I'm not sure I'd argue in favor or tabula rasa. It's just that making an assumption about "human nature" is really risky in general. A year or two ago I'd probably have told you that I think humans are, overall, good "in nature". Nowadays... I'm not so sure. I'd rather follow the spinozist principle that "men should be conceived of as they are, not as we want them to be". My whole argument is that saying "people are stupid" is saying nothing. If you assume people are stupid, act as if they were stupid, tell them they're stupid, and ask them stupid questions, they're probably gonna give a stupid answer, regardless of whether they're intelligent in general or not. So if people are acting stupid, the issue is not with the people but with the system, and it needs to change. That's all. What kind of legitimacy would there be to a group of people in particular, the "elite", which chooses for the mass deemed too stupid to govern itself what's better for them? What, exactly, is supposed to insure these people are going to act dumb? The answer would probably be that they know what they're talking about, at least more than the average Joe, or something like that. In a society where people all have access to a minimum education, and a way to access any knowledge they want combined with a way to discuss it (the internet), that argument doesn't hold. People could be better informed, enough to take political decisions of all sorts. But for that you'd need to ask them real questions, not "which of these ten clowns do you want to have some amount of power over this country?". Of course that'd mean pretty deep structural changes. Not something that'll happen without some big turmoil to shuffle the cards again. I don't really understand what your second paragraph refers to in what I said. As for the last line, I don't pretend to be an expert on US politics. I couldn't possibly discuss the specifics of any candidate's program and I obviously can't gauge the political climate in the US as well as someone who lives in it. I think I know enough to make general comments on the system though - representative democracies of this kind are not that different in France or other European countries.

There's something funny in the schizophrenic way Sullivan displays side to side elitist conservatism with liberal values. I hear he's often been like this. There's a latent fear of the masses that is kinda imbued throughout his whole article (if only by the claim that the issue is that there can be "too much democracy") but at the same time he can't really bring himself to say the increase of inclusivity and representativity of minorities, and the lifting of several anti-democratic barriers in the US system, are bad things, because you know that wouldn't be progressive, and liberals are always progressive, history is obviously going towards more progress y'know. Another type of schizophreny: that of the color-blind, gender-blind liberal. Sullivan is "obviously" for everyone's equality yet he manages to make several claims that "white male culture" is being demonized, which proves that he doesn't understand at all how minorities movement work, what's at stake and what are the issues, but also that he probably lives in a parallel world. Anyway, the problem is not that there's too much democracy, it's that there's not enough. The article can flaunt all the increase in democracy there's been, it doesn't change the fact that there remains many structural issues with current political systems. With its Electoral College and its complete lack of regulations on campaign spending and funding and media coverage, the US arguably has "less" democracy in its system than we have in France, yet the french system is still terrible. On the politician side, structural issues make it so that representatives don't represent people at all. On the people's side, the fact that politics has been reduced to elections and that everything is done to de-politize a lot of other things make it so that people are not involved enough in politics. Democracy would gain a lot from having people more involved in politics overall, and that doesn't mean sitting there waiting for people to get interested into politics but making the system so that they do get involved. Debates are fueled by emotion and personal position: no shit bro. That's not a new hot take specific to the internet, Spinoza already talked about all of this centuries ago. Human beings are not rational most of the time. Most of what drives us is our passions. Debates on political matters that would happen on a pacified public place where everyone would be equal and rational are mere fantasy. And what's true of the masses is true of the so-called elite too. They're not more rational, they're not any less determined by the social, political, historical structures in which they evolve. There is no virtuous people, so what we need is virtuous institutions, a system which will push everyone upwards, and that's probably not representative democracy. One could even wonder if it would be democracy period, maybe the anarchists were right all along, who knows. One thing is for sure, it's that on the contrary the internet, through its network, horizontal, decentralized structure is a huge step forward. It may take a while but it will, like any structure, have deep effects our society. Assuming we don't all die before, of course.

