Probability. If something has a 50% chance of occuring, that does not mean it will happen every second time, and our brain has a very hard time rationalizing that. For example, we assume its near impossible to flip heads on a coin three times in a row when really, the probability is 12.5% - not that low. Another example would be something with a 95% chance of success - we naturally round up and assume thats basically garenteed success, but theres still a very decent chance of failure, esspecially on repeat attempts. Our brains are just not wired to handle randomness well, which is part of why gambling is so addicting and why games like X-Com have to rig the odds in the players favour to avoid pissing them off.
We have developed intuition around things like naive physics - you can catch a thrown frisbee without doing calculus in your head - but it’s really, really hard to think through statistical questions in an intuitive way.
It’s one reason I’m extremely skeptical about the utility of informed consent in medicine. A physician can tell a patient’s family that if they don’t do the procedure then the patient will definitely die, but if they do it there’s a 20% chance of complication A and a 5% chance of complication B. The right thing to do is plan on the complications happening and having a realistic idea of what that will entail. But people, especially under stress, really aren’t able to deal with that kind of thing as easily as they can deal with catching a ball thrown to them.
RPG games like Fortnite use an algorithm which tricks people into believing their skills are improving.
When you hit a pixel, it doesn’t automatically score a hit like Space Invaders, it runs an algorithm based on the time you have been playing the game to determine the amount of damage you cause. The more you play, the more “accurate” you become.
This kind of thing definitly exist, usually part of adaptative difficulty where for exemple you get an invisible buff after dying so you feel like you are improving.
But I fail to see that in fortnite since it’s a multiplayer game, only your skill and luck influence the outcome, not playtime. Fortnite isn’t an RPG either (As far as I know), so I guess you meant an other game ?
It’s not always for the benefit of the players. Gameloft, the makers of the Asphalt mobile racing series, was caught making the AI harder during special timed events that allowed you to win extra/special stuff by beating said AI. This was obviously for the express purpose of manipulating people into playing more and even though I once loved playing Asphalt 8 & 9, I no longer touch any of their games because of how shitty and disingenuous that is.
I never heard of that since I stopped playing asphalt but that seems like something Gameloft would do. Gameloft really fell off, they used to make good games…
But yeah, it can also be used badly, like making the game really easy after a purchase and then slowly go back to difficult. I don’t think I’ve heard of something like that yet, but it probably exist.
Every combination is equally likely we just ascribe special meaning to certain ones due to overactive pattern recognition. Hx6 is just as likely as any seeminly more random result from 6 consecutive throws there are just more options we don’t ascribe special meaning to.
I listen to PolarisRadio every day on my way to.work. 273 plays for Sea of Stars. I like most of his works. Gorillaz is also in that Playlist but I don’t get that far every day driving.Sabaton and Voltaire are straight choices I hit play on. I’ll listen to their new albums day one.
I can totally agree with the whole with great power comes great immorality way of thinking.
But I view it in the adaptation angle. Like, how many “average” people can adapt to such a huge shift in power? Pro athletes tend to have bad spending habits because of sudden shifts of wealth. Country laws and legislations stay for generations because the lawmakers are stuck to their own bubbles of how things are progressing.
Being able to adapt is a general trait for people, but not everybody can do it as quickly. I think that part causes conflicts that may or may not lead to immorality.
I suspect that colonizing Mars (or wherever else) will turn out to be much more than just an engineering problem. If we get things like food, water, atmosphere, and even gravity right, I think we’ll still find an endless list of requirements that we didn’t know were requirements… and some mystery problems that don’t seem to have any cause at all. Those problems will be because of factors we never thought of, or don’t even know how to detect.
There could also be surpluses/deficiencies in our diet or environment that will take years (or perhaps generations) to show up. Again, that would be because of unanticipated, and maybe unsolvable, problems.
I could still see people trying to make it work for generations for some reason, many early colonists in the West died before stable states could be founded.
I remember sitting in on a briefing from the Biosphere folks when they reached out for collaborating institutions. One of the things that stuck with me was that they discovered that trees that were not subject to wind failed to develop a healthy trunk and tended to fall over and die. That’s not something that the researchers had even thought of.
Can I ask what year that was? We’ve known that greenhoused cuttings need an oscillating fan in order be able to hold themselves upright once they start to gain height for the 30 years that I’ve been growing that way. It’s like a little work out for them.
It would have been something like 2005 or so. It may have been a known fact at the time, but they mentioned specifically that they were caught by surprise by the phenomenon. I didn’t fault them for it - the whole project was kind of a mess. I’m a biologist and I wasn’t aware of that, so it wouldn’t have occurred to me, either.
That’s weird though. You’d think they would have had multiple botanists on the design team who could have pointed that out.
Also there’s that documentary where the group that organized it was kind of cult adjacent. They weren’t scientists first. Still very interesting and impressive they did what they did.
I’m sure it was just that no one realized it would scale to trees, since that hadn’t been done before. As far as I know you don’t have to do anything special in that regard with small seed-grown plants in a green house, only cuttings that root from stems, and so have weaker roots at first and stalks that were previously branches. I’m sorry I sounded critical, I was just curious.
Interesting! Plus, that’s exactly the sort of weird, unanticipated thing I’m talking about. How do you plan for everything? You can’t.
The first human colonists (who are just ordinary people) won’t be the rich. They’ll be desperate people who are sold a dream of the future and treated as human lab rats.
Depends on the person. You can see a clear discrepancy in what a person does without super powers. Some work toward a better planet, others toward a more secure life for the self. Adding super powers would just amplify existing MOs.
I usually listen to everything just a little bit.I also listen to untracked mixes on youtube like JAZZ PL concerts and 飛行船の上のシンセサイザー弾きOf course there isn’t good way to share wrapped in English. My genre is Japanese Jazz Fusion.
I have a theory that moral traits, like many other things in nature, follow a normal distribution. If I'm right, we can make some estimates of who would violate social rules given the chance. The bottom 5% of the distribution are going to do some terrible things. About 45% are going to be kind of shit, maybe not terrible. The remainder will be some level of decent to pretty well behaved, actually. Admittedly, that depends on what we think the mean level of morality really is. Having observed many a group of kids playing, I don't think it's that bad. Honestly that's why so many teenage edgelords and doomers get told to go touch grass; reality will almost never be as bleak as we think it will be. There's a well documented cognitive bias towards negative events, but it IS a bias.
The Boys isn't realistic so much as it's a deliberate deconstruction of the genre and a bit of speculative fiction ("What if Superman was a sociopath" seems to be the question it asks). It has elements of satire too, so it's not really concerned with being fair so much as creating the story conditions that allow it to show us its narrative.
If you want a more "realistic" superhero show I think the 2012 movie Chronicle is more plausible. And yeah it does go badly for some but not for others.
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