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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2638 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 3, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Just a fun thought. There’s a notion that “great” contemporary “literature” ought to be appreciated along the same lines as older literature. The idea is that they are both approximately the same quality, one just happens to be newer. Hidden within this sentiment is perhaps the assumption that any time period and culture can produce literature of the same quality, you just have to find it. Why would one time period produce better literature?

But actually, a culmination of different factors led to 19th century literature culture and its great works. The culture was far more word-driven, with writing rather than imagery and speech being the primary method of communication. If you wanted to experience something far away you would read about it, and professing love to a girl far away would be done by letter. The tradition of Protestant Bible study gave birth to a rigorous study of Greek and Latin among the upper classes and an emphasis on grammar and rhetoric. Morality de-prioritized entertainment as a good unto itself and was skeptical of newspaper culture. The novel quickly became the method of massed produced artistic creation. If a young writerly man wanted fame, a hot wife, glory, and even his pick of concubines and a great state, he had to pen a novel which was then proclaimed as good by a class of well-trained critics and filtered through a moral and slightly religious lens.

So there’s very good reason to believe that no century will compete with late 18th to 19th century in the novel format. The men had more training, more cognitive capacity for the written word, more incentive, and a better filter through which literature was judged.

and professing love to a girl far away would be done by letter.

Does McSweeney's accept random submissions? I have an idea for a 19th century style letter to a girl that is just 500 words vividly and unashamedly describing my cock.

Go for it.

I'm skeptical that old literature actually is better than new literature. Many classics seem boring, bloated, and not that deep to me, but it's low status to criticize them. In any objectively measurable art or science, or even arts that are technically subjective but kinda not like photorealistic painting, 21st century skill puts our predecessors to shame. How coincidental is it that the only field where the old masters outclass us is one where the judgement is purely subjective?

You've written a plausible sounding story for with the 18th and 19th century produced better literary iron than the 20th or 21st. These factors are a rounding error to the fact that great literature was written by a tiny subset of the Western leisure class that didn't go for parties, hunting, politics, business, science, or surrogate activities; and the circles that judged their output were a self-congratulation society.

Many classics seem boring, bloated, and not that deep to me

You definitely have to watch out for the novels that were originally published in a paid by the word format.

In any objectively measurable art or science, or even arts that are technically subjective but kinda not like photorealistic painting, 21st century skill puts our predecessors to shame.

Yeah! There is always time for good Ancients vs Moderns cage fight!

So, is there some ancient knowledge we, proud 21st century people, lack?

Not lost literature, poetry and philosophy, not lost history, not top tier craft skills made obsolete by machines, but practical knowledge we could use and we just do not have?

Yes, there is lots we can still learn from as basic thing as ancient agricultural technologies.

For example - ancient fish farming. Coasts of ancient Mediterrannean and Atlantic were thickly covered with fish farm installations, better built and superior to our modern cage contraptions.

As far as history was concerned, ancient fish farming was seen as sign of luxury and degeneracy of Roman elite,if noticed at all.

For more see works of Geoffrey Kron about ancient agriculture and economy. He is as bullish on them as Lucio Russo is bullish on ancient science and mathematics.

TL;DR: Ancient agriculture was scientifically sound and extremely productive, and was superseded only with modern introduction of powered machinery and chemical fertilizers. 18th century agricultural revolution was based on revival of ancient methods. White man invented nothing than hate and racism.

Yes, Professor Kron is also die hard antiracist social justice activist, seeing side by side his denunciations of modern white racist capitalism and his praise of Roman Empire as land of freedom, equality, unlimited opportunity and world's highest standard of living

might be jarring, unless you are woke and enlightened enough to understand that racism is the worst thing in the world, and slavery is fine as long as you enslave people of all races and colors equally.

Sauce:

Ancient Fishing and Fish Farming

The most striking evidence for the importance of seafood in Greco-Roman culture comes from the remarkable development of ancient fish farming. Extensively described in the ancient sources (Varro, Rust. 3.17. 2-3; 3.17. 6-7; Columella, Rust. 8.17.12-3; 15; Pliny, H.N. 37.2), fish farming reached a high stage of technical perfection, developing techniques for spawning and rapidly raising to maturity a wide range of maritime species, including the common eel, conger eel, moray eel, several species of grey mullet, sea bass, gilthead seabream, red mullet, dentex, saddled seabream, shi drum, the angler or monkfish and the rhombus, most likely either sole or turbot, many proven highly suitable for cultivation, but only rarely farmed, or in small quantities, today (Higginbotham 1997: 41-53; Kron 2008a: 179). Freshwater ponds were even more common, so ubiquitous as to engender widespread indifference (Varro, Rust. 3.17.2-4), and fish remains suggestthat salmon, trout, carp, common bream, perch, tench, roach, and even the tilapia (Kron 2005a) were widely eaten, and many of these species very likely farmed (Kron forthcoming).

The techniques described and physical infrastructure uncovered by archaeologists are consistent with a level of technical sophistication and potential production not seen in modern Europe until the mid-1980s, with the rise of large scale sea-cage aquaculture of the grey mullet, sea bass and gilthead seabream, three of the most important ancient (and modern) farmed fish breeds. One cannot help being impressed by the number and size of the many massive hydraulic concrete fish tanks excavated along the Tyrrhenian coast (Kron 2008a: Figure 8.4), from Faleria in the North to Briatico in the South, as well as other fish-farming facilities discovered along the Adriatic, in Croatia, the French Riviera, Greece, Spain, North Africa, Egypt, Israel, and as far North as France's Atlantic coast, Germany, the Low Countries and England (Schmiedt 1972; Giacopini et al. 1994; Higginbotham 1997; Lafon 2001; Kron forthcoming). The fish tanks known to us along the Tyrrhenian coast alone represent a capacity for intensive fish farming production comparable to that of the Italian industry at the end of the 20th century.

Roman aquaculture: the techniques and agronomic importance of fish-farming in the light of modern research and practice

European aquaculture is only now beginning to farm a number of species long cultivated by the Romans, the result, one suspects, of low demand, rooted in a less adventurousness taste for sea food. Although the number of finfish species cultivated in Europe today has increased from 18 in 1981 to 40 in 2001, only 11 of these spe cies yield more than 1,000 metric tons (the product of a handful of small intensive farms) and only 5 (carp; tilapia; gilthead seabream;sea bass; trout) yield more than 10,000 tons.(34)

Even a superb foodfish like the turbot, farmed in Columella’s day, has only recently begun to be cultivated, and still yields only 4,338 metric tons per year (35). The moray eel, one of the most important of Roman farmed fish, (36) is not farmed at all today, despite its high quality and the limited supply available from capture fisheries (37). The Romans’ choices for farmed fish are all very good, and likely reflect considerable effort in testing suitable species. The sole, turbot, Gilthead seabream, striped red mullet, red mullet, European seabass, meager, anglerfish, and European eel are all ranked as excellent for taste by modern authorities (38) - and most are now beginning to be farmed (39) or have been highlighted as attractive prospects(40).

