Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
While some of the games given as examples, like Dark Souls and Dwarf Fortress, are memed as being hard, they're really not that hard.
I played Dark Souls after dealing with the far harder Monster Hunter games (the newer games have eased the difficulty curve but get even harder towards the end) before, so it never really felt all that difficult. Nioh also scales up the hurt to far higher levels than Dark Souls, but also gives you the tools necessary to do those fights if you get gud, which is where Elden Ring's last few bosses fall apart. Most Fromsoft Soulsborne games tend to have several mechanics that allow you to trivialize most of the content even if the standard guy swinging big stick will struggle. Usually something involving magic, blocking or parrying.
Dwarf Fortress is not hard. It's just convoluted. You can stick 7 dwarfs in a hole with a tiny patch to grow food and they'll live in happy mediocrity forever. Any difficulty comes from the player trying to do a 'stupid dwarf trick' or RNG sometimes sending an indestructible syndrome-spreader your way.
Stephen's Sausage Roll is by far the hardest puzzle game I played. Nothing else warrants mention in that genre.
And to highlight something in a genre that interests me, the Codemasters F1 games are both the most "mainstream" sim racing titles, but also by far the hardest. Sure, you could whack on all the assists and drop the difficulty to 0 and cruise your way to victory, but the baseline car without assists is one of the the most difficult cars to drive in all of sim racing. So difficult, in fact, that actual F1 drivers criticized it as being unreasonably difficult to drive and unrealistically prone to spinning out of corners. The AI is also extremely aggressive relative to most older racing games. Driving the same car in any other series, even more "hardcore" simulators, is a far more relaxed experience. I believe the 2023 version of the game improved, however this. Similarly, their contemporary "Dirt Rally" games are so much harder than the old "Colin McRae" titles that they might as well be a separate genre. Sim Racing has long had a bit of a problem with a hard=realistic perception, and generally improved simulation has lead to easier driving, not harder.
Dark Souls is like a 6 or 7 on the hardness scale out of 10. It's sometimes challenging but doesn't scale up too far once you've figured out whatever particular gimmicks are useful in the exact title. Monster Hunter and Nioh are more like an 8 because they do in fact keep scaling up in difficulty. Dwarf fortress is maybe a 3 or 4 once you've gotten around the controls because, aside from deliberately challenging yourself, the core gameplay is easier than most city/colony builders. I'll give Stephen's Sausage Roll and the racing games I mentioned 9, because they hit hard and never stop hitting. And the hardest mainstream games tend to be rhythm games on their highest difficulties for the sheer level of mechanical execution they expect. You cannot fire up Through the Fire and Flames on expert and clear it without at least 100 hours of prior practice in either Guitar Hero or in very similar games.
Old games are rarely hard. Contemporary gaming is harder at a baseline for at least some of these reasons:
- The controls are better and thus the difficulty has gradually shifted from wrestling with controls to actually making the game hard.
- There's more competitive multiplayer. It is impossible for the average competitive multiplayer game to give the average player a win rate greater than 50% in the long run, making it inherently difficult compared to single-player games.
- Developers are free to add more difficulty because they know players have access to better online resources on how to overcome said difficulty.
- There are more layers of conventions that developers expect you to understand. Even relatively handholdy games often have broad swaths of unexplained mechanics due to being more complicated.
- You were just younger. Go back, play them, smash them over your knee.
Whenever I have played an older game that I thought at the time was difficult, I soon learned it was not. I was just younger. To give an example of something I recently replayed, Pikmin's 30 day time limit sounds like a challenge, and my memory of the game was that it was a serious threat. When I replayed it, I beat the game in 11 days, and the time limit was totally irrelevant. Roller Coaster Tycoon is another old game I recently played, and is utterly trivialized by using high ride prices (often 10x the default) and advertising, something the game doesn't clearly explain the impact of but once you know about them it's GG. There are exceptions, like Battletoads and Ghosts 'n' Goblins still being difficult, but these were the exception then just as very hard games remain the exception now.
Tophattingson
7mo ago
I can confirm this is definitely the case for Touhou. Not just normal, but also only 1 credit clears of the game are considered "real completion". I have done 1cc on some of the games but only on easy.
Tophattingson
7mo ago
There's no consistent pattern here. It all reverses for vaccine mandates, where elevating personal choice quickly becomes somewhere between "get the jab chud" and supporting concentration camps for the unvaccinated.
Tophattingson
8mo ago
For some time now I’ve been feeling like I live in a different world than most people I know. It has come to a point where I have to face an awkward alternative: Either most people I know are wrong (including learned men and experts) or I am insane. As I don’t believe I have lost my sanity, and as I believe that I have very strong arguments to hold my ideas against all reasonable counterarguments;
This is really less significant than you seem to be making it out to be, or beating yourself up over. The majority of people disagree with the majority of everyone else, including learned men and experts, on the most profound question possible. Religion.. No matter what religion you are, you're disagreeing with at least about 70% of people immediately due to not sharing a religion, and if you drill into the different denominations and sects that number grows larger. Add in ideologies akin to a religion and the number grows yet further. Are you an Atheist? Communist China has obligatory support for Communism, and unless you too believe in Xi Jinping Thought, then you still disagree with the majority of Atheists.
Anyway...
This is what psychopathology really is: It is not a science of mental pathology, it is the art of distributing psychiatric drugs and psychological treatments.
There used to be psychopathology. Classic psychiatrists wrote impressive treaties on the subject, with thousands of pages explaining in detail and classifying the behavior of their patients. The mountains really were in labour, alas, only a mouse was born: No progress was made regarding the causes, and most importantly the treatment of such behaviors.
