Lu Xun
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On 10/11/2019 at 8:16 AM, Noctis Anarch Caelum said:
Not really, I'm more open minded than most. I can think of a lot more people who have very set viewpoints and think everyone who doesn't agree with them is wrong. The most blatant cases being those who always believe the government version of events as always right & think anyone who questions it is always wrong.
There's a difference between being skeptical of government claims and going simply "if the government says it's true, it must be false". There's definitely government skulduggery in many affairs, and media sources should be approached critically. But that doesn't mean that if the government says 1+1=2, then the correct value is 3 (there have been attempts to define arithmetic using 1+1=3 for comedy value).
And once again, what of it? If the government is using chemtrails to poison the populace, is anyone actually going to do anything about it?
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Paranoid delusions are often the result of inflated self-importance. Usually, they're not out to get you because they don't even know who you are.
I'd also argue that conspiracy theory is awfully under-educated because it's ignoring real attempts at social control in favor of unrealistic conspiracies.
Do you have the least familiarity with how organizations work? There's constant infighting once an organization grows past a certain size, a global governmental conspiracy is in fact a Utopian vision because it imagines that global leaders can come together and work together on joint, coordinated oppression and planning when real-life geopolitics involves constant backstabbing, jockeys for influence, and so on.
Your intuition that you're not actually free is correct (there are multiple forms of power, and the United States only guarantees, or attempts to guarantee, political freedom) but you're ignoring the actual mechanisms in which power is exercised (elite networks, ideological unity, and so on).
To be a conspiracy theorist of your ilk, you're not just a bad epistemologist and ontologist, but you're also a bad sociologist.
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It's almost Halloween. Some seasonal variety is good.
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5 hours ago, Dryad said:
I think it's important to ensure that there is no risk that an exploit exists that somehow lets you win more often; due to EM winning big in keno at least twice there has been speculation in that direction. If there is a risk of an exploit here then i'd say turn it off, otherwise i think its a fun feature that i'd be sad to see go. If on average the net profit from keno is negative then i don't think it's needed to remove it despite occasional jackpots.
I mean we're all numerate here, EV of Keno is .97, i.e, per game played, martingale or not martingale, you should be losing on average 3.5% of your bet per game.
Law of large numbers says that, for an individual player, Keno makes no sense. For a large group of Keno players, some players are simply going to get lucky and make out like bandits from it.
As far as exploiting goes, with .1% yield in the positive direction, you get 50k per game, about 5x better than baseball per keno game. At 1% yield in the positive direction, you get 500k per game, or 50x better than baseball.
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1 hour ago, Noctis Anarch Caelum said:
Its a fact they're spraying stuff in the sky to try modifying the weather and "combat" global warming. I don't have a telescope powerful enough to see anything they left on the Moon & seems we need to reinvent the technology to get there almost; so don't have a strong opinion on it. Its possible they could have faked it in order to beat the Russians; also possible they got there after (or the first time). Although I don't blindly believe everything the government says & can see why people are skeptical. I don't think the government would have any moral issues with faking it though. lol
Also just a fact the government has or had bio weapon programs to develop viruses; as well as many of the Nazi Scientists coming to the United States after WWII in order to work for the US Government.
Thing is, with chemtrails, there's actually people who seriously want to aerosolize the air to increase albedo and reduce insolation. And given how many people believe global warming is a severe threat, you don't need to do it surreptitiously.
I think your underlying belief is a need to think "I'm right, and everyone else is wrong", and subscribe to the most zany theories that don't concern you. If you can hold a 9-5 job, that's fine, there's many people with bad epistemology and faulty reasoning, the only baseline in most societies is whether you pay income tax.
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47 minutes ago, Forsteri said:
Why is this a topic were you microwaved as a child OP
Noctis has a bunch of obsessions (you know what mine are). I'm trying to talk him into recognizing that his obsessions are not worthwhile, as well as lead him to more rigorous thought. It's easier for me because I'm a philosophical skeptic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_skepticism , https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism/ ) because my arguments aren't based on "you're wrong" but rather "you're worse than wrong / this isn't worth thinking about".