How coincidental is it that the only field where the old masters outclass us is one where the judgement is purely subjective?

Surely not coincidental, but there's a simple possible causative path: objective judgement lets us identify what characteristics of previous work were worth keeping, which lets us keep them while discarding others, which almost forces new work to be an improvement. Is it really surprising that the fields where we're making less improvement are also the ones where we're half-blindly groping?

I think the need for originality is also a constraint on new art. If you tweak the ideas behind "Light-Emitting Diode" to retain the functionality with a shorter-wavelength output, you can earn a Nobel Prize. But if you could tweak the ideas behind "War and Peace" to retain the impact with a shorter text, would you even bother? Perhaps your masterwork could be published as a Readers Digest Condensed Book under a pseudonym. This isn't because War and Peace was at some perfect local optimum of concision upon which no incremental improvement can be made, it's because the very idea of incremental improvement isn't necessarily considered an improvement in the world of literature; it's considered somewhere between "derivative" and "plagiarism" depending on how small the increment is and on how close to "the canon" the inspiration is.

The disparagement of derivative literature and incremental improvements on classic stories seems to me to be a quite modern development linked with the strengthening of copyright protections in the west. Early epics like the Odyssey were probably composed iteratively over many centuries and you can trace characters in Shakespeare's plays all the way back to Ovid. Our modern equivalents would be comic book and movie characters like Batman and the Joker, whose stories continue to be retold in (sometimes) new and exciting ways. Of course, it's still the case that the things that make one iteration of these stories better than another are less objective and more culture-dependent than something like mechanical engineering.

I imagine median people would consider the greatest achievements in architecture and painting to be from the past. With music too, many would place Mozart, Bach, Wagner, and Chopin above modern composers in their ability to express inexpressible things.

There is no objectively measurable art, apart from what people find truly beautiful and great and enriching. “Photorealistic painting”, the point of painting is not and has never been to obtain photorealism.

Yes a moral leisure class is probably necessary to create good novels but their works were consumed by much of the leisure class

Nope wasn’t self congratulatory, were many authors they did not like and whose works failed

There is no objectively measurable art

You're only thinking of aesthetic considerations. The craft of modern architects, designers, engineers, educators, bureaucratics, welders etc etc blow their premodern equivalents out of the water by any objectively measurable metric. Like, say, how much weight a bridge can support. How far an athlete can train themselves to throw a javelin. Only in totally subjective considerations is there even an argument to be had -- which I attribute to people's predisposition to ancestor worship and IAmVerySmart-signaling status games.

While I would say your point holds true for materials science, physics, and chemistry (though we didn't figure out how to make Roman concrete until earlier this year), I'm not sure what the objective measures are for architecture, design, and bureaucracy. Premodern homes built with a knowledge of the surrounding climate often require much less energy to heat in winter or cool in summer than modern homes, design seems by its nature concerned with aesthetics, and the recent growth in the number of administrators in just about every organization imaginable seems to have had no apparent benefits.

Yet, technological know-how is almost a separate domain of knowledge from ought-to. Artists don’t just show their technical skill, but they arrange things in a beautiful order.

Between recently attending a rave for my first time, and a fair bit of Joe Rogan consumption, I'm interested in what I would naively term "ritually induced altered states of consciousness". I was struck by the stimulating effect of a good DJ, some flashing lights, and being surrounded by people in a similar headspace. I was stone-cold sober, but it was better than coke. It occurred to me that the ability to induce intense emotional states (or inverse, with meditation?) through ritual is something that seems to be a constant across cultures and times. I'm thinking of stuff like glossolalia or "quaking" in certain sects of Christianity, to Buddhist meditation, perhaps even political rallies that induce patriotic/nationalistic fervor.

Does anyone have recommendations for books or other resources on this, or some scattered thoughts to share? I'd almost venture to say that this is something modern society sorely lacks, but that might be veering into culture war territory, so perhaps we'd best discuss the phenomenon itself.

Apologies if this would go better in the small scale questions thread.

So Home Depot does these free kids workshops on the first Saturday of every month. Just randomly wandered into one in October with my 2, now 3 year old daughter, and it's basically her favorite thing ever now. I bake scones that morning, we have them as a family, and then it's off to Home Depot for her to hammer and screw together another variation of what is essentially a box.

It's actually legitimately great. It's been a ton of fun for me watching her get better with a hammer or screw driver, although I usually have to get them started and finish them off for her. Then she gets to paint the thing which is usually her favorite part. Finish it off with some stickers, and she can't wait to bring it home and show it off to her mom.

It's also a ton of fun watching the other parents help their kids assemble the 4 pieces of wood that come in each kit wrong.

So yeah, it's a thing, it's free, it's a place to take your kid on a Saturday morning for an hour or so. They use their hands, gain some confidence, and walk away with something.

They'll also just give them to you to take home if you ask. Or, at least they did when I would ask for my scouts.

Are younger people less skeptical of the US government compared to older generations? I only have a small sample size but it always struck me that the boomers I know seemed more skeptical of Uncle Sam regarding privacy and foreign policy compared to people that use reddit. Or is it just reddit that tends to be more pro-US than the general population?

No forum where a majority of rising posts are deleted for unspecified reasons can be representative of anything other than the people in charge want

I think that's just reddit.

In Avatar movie, blue cat-like natives have sex via appendage which looks similar to USB cable. Is it symmetrical and allows same-sex sex, or does it support same-sex sex in some other way, maybe using an adapter?

Is it symmetrical

Considering that it allows you to "jack in" to every other animal around that world in the exact same way, I would assume that it is.

have sex via appendage

Even though (according to the Wiki) that's not actually how they fuck, the movie seemed to imply that it was (since we don't get a "proper" sex scene).

Pair that assumption with the above and you get "the natives are fucking all the animals"; that might not have been what they wanted to show, but the movie didn't give me any reason to think otherwise.

have sex via appendage

According to the wiki: "The intertwining of queues is both highly erotic and profoundly spiritual, but is not the actual act of sexual reproduction."

appendage which looks similar to USB cable

It doesn't look like a USB cable to me.

Is it symmetrical and allows same-sex sex, or does it support same-sex sex in some other way, maybe using an adapter?

