[quote]Satyricon331 wrote...
No, I stated a preference, and you objected to it ("I've always disagreed with this stance on games"). [/quote]
I expressed my view on it. It wasn't meant to be anythng more than that. If someone says "I like cheese," and another says "I don't." the conversation isn't required to be deeper than that.
[quote]I'm not the one making the objections - I'm happy with people playing in ways that suits them. Since you object to at least some of those playstyles, the onus is on you.[/quote]
Neither am I. But you seem to feel that I owe you a justification for my view.
[quote]We need to review this parto f the exchange. I noted that elves and dwarves seemed broadly similar to humans in intelligence and emotions, but there wasn't anything in the game that established they have all the exact same departures from full rationality. [/quote]
We do need to review this exchange. You supposed certain well-known empirical features about intelligence and emotion, using relatively technical language at a low level, translate to dwarves and elves.
I pointed out the necessary implication of imposed that consequence, from RL, into fantasy races.
[quote]You then replied that having broadly similar intelligence and emotions mandated they do have just those same departures, which isn't a logical necessity and isn't a normative argument, [/quote]
It isn't a normative argument. The only normative position I staked out that was that if we use scientific terms at all, we should use the correct scientific terms (i.e., insight instead of intelligence).
[quote]so it seemed to me to be an empirical claim, but you didn't have any evidence and declared that viewing as empirical was "question-begging" and all that we had was conjecture based on human cognition, and then tried to shift the burden onto the skeptic. [/quote]
No. I said that I would link you to papers on human cognition, but that I didn't have any handy, because I have not studied this topic in some time.
I then said that suppose that elves and dwarves are neurological atypical is
question beggining because that presupposes an answer to an empirical question. There is no such thing as an "elf" or a "dwarf" IRL. There is no such thing as an entity that exists that is so neurological similar to happens that we can meaningfully speak of it as having the fully capacity for intelligence that we do and the full range of emotion that we do.
Your premise is that it is
possible for elves and dwarves to be distinct from humans irrespective of their similarity in cognition. This is what begs the question. Insofar as
our science is concerned, there is no such thing as a sapient mind like ours. There is no basis for comparison. Our best models lead to the conclusion that this is impossible. But your starting premise is that this
is possible.
Put another way, you start with an empirical question and simulatenously suppose an empirical answer to it.
[quote]Your idea that conjecture is dispositive is illogical, but I've been giving you repeated chances to salvage this point into something. [/quote]
I'm not sure dispositive means what you think it means. I've only encountered it as a legal term of art with regard to estates and trust law, so I'm honestly not sure what you're trying to say here.
[quote]In any event, if it's not establishing a logical necessity, you do need to supplement it with an argument supporting your earlier "oughts" and "shoulds" - as in why I ought to conform to your conjectures there.[/quote]
Edit: Since you repeat this point, I should add this as a preliminary response: I have actually controlled-F for all the times I used each word. And it turns out I never used the word "ought". And I used the word "should" four times, which I helpfully describe below. My original paraphragh is below.
As with the vitamin D case, you are making a presumption about how scientific phenoma work borne out of ignorance. But you suppose that this must be true without having done the necessary research, and then further suppose that the world has to conform to your view of the matter. It is the same situation here, only you assume as one of your starting premises that the very empirical question at issue.
[quote]For one thing, I didn't know you could survive on dietary vitamin D exclusively, and I'm glad to learn that, and it does change that deep roads issue. [/quote]
Well, at least we've got that far.
[quote]But I don't have this premise that any law of nature here is a law of nature in the DA setting - I'm willing to drop one when there's a direct contradiction to an important lore point; see below. [/quote]
That statement isn't clear. You're saying in the first clause that you don't pressupose that every law of nature IRL is a law of nature in DA. Okay. But in the second clause you say that you're willing to drop "that" when there is a direct contradiction.
So should I take that to mean that you
do suppose that every law of nature here is a law of nature in DA?
[quote]And just to repeat a point you avoided, I see this process as mitigating arbitrariness - so no, it's not wholly to my taste, though even if it were I don't see the problem. Also, I never claimed to have eliminated arbitrariness so several of your points aren't telling me anything I didn't already know. [/quote]
It doesn't matter. Your mode of mitigating arbitrariness doesn't do that. The very process that you're using - you're limited knowledge of science and your preferences about how a game world should conform to what limited knowledge you have - is what is the source of the arbitrariness. It is arbitrary not because of your limited knowlege, but because the final determination of what the state of the game world and its rules are is decided entirely by what you prefer.
That is what I am objecting to as arbitrary
[quote]First, on this elves and dwarves point you have, this is exactly the issue above - you're conjecturing from humans that they must have the same vD requirements and storage limitations. [/quote]
No, I'm not. I am telling you that there are two possibilities here: either they are similar, or they are not. In either case, core principles of evolutionary biology are not being respected, because of a known fact:
non-humans in DA can interbreed with humans and produce fertile offspring. The level of genetic similarity required here is (to put it in layman's terms) to be that of the same species. Indeed, this is one of our ways to determine what is the same species.
