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Notes -
American Compass has a new article complaining about the decline of the Summer job:
The article notes one reason why:
This might lead you to wonder if maybe you should learn something from the wealthiest racial group in America. But no, the author doesn't suggest that. Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?
This is the same kind of error Leftists make when they see that kids whose parents took them to art museums have higher incomes than kids whose parents didn't and conclude that it means we need to subsidize art museums. In both cases, genetic confounding is ignored. But while the left fetishizes education and high-class culture, the right fetishizes hauling boxes and cleaning pools.
None of this is to say that summer jobs are necessarily bad. If your teen is rotting his brain with electronics 16 hours a day, kicking him out and telling him to get a McJob is probably gonna be good for him. But if he's well adjusted, does well in school, and has lots of friends, there's no reason to make him work manual labor because someone conservative writer who attended a third-rate university told you it's an "American folkway." It isn't, by the way. John Adams said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." It wasn't "I must study politics and way so my sons can work a cash register and be in touch with the working-class."
The problem with systems is that they can be gamed in a way that takes the joy, the fun, and even the intellectual work out of it for everyone else. One of the reasons new multiplayer games are a lot more fun to play than old ones is that for the first few weeks after a game is released, or while it’s in beta, the nasty people, the min-maxers, the forum theorycrafters, have yet to ruin everything by Excel spreadsheeting statistical models of damage and critical chance and elemental resistance until they derive, mechanically, the ‘most efficient’ build, after which everyone adopts the new meta, increasingly of course because even the developers now design to it (see World of Warcraft’s designers building raids with the expectation that players will play the most meta builds, with all the most advantageous mods/addons). Why bother experimenting, playing, using your own intelligence when someone else who gamed the system with the ‘meta’ will curbstomp you for 1/10th the effort.
The problem with meritocracy is precisely that everyone except the underclass and the generational super rich is required to participate in it. Don’t, and you will be left behind. If you are a doctor and want your children to be doctors (an ancient professional right, just as the son of a blacksmith might become one), you will probably have to work them to the bone because they will be competing with every son and daughter of every sniveling, striving pauper who harbors the same ambition for their children.
Of course it shouldn’t be so. Let us reserve 75% of medical school places for the children of doctors. Perhaps 85%, even. Of course the child of an accountant should have it easier becoming one than some random person. AI changing all this stuff aside, it’s a perverse system that forces the children of good families into torturous over-education just to maintain their own standard of living.
A big part of the reason Americans voted for Trump is because we were tired of the rotten policies of the meritocracy. I wanted an heir. Those chosen because they tried so very hard at school failed their country.
What downsides of occupational castes do you foresee, and how did you come to the conclusion that they would be a net-improvement?
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That's an artifact of playing Number Shooters (where enemies are transparently walking sacks of hitpoints you're trying to subtract), or Number RPGs/looter shooters where you're just trying to make Number Go Up. Everything can be easily reduced to metrics like DPS, to the detriment of having a game at all.
I'm grateful that I prefer my games to operate in a manner that obfuscates the fact that it's all 1s and 0s on a storage drive, and which remain fun even if you're not playing them like you're a glorified SAT-solver.
People find SAT-solving fun, a classic example is the game Sudoku.
If you are not into it then you are not into it, but the game of building the meta, thus meta gaming itself can be fun, for people like me at least.
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No, that can happen to any game. Call of Duty 1 and Insurgency, for example, everyone knows the spawns and the approximate travel times, so have fun eating a rocket or grenade within 5 seconds of spawning and running out.
COD and Insurgency, while not quite as "Number Shooter" as say, Destiny, are still not that far.
You have small maps, predictable spawns and player behavior, and a constrained set of weapons. Said weapons can be somewhat easily modeled with DPS being the only really relevant property.
I play a lot of Arma, and you're not going to be able to do that. The bigger the playing field, the wider the space of strategies, the more simulationist the modeling..
You will have a hard time min-maxing Arma for the same reason nobody has solved IRL war, despite the obvious extreme optimization pressure.
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If I want my (hypothetical) kids to be doctors, then I'd need to quite a bit of faith that there are Amish communities running around in 2050. I really don't see how it's feasible to be entering that profession otherwise, that's just not the way things are going.
One might argue we're already over Peak Doctor, we just don't know it yet. I certainly wouldn't want to even be just a bright-eyed student entering med school in the Year of Someone's Lord 2025.
At the end of the day, I'm strongly of the opinion that there's no point in worrying about the state of education if you're someone who has only young kids or no kids at all. Formal education as we know it will very likely not exist by the time they'd be old enough for it, and if it does, it'll likely just be entirely signaling as opposed to 75% signaling.