It looks symmetrical to me.

Maybe better for the Wednesday thread but what are your experiences with clonazepam?

Ive taken a pill recently and it gave me a sense of calmness that will require years of meditation in a buddhist temple to acquire naturally.

I don't want to develop a benzo dependency so I might pop a pill only in the direst of scenarios such as high stakes social event or really bad life event. Just keep the door open.

Thoughts?

I've taken some benzos at time to get some sleep but while they work[1] , the sense of calm and clarity they bring doesn't compare to more .. natural and less pharmacological methods.

There's onw weird trick that brings great calm at little risk and little cost (except people will think you're weird) plus is unlikely to be abused.

Of course, really hard to pull off while single, and asking a roommate for a hand here would come across as extremely odd.

/images/16755592563604367.webp

[1]: I only ever use low dose benzos if I have withdrawal symptoms to get some sleep, or if I have to go to work next day and am too nervous to fall asleep (extremely rare). The sense of calm from them is.. rather mild. Comparing effects of low dose benzos to solid pain is like I dunno comparing a very mild breeze to a stiff wind.

It's terrific, if I had the self control to take it with moderation then I would take it all the time. (That's an AA joke)

Where I landed on drugs, and this especially applies to drugs like benzos that make you feel like everything is peachy, is that the rest of the world isn't doing them with you. Anxiety up to a point is useful to keep you from making an ass of yourself and I've seen a lot of people do this. That said, I've thought about doing the same thing and keeping one or two around for "break glass" types of emergencies. THAT said, it's the worst class of drugs you could possibly be addicted to, I think.

The only emotion that doesn’t deceive is anxiety, and anxiolytics are the most valid class of psychotropics. Benzo withdrawal is worse than alcohol as I understand it, so care is required. However some psychiatrists prescribe it to be take daily despite the possibility of tolerance.

Is its effects for you really the same type as those achieved through meditation?

I never had much apparent success with medication, but I don't think I ever stuck to a proper meditation schedule as I do for lifting.

I mentioned that more to highlight how calming it felt because I couldn't really think of any other relatable analog.

What are your favorite articles/videos on game strategy? I'm thinking of things along the lines of Who's the Beatdown? for the Magic the Gathering card game. Not looking for any particular game, just interesting strategy articles.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=QHHg99hwQGY

https://youtube.com/watch?v=8uE6-vIi1rQ

It's not really strategy, but I think the general realm of game design is pretty similar, since obviously good designers are considering possible strategies. The first link is twenty lessons a Magic game designer learnt. The second video is about "cursed" problems in game design, where cursed problems are where your game design goal has a fundamental contradiction and is basically impossible to make fun.

Related to MtG, I always recommended that article as well as Ben Stark's drafting the hard way to new players on Arena.

I also like level one, but that's not an article.

I love aggro in magic so who's the beat down was one of my favorites. And surprisingly I was the beat down less than I would have guessed.

Absorbing that lesson really improved my play but most of my favorite wins came when my opponent thought they were the beat down only to learn they were not about midway through turn 4.

For MTG, clearly 36 bears. There are some other cool explanations on that site, but none so readily capture the essence of competitive gaming.

David Sirlin's Playing to Win is a classic book on strategy as pertains to fighting games. It generalizes pretty well even for games that aren't designed with the same principles. Some parts of it are also more about the culture of winning, especially in contrast to a culture of improving.

This blog has a bunch of articles on the design of roleplaying games. The top series is not strictly about strategy, but about decomposing the interactions between players, game conceit, and in-fiction logic. I thought it had pretty interesting implications about translating player intent.

I've got a lot of disagreements (and don't particularly like the fighting game genre), but Sirlin's writing are generally pretty strong. Not all are about strategy, but even things more focused on game design still drop ideas like donkeyspace.

The Game Design Forum is even more about game design, but it's overwhelming through a logistics and strategy lens. I don't think every player encounters the game like the author expects them to (aka the Elixir problem), but it's interesting to see from the inside.

I have been playing Icarus, alone (as always).

Its hard to know where to start discussing it.

First of all I'm loving it and playing the crap out of it (185 hours logged in just 1 month).

But second of all I do not recommend playing it.

Before I get into why those two things are at odds, I'll describe the game:

Shortest: Roguelite RPG action survival.

Mid: Get dropped off on a large map, built up items to survive, complete an objective, and then leave it all behind to do it again.

Longest: The survival mechanics are pretty standard. Pickup sticks and rocks, build basic tools. Chop down trees, mine some rocks and iron for better tools. Build some better crafting stations to unlock even better tools. Fight off the wildlife, hunger, thirst, and suffocation. But all of these mechanics are tight. They aren't trying to string you out on these mechanics for weeks on end. You are meant to progress through the stages of survival relatively quickly. Because you have to start from scratch each time you drop into a new mission. There is also a set of RPG type mechanics where you gain levels, each level gives you some perk points to spend on being better at some aspect of survival, and each level gives you blueprint points, which you use to unlock new buildable items. The planet you land on (called Icarus), has some nasty storms that can tear apart most buildings. So you are either building temporary shelters to huddle in, or sitting in one spot for a while trying to gather up resources for the more expensive concrete permanent structures. The planet also has some harsh environments. There is a temperate forest/river valley starting area. There is a hot desert area, and cold snow/tundra area. Both require some degree of preparation if you want to traverse them safely. Also polar bears are scary as hell.

If that all sounds great, you know why I am playing the game so much.

But now, the bad news, and why I don't recommend the game. I'm dealing with constant performance issues. The framerate can slow to a crawl during some storms (especially fires), and I'm playing on the lowest graphical settings (and have a decent rig).

This week in particular has been a rough week for the game. They just implemented some weather changes last Friday, and the changes were messed up in some way, and as a result there are nearly constant storms. If I hadn't already been playing on a map where I had a permanent base I might have just entirely dropped the game. As it is I spent most of my time playing this past week huddled up in a shelter while storms passed by. And before the latest update the 2nd highest tier of building material (stone) could withstand all storms, but after the update, only the highest tier building material (concrete) could withstand all storms. So if you want to have any permanent structures that won't collapse after a few hours you have to build up to concrete.

Overall this game has the potential to be one of the greats in the survival RPG genre. The updates are coming out every week, and the progress has been good. I'd suggest that people who are interested in this general genre keep an eye on the game, and keep an eye out for good deals on higher end graphics cards.

I'm playing on the lowest graphical settings (and have a decent rig).

Can you elaborate a bit here? Trying to figure out what my chances would look like.

