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Zephyr


				

				

				

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Zephyr


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

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				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Unfortunately, I think this runs into the same sort of issues that the foreign student process does.


For anyone who isn't aware, Canada requires that foreign students demonstrate that they have enough money to support themselves for the time that they enrolled. It sounds like a good plan, but:


    

  1. The amount is laughably low (it was $10,000 CAD until very recently - for reference, rent averages around $2100 a month for a 1 bedroom in my city).
    2. 

  2. The verification is only done once; the government checks if you have the funds once, then never checks again. There's an obvious loophole (that has been exploited) of people getting very temporary loans to pass the check.
    3. 

  3. The government has no interest in pursuing individuals who blatantly abuse the system - a recent estimate had about 1 in 40 people in Canada being present from overstaying visas, for example.
    4. 



My concern with the grandparents is that "supporting" their grandparents does not actually reflect all the services that they consume (healthcare, primarily), and even if it did, the government isn't going to do anything about it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That seems very strongly related, although it isn't the one I read back in the day. Thanks for sharing!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In addition to the size of the staff, you also have the costs of the game exploding; one of the interesting side effects of this is has been that anything put into the game has to become accessible to anyone who has the game (or they've wasted a lot more real money than they would have before).


A long time ago, I remember reading a definition of the 'types' of gamers; although I cannot for the life of me track it down, I can remember that some of them were as follows:


    

  1. Immersion - the feeling of being a part of the game, and the story.
    2. 

  2. Subsumption - the feeling of being a passenger, carried along by the story.
    3. 

  3. Agency/Power Fantasy - the feeling of influencing the world.
    4. 

  4. Exploration - the feeling of discovering the unknown, and finding things no one else had.
    5. 

  5. Challenge - the feeling of overcoming adversity.
    6. 



(you'd assume that with this much detail, I'd easily be able to track it down, but alas, no luck).


I am pretty sure that the strategy of making all content in the game accessible to anyone ends up alienating players who enjoy challenge and exploration. I could also see arguments as to how anyone who enjoys immersion and power fantasy would end up feeling dissatisfied too - I just don't personally find those as critical in my enjoyment of games, so can't comment.


Although it may be cherry-picking a little bit, I think it's fairly obvious that a lot of what makes some games into a sudden and surprising success is that they tap into one or more of these markets that are just not being explored by the mainstream.


    

  1. Dark Souls (and its sequels) really cannot be beaten until you 'git gud' enough to overcome the levels.
    2. 

  2. Outer Wilds explicitly lets you figure out how to beat the game on your own, with the in-game guidance being extremely minimal.
    3. 

  3. Something like Baldur's Gate 3 is extremely good at reacting to most decisions you can make.
    4. 



I think a lot of people rush to defend the plot to these games because the plot literally feels better when it's acting in support of the feeling that you want to get from the game. Unless you are a Subsumption (and possibly Immersion) gamer, you become interested in the plot when your other wants are being met.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So one of the things that I think a lot of people don't really realize is just how messed up a bunch of families are, especially in ways that aren't intuitively obvious. There's a reason that the stereotypical 'instance' of a therapist is some elderly man saying "Tell me about your mother." - the way kids are raised can really screw up their relationships with reality. Kids are fairly hardwired to love their parents; they are basically unable to conceive of the fact that their parents disliked hated abused were not ideal to them.


There are basically 2 & 1/2 ways that I have seen how kids can react to severely traumatic experiences, which boil down to what I'll call relitigation, reproduction, and repression (note that these probably have real names, I'm not a psychologist).


Relitigation


In this situation, kids basically attempt to reproduce the situation that is too traumatizing to process in such a way that they are now in control of it. The stereotypical example here is of a man who was severely beaten as a boy, so beats his wife/kids as well. This is where the stereotype of bullies having low self-esteem, or being victims, tends to come from. There was a very sad picture posted last week of a man's boss yelling at him, who yelled at his wife, who yelled at her kid, who yelled at his cat; this is that behaviour.


Reproduction


This is the "1/2" of the above (I spent a lot of time wavering on whether to include it as part of the first category); in this situation, the child in question basically 'accepts' that the situation at hand is how love is expressed, and attempts to replicate it in their own life. The standard example here tends to be the girl who was sexually abused tends to end up as someone who overtly sexualizes herself; a warning sign of sexual abuse amongst teachers and similar mandatory reporting professions tends to be kids who do sexual things to get what they want (think, for example, of a 10-year-old who begins to strip if you tell her 'no' - it sounds horrifying, but I've seen it happen).


Repression


Unlike the popular conception, repression doesn't mean completely blocking out an experience; instead, under a repressive system, a child will instead block out all emotional valence from a bad experience. From my experiences in this category, you end up with children who tell 'funny' stories that absolutely do not hit the mark. Things like:


"Yeah, I was kind of mouthy when I was 7; at one point, when I was being a brat, my parents threatened to drown me if I didn't stop swearing. I called them 'shitheads' to their face, and after 5 minutes in the sink, I'd learned my lesson."


or


"When my dad decided (at age 5) that it was time for us to learn about the birds and the bees, he got me and my younger brother to watch one of his pornos."


Although that may sound horrifying to anyone with a normal childhood, that is just sort of the way that people with highly distorted childhood's think. They can recognize that it's weird, but they tend to think of it as 'funny' as opposed to 'awful'.




So the reason I bring all 3 of these up is that all 3 of them can become, in the parlance of rationalists, 'Trapped Priors'. The problem with a lot of them is that they're self-reinforcing; someone stuck in the reproduction mindset will tend to find people who are not interested in mimicking their abusive past boring, for example. The major area in which therapy is actually useful is in breaking these patterns; in an ideal situation, a therapist will identify what the negative pattern is, identify a way to counter it, and, well, train the individual in question to do so.


The problems with it are fairly straightforward:


    

  1. The solution to a repression is not the same as a solution to a reproduction, which differs still from the solution to a relitigation.
    2. 

  2. The types aren't cleanly split; someone can easily exhibit all 3 traits, and the 'obvious' trait may not actually be the one that needs to be treated (think here of someone who was, say, consistently starved as a child; they may repress the severity of the parents' behaviour, but mentally replace their parents with their own voice telling them not to eat in modern times. Were you to attempt to convince them that it's okay to be hungry, you'd find that they'd be incredibly resistant to it, because the actual thing that you are trying to overcome is the belief that they are only worthy of human love if they are not eating).
    3. 

  3. (Mediocre) therapists have an incentive to keep clients as long as possible, instead of attempting to cure them.
    4. 

  4. The therapeutic tools used are designed to change patterns of thinking; there is nothing preventing them from changing healthy -> unhealthy, even if they are intended for the inverse.
    5. 

  5. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; the skill to identify someone who needs aid is completely independent from the skill to successfully apply therapy skills.
    6. 



I think that what we're seeing is the fairly standard loop of humans identifying a 'miracle cure-all', applying it way too broadly, and badly, and then eventually reaching the stage where we recognize it as a useful tool, and not an 'all the time' sort of thing. We've seen this before with radioactive material, and we'll see it again; it seems to be a familiar loop our brains get caught in.