To have such a radically differnet biochemical process and still interbreed would be a violation of all that we know about evolutionary biology. You cannot,
full stop, bring in knowledge about science into this setting without breaking core assumptions and pressupositions of that field.
Magic is the operative analogy because magic and physics share the same relationship, insofar as many laws of physics are persistently violated by magic. They are no longer
laws, but conditions that can be suspended based on ... whatever principles magic corresponds to, which is to say that whatever 'rules' operate to describe nature, they are nothing like our rules even if they are similar.
[quote]Perhaps the space of empirical options is narrower for all organisms than you'd think ex ante, and if so I'd change, but saying that sometimes there's science out there that I'm unfamiliar with doesn't entail these claims of yours that it's "absurd" or "pseudoscience" or a "contradiction." [/quote]
It most certainly does. If you want to talk facts, and scientific facts at that, and then talk about how your preference for multiple races in DA:O turns on how it helps to resolve what you see as contradictions with science, then you had better inform yourself on how science works.
Because otherwise the theories that you put forward are psuedoscientific, the propositions that you put forward are contradictory (because you suppose (a) a law of nature is true and (
a set of conditions to be true that violate that the law of nature says are false) and therefore absurd, because definitionally doing the first two points mentioned "ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous" (to quote Merriam Webster).
[quote]Earlier you mentioned internal coherence; I see a tradeoff between internal and "external" coherence created by having creatures they want us to view as human, and I prefer mitigating the external incoherence as much as I can get away with.[/quote]
Okay.
[quote]I don't see how I could get away with it with magic. [/quote]
You can't. But the better way to frame it is that you cannot do this with
physics. And once you realize that this is what you are dealing with, by the very same token (and for the reasons I discussed above regarding evolutionary biology and genetics) you cannot do it with genetics, either. And it is the same issue with respect to cognition.
It is not that there is no problem. It is that you cannot
solve it.
[quote]If you just ignore external coherence, then sure, there's no tradeoff, and the optimand is just to take DA humans as much ubermensch relative to terrestrial ones as anything in the game might suggest. [/quote]
You have to: because there is no alternative.
[quote]I think that's still arbitrary since the DA humans aren't human - it's partly analogous to taking the color blue in the DA world and having all the characters systematically term it "green," and I find it somewhat similarly annoying. [/quote]
It's not arbitrary, because it doesn't depend on discretion (well, other than the creators; but that is the very nature of fictional work: it's always discretionary on the part of its creator). What matters is that it is no longer a function of
your discretion, or
my discretion.
[quote]The lore implies biochemical non-uniqueness, sure, but it's insufficient to yield a logical deduction establishing it. So again, we're left with why this conjecture should be dispositive. [/quote]
Wait, are you trying to use dispositive to mean, not demonstrated to be true?
Anyway, I didn't want to touch on an actual point of epistemology, but if your criterion for a justified belief is logical necessity then you might as well ignore science altoghether, because absolutely nothing in science is logically deduced.
I can't referenece any good starting point, but I suppose your way of thinking about science is in terms of Popper's falsification and so my recomendation would be to look at the Duhem-Quine thesis on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and then to follow the links from there.
[quote]In upper bounds, I was relating back to the earlier points about cognitive and physical feats. That's what the Lebron James/Nobel laureates thread was discussing. There is an upper bound there, and again, I've never said anything that the idea that points like "Some humans are capable of feats, on a spectrum, that most are not" would contradict. [/quote]
Your statement was "the PC has to be highly capable, but if the story starts requiring real outlandish capabilities, I start to lose interest. "
That would be the statement I am addressing. The feats of the PC are just that. But you attempt to minimize this in the following way:
"I don't think, for example, the Warden was really that extraordinary for
slaying the Archdemon - s/he was just lucky to kill it so quickly.
There's nothing that different about the Warden than Garahel, in my
view. The Warden just nipped the Blight in the bud partly from personal
"merit," sure, but also b/c Flemeth happened to help and Riordan gave
his life to injure the Archdemon's wing, etc. And I'm willing to think
that the high dragon's reputation for dangerousness partly increased
through retellings or tall tales, etc. etc. "
Several problems here, if I'm going to pick it apart:
- You draw a parallel between the Warden and Garahel. But this does not mean very much, because it could as easily be the case that Garahel also had outlandish capabilities.
- You reference that the Warden "nipped the Blight in the bud". But this is in and of itself an incredible feat: Blights lasted decades and centuries, yet this lasted months. Rather than supporting the theory that this was something that would minimize the nature of the PC's capabilities, it could as easily support the claim that this is what makes the PC incredible - having the capacity to form a military alliance against the Blight so quickly, even though in each case there was a threat that mere mortals would usually be overwhelemed by (e.g. the Pride Demon that Uldred became, which according to the lore could murder scores of templars).