Of course, the side effect is that strictly speaking, I can't tell if every moment before the present one is a delusion, that I'm not a brain in a jar being fed false electrical stimuli, or that all logical systems aren't delusions either.
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17 minutes ago, Noctis Anarch Caelum said:
Those are the main strains they know to test for; although many other strains & mutations. Wonder what plague upon humanity the Agenda 21 proponents come up with next, maybe a zombie virus next. Where it makes them more aggressive in spreading it.
There are already enough doomsday scenarios to worry about without resorting to conspiracy theories.
My evaluation of a hypothesis:
"If true, then what?"
For instance, let's consider the hypothesis that the moon is made out of cheese. If the moon is made out of cheese, what are the implications of such? What kind of cheese is it? If society as a whole discovered the moon was made out of cheese, how would that change our lives? In practice, it wouldn't. It might raise interesting scientific questions about why the moon is made out of cheese (probably evidence for simulation hypothesis), but given the low cost of terrestrial cheese it wouldn't make a dent in anyone's lives.
In this case, if AIDS was in fact the creation of American scientists, it wouldn't change our lives because most people are low-power individuals within the American World System or American Tianxia (look it up, it's a good book). For the majority of recorded history, most people have been low power individuals (slaves, serfs, peasants). What they believe does not matter. Modern American liberalism extolls the individual, but in actual fact, even if a government doesn't oppress you, you still live within a society that has norms which may not to be your taste, you still hold a job which allows individuals and corporations to control your survival.
Yes, there'd be a tremendous blow to American prestige, and perhaps the organizations and individuals involved would be punished, but then what? Do you get a raise? Does so and so decide they like you? Are your children going to better schools as a consequence?
Next:
"What strong evidence is there for the hypothesis?"
In the case of AIDS being the creation of the American government, we've had zero Snowden-class leaks implicating the American government or any particular conspiratorial group on this. Even if your hypothesis is worth paying attention to (it's not), we have no strong evidence for it. We wouldn't be able to get any strong evidence for it, because it'd be a scandal of enormous proportions and the individuals involved would be able to do an exceptional cover-up.
"What weak evidence is there for the hypothesis?"
This is the only merit of the AIDS conspiracy theory. We know for a fact that people were concerned about overpopulation in Africa, and there were interest groups for which male homosexuality posed a problem. Foucault, for instance, died of AIDS after a wicked sexcapade in the San Francisco gay scene. The alleged perpetrators came from a society that was racist (anti-Black) and homophobic, and being able to kill such individuals would have been of benefit to them.
The problem with your conspiracy theory is that it only meets the third criteria; i.e, there were incentives for HIV to be engineered by American or Western-backed scientists. If it met the first criteria, the important thing would be to satisfy the second criteria by obtaining strong evidence, and even then it wouldn't be within the capability of random individuals to expose. But it doesn't, so it goes into the category of "Not Even Wrong", or not worth thinking about.
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15 hours ago, Edward I said:
On average, keno is a cash sink and so probably a good thing. To prevent gigantic winnings - which are problematic - cap the amount you can bet at a single time.
Keno is already capped at $50 million per game. Otherwise, alliances, before they lose wars, would decide to blow the alliance bank on Keno on the off chance that they hit the 500 billion jackpot and boost all their nations to C30 or C40.
Pragmatically, the problem with Keno is that the max jackpot is huge. It's the difference between Keno and Dice; Dice has only 1.5% expected losses per game, but Dice only gives you a max of 25 million return on hitting the jackpot. If, say, 10000 players play about 1000 games each of Keno at 50 million, and most players end up losing 1.750 billion, there's a 63% chance at least one player will end up hitting the 500 billion jackpot. And that's really destabilizing, for a single individual to randomly luck out and hit 500 billion, which is more than the quantity of money in all nations right now. Hell, it's half of the quantity needed to hit 100 cities, about the quantity needed for NPO to hit 25 cities, and so on.