Graphics card is probably my weakest link: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070

If the groundhog sees its shadow, we get six more weeks of winter. If the groundhog doesn't, then spring comes early.

So what does it mean when the groundhog just dies?

(This is why we need the BLR back. That headline is just chefskiss.)

This or maybe this?

Hurrah! Nuclear Winter! It's about damned time.

Doesn't that release in a couple of weeks?

The website says next Friday, at least for me.

Fun article on how the Taliban feel about moving into Kabul since the end of the war

https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/en/reports/context-culture/new-lives-in-the-city-how-taleban-have-experienced-life-in-kabul/

There is another thing I dislike and that’s how restricted our lives are now, unlike anything we experienced before. The Taleban used to be free of restrictions, but now we sit in one place, behind a desk and a computer 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Life’s become so wearisome; you do the same things every day. Being away from the family has only doubled the problem.

I’ve made friends with three guys who are from our province but have been living here [in Kabul] for more than 15 years. We sometimes go to Qargha, Bagh-e Wahsh [Kabul Zoo], Sarobi and Tapa-ye Wazir Akbar Khan. To be honest, every time I go with them, they pressure me to play and listen to music in the car. At first, I was resisting, but now I have given in, with the one condition that they turn it off when passing through security checkpoints because many other Taleban don’t like it, and it’s bad for a Taleb to be seen listening to it.

Although my new friends are from good families and are good lads, there are a lot of bad circles of youths in Kabul who smoke, use drugs and do bad things, so it’s hard for us to become friends with them. Our nature and values differ, and therefore most of our friends don’t make many friends in Kabul because we don’t fit in with them. Despite this, some Taleban have now become friends with such youths and are inclined to do many bad things, such as going hookah cafes [qilun khana].

In those first days, when we sometimes came out of the ministry to Macroyan bazaar, there were a lot of women wearing indecent clothes. We anticipated they would wear hijab,[7] but after the initial days when women feared the mujahedin a lot, their attire has actually become less proper.

Now, they’ve become assertive to the extent they’re entirely heedless of us. Many of our friends say that, apart from us coming and replacing the police and officials of the former regime, little has changed from the Republic’s time in Kabul. During the first few days, many of my comrades and I hardly dared to make our way to the bazaar because of them [women]. We hoped the situation would soon get better, but it didn’t. Even worse, one of my classmates in his computer course is also a woman. We sit in the same classroom. Although I despise women that don’t wear proper clothes, nonetheless, I can’t turn my back on the bazaar or my class because of them. If they’re unashamed, let us also be so. This is the only thing I never imagined a Taleb would encounter in his lifetime.

Great read, arguably could've gone in the main thread.

“If they’re unashamed, let us also be so.”

A tungsten turn of phrase if I ever saw one; small but dense, concise but wielding the kind of power that changes the course of a nation’s history.

I wrapped up God of War (2018), which I hadn't played before. But it was on sale over at the EGS, so I figured why not?

At first, according to my nature, I kept thinking the originals were better. Especially during the hour long introductory sequence. OG God of War had you fighting with your complete control set like 60 seconds into it. I further rolled my eyes at how truly tedious travel was, and how stingy they were with fast travel. I'm assuming it's the old "elevator trick" of hidden loading screens, but all the segments where you are slowly crouching through a cave, or scrambling along a ledge, or sailing across the same lake drove me nuts. They tried to spice it up by filling it with banter between Kratos, his son, and later a 3rd character. But I found it rather hit or miss.

That being said, by the time I unlocked a second weapon, and full fast travel, I was all in. So like... 2/3rds through the game?

Of course, in my need for more God of War, and not owning a PS5, I went back to the original. I...may have had rose colored glasses. Yes, it throws you right into the action. Yes, IMHO the Blades of Chaos are a way more fun weapon than the axe in GoW 2018. Yes, the game has a much brisker flow to it without the excessive hidden loading areas. But man, that first level throws a really obnoxious "escort a fragile crate" activity at you which I forgot was a thing. And the narrow ledges you need to slowly traverse and keep your balance on while the camera uncontrollably pans causing you to now be holding the wrong direction adds nothing to my enjoyment.

It's funny how the original GoW was an immediate, almost unquestionable 10/10. The only criticism I even remember was some grumbling over the segment in Hades where there were tons of spinning blade obstacles. But I guess it was more of an action platformer, where as the new one is more of an action open world game. So marginally tedious "puzzles" and obstacles are part and parcel of the slightly different genre the original GoW was in.

I don't want to add (much) negativity here, but I'm someone who was around when the original God of War games came out and thought they were 7/10 at best, and mostly due to the good graphics, animation, and (though I hate to admit it) story. I was around 20-24 around that time and a massive gamer, so I was right around the target demographic, and I found the combat to be really dull even compared to the much older game Devil May Cry, and especially compared to its contemporaries Devil May Cry 3 and Ninja Gaiden. And God of War was one of the major popularizers of Quick Time Events in games, and I remember finding them tiresome already by that time, in how they essentially inserted short cutscenes with win buttons into combat sequences instead of actually making a combat system that's fun and flexible enough to cause these spectacular moments to come about in the course of natural combat. On top of that, the 1st game had a grand total of 3 bosses (Hydra (and don't get me started on how the Hydra popularized the awful "huge boss standing in front of a platform you're standing on" genre of bosses), Minotaur, and Ares IIRC), with 2 out of those 3 being primarily gimmick bosses that relied very little on combat for victory, when its contemporaries made it basically a standard that there'd be at least a dozen bosses with most of them being actual ways of testing the player's understanding of the combat system.

I haven't played the latest God of Wars, but I have watched a playthrough of the 2018 one, and I was surprised by how much better it looked. Moving away from the crazy action genre of the originals to a slower, more Souls-style combat genre really seemed to help; the series never did the former style well, and these recent iterations seem to be doing the latter style much better. The combat looks less visceral and more slow-paced, but it also looks like there's actually a fun sort of flow to it, with bosses that actually engage the player with it.

I don't want to add (much) negativity here, but I'm someone who was around when the original God of War games came out and thought they were 7/10 at best

94/100 Universal Acclaim

Your and my memories of God of War's reception at the time differ significantly. And I'm not entirely sure it belongs in the same category as Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden. But, what struck me most about God of War was how playable it was. Especially coming from PC games, where being able to save whenever you want is the expectation, I found a lot of acclaimed action games on console borderline unplayable. You'd regularly lose 10-30 minutes of gameplay at a chunk if you died in a difficult section. In rare cases as much as an hour, with some unskippable cutscenes thrown in to add insult to injury. God of War started you either at the entrance to the room, or a room before, tops. And there were often save points in all the places you'd really want one. There was just so much focus and polish on it being fun, with very few exceptions. The rough edges that were infrequent exceptions were standard in other games.

