Cipheron on 15/9/2021 at 11:17
Quote Posted by Azaran
<Asking Hunter-Gatherers Life's Toughest Questions>
I love how concrete (vs abstract) those answers are. What are the most important things in life? Hunter-Gatherer: Meat, Honey, Corn Porridge. There's kind of a mythology that primitive people are extra-spiritual, but it's largely romanticized and not born out in fact, and the romanticization can impact the scholarship. An example was exposed by the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who analysed the actual practical reasons for the 'totem' system in north american indian societies. These were assumed to be all mystical and religious in nature, but in practice, what the assigned animals did was merely sanction inbreeding: you took on the animal totem of you father, and on marriage, women took on the animal totem of their husband, in a common system. Basically you were forbidden to marry someone with the same totem. So it's like a sub-tribal system for minimizing inbreeding. I think it was also common that your totem group was prevented from eating your totem animal, which also serves a regulatory role in preventing any one group from monopolizing the hunt.
(
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=481)
Note how (relatively) primitive people's are extremely concrete in their interpretations
Quote:
Dogs and chickens (pp. 81-82):
Q: What do a chicken and a dog have in common?
A: They are not alike. A chicken has two legs, a dog has four. A chicken has wings but a dog doesn't. A dog has big ears and a chicken's are small.
Q: Is there one word you could use for them both?
A: No, of course not.
Q: Would the word "animal" fit?
A: Yes.
Fish and crows (p. 82)
Q: What do a fish and a crow have in common?
A: A fish — it lives in water. A crow flies. If the fish just lies on top of the water, the crow could peck at it. A crow can eat a fish but a fish can't eat a crow.
Q: Could you use one word for them both?
A: If you call them "animals", that wouldn't be right. A fish isn't an animal and a crow isn't either. A crow can eat a fish but a fish can't eat a bird. A person can eat fish but not a crow.
...
Illiterate (oral) subjects identified geometrical figures by assigning them the names of objects, never abstractly as circles, squares, etc. A circle would be called a plate, sieve, bucket, watch, or moon; a square would be called a mirror, door, house, apricot, drying-board. Luria's subjects identified the designs as representations of real things they knew. They never dealt with abstract circles or squares but rather with concrete objects.
...
Subjects were presented with drawings of four objects, three belonging to one category and the fourth to another, and were asked to group together those that were similar or could be placed in one group or designated by one word. One series consisted of drawings of the objects hammer, saw, log, hatchet. Illiterate subjects consistently thought of the group not in categorical terms (three tools, the log not a tool) but in terms of practical situations — 'situational thinking' — without adverting at all to the classification 'tool' as applying to all but the log. If you are a workman with tools and see a log, you think of applying the tool to it, not of keeping the tool away from what it was made for — in some weird intellectual game. A 25-year-old illiterate peasant: 'They're all alike. The saw will saw the log and the hatchet will chop it into small pieces, If one of these has to go, I'd throw out the hatchet. It doesn't do as a god a job as a saw' (1976, p. 56). Told that the hammer, saw and hatchet are all tools, he discounts the categorical class and persists in situational thinking: 'Yes, but even if we have tools, we still need wood — otherwise we can't build anything'
This also reminds me of a debate I've had before, about religion. For religion, i've had a few people try and tell me that ancient people knew that heaven, hell etc represented "other dimensions" and not actual physical places related to Earth. I think this is heavily ret-conning how ancient peoples viewed the world. I have zero doubt that ancient people believed God was literally up in the sky and that the Devil was literally down under the ground. Even for the Day of Judgement, it mentions the dead rising, physically, from their graves to be judged. And people in The Bible who are the chosen of God literally rise into the sky "ascend to heaven". i had a similar discussion once about Norse paganism's World Tree which supports both Earth and the Heavens. The same argument: the other person said that "of course" the Norse didn't believe it was an *actual tree*, but was a metaphor and they actually thought of those places as "different dimensions". I'm ... not sure ancient people even had the concept of "dimensions" the way we have it now. I'm much more inclined to believe that when the Norse said the rumblings at the base of the world tree caused earthquakes and that the world tree held up the stuff in the sky, they were being absolutely literal in that belief. The World Tree was conveniently placed in the far north, where nobody could go.
Azaran on 15/9/2021 at 20:27
Quote Posted by Cipheron
An example was exposed by the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who analysed the actual practical reasons for the 'totem' system in north american indian societies. These were assumed to be all mystical and religious in nature, but in practice, what the assigned animals did was merely sanction inbreeding: you took on the animal totem of you father, and on marriage, women took on the animal totem of their husband, in a common system. Basically you were forbidden to marry someone with the same totem. So it's like a sub-tribal system for minimizing inbreeding. I think it was also common that your totem group was prevented from eating your totem animal, which also serves a regulatory role in preventing any one group from monopolizing the hunt.