- "Flemeth" happened to help is cited, but all that Flemeth did was save you from death once: at the Tower of Ishal, and that was the one place where the injury you suffered behaved according to our rules rather than the rules of gameplay, i.e., where a single arrow was enough to injure you, despite that you could use that same equipment and suffer through ten later with no ill effect.
- You quote Riordan, but all that he did was ground the archdemon: he did not do anything more than clip a wing. That certainly has no impact on whether or not the PC had the capability to slaw the archdemon alone, and whether or not this is a feat that is "outlandlish".
- And then you suppose that the dragon was less dangerous, and that there were "tall tales".
All of this is to say that it seems to me that you are working quite hard at minimizing the scope and scale of achivement. But I will clarify this below:
[quote]Nope. This is all flatly wrong. I don't care about the 40th percentile - as I indicated several times by now. [/quote]
You do. Whether or not you say you don't doesn't change the structure of your argument: it's one that works by setting a limit on the upper bound. All of your arguments are designed to close the gap between what it means to be in the 99.99th percentile and the 40th.
Why does it matter that the high dragon's prowess was exagerrated or not if only a single living being had the talent to slay it? Because what is relevant is not just the upper bound, but the distance between that and the lower bound.
This is necessarily implied (and here we can talk about logic) by your statement that you don't mind that the PC is "highly capable" but lose interest if the feats are "outlandish".
[quote]That's not pseudoscience - I never purported to be doing procedures that produce empirical truth. You throw these words around as though you have no idea what they mean. [/quote]
It seems that you're the one that has no idea what the word means. Psuedoscience can refer both to things like astrology, as well as to erroneous scientific positions presented
as if they were scientific.
Which is what you are doing, with respect to your statements about how vitamin D works.
[quote]Well, you purported to care about arbitrariness and discussed internal coherence.[/quote]
Yes, but gameplay and story segregation isn't arbitrary. The gameplay operates by quite clear rules independent of discretion: the game rules. The story, unless it isn't internally coherent, isn't arbitrary - it doesn't depend on our discretion either.
[quote]I left this one for last because I find it baffling. If you agree I can do what I want on the basis of my preference, what have you been going on about (and see the first point above)?[/quote]
Because, even if we take your stated prefernece for granted, you're not doing a very good job of it. Case in point, the vitamin D example. You want to be scientifically accurate about it, but you aren't doing that. If I point out that you're not doing it I'm not implying that you're wrong for doing it, but I am pointing out that you are doing it wrong.
[quote] What were those earlier normative assertions (those "oughts" and "shoulds")? [/quote]
I've never used the word ought. And since you've kept harping on this point, let's quote my uses of the word should (I've used it a total of four times):
"Again, you're talking about it in too general terms. We should be
talking about things like "insight" and "g", and various other
mechanisms. And there's no empirical evidence I can show you - because there's no comparably sapient species to humans out there."
In this context, I used "should" to make the following normative assertion: if we are going to have a debate about scientific technicalities, we should refer to the correct scientific phenomenon. In this case, regardless of whether you took a course on bounded rationality, the categories of "intelligence" and "emotion" are not informative categories because they don't capture the mechanisms which science makes claims about.
Next:
"No, my basis for disagreement is that two logically possible outcomes
means that it should lie with the player to pick between them."
This is just a statement of my position on arbitrariness: it is bad.
Next:
"But let's suppose your theory doesn't competely violate this law of
nature. It has another problem. Why should either elves or qunari share
this biochemical mechanism with qunari? They evolved above ground, in
the sunlight."
There, I'm using it to make a rhetorical point, and asking if there
is a normative reason at all to suppose that non-humans (as a class) are biologically identical but distinct from humans (as a class). Put another way, I'm asking you to justify
your supposed normative position that we can treat non-humans as an analytically sensible class instead of being forced to speak of each "race" as a separate entity.
My last comment was:
"I simply said that I do not think a game should be designed that way,
and I do not think that players are justified for making those
inferences (for the same reasons, if you must know, why I don't think
that people are justified in making inferences from the absence of
evidence IRL). "
And since this ties in well with the point below, I'll move to that:
[quote] You never mentioned anything about how they "should" design the game. What inferences? [/quote]
I did mention, actually. I said:
"I don't think the game world itself should vary based on the whims of
the player. My disagreement with you here is on whether or not you are
entitled to draw such inferences from the absence of evidence. "
I don't think designers should (intentionally) design games that allow gamers to draw multiple inferences about how the lore operates and be equally justified. That's not to say that there should be no mystery: but there should always be a right answer in the lore, and it should not be left to the players.
As for what inferences, I mean all inferences, as an epistemological point.
Modifié par In Exile, 09 janvier 2013 - 06:33 .
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