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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Does every single human need to be put into neat little categories without any grey room at all? It’s always good vs evil! Yeah! Exactly how life works! No complexity! 🙃

    I’m a Bernie supporter. Pretty liberal. I wish no one died, the shooter included. I hate Trump, but stop cheering. Why are we celebrating the end of our species? We’re all human. It’s someone’s son, or brother, or family, or friend.

    #ScreamingIntoTheVoid




  • There was a similar study reported the other day about using FMRI imagining and AI to recreate the “thought content” of someone’s brain. It required training for the AI in the person’s brain and some other training. It does seem these techniques can work with some specified models, but yeah, it doesn’t seem like hooking someone’s brain up to this would create a movie of their mind or something.

    I think the more dangerous part is “This is step 0,” which this tech would have seemed impossible 10 years ago. Very strange times.





  • Meta ethics focuses on the underlying framework behind morality. Whenever you’re asking, “But why is it moral?” That’s meta ethics.

    Meta ethics splits between cognitivism (moral statements can be true or false) and non-cognitivism (moral statements are not true or false). One popular cognitive branch is natural moral realism, the idea there are objective moral facts. One popular non-cognitivism branch is emotivism, the idea that moral statements all all complicated “yays” or “yucks” and express emotions rather than true/false statements.

    Cognitivism also has anti-realism, which is there are moral facts, but they are truth/false conditional based on each person or group. My issue is you lose the ability to call out certain behavior as wrong; slavery is wrong; not respecting others is wrong. If you want to believe all morality systems are valid, meaning your morality is no better than some radical thought group’s, then go ahead. On an emotional level, speciesism level, rights level, deontological level, utilitarian level, and many more slavery is wrong. Again, some nut job doesn’t invalidate all other thoughts. That’s my take.


  • Half of the comments in here are a bunch of equivocations on the words.

    “Objective” morality would mean there are good things to do, and bad things to do. What people actually do in some hypothetical or real society is different and wouldn’t undermine the objective status of morality.

    Listen to this example:

    • Todd wants to go to the bank before it closes.
    • Todd is not at the bank.
    • Todd should travel to the bank before it closes.

    This is a functional should statement. Maybe Todd does go, or maybe he doesn’t. But if he wants to fulfill his desires, he should travel if he wants to go to the bank. The point is that should statements, often used in morality, can inform us for less controversial topics.

    Here’s another take: why should we be rational? We could base our epistemology on breeding, money, or other random ends. If you think I should be rational, you’re leveraging morality to do that.

    Most people believe in objective morality, whether they understand it that way or not. Humans have disagreed over many subjects throughout history. Disagreement alone doesn’t undermine objectivity. It’s objectively true that the Earth revolves around the sun. Some nut case with a geocentric mindset isn’t going to convince me otherwise. You can argue it’s objective because we can test it, but how do I test my epistemology?

    This is just a philosophy 101 run around. I’m a moral pluralist who believes in utilizing many moral theories to help understand the moral landscape. If we were to study the human body, you’d use biology, physics, chemistry, and so on. When looking at a moral problem, I look at it from the main moral theories and look for consensus around a moral stance.

    I’m not interested in debating, but there’s so many posts making basic mistakes about morality. My undergraduate degree was in ethics, and I’ve published on meta ethics. We ain’t solving this in a lemmy thread, but there’s a lot of literature to read for those interested.




  • You are correct, but as someone who has worked in F2P mobile for a decade, it is true that most profitability comes from whales, at least in this market. You might have hundreds of thousands who spend as you mention (dolphins or minnows), but as a percentage of revenue, that aggregate is considerably smaller than the aggregate of whales: I’ve seen that ratio as high as 5:95 on a financially successful mobile F2P 4X strategy game, meaning 5% of total revenue coming from players with a lifetime spend of less than $250, 95% of total revenue coming from those above that. The populations of those groups is usually the opposite (very few whales vs. many dolphins and minnows).

    Not all F2P models swing heavily into “whale-based”, but the traditional wisdom is similar to the casino industry. Large corporate companies often have small teams dedicated to servicing VIP players, ensuring they come back to the game through attractive offers or other gifts (https://www.gamesindustry.biz/how-does-zynga-hunt-for-whales-this-week-in-business).

    Another component that people don’t understand is that often these aren’t “normal people” in terms of their income. We had geo-tagged data, so when you’re looking at your high level VIPs north of a million in lifetime spend, you’re talking about someone in UAE, someone in Petersburg, someone in Hong Kong, or someone in the Texas oil fields. That’s not to provide moral ammunition, but it is a different viewpoint from these games preying on people who don’t have money. A lot of whales have so much money, they just don’t care about spending $100s or $1,000s at a time.

    Finally, I personally know at least 1 divorce caused by a game I worked on: the husband couldn’t stop spending, and it led to a separation. There are likely more. By the same token, I also know marriages caused by that same game.

    If people are having issues with spending, please stop playing, stop spending, get help. If people don’t want this to be the dominate model, they need to support with their wallets. Having said that, there’s more free games to play than when I grew up. I do think that is pretty cool.