Keno is also an incredible money laundering opportunity. Let's say, if Pooball had decided to launder all his money through Keno, with 400bn, he'd have a reasonable chance to claim that he won all his money fair and square on Keno, since the cheatcoin ended up getting converted to Keno winnings. We'd probably never have been able to bomb him under those circumstances.
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HIV-1 and HIV-2 are the two main strains, under which many other strains fall.
Are you familiar with viral genetics? These things mutate like crazy and each individual infection, or even each individual virus, might have a different genetic code and set of properties.
Noctis, we're both considered conspiracy theorists in this game, but the difference is that I'm a probablist who deals in risk. I suggest you read some skeptics writing to train you on how to think.
https://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Wrong-Isaac-Asimov/dp/155817169X Is out of print and hard to get a set of, but it's detailing specifically how scientific theories become outmoded.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G3L6JQ4/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 is another fun little book, and handles common logical fallacies.
https://www.amazon.com/Epistemology-Contemporary-Introduction-Introductions-Philosophy-ebook/dp/B00466H4TE/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=introduction+to+epistemology&qid=1570780281&s=digital-text&sr=1-1 You can also try this, but a digital edition isn't available.
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4 hours ago, CandyShi said:
Is your source scientific at all? Recombining viruses with an enzyme would only help in possibly testing a virus not creating them, as without the genetic material to synthesize the proteins the enzymes wouldn't be produced and therefore are irrelevant after the first instance of replication. In addition, HIV doesn't have DNA, it has single-stranded RNA as its genetic material.
Is this the same Dr. Gallo that received the Nobel Prize for discovering the HIV-AIDS relationship and was granted 15m by the Gates family to (attempt to) discover a vaccine?
Of all the stupid conspiracy theorists, of course Noctis would be one of them and believe in something this retarded.
I don't see how you could make the conclusion that HIV targets homosexuals or Africans, since HIV transmits through bodily fluid contact.
I want to point out here that I am referring to the CIA being responsible for HIV as something that is possible, but highly improbable due to lack of evidence and the sheer unthinkableness of such a genocide. I mean, it could definitely be true, but the only way you could know exclusively would be if the CIA or the relevant organization archives were opened, and they said, yes, we did it, we killed a couple of million people with biowarfare. That's extremely unlikely to happen.
As far as HIV goes, there are two varieties, one which is optimized for transmission by vaginal sex, and the other which is optimized for transmission by anal sex. The former is more common in Africa, where the HIV epidemic is not limited by sexual orientation, and the latter is more common in the West, where AIDS is most common in the male homosexual community. This is considered an example of pathogen evolution; i.e, HIV went from a variant that infected simians, to a variant that infected humans, to a variant that was optimized for spread in the gay community.
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TBH, on thinking of the subject for a bit, the "CIA created AIDS theory" is an example of something that is possible (remember that the US killed a million or so in North Korean strategic bombing), but for which there is insufficient evidence to believe such a thing is true. Because the accusation is so heinous, it's not really worth speculating about.
Moreover, I'd point out that the Soviets (now the Russians) and the Chinese would have great incentives to obtain sufficient evidence to prove such a thing is true. They'd be able to score incredible political points if it could ever be proven that the United States committed a massive democide against all the peoples of the world. But have they been able to prove it, given that both have state-level resources and well-developed intelligence services? Most certainly not.
So leave the subject to the Russians and Chinese, and we should focus on better things to do with our lives and time.
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I'm just making this public since TheNG's stats aren't updating on NPO War Stats, and Frawley reported it was due to a breakdown in bank loot API in the last weeks of September.
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Ooph.
Probability listings, in order of increasing probability:
-Whales suddenly materializing in the middle of the air above the middle of nowhere, and spontaneously exploding.
-The CIA having worked to engineer two variants of HIV specifically to target homosexuals and Africans.
-Noctis ever being a good poster.
-The incessant and doubtless downvotes you'll receive here.
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That said, there's a variety of ways the idea "AIDS was man-made" can be construed as true.
-AIDS, as a concept, is the product of the international medical establishment.