I'll give you an effort/10 for this post

It's been going on the same thing that has been going on in the "gaming" community those last few years, because it reveals issues that are endemic to "geek" culture as a whole, despite all the people who want to believe that "it's just a few assholes on the internet". http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/04/how-hugo-awards-got-very-own-gamergate

Nah, I have the regular 5 volume edition that was published in France. The covers are the same but I can't tell you more.

*rereads his blog posts* There was some irony in my statement. I don't think rankings are good indicators of quality for various reasons which I can expand on, but I also don't think they're completely useless: they do bring some amount of information. My point was that behind the casual dismissal of these kinds of rankings that you'll often see around the internet, there's often the underlying idea that most people are dumb and have bad tastes, and the other idea that completes this point of view that we, ourselves, wouldn't bandwagon over something popular and are free of the various external influences that we see in other people. Needless to say that I think both of those ideas are very naive, although they're extremely hard to get rid of, especially the second one. Now, about rankings. If you wanted to correlate ranking with quality, even if it were to a weak degree, you'd first need to define quality. Good luck with that. Do pieces of fiction have inherent, objective qualities? That's already a vast topic that could lead to a long discussion. Let's make a hypothesis: pieces of fiction do have objective qualities, but we can't access them directly. A given reader will have an experience of reading through which some objective qualities of a piece of fiction have a subjective effect on him. (notice I made a semantic shift here: I'm talking about qualities, i.e. properties that can be "positive" or "negative", rather than an abstract "quality": we can assume for the sake of the argument that these qualities can be summed to give a "quality".) Let's now assume that the sum of a bunch of experiences-of-reading can give a good idea of what the objective qualities, and thus the quality, of a given piece of fiction is. That's already a lot of assumption, but the "quality" we reach in the end is still a very multi-dimensional, complex item. A ranking is the result of collapsing this on a one-dimensional, numerical scale. Collapse a 2D drawing onto a line and you lose a lot of information: same thing here. IF the complex, multi-dimensional items can be organized into a hierarchy, there's no guarantee that this hierarchy will be preserved in any way when you collapse to one dimension. I have no idea where I'm going with my weird and obscure metaphor but the gist of it is that even assuming "quality" exists and can be clearly defined, it's irreducible, even in a weak way, to an average score. Let's take a much more empirical approach to this: here's a social psychology experiment[citation needed]. An internet site gives the possibility to download a bunch of songs, and people can rank them according to their preferences. Those rankings then make up a global ranking. In one instance of the test, people have access to the global ranking, in another instance they don't. In the first case, within a few hours a clear global ranking established itself with some songs being clearly at the top. In the second case the votes were all equally dispersed, no song ever clearly took the top of the ranking. What would happen if people inputted their scores on vndb without having access to the ranking and without ever having contacts with VN communities? Who knows. The result would certainly be different from the experiment: the songs were chosen to be of a rather similar quality (I haven't looked up the precise protocol). I think that what all of this makes clear is that rankings are indicators of popularity (although uncertain ones...), and popularity affects our opinions, so rankings do give us interesting information that we should consciously take into account (because otherwise we'll unconsciously take them into account...). You could also say that they play into what "interests" us, or that they give us information on the people that vote in them rather than on the works themselves. But saying they can measure, even in a weak and non-certain way, quality, throws us back to the immensely complicated question of what the hell is quality anyway. I would like to believe there's indeed some sort of "quality" to be found in popularity, but I can't justify it. edit: well shit this is way too long and nobody will read it now ._.

It's shit™.

Oh, yes, that's the one. I guess I didn't find it because it's in the second half of the video. Heh, I thought that logarithmic perception was more firmly based in scientific observations than it seems to be after rewatching that video.

I'm pretty sure Vsauce made a video explaining how we perceive time in a non-linear, more or less logarithmic way. But I couldn't find it again last time I searched.