94/100 Universal Acclaim

Your and my memories of God of War's reception at the time differ significantly

I never said that God of War didn't receive near universal acclaim. I said I judged it as 7/10 at the time. I recall being absolutely befuddled at the good reviews it got and finding that the actual reviewers just didn't seem to care about the fun of an interesting combat system that its contemporary competitors had, but rather about the presentation and the visceral feeling of controlling Kratos as he rampaged over Greek mythological creatures. Which sorta makes sense, because game reviewers often play lots of different types of games but don't delve into any single one all that deeply and so tend to make mostly surface-level judgments.

I recently found out another Mottizen likes to dance. Curious if anyone else dances seriously?

For myself I mostly do partner dance - blues & swing right now though I used to compete in ballroom.

I've been partner dancing for almost a decade now. Mainly latin, but I've also tried my hand at Lindy Hop and Forro.

I've been toying with making an effort-post summarising the prominent styles for laymen, in the style of this post:

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9h2jbi/you_should_probably_lift_weights/

I do like contra dancing, although not enough to compete in it. I find swing dancing a fun date but not something enjoyable in and of itself.

I’m trying contra for the first time next week. What do you like about it?

I like that 1) it's a good workout 2) there's no awkwardness about whether you know the people there, know how to do it, what have you 3) you keep changing positions.

I've got a plan to dip my toe into salsa classes and other non-formal partner dances. What's holding me back is I'm making a concerted effort to clear out the backlog of loose ends accumulated from sub-diligent general living before I take up new projects and hobbies.

The primary reason I want to try partner dancing is that I've spent years going to clubs, parties, raves, festivals and other gigs and I'm fed up of the atomisation and informality. No matter the size of the crowd or the style of the music the audience were 99% locked in to focusing on the performer over the music or the other attendees, and any dancing that did happen was either self-conscious freestyling, lesser or greater degrees of going berserk, or thinly veiled dry humping.

Since you're here and it sounds like you've got some breadth of experience, how would you describe the differences in the type of people who are involved with the different styles? Any hobby drama or other funny/memorable stories?

Since I live in a university-town, all the dance scenes in the city trend fairly young, although there are definitely social differences. Salsa has more (continential) Europeans, Kizomba has more African men and 'curvy' women, the Lindy Hop scene is apparently a collection of polyamorous bisexuals, Forro has a lot of Brazilians and Portuguese.

The Latin scene is relatively drama-free, I would say.

Assuming that you're male, I can say that women love a man that can dance. Dance scenes are generally female-heavy as well so it's a great place to meet women if you can get reasonably competent (which does take time).

I notice you've put curvy in scare quotes, lol. Meeting women is a secondary but admittedly conscious goal. Nonetheless dancing is fun for its own sake. As I said it's mostly to find events that have the more structured socialising, structured steps and the different expectations that follow from that - you can't dance for a minute with a new partner and not meet them, but you can dance in a crowd for an hour and meet nobody but the barman. The gender imbalance is another drawback of all of the music-first scenes I've been around. I've lost count of the amount of times I've done a quick head count and found an 8-1 men to women ratio.

I'd be happy to try out most styles just for fun, the only ones I'd avoid are the high tempo, highly athletic ones that reward lifts and dives and suchlike.

Hah I have a ton of stories. From my experience on east coast US, Latin style dances are generally a bit more conservative and can have an element of snobbishness or elitism for new leads. A lot of competing for female attention.

Blues is the most left or woke and is harder to get into because it’s all freestyle. If you’re generally more traditional I’d recommend learning east or west coast swing, maybe trying both and going with your preference. West coast tends to have more modern music and younger folks though.

Best memories of dance are at the weekend exchanges/competitions. I’ve danced naked at a campground shower with beautiful women, stayed up until 8am dancing the whole time then getting breakfast, hooked up with women I had just met dancing that night, competed and won grants for hundreds of dollars to go to dance camps, it goes on and on. If you can find a group of close friends to travel with to these events I’d highly recommend it, easily some of the best times of my life.

That being said there’s also a ton of drama. I’d definitely avoid sleeping with too many people or dating around too much initially unless you know the person well and are serious about them. It can get real awkward and partner dance communities are somewhat small/insular unless you’re in a huge metro area.

I think the best part of dance for me though is the confidence it brings you. As a man, dancing regularly really changed the way I walk, carry myself, and interact with people, especially women. It helped me connect with my physical side which is something I find seriously lacking in modern society.

It kills me how woke the blues scenes became. I have many years of treasured memories, but my political positions stayed fixed while everyone else's moved, and it's hard to express oneself freely while also biting one's tongue all the time.

Yeah it's been pretty insane here. Big reason I don't do blues anymore. My local scene is still requiring N95 masks to go to any event...

Even after the Cochrane paper? Jeez.

I don’t think science is motivating them at this point.

Competing for female attention in latin dance totally fits my model. Here's my completely uninformed stereotypes of open classes (I assume the competitive level acts as a filter), please correct or confirm.

Rock'n'roll/Ceroc/Lindyhop: High metabolism neurodivergents with that weird blend of woke politics and retro aesthetics.

Salsa/swing: Casual singles. Divorcees dancing with unmarried tech workers and suave manlets.

Kizomba: As above but the divorcees are older, hornier and outnumber the men who are scared off by the more direct sensuality.

Tango: Trad types who like rules and following them. Etiquettists.

Ballroom: More stable relationshippers, enjoy the glamour, inclined to take the activity seriously and with all the conflicts that follow.

Street: DDR variety Asians, retired b-boys, female actual-dance-students polishing their moves.

Not sneering, I could probably fit in with nearly all of them to some degree.

Given that the activity involves dancing all night how pervasive are drugs? What's the drinking culture like? I guess the need to both be coordinated and coordinate with another person puts a natural ceiling on that aspect.

Drugs are mainly just booze and some pot. Most people are sober though as far as I can tell, albeit I’m usually drunk. People don’t care as long as you’re a solid dancer, although smoking and smelling like cigs/pot is usually frowned upon.

These seem to check out for me. I’ll add that ballroom, blues and lindy tend to have an older crowd.

Extra question, and one that might prompt another story or two: What's the - ettiquette probably isn't the right word - concerning involuntary erections? Take a closed position dance style, add an attractive woman, lower the lights and top off with sustained synchronised rhythmic movement... You don't need to be a rocket scientist to predict where that can land.