-AIDS, as a human disease, requires a human being's white blood cells to manifest.
-HIV, as a variant of a simian virus, was probably developed by someone in interspecies intercourse with an infected animal, or by eating inadequately sanitized bushmeat.
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7 hours ago, Bartholomew Roberts said:
Even though they're cosmetic you can't ignore they have a psychological impact on people. Reddit is the most famous example of this - the term "Karma Whore" exists for a reason. People will change their posting behavior to accrue positive feedback. Upvotes/likes/etc are just another positive feedback mechanism.
I'd disable the entire Karma system tbh because it's turned the forums into a game unto itself. Everyone wants to post a witty comeback and get upvotes, people downvote their enemies and if you piss them off enough they'll seek out every post you've ever written, good or bad, and downvote it. Noctis is an example of this - everything he posts now comes with 6 or 7 downvotes regardless of its content.
It discourages true discourse in my opinion and creates an avenue for lazy people to not need to reply.
another example that would be good for at least removing downvotes: Micros post announcements and get downvoted... for being micros.
That's a good point regarding the laziness of the downvote system. A forum is supposed to be about discussion, whereas if someone chooses to reply with a downvote, there's nothing to respond to, and it doesn't require any effort or risk on the part of the user outside of hitting their upvote / downvote limits.
Put another way, if a post is unpopular with an ideological sphere, with a downvote system, what you see are 5-10 red marks. Without a downvote system, for the ideological sphere to make its presence felt, the posters actually have to make replies like "coward", "war dodger", "idiot", etc. These posts can be singled out for low post-quality verbally, or they can be rebutted in detail and addressed. And if they're insubstantial, it's a lot more obvious to see what's going on than it is with a downvote system.
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As for removing the reputation system altogether, you make a good point, but the point is to encourage posting, not discourage posting. The game-like feature of collecting karma likes does drive posters to post, but the way the game has turned out is that there's a limited number of posters who dominate the discourse, get upvoted, and don't get downvoted for it. People who try to jam the game either end up joining the dominant discourse, promoting an echo chamber culture, or they get downvoted until they stop posting.
As someone who works with new players, I'm familiar with players who make a few posts, get downvoted, and stop. I'm also familiar with players who focus on making non-offensive shitposts (which is not what the forum needs) to avoid getting downvoted and it's not good for the forums either.
I think there are basically four options being discussed here. You have the most radical; which is to toss the reputation / karma system altogether. The option originally proposed in the OP was to remove the downvote system, and it seems to be something Alex has suggested and supported. A softer variation of this would be to establish downvoting as invisible to the reputation score, as I've suggested elsewhere, or to limit downvotes to certain boards. Then we have the option supported by some posters here which is to keep the downvote system as is.
I think that in light of what the discussion on the upvote system has amounted to, I have to support Alex's original proposal of just removing downvotes as it's the simplest implementation and the one that is most easily adjusted.
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1 hour ago, JasperFrost said:
And that's after you've embargoed half the game? Jesus christ.
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No bank is 100% trustworthy. You're better off having assets in multiple banks, so if any single bank goes bust, you still have assets in other banks.
Orion, for instance, was the victim of a bank theft earlier in the year by Radoje. Purportedly, Radoje had set up a ponzi scheme that was on the verge of unravelling, so he took out his assets and quit the game.
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1 hour ago, Kevanovia said:
On one hand - well played ?
On the other - if you’re implying that Inst has the same amount of influence on your bloc that Thrax does on ours...that explains a lot about your bloc.
True, as I understand, Thrax is too busy buying hookers and blow to be much involved in PnW. The official claim is that he's retired, isn't he?
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39 minutes ago, Kevanovia said:
I don’t agree that downvotes are politicized. For instance, the people who have the most downvotes (from both sides of the coalitions) typically post the things that either make the least amount of sense to others/are seeking attention/are generally disrespected due to their own actions.
Roquentin is the leader of the opposite coalition of me, but I would be willing to bet that I have upvoted more things than I have downvoted of his. I would bet that it is the case for a good portion of folks from both sides of the aisle.
