Tag: society

Corruption FPS

A downloadable Chinese game called “The Incorruptible Warrior” is an unexpected success — something attributed to Chinese exhaustion and frustration with official corruption. In the game you’re a civil servant out for blood, torturing and executing corrupt officials. The reason for the public interest is that the hero of the game is a “honest and upright official” whose assignment is to weed out corrupt officials, along with their children and mistresses. Here ‘weed out’ does not ‘putting in jail’ — it means using weapons, wizardry and torture to kill them.

sponsored by “the Communist Party Disciplinary Committee”

History of House Cats

We think what happened is that the cats sort of domesticated themselves. The cats invited themselves in, and over time, as people favored cats with more docile traits, producing the 10s of breeds of house cats known today

English and Irish Ancestry

Say goodbye to foundation myths, and hello to Levenshtein distances of DNA strands to define the “other”.

Britain and Ireland have been inhabited for 1000s of years by a single people that has remained in the majority, with only minor additions from later invaders like Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings and Normans.

2023-03-30: lol, this is completely wrong.

Ape altruism

altruism goes back as far as 6M years

the foundations for non-zero sum games were laid early, apparently

QOTD

Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.

Social Media Class

The look and feel of MySpace resonates far better with subaltern communities than it does with the upwardly mobile hegemonic teens. This is even clear in the blogosphere where people talk about how gauche MySpace is while commending Facebook on its aesthetics. I’m sure that a visual analyst would be able to explain how classed aesthetics are, but it is pretty clear to me that aesthetics are more than simply the “eye of the beholder” – they are culturally narrated and replicated. That “clean” or “modern” look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I’m drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.

ha! i knew i didn’t like facebook for some reason. it’s the damn jocks being their vapid selves. god i hate sports and the atomic waste it produces.

Frankly, i’m uber disappointed with comScore but even more disappointed with all of the press and bloggers who ran with the story that MySpace is gray without really looking at the data. This encourages inaccurate data and affects the entire tech industry as well as policy makers, advertisers, and users. I’m horrified that AP, Slashdot, Wall Street Journal, and numerous respectable bloggers are just reporting this as truth and speaking about it as though this is about users instead of visitors. C’mon now. If we’re going to fetishize quantitative data, let’s at least use a properly critical eye.

Voter Bias

bryan caplan identifies 4 biases that prompt voters systematically to demand policies that make them worse off. First, people do not understand how the pursuit of private profits often yields public benefits: they have an anti-market bias. Second, they underestimate the benefits of interactions with foreigners: they have an anti-foreign bias. Third, they equate prosperity with employment rather than production: Mr Caplan calls this the “make-work bias”. Finally, they tend to think economic conditions are worse than they are, a bias towards pessimism.

Brown’s human universals

By winnowing the literature of anthropology, Donald E Brown collected a list of some 200 ‘human universals’. I think trying to re-sort it in ‘evolutionary‘ order should be more instructive

Behavioral economics and poverty

Many activities — from over-eating, drinking, smoking — combine immediate gratification with delayed costs. It is no coincidence that the poor are much more prone to engage in such activities than the rest of the population.

Irrational Fear

people decide whether a new technology is risky. They don’t do it based on fact, but emotion and cultural assumptions. A response is to not bring emerging technologies to the attention of the public, since they will not contribute rational risk analysis.