And vice versa women. Natural physical responses don't discriminate.

Yeah... the general response is that people don't mention it but then don't talk to you or dance with you again hah. Luckily I've avoided that but I have heard stories of other guys.

Unfortunately you're screwed if you get an erection! I'd recommend just trying to not go into closed or something until more comfortable.

Agreed with not rushing into closed. After dancing for a few weeks, the downstairs head stops going "oh, someone's close to us? TIME FOR SEX" and learns to chill out.

It is pretty clear to the women and to the other dudes when a new guy shows up just to pull — he gives off vibes.

Less of a problem than you might expect: even close-style dances tend not to have things that close down there.

https://aella.substack.com/p/chaos-survey-results-pt-1

Some choice gender differences:

Statements most disproportionately agreed upon by women

(number in parentheses is the difference in score between women and men)

  • I prefer written pornography to visual. (1.74)

  • I keep a journal. (1.21)

  • I would feel violated if I learned that my opposite-sex friend was imagining what I would be like to have sex with. (1.19)

Statements most disproportionately agreed upon by men

  • The primary reason I interact with Aella's web presence is a (dimly) conscious desire to do something sexual with her. (1.93)

  • I often imagine having sex with stranger I see in public. (1.79)

  • I would bang a hot 15yo if I had enthusiastic consent and a certainty of getting away with it (1.58)

I would feel violated if I learned that my opposite-sex friend was imagining what I would be like to have sex with.

It's statements like this one that make me think men and women live on different planets. Is it not fair to say that, if you're a good looking woman, almost all of the men you meet will, at some point, imagine having sex with you? Why do women not know this?

It sometimes surprises me what women don't know about men. On the other hand, every once in a while a woman will shock me by telling me about how often they experience sexual harassment or get marriage proposals, and then I realize I am also very ignorant of what it is like to be a woman.

I don't like to be around weapons of any sort (guns, bows, swords; only counting things made as weapons, not e.g. cleavers)

This doesn't surprise me now, but I was very confused as a teenager when I showed a girl I liked a nail gun my friend made that I thought was really cool and she had a negative reaction.

It does seem the case -- I'm left wondering what women think about when they are jerking off? I can count the women I've known who wouldn't be freaked out if you told them you fantasized about them on one hand -- I never thought to ask them what they fantasized about at the time, and it would be kind of weird to ask them now. So IDK -- is it just a massive blind spot?

The recurring themes seem to be about being desirable and being desired (in the way that they desire best). The countervailing horror, beyond being undesirable, is that they're being desired in all the ways they desire least.

I was a bit surprised by how horny the survey answerers were but I guess her audience really selects for that

Are you reading it right? The numbers in parens are the differences.

E.g. looking at 'The primary reason I interact with Aella's web presence is a (dimly) conscious desire to do something sexual with her.'

The male average is -0.33 (between neutral and somewhat disagree)

The female average is -2.21 (disagree)

The 'bang a hot 15yo' is -0.5 male, -2 female

So both of these questions are disagree, but women disagree harder.

Ah, I just misunderstood what the numbers meant then

I don't know why someone would lie on an anonymous survey. Really strange.

There’s no evidence that they’re lying, though.

We should just ignore these surveys, the selection effects for people who respond are much too strong. Doesn't tell us much about regular people.

I cannot endorse simping of any stripe, whether it's huffing a girl's farts or Aella's brainfarts.

Aella's web presence is manifestly great for driving attention to Aella. Not sure what anyone else gets out of it.

EDIT: Scrolled down and saw I was beaten to it lol.

They tell us about Aella's followers, and I find that mildly interesting. It explains more about the techy coomer demographic.

Sure, I more meant that it's not generalizable.

I think most of the directional correlations would probably be generalizable. Like if you see from the survey, men in Aella's demographic are more likely to enjoy visual porn than the women in Aella's demographic, you can infer men in general are more likely to enjoy visual porn than women in general. Even if it tells you nothing about the actual specific rates men in general enjoy visual porn. Or are there any correlations listed that you think would be reversed if we redid this survey but asked everyone instead of just Aella's followers?

Or are there any correlations listed that you think would be reversed if we redid this survey but asked everyone instead of just Aella's followers?

I think most of these are likely to generalize, but enough won't that it's useless to attempt to learn anything from the survey. I don't know these sorts of statistics off the top of my head, so I'd have a hard time pointing to particular results, but if you put a gun to my head then I'd focus on answers particularly likely to be related to Aella's userbase or to the nature of surveys. So here are a few that I think won't generalize:

  1. The world would be better without Christianity (women are much more religious than men)

  2. If I could live anywhere in the world without paying more... I would move (I expect men would move at greater rates)

Basically everything about socially conservative people, because I think socially conservative people who follow Aella are particularly weird and unlikely to match the broader population.

I don't really care to make predictions about the sex stuff save to say that I think the data is wrong enough to not be worth learning from.

I want to reiterate that these are totally unprincipled, and I'm basically pointing at some of the survey responses which conflict most with my intuition. In other words the survey just hasn't shifted my priors one bit.

Fair enough. To me the survey is mostly just something of mild interest, not something that I'm building world views around. And I think it could be useful as a jumping point for more rigorous study. Like you notice that "The world would be better without Christianity" demographics isn't a result you would expect, so you go do a better more unbiased survey to see if it is the truth or just a result of Aella's sampling bias.

This is a weakness of any survey conducted ever. Can you put forward a mechanistic reason why that effect would be especially bad for this specific survey?

"The selection effects are much too strong" is not true of all surveys. Sure, many select for "people who answer the phone" or "people who answer the door", but either of those categories is much more similar to the average American than "people who follow Aella."

Alright how is people who follow Aella going to confound the results of this specific survey.

It should be obvious. Anyone who follows Aella and is willing to complete (an average of) 100 questions is highly atypical relative to the average person. They'll generally be far more sex-focused, techy, liberal, young, urban, intelligent, white, unmarried, open to new experiences, etc. than the average person. This will have an enormous effect on survey results, especially since most of them are so focused on sex. It's like taking a survey on religious beliefs, but only including active scientologists. Sure, there is probably something to learn from the survey, but if you're trying to generalize to any larger population, the noise will far, far outweigh the signal.

Yep

This isn't true though - just the headline 'Statements most disproportionately agreed upon by women/men' are true across the general population. Women do like written porn more than men, men do want to 'bang hot 15yos' more than women. Which makes other, less obvious results more plausible.