Funny thing is, we can easily inject politics into this.
In actually investigating your posting reputation record, I found that you had roughly this upvoting record vs Roquentin:
Your claim is correct, i.e, roughly 6 upvotes or upvote equivalents vs 2 downvotes.
However, your co-coalitionist Nizam Adrienne has stated that downvotes are means of signifying disagreement. A cursory look at Roquentin's downvotes and seeing that the vast majority of them are by political enemies shows that this assessment is more correct, and is representative of general use of downvotes.51 minutes ago, Nizam Adrienne said:I don't think downvotes should be removed. It's not censorship. No one is stopping anyone from posting. It's a method of signaling disagreement and that shouldn't be removed from a game like this. There are situations it gets abused in but that doesn't mean the entire feature should be nixed.
First, when you say that downvotes should not be removed, are you being polite? The literal meaning of what you've said states that you don't support removing downvotes, but that doesn't mean you oppose removing them either. You can be more specific as to what you mean, although the rest of the post is a defense of the downvote feature. As I'm very used to ambiguity, I trend to, but will not conclude, that you oppose removing downvotes.
In practice, though, we both acknowledge that the game is split along two ideological spheres, no matter what the treaty web might indicate. Because downvotes function as a mechanism of signalling disagreement, the effective result is that downvotes end up functioning as an indication of a particular sphere's representation in the forums.
This creates unwanted confusion; are downvotes generally indicative of, as Kevanovia argues, bad posting, or do they indicate that a particular sphere is better represented on a particular forum?
The other concern is that for new users, downvotes are unspecific. For instance, a downvote for being Captain Vietnam (I'm not sure if you remember that individual, a troll from many years past) and a downvote for having a different political perspective than your side looks exactly the same. Requiring posters to actually voice their disagreement as opposed to simply clicking the red button lets new posters know why their posting is considered bad and how they might remedy it. If the disagreement is couched in the form of a flame, that's reportable, invalid, and removes an unwanted downvote.
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1 minute ago, Azaghul said:
There doesn't have to be only one person playing away games...
There's usually only one person playing away games as prisoner's dilemma encourages everyone to parasite off that single player, although in league play, it definitely makes sense for multiple people to do so.
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1 minute ago, Nizam Adrienne said:
The deflection is strong with these ones...
Mistaking deflection with absorption.
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23 minutes ago, Alex said:
I agree, I'd be fine with just disabling downvoting. I think I suggested that when upvotes/downvotes were added but was shot down.
I'd also like to add to Dryad's point and reframe it.
Downvotes currently serves as a method for users to censor the boards, by giving posters downvotes. However, we have a "Report Post" function already, and board censorship should rightly be the right of moderation and the administration.I want to note that I have posted this thread in public Discord and invited posters who would be negatively impacted by the nerfing or removal of the downvote system to speak their mind. So far, the only poster who has responded negatively against this is Pasky Darkfire, and he's not chosen to provide posts substantiating his refusal.
I strongly encourage people who disagree with the scrapping or nerfing of the downvote system to post here and make their view known.
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I also wish to make a final comment here. If you were convinced of your innocence, you could simply have pointed out that you know the rules, you think you did nothing wrong, and that moderators would act in an appropriate way (i.e, ignore the report). You would not have needed to resort to personal attacks or to try to paint me as the perpetrator (I have invited Pasky and others to put up a thread if they'd like on my use of "moderation as a weapon").
But of course, I think character should not play into moderation judgment. The questions should be: "Did Kevanovia break the forum rules by thread derailment / flamebait?" If he did, he gets warned, if he did, he doesn't get warned, and I don't need to know the outcome. As you have made the counter accusation (and I assume with a confidential "report post" as well), the question also is, "Did Inst break the rules by thread derailment?" But these questions are independent of each other, and how they are answered, besides the information given in this thread, has nothing to do with me.
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32 minutes ago, Kevanovia said:
You’re trying to set up scenarios into moderation ‘gotcha’ moments, which is not what this game is supposed to be about.