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Not sure if you're being serious but if you are, it's kind of funny to see a Jewish person like you advocate in favor of just the sort of anti-meritocratic policies that would have locked many of your European ancestors out of social advancement 200 years ago.
To be fair, I think that "I got mine, now it's time to pull the ladder up" is a perfectly sensible strategy from the individual point of view, and I'm not criticizing you for it if you do have such a strategy. It's just not a strategy that extends well to a global imperative for all society, for obvious reasons.
She's not that religious and there was always the baptism loophole.
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Jews have been bankers for far longer than modern meritocracy has existed. In any case, given the probably twenty or thirty fold increase in the number of white collar jobs created since the Industrial Revolution (on a per capita basis, let alone overall), some degree of meritocratic advancement was always inevitable. Even in 1400 someone very smart of humble birth wasn’t necessarily tied by fate to that origin - social advancement is a feature of all human society. As the total number of certain jobs increases, of course there’s space for people to move up the ladder.
But the rigorous nature of our meritocracy, combined with slower economic growth and elite overproduction, has created more perverse incentives. The only way out - the only way to protect children - is either a lottery system (structurally bad in so many ways) or some kind of hereditary structure, even if only in part.
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It’s always been weird, because rafa would lose enormous amounts of status in such a system. Right now the PMC, doctors bankers lawyers are at the top of the status pyramid because it’s their bourgeois regime. Replace it with rigid generational classes, and rafa’s title and status would be downgraded to ‘banking clerk‘. Just like it was in the good old days. And rafa works like 60 hours a week or something, which is huge, but most people do not feel this pressure, and they don't need to be "liberated" from it/re-enslaved in a guild by the revolution.
What's a "rafa"?
@2rafa
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Cries in DOTA2...
Dota is arguably one of the multiplayer games that deals best with this - just by cranking the complexity up so high, it takes the min-maxers weeks or sometimes months after a patch until the meta has settled completely. And even then, individual disposition/skill can still make non-meta strategies very viable, because the game is overall pretty well balanced.
Now, you can argue the game was more fun 20 years ago, when played with 9 friends sitting in the same room, with nobody having any idea what they were doing... but that's probably nostalgia.
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This strategy guide for DOTA2 players is the best around. Hope that helps!
I had a friend who straight up quit Dota 2 because of how negatively it affected his mood and mental well being. I never let myself get too frustrated but the tryhards in ranked are obnoxious to play with so I usually just play turbo as mid ogre and hit Q and 4x multicast (multicast is pure skill and zero luck fight me).
I hope I am never in the same game as you. Either with you or against you...
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If a game gets worse when you play the meta then it's just a shallow, badly designed game.
There's been some controversy over how AI has impacted top level Chess and Go, but my impression is that top players of those games still find them enjoyable and worthwhile, even though many hours of AI study are required to succeed at the top professional level in both games now.
I play a lot of fighting games, which for the most part only get better and more fun as you get deeper into the meta. Learning the meta gives you more tools and options to integrate into your gameplay, but because the game has inherently unpredictable elements (twitch reactions, making reads on your opponent, etc), they always stay fresh and it's impossible to fully "solve" them.
If a game gets worse when you play the meta then it's just a shallow, badly designed game.
David Sirlin's Playing to Win is the canonical essay on this point. His day job was balancing console fighting games, but he also develops viciously competitive two player board games as a side gig.
From the essay:
The thing is, this works okay if you can keep the low-level players and the high-level players apart. But a) that doesn't work for real-life friend groups and b) it means you're either stuck in the little leagues forever or you have a long, long, hard grind before you can play with the experts. Thus rafa's original point, which is that if you open everything up to maximum competition with everyone all the time, only the monomaniacal grinders will have any fun.
Weak player != scrub. In the weak sense of the word, the Scrub is someone who has no interest in gitting gud. Sirlin mostly uses the term in the stronger sense that the Scrub is someone who does not want to play the game that competitive players are playing because they consider some expert tactics (like throws in console fighting games) that are clearly permitted by the rules and considered a key part of the game by competitive players to be unfair. You see a bit of this in competitive bridge with the debate about exotic conventions in competitive bidding, but in general weak but competitive players play against strong opposition and hope to learn from the experience.
With the notable exception of contact sports where too large a skill gap creates an unacceptable risk of injury, the size of acceptable ability gap for social and competitive play is the point at which the weaker player never wins anything at all. In chess that is about 400 ELO points, but in bridge the luck element and more granular results (you play about 7 hands an hour) means that it is the difference between a decent club player and a world champion. I know several people who play racket sports socially in groups where the weaker players never win a match but win enough points/games to keep things interesting. You can cover an even wider range of abilities if the game supports handicapping. I don't know how large this gap is in console fighting games.