Not really. It seems intuitive to me (from long personal experience of perverts and deviants, I got Gladwell's mythical 10,000 hours in) that the normal stuff and the weird stuff don't correlate. The average sexually submissive freak who is into degradation still likes football more than hockey, still puts pants on one leg at a time, still prefers Coke to Pepsi. But they're much more likely to be in favor of sexually submissive degradation shit. You can't say: well the audience prefers Coke to Pepsi, so in audiences that prefer coke to pepsi they also have a 49% incidence of liking getting spit on.

Exactly, just because it gets 1 thing right doesn't mean everything is right.

"These people don't represent the general population."

"The biggest study findings line up with what we know about the general population."

This points less towards "these people match the general population, and we can trust the findings" and more towards "these people are not so different from the general population that their most obvious results differ." There's certainly some useful data that can be extracted from these sorts of surveys, but the powerful confounding effects mean that unless you're a perfect computational machine, I think you're as likely to be misled by the data as to learn something useful.

I'm not saying all, or even most, results from this survey will generalize. But given the big results were all generalizable, it's likely that some (at least half of) smaller results will generalize too (relative to how well they would in a representative survey). And even results that don't generalize will still be interesting, because they're about a group similar to us. Yes, one should be skeptical, but "We should just ignore these surveys", based on that, is not reasonable. Also see decent-accuracy political polls with Xbox users - nonrepresentative data can be useful, although I don't think it's as useful as that paper would suggest.

The problem with surveys, imo, is a combination of: the people only answer them as well as they themselves understand the topic (which isn't very well), people not putting much effort into answering the surveys, and people treating surveys as 'things to give vaguely correct answers to', like you would a homework assignment, rather than 'serious topics my answer matter on'. When someone answers a question like 'All pedophiles (including non-offenders) should face the death penalty ' their answer isn't going to try and situate those ideas in any broader context, it's more a simulacra of attitudes than a real 'belief'. Executing non-offending pedophiles, which is a private desire, would be ... very unusual in the current justice system - especially if one (as many conservatives would) interpret someone who likes loli to be a pedophile - but nobody's considering that when answering the question. And if Joe believes 'non-offending pedos should be executed', but wouldn't actually endorse 'immediate arresting and lethally-injecting people who post on /r/ageplaypenpals' if it was on a ballot, is that a real belief? This doesn't prevent polls from being interesting, but does mean they're not solid ground to stand on.

Or take the dream question - apparently women have more vivid dreams than men -'My dreams are vivid (1.13)', 'There have been mornings where I could recall 4 or more different dreams. (1.02)'. Is this true? Is it just 'women remember dreams more, but men have equally vivid dreams they forget'? Maybe women talk about their dreams more in idle topic-agnostic chatter so end up recalling more dreams? My sense is most 'interesting' poll questions like this have causes that aren't what the poll facially implies.

But given the big results were all generalizable, it's likely that some (at least half of) smaller results will generalize too

Agreed, but even if 75% of the smaller results generalize, there's a high enough failure rate that it's very risky to update at all based on any particular survey result.

And even results that don't generalize will still be interesting, because they're about a group similar to us.

Eh... how similar though? I agree it's interesting but I don't particularly want my intuitions informed by evidence which may be quite faulty.

Also see decent-accuracy political polls with Xbox users - nonrepresentative data can be useful, although I don't think it's as useful as that paper would suggest.

Xbox users are much closer to the typical person than Aella followers are. I agree that nonrepresentative data can be useful, but at the same time, this is a very sexuality-focused person asking her sex-focused followers about sex questions, so this seems uniquely likely to not generalize.

I think we probably agree that there is some threshold of study quality below which it's not really worth paying attention to the results at all; we just may disagree on where that threshold is and where this survey lies. My threshold for survey quality, above which I actually pay attention to what it says, is very high because I think most studies generally get things wrong. I also think this survey is quite low-quality. Based on your wordings such as:

apparently women have more vivid dreams than men

it sounds like you think this survey passes that threshold, despite that question having only a 1.13 average difference between men and women. I think it is very reasonable to simply ascribe that difference to confounders. Even something simple like a difference in average age between men and women (which seems quite plausible) could easily be enough to explain that difference on its own, and there are probably ~10 other equally likely confounders that could explain it.

There's a chance that the survey result to that question is genuine, but given all the extremely powerful confounders that could push it one way or another, I think the most prudent course of action is to simply ignore it entirely and not update at all based on it.

there's a high enough failure rate that it's very risky to update at all based on any particular survey result.

Oh, to clarify, I don't think it's a good idea to take any survey result as 'true, because it's in the survey'. That's a very high standard - I wouldn't even say that about a lot of large RCTs or meta-analyses in medicine (you're not uniformly sampling them, and the characteristics of an "interesting" RCT to a random person makes it more likely to be wrong somehow) . (e.g. fluvoxamine, which a lot of rats made a massive deal over because of a few trials, ended up not showing benefit in later trials, i think). And most survey-readers are much too credulous about the results, whether it's a serious poll or a fun one like aella's. But this survey is interesting to look through and see potential associations, and then investigate them more.

it sounds like you think this survey passes that threshold

I think there's a decent (50%? idk) chance that'd generalize to the general population. Aella claims it replicates in other studies, although I didn't find any on google scholar quickly. My choice of the dreams + pedo examples was to argue that, even though such associations probably are present, I don't think they're that interesting.

Sure, I don't think you're taking the survey as absolute fact either. What I mean is that it's low-quality enough that (as an imperfect human) I don't consider it evidence at all. If I were a perfect bayesian updater then I could consider all the relevant factors, weigh hypotheses, etc. and update my beliefs by 0.01% towards believing that women dream more than men, but I'm not perfect, so it's safer to just not update them at all based on such terrible evidence.

But this survey is interesting to look through and see potential associations, and then investigate them more.

That's true, there's some value to it there, but again I'd be a little worried about it coloring my beliefs about things if I thought about it too much. This sort of data is very hard to find elsewhere, but can really color your day-to-day interpretations of how people act in real life. Since it's so hard to prove or disprove, those biases can just stick around for a long time if you let them.

If I were a perfect bayesian updater then I could consider all the relevant factors, weigh hypotheses, etc. and update my beliefs by 0.01% towards believing that women dream more than men

I don't like 'bayesian thinking' as an idea (and think 'thinking's bayesianness is overstated in rationalism). It's entirely possible to see something, and then say 'huh, that could be true, and it'd be interesting if it was', and then spend time evaluating how plausible it is / looking for more evidence for it without that corresponding to a probability. You can be smart enough to consider unlikely hypotheses without it contaminating your probabilities. And this still adds up to 'the results haven't told me anything new of meaning' for me anyway.