There was a thread created that was about the current war. You are someone (by your own admission) that shitposts about our coalition. I pointed out the irony of you constantly shitposting (to a shitpost you made earlier in the thread) using the topic in the thread (the war) to make my point. Just because I made a post that you describe as “bait to derail” doesn’t mean I should be punished merely because my post gave you the desire to derail the thread.
I can tell you right now that moderation doesn’t give a shit about ‘Soup Kitchen’ or ‘Coalition B/A’ or whatever. You keep bringing up political points, it’s irrelevant. They’re here to moderate behavior, not politics.
I would beg for the warn to shut Inst up. However, it I lay down and take it - it would set the standard for Inst, among other people who want to feel important, to follow in the future and therefore create an even bigger headache for everyone.
That's sort of the point of KERCHTOG$ forums behavior, isn't it? You haven't read anything I've said about how I want you to stop thread derailing behavior.
As I've said, I personally do not care whether the warns are given or not. I encourage everyone to report posts that seems to be in violation of forum rules, and you've said as much you don't want forum rule violations to be reported aggressively. The present policy implementation gives zero feedback on whether a given report has been penalized or not, so for all I know, you got a single forum warn point or a 0-point verbal warning and are hiding it. For me, the report outcome doesn't matter, it just matters that the report is made.
I would beg for the warn to shut Inst up. However, it I lay down and take it - it would set the standard for Inst, among other people who want to feel important, to follow in the future and therefore create an even bigger headache for everyone.
I want to address this in particular. In PnW, unlike in other games, players have no obligation to report rules violations. Consequently, some rule violations are not reported or addressed, and I think things have gotten so bad that Alex has made a statement in Discord to the effect that players should remember that the player on the other side is a human being, and that players should behave with civility.
When the issue was debated on the forums, the moderator line was "use the report post feature, we usually act only if the post is reported." Obviously, some of these reports will not be acted upon, but it's better than having posts that should be addressed not be addressed because people assume moderation does nothing.
And no matter how moderators respond, I will continue reporting posts I feel violate the forum rules. I suggest you do so too, even to me, and even to people I would not like warned.
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I forgot to mention, but capping baseball delays is, as Edward I has said, removing liquidity. Pitch-only donors are now limited to 12 games per second, encouraging the supply of pitch-only players to dwindle.
In effect, Alex's changes have penalized both the first and third class of players, leaving baseball only to tippers, and tippers in high moderation
What I'd like Alex to be aware of is that there IS a baseball community, i.e, there are baseball Discord servers, there used to be attempts at Baseball-oriented alliances, etc etc etc. Everyone here agrees about the problems with bad actors in baseball (scripters, people who play too much, etc), but what Alex has done is to throw the baby out with the bathwater and punish all members of the baseball community.
One, simpler way to handle this is to put a moratorium on the baseball changes outside of increased controls on scripting. Let's see how the baseball numbers change in the following weeks, i.e, have the bad actors been neutralized, and if so, are baseball changes still needed?
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1 minute ago, Alex said:
They do, yes. After you've played 1,000 games for the day, you only get 10% of the home team revenue generation.
If you're playing only away games though, it doesn't matter. 10% of 0 is still 0, nothing is changing.
You're not aware of how the baseball community works.
There are three main ways of playing baseball. One involves a baseball player in a donor league; i.e, the player does nothing but away games for hours. This is less affected by your changes because they don't get penalized at all for their generosity.
Second, there's tipping. That involves players tipping other players for running the away game queue some portion of their earnings. This can be very irritating, as you often have scripting support in order to figure out how much you owe any given player. This is less affected, although quite affected, by your new baseball hard-caps.
Third, there's switching. Many casual players prefer this because it means they don't need to calculate how much they owe any given player through the notifications screen. A player does away for a given period of time, then switches to home for a given period of time. This is most highly affected by your baseball changes as it is no longer possible to switch due to the high losses involved.
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peace talks
in Orbis Central
Posted
Where's my old Bush 4 more years memes? Oh well, we'll probably have 4 more years Trump memes in 2020.