What you can't do is allow a true scrub to play against anyone who isn't playing the same crippled game that he is.
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The issue with viciously competitive games is that they are attractive mostly to viciously competitive players. A game that is designed with "play to win" in mind doesn't necessarily accommodate those who "play to play".
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Yep, I link people to that book all the time.
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Absolutely right but getting to be a doctor, academic, high-ranking officer, lawyer isn't a game. It's not designed for fun. Becoming a doctor is one of the least fun things I can think of.
Does Korean hyper-intensive education of young people really pay off? Well it's a highly developed advanced manufacturing powerhouse. But we can't be sure that the extra stress and strain of intensive meritocracy is helpful. 90% of their edge could be from doing good industrial policy, not wrecking their economy, having a population of high-IQ Koreans... Perhaps Korea would do better with a less stratified economy, more emphasis on zero-to-one innovation, more start-ups and entrepreneurship rather than chaebols eating everything.
Perhaps shredding the nerves of young people with high-intensity tests and competition (I've seen this happen with some Chinese kids) is just too much meritocracy, I think that's 2rafa's main point.
I think that is the way for the economy to survive, instead of emulating Japan which in the 80s was the Coming Economic Global Superpower (remember the movies about Japanese companies buying up America?) but look at where it is today.
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This sounds right, but is it true?
Chess is a famously enduring centuries old game, the goto example of refined design which even you cite. Yet I think your impression about it is wrong. Basically every GM has a quote about how high level play is a boring memory game. And 960 became popular for a reason. It's not entirely unfun, but it's a lot less fun (and arguably less entertaining) than 1500 level play.
Football is celebrated as one of the best ball games ever created and enjoys popularity on the scale of the whole human race. It's well known for it's upset outcomes and the general unpredictability to the last minute. And yet, it too has a well known problem where mid to high skilled play can be incredibly boring 0-0 matches where nothing happens because a dominant strategy at those levels is to play quite defensively for most of the match and aim for a last minute killing stroke.
Motorsport is well known for its pattern of very long periods of boring dominance intermediated by legendary high stakes races where it's anybody's game. And that's despite the best efforts of its organizers to tweak the rules to prevent dominance as much as possible. It seems to constantly naturally arise out of the business dynamics of the companies involved and the technical characteristics of the cars varying over time.
My theory is that the level of fun at meta level play is actually not a common or required characteristic of good games. The sporadic entertainment value they provide is what's selected for at those levels, alongside fun for the median player.
Fighting games are actually like this: it is fun to watch high level players and fun to play the game at an intermediate level yourself, but whether or not the high level players enjoy themselves is I think immaterial to their success.
This is also true of all the above: playing chess with friends, a pickup footie, or racing your buddies in lemons is a lot of fun. And GM galaxy brained moves, Champions League upsets and F1 drama are fun to watch and talk about.
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That's pretty dramatic hyperbole if you ask me. You can optimise the fun out of any game. Chess and go grandmasters often burn out, as do many esports players, when they reach the skill ceiling and their motivation becomes extrinsic instead of intrinsic. Esports players bitch all the time about how playing professionally has impacted playing for fun because they can't help but optimise for success, they can't just relax and fuck around like they used to. Fighting games are great for meta because of the reasons you mention, but even they have ceilings.
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Cries even worse in DOTA2...
Cries in League of Legends...
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I would counter that lots of games are not meant to be played for mastery. They’re meant to be played for fun, and that might mean some self-expression by picking items you think look cool, or trying to do silly things that probably won’t work, or just playing infrequently and not getting good. It’s not fun if playing with less than maximal seriousness means you get constantly steamrollered by the meta people. At least they should be on a different server.
I’ve had this problem in real life too - often your friend group picks up something like table tennis or a new fps and it’s great fun but after a few weeks one or two people have knuckled down and got good, and now it’s no fun for anybody else because you have to play 1v2 or 1v3 even to have a chance.
With games it’s tricky because the set of your players who are mastery-oriented are going to overlap a lot with the set of loyal fans who set the culture and promote your brand, so you can’t suppress them and you will end up being disproportionately affected by their vision whether you like it or not.
Not to mention that quite often such players infest even non-gaming forums (including The Motte!) and viciously attack anyone who suggests that the non-competitive version of the game (usually the single player campaign) should not be held to the same artificial limitations put there for the competitive players (eg. making RTSes depend heavily on actions per minute because the player AI has been intentionally left braindead).
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Well, they're the same thing for me (and a lot of other people too). I'm not having fun if I'm not trying to attain mastery, so I pick games where playing them at a high level of mastery is also fun.
Yeah, if you're playing in a social setting you want to pick games that will work well for everyone obviously.
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