Fascinating, I had no idea, but it makes sense.
Quote Posted by Cipheron
This also reminds me of a debate I've had before, about religion. For religion, i've had a few people try and tell me that ancient people knew that heaven, hell etc represented "other dimensions" and not actual physical places related to Earth. I think this is heavily ret-conning how ancient peoples viewed the world. I have zero doubt that ancient people believed God was literally up in the sky and that the Devil was literally down under the ground. Even for the Day of Judgement, it mentions the dead rising, physically, from their graves to be judged. And people in The Bible who are the chosen of God literally rise into the sky "ascend to heaven". i had a similar discussion once about Norse paganism's World Tree which supports both Earth and the Heavens. The same argument: the other person said that "of course" the Norse didn't believe it was an *actual tree*, but was a metaphor and they actually thought of those places as "different dimensions". I'm ... not sure ancient people even had the concept of "dimensions" the way we have it now. I'm much more inclined to believe that when the Norse said the rumblings at the base of the world tree caused earthquakes and that the world tree held up the stuff in the sky, they were being absolutely literal in that belief. The World Tree was conveniently placed in the far north, where nobody could go.
Yeah, case in point, the Greeks and Romans in late antiquity viewed the planes of the gods as part of the visible cosmos; i.e., you had the earth (the sublunar realm), followed by the 7 spheres of the planets (where their respective deities dwelt), and then the realm of the fixed stars, &c
Cipheron on 16/9/2021 at 02:52
Quote Posted by Pyrian
That video is so bad. Counterpoints:
[video=youtube;pE3TjauWcow]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE3TjauWcow[/video]
I didn't find any of those counter-points convincing at all.
For example at 11:30 he takes umbrage at the "Earn Serious Cash" promise of the Roblox website.
So his argument is whether that the construct "make games, share them with your friends, reach millions of people, earn serious cash" is an exploitative promise. He says that if you just took off "earn serious cash" then it *wouldn't* be exploitative, and then says that therefore ... adding back in the words "earn serious cash" can't possibly be exploitative, if you would have done the other bits already.
Sorry, but this is just a really terrible argument, it's borderline incoherent. Everything he said before that was vapid platitudes and meaningless sound-bites, and then his first actual argument was just utter bullshit.
I could make the analogy of gardening. Some people garden for fun, and that's not exploitative. By this idiots logic, if I said "do gardening for me, AND EARN SERIOUS CASH" and no cash is forthcoming, I'm not being exploitative, because some people garden just for recreation. Hell, since I (by this guys logic) asked an *avid gardener* to do it, it's not exploitative to add the fake cash promise on the end, since that guy would likely have spent his time gardening anyway. So, the people gardening for me who didn't get the promised paycheck, they should feel grateful to me because i provided the tools and garden for them to play gardening in. bad logic, and literally the same argument he just made.
By his exact argument, since i could tell you to potter in my garden without offering money, asking you to garden for free, then how could it be exploitative to get you to do my gardening by promising you money that I have no intention of delivering? You're gardening for no money either way, so the promising of money can't have added an exploitative twist. <= This logic doesn't add up, since the expectation of cash heavily influences behavior, which is a fact of life that this guy's argument entirely depends on us pretending isn't a thing.
Also, he makes the argument that since shit sucks in Roblox and it fucks you over (the problem with discoverability) it's important life lessons, so beneficial to the user, so it's not exploitative. But ... the promise was that you're going to reach millions of players. Even if failing is a valuable life-lesson that doesn't mean the person who set you up to fail with false promises isn't at fault. This is like saying that getting scammed teaches you the value of internet security, therefore scammers are the good guys, or at least morally neutral.
I'm not up for watching the whole video but if the rest is as convincing as the first quarter I'm not sure I should bother.
EDIT: i'll also point out that at the start of the video there was an odd bit, where he did the old "I usually love this guy's work" bit to make his critique sound more credible, but then ... he gets confused about the *existence of the channel* People Make Games, calling it a "company" and acting like he doesn't know what that is. It's not a "company" it's a Youtube channel. At the time I let that slide but having watched a bit more it seems like he whole thing is just word salad and this guy doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about.