What's weirder, Frontwing deciding to make a DLC/deluxe version out of shit nobody cares about anyway, or people arguing about it (I can't even imagine on why and don't count on me reading everything) for four pages? Everything about this project makes no sense, even the threads discussing it.

You clearly have missed my quality shitposting. Or maybe I indeed need to shitpost more. I'll try to work on that as my 24th year resolution. Hi old man =) Thanks for the birthday wishes, folks!

There's not much use in reporting/pm'ing us about it, that kind of spam is completely blatant, we're not gonna miss it.

I'm not really sure why it's been happening those last few days, I can tell you that there is some protection active on the forum because I use a VPN and have to solve a god damn captcha every day. Anyway usually there's always a mod on but all it takes is me going to the dentist for half an hour for a spammer to pop up of course ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It's not a major difficulty to get rid of the spam and it rarely stays more than an hour or two so it's not that big of an issue.

Because tentacle rape on Steam maybe.

For those who still had a doubt about Gahkthun:

It's a live that starts in a few hours to announce stuff about the anime - seiyuu, staff, etc In the description it's mentioned that animation production will be done by david pro.

Arguing on forums is also different in the sense that you're being read by other people than the one(s) you're arguing with. People kinda outside the debate are more likely to be sensitive to arguments on both sides because they might not have committed to an opinion yet, and therefore are less likely to rationalize in favor of their opinion etc Also, it's not common to see people changing their opinions in the course of a debate. Changing opinions happens on a much longer time scale, one of weeks or months or even years depending on how often you argue on the topic. It's still never a waste to argue because it forces you to put your arguments into coherent paragraphs, re-check your sources, take in opposing arguments & sources, etc...

Yes, making lists of things to do is a great way to postpone other things you have to do while making you feel like you're actually doing something

I did anyway

That's what takes 95% of the time in a review... Do you guys want me to split some posts in here into a topic about (non)objective reviews? I think batman is eating is keyboard atm. Edit: Here.

Have you ever seen a cinema critic telling you a film is worth its movie ticket or buying the DVD? A book critic telling you that this book is kinda worth its price, but only if you get the pocket format? Video games seem to be, as far as I can see, the only fictional media items that are mostly seen as objects of consumption where the price tag is inherently part of the evaluation rather than pieces of fiction judged in abstraction of the way they were distributed (unless there is a particularly peculiar distribution history that makes it interesting or something...).

The thing is, no it's not every useful, but it's not much more useless than "I enjoyed this a bit/a lot/it was a nice experience overall/I really hated it/etc etc" which are, in the end, all as empty and arbitrary as a numerical quantification. The justifications for those arbitrary statements, just like the justifications of the score, would be found inside the review anyway. If people want to go bonkers about why I put score y on a game without reading it, cool for them, they probably wouldn't have read the review anyway and I don't see any worth in discussing with them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I really have an issue with the weird way in which video games reviews are taken to be consumer's guides rather than actual critics/reviews. I think a reviewer's role is to tell me something interesting about a piece of fiction, not evaluate the worth of a consumption product. I'm not really for a scale like that.

In my opinion, the numerical score only serves as an addition to the review. Sometimes you want to express the "raw" enjoyment you had with a title, for example, and place it on a scale of comparison with other experiences you had, and a numerical score is pretty convenient for that. It's absolutely obvious that a numerical score can't sum up a whole game in all its dimensions, that it doesn't make sense to give a "grade" to a piece of fiction, etc... but it can express something in a different way than words. I doubt getting rid of numerical scores would make people more attentive to the reviews and I think it's just a supplementary tool that we have no reason to suppress.

Last Baader-Meinhoff I had was Jorge Luis Borges' short story Funes the Memorious. Read about it in an Umberto Eco book, then a week later in a Foucault book, and that same day someone mentioned in on my Twitter timeline. Reminds me of when I got Clannad spoiled twice the same day in two completely different places of the internet without even particularly looking up Clannad stuff. Dem weird coincidences.