Even if these surveys really were 'coloring your beliefs', I think the best move would be to read so many of them that you viscerally notice the contradictions and absurdity, and then stop having them color your beliefs. Otherwise, all sorts of random things people say will 'color your beliefs', even if you don't seek them out.

More comments

I would have sex with my dad for 1 billion dollars tax free. (1.03)

Gigabased

Women in male-dominated communities like heavy metal or video games often complain about men gatekeeping them, which typically takes the form of a man aggressively demanding that a woman name three songs by the band whose T-shirt she is wearing.

What women don't realise is that sometimes this gatekeeping is carried out for the woman's own protection, to avoid the woman being accused of tacitly endorsing neo-Nazism and white supremacy, however unintentionally.

/s /s /s

Some of those women just have personality disorders. I remember the first time I was accused of "Gatekeeping" was in 2012.

A woman asked me to teach her to play magic and to " help me build a deck or whatever." I said it's best to learn with something preconstructed before building your own, let's sit down together with some starter decks, and she immediately accused me of Gatekeeping by not letting her make her own deck. Then she said I was just like her Father and her Brother. Then she called me a Niceguy and then a Creep. I guess she was more interested in bullying male geeks than actually engaging in any geeky hobbies.

That's how you know it's time to give someone the cards and knowledge to make a good standard deck and then introduce them to your modern or legacy (or vintage if you're old/rich).

You know, I think of how I have conversations about mutual interest with my friends. Like say we both just played a game. It immediately launches into how far did you get, did you find the secrets that I found, what difficulty did you play on, etc. Just some fun dick measuring banter. At some point the tide turns and it goes from dick measuring, to earnestly trying to learn a thing or two you might have missed from the other person.

Alas.

I don't even see it as dick measuring. More like trying to figure out how much shared experience of the game I have with them, when I do that.

I used to play ranked CSGO at a high level and that means for every 1000 male players there was 1 female player.

The problem being the females used to be universally much worse at the game than their elo. Reason being they usually have high level guys willing to play with them and help them go up the ranks. Lingo for doing this was called boosting.

All female players I came across barring none were boosted to oblivion and that made their teammates frustrated. People berate and roast their teammates anyways regardless of demographic, females just got female specific insults thrown their way instead of being called a faggot. Women interpret this as hostility specifically towards them when in reality everyone gets their fair share of hostility. Thats common within all male dominated hobby groups, girls are just not used to those dynamics. When you call your teammate a fucking idiot, its just that he was being a fucking idiot, its not personal.

Thats common within all male dominated hobby groups, girls are just not used to those dynamics. When you call your teammate a fucking idiot, its just that he was being a fucking idiot, its not personal.

Certainly in online games in my experience there seems to be little correlation between being a fucking idiot and being called one. The correlation is usually them doing something the other person did not agree with.

I've been called an idiot for piloting a Centurion (a very non-meta pick at the time) because it is my favorite mech. I am playing for fun, they care about winning. We have different goals. Berating teammates is one of the most most annoying parts of online gaming, and I used to play rugby! And online gamers (or some of them at least) manage to be much more committed dicks over a fun bunch of pixels than a bunch of testosterone fueled macho men risking broken bones. Online gaming is I think worse than other male dominated hobby groups in this respect because of the anonymity and distance. and because some people get so attached they think it is more important than it actually is.

It's just a game. If someone messes up, it's ok.

because it is my favorite mech. I am playing for fun, they care about winning.

Well then play single player. People playing meme vehicles and doing badly in them in competitive online games where you require cooperation to win are very annoying, and using the word 'idiot' may even be appropriate. After all, typically the team that loses is punished with rewards, thus anyone not pulling their weight is messing it up.

Nah, it isn't. I try to win within the context of each match but if they want to run cookie cutter builds that are super efficient but boring that is entirely their look out. I won't call them idiots for it if that is how they have fun, I just want the same courtesy in return. Having different priorities within the context of the game does not make one an idiot in any way shape or form.

super efficient but boring

I really don't get how that game works and I'll take it at your word that such a situation is possible.

I mostly play War Thunder where there isn't such a thing as a 'super efficient but boring' build. I guess you could say that about attack helicopters that theoretically can destroy the entire enemy team within 30 seconds, but it's a quasi simulation so if you play them the there's going to be air defence missiles closing in on you at 3-5 machs and that'll be that.

From the other side, if a game has a competetive mode, you expect your teammates to actually try to win. The teams result affects your elo. I was very high ranked so that wasnt much of a problem. But if you are playing for fun stick to casual mode.

One twist to these kinds of dynamics, as someone who was quite high ranked in a couple of games myself, is that berating your team mates is a poor decision just on the strategy level. You can maybe if you have a good rapport established, suggest other players do something else, especially when citing some game reason, I don't know CS GO but maybe a gun choice is poor because it doesn't fit as well into the team composition this game rather than just being a dumb idiot choice in general. If they push back at all it's pretty much a losing play to continue to antagonize them. You really can go up a few ranks in team base competitive games just by minimizing the number of times your team mates tilt.

is that berating your team mates is a poor decision just on the strategy level.

In my experience in Red Orchestra 2, playing as a squad leader and berating bad campers so they'd stop hiding and go assault the objective, in worst cases summarily executing them for 'cowardice' kind of worked.

It's also fairly in character - summary execution for failure to carry out orders was a thing in the Red Army.

In other games, explaining why what they're doing is stupid is usually enough - no need to call them idiots.

Sure, but that doesn't mean everyone has to be in whatever the meta pick is. That makes it boring. I'm still going to try to win in each game, but I'm not going to only be a missile boat or a light speedster just because it's meta if I don't enjoy that.

Competitive or not, unless you're playing for money it's competition for fun. And as per the lore a good chunk of people should be in boring work horse mechs (in my example at least). I might as well say, if a game is based on lore of some kind, you expect your teammates to adhere to that.

But the difference is I don't call them idiots for adhering to boring (in my view) cookie cutter builds. I let them do their thing, even though arguably it also makes the game more boring for me. Because it's their choice.

I've been called an idiot for piloting a Centurion (a very non-meta pick at the time) because it is my favorite mech. I am playing for fun, they care about winning.

MWO? I had a good time without being berated once upon a time, but I hear the player base has enormously shrunk since then. I think as it shrinks, it just gets sweatier and sweatier.

Indeed, and it was hit and miss back in the day. I haven't played in a decent amount of time though to confirm if it is better or worse now.

In my experience, there is little correlation between how one perceives their own performance, and how a neutral ovserver would. Non-Asian people tend to overestimate their capability, which is in psychology called Illusory superiority.

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