It's calling damning with faint praise especially the way he calls guy's work a "quote unquote 'investigation' ". As if this fucknucker did any actual investigation. Basically he's just responding to the content of the original video and saying "i don't agree, saying 'earn serious cash' is fine". I didn't see ANY point where this guy pointed to any external source so far as part of his contradiction of the original video, at this point in the video, 1/4 of the way through the thing. He's just spinning the same points from the original video then spinning word salad around it to say it's ok.
One of his points was literally "at this point the guy sounds angry, like he has an agenda. Ha! gotcha there!" as if that disprove the claims.
And looking at the comments there's this one:
Quote:
The entire concept of Roblox makes me think less of a workplace and more of an amusement park where the rides are created by guests. Sure you only have tickets for the amusement park instead of money, but you kinda knew that going in.
So we're back to the "it's not really work" argument. So if you were an engineer working on actual amusement park rides then it's not really work and they don't have to pay you because they gave you a ticket to ride the other rides? So you "knew that going in" that you'd only get tickets for the rides for your labor? That's plainly contradicted by the phrase "earn serious cash" which isn't "earn monopoly money you can only use on the rides". Also "you knew that going in" what? the little kids did? When they read "earn serious cash" they were supposed to know up-front that this wasn't exactly aligned with the truth?
Gimme a break: "i know we promised you a cut of the take in CASH if you built a ride and a lot of people rode it, just look how many people there are here. But, the fine print is that we actually pay you in *ride tokens* not cash. Didn't we make that clear at the start? Sorry must has slipped my mind. Sure, we'll cash out your ride tokens for you, but only if you have a BIG stack of ride tokens, and we won't give you that much cash for them. After all, they're just ride tokens, right?" So this is getting to a point made in the counter-points video that lots of online platforms have their own credits, and you should just know that's not equivalent to cash you can pull out of the system, so paying them in scrip therefore isn't exploitative. But ... the site uses the word "cash". That's deceptive business behavior aimed at children.
Even though the guy calls it an "opportunity" what he's missing here is the classical economic concept of ***opportunity costs***. As in, if you were tricked into learning Roblox coding because you thought there was a career / entrepeneur opportunity there, but it turns out that there isn't then that's NOT an "opportunity" since you had to make a choice to do that instead of learning something else. Note that parents are sending their kids to paid Roblox developer courses that cost actual money. That's not just "playing a video game" that has a chance of making money.
Here's another youtube comment:
Quote:
You mentioned Roblox being a good opportunity to teach children that just because someone promises you the moon doesn't mean that they will deliver on that. If Roblox is promising anything and not delivering on that while simultaneously being financially enriched by that child's efforts then, for me, that's exploitative on its face.
So that reinforces my argument. Hoeg is claiming that since being lied to by Roblox is a good learning experience, then Roblox being liars *isn't* exploitative. I have a serious problem with this argument, it's back to the "being scammed is good for you so scammers aren't exploitative" bit.
EDIT2: also, if you look at one of the points he contradicts, it's about company scrip. It's about 45 minutes into the video. Smith argued that Robux is like scrip, since you can only spend it inside Roblox, so it keeps your capital inside the Roblox eco-system and thus enriches the company (since they don't have to pay out the agreed value).
So Smith (original video) makes the point that scrip is used because it "enriches the company". The guy in the counterpoints video then disputes that and says "scrip DOESN'T enrich companies" he claims it "leaves the company poorer". Hoeg's argument is barely worth even giving time to reply to it. He says that scrip is issuing a bit of paper, and then taking that paper back, in exchange for e.g. "a bag of oatmeal". since the company had to pay for the oatmeal, their cash-on-hand decreased, thus the company is now poorer. However, this is plainly an idiotic argument, because it's just totally ignoring all the context connected to the transaction. The company doesn't just *give you the oatmeal* it's part of a transaction where the company gains the value of your labor, and then onsells that to customers to make a profit. Additionally, the cost of the scrip-transaction doesn't exist in a vacuum, you have to analyze the net gain *compared to the alternative* to determine whether or not the *practice of using scrip* actually enriched the company or not.
Say I give you $50 of monopoly money, and then take it back and give you "$50 worth" of oatmeal, but this oatmeal only cost me $20 because I bought wholesale. Sure, I'm "out $20" in that circumstance. HOWEVER, what we're contrasting it with is what would have happened if you DIDN'T pay in monopoly money, and thus had to actually pay $50 in cash. So yes, the company is $30 richer than they *would have been* if they didn't pay in scrip. This isn't exactly rocket science to see the original guy is right here, and Hoeg's argument doesn't make any sense.
Hoeg claimed the original video's guy had "an agenda" but it's clear Hoeg is the one with the agenda, making utterly ridiculous arguments like that.