A layman's explanation for how science works is that you make up a theory about how something works, you test it, try to disprove it, and then if you can't disprove it, you incorporate it into The Science. But this isn't quite true. It is a mistake to believe that science requires theoretical mechanisms to be explained before it can describe the world. Sometimes, things just are, and you can do science on that even if you don't understand why they are. Quantum physics makes incredibly good predictions about the behaviour of what it seeks to describe, yet it provides no theoretical explanation of why physics behaves that way, leading to several competing explanations.
A more apt comparison for medicine, however, would be general anaesthesia. A weird and miraculous phenomena where, upon breathing certain gasses or being injected with certain chemicals, your body enters a coma where it forgets everything that happens and stops experiencing pain. And when they are no longer administered, the coma reverses, and if the process is controlled correctly, you wake up unharmed! What function could this possibly serve? Why would the human body evolve to be capable of this feat in the absence of naturally occurring anaesthetics? But oh how useful it ended up being. It's a process we can predictably control and we even have a good idea about what sorts of molecules can cause it.
So what's the mechanism for anaesthesia? Why does it work? Nobody really knows. There's a few competing hypotheses but nothing to settle the question. But for the sake of using anaesthesia in millions of surgeries, that doesn't matter. Still works. We can still do it without having that explanation.
The same applies for mental illness. You don't necessarily have to understand it to treat it, though it could certainly help.
Tophattingson
8mo ago
If the government is powerful enough to stop people talking about shoplifting, it's powerful enough to stop the shoplifting itself. Just do the latter. For an analogy where society is already rife with pro crime messages that can't be censored, consider all use of illegal drugs and their widespread promotion in various forms of media. That's the test case. Should the government get social media to censor discussion of that?
We've already seen the risks of government control of speech. 2020 happened. Hypothetical risks are not a good reason to grant license for 2020 to keep happening in the unlikely chance it prevents some other nebulous problem that could already be dealt with within the bounds of the law.
Tophattingson
8mo ago
That's likely a contributing factor to why tech is seeing far more innovation, far faster, than finance, manufacturing, international trade and nuclear energy. Everything before it is already stuck under a pile of stupid regulation.
Tophattingson
8mo ago
I would suspect that >0.01% of people running unrecognized code can be accounted for just in people messing about with minecraft mods.
Tophattingson
8mo ago
It seems there is a box on a form that you check if the person is pregnant, and they have been counting every single death of a pregnant person as a maternal death. Shoot, they included a lot of men in those stats too apparently. Even if the death didn't have anything to do with being pregnant or delivering a baby.
This is also how covid deaths work in most places. In the UK, it was 28 days within a positive test (initially, it was anyone who ever died after getting covid, which would have given covid a 100% mortality rate) . Given that some % of people will die within 28 days regardless, this will overestimate covid deaths. During the height of mass testing mania, so many people were testing positive for covid, and so few dying, that it implied that up to 40% of published deaths were just a quirk of counting people who tested positive before being hit by a bus. My own calculation of this.
This is about the standard level of death statistics you should expect. Covid dashboards may have cultivated the impression that orgs like the CDC have ultra-precise data about the cause of every single death ever, but besides that not being true for covid, it's also not true for much else either.
Take for instance the flu. Supposedly covid is far less deadly than the flu. Probably so, but this claim depends on two things. First, covid data. Second, flu data. Do we have the data on the latter? Yes, but it's not very good. Covid monomania left us with far better data about covid even by mid-2020. The CDC has moderately confident data about how many people die of flu, very weak data about how many people get flu, and therefore only a weak idea of what the mortality rate of flu is.
Tophattingson
8mo ago
I suspect being a communist in Estonia makes you extremely unpopular in a way that it doesn't in the west, an asymmetry that is oft complained about on the right. Not just when the game was developed, but especially after 2022 where nostalgia for communism is going to get associated with Russian imperialism even moreso than it already was.
Tophattingson
8mo ago
Some of the most important and advanced works of recent decades were not produced by the organs of the academy and traditional "literary circles", but are instead being circulated on obscure Japanese doujin sites and fanfiction platforms.
If I have skimmed the study correctly, it's not talking about "pornography" in the same way you are. While it starts with a broad definition, it soon narrows down to just look at "watched pornography online". This is also why it reports such large differences between male and female consumption - it deletes the female consumption by ignoring euphemistically categorized written material (this doesn't explain all the gap but it is a sizable fraction of it).
Tophattingson
8mo ago
The UK did not have the post-war boom that the US did. The Empire slowly collapsed and rationing continued into the 50s. Our baby boom also did not happen at the same time as the US. Yours was in the 50s. Ours was in the 60s
Tophattingson
8mo ago
After all, 90% of England no longer considers it necessary to be white in order to be English, and the rate for people aged 65 and older is similar.
In 2019, someone who was 18 years old in 1945 would have already been 92. Dead people don't vote in polls.
Tophattingson
8mo ago
My own personal experience is that scientists and people with genuine expertise in a subject are way more softly spoken and uncertain about the topics they hold expertise in, particularly in friendly company and in private, than political activism would like. From personal experience, to keep things vague since the topic is niche, I actually had to tone down a claim that I already thought was already very modest about whether [some human activity] would increase levels of [some dust], even if it was the best way to link research to real-world impacts. Climate change is the obvious one, where IPCC reports are incredibly modest compared to claims made by activists, to the point they might as well be speaking different languages. And to bang my usual drum, claims about "The Science" for covid restrictions often didn't exist at all in literature, or were contradicted by it. Even something like lab leaks will see surveys reported as Virologists and epidemiologists back natural origin for COVID-19 when actually the survey findings was that said experts averaged 77% probability of zoonosis and 23% of lab leak, and only 25% of scientists reporting to be near certain that it was zoonosis, hardly a consensus.
As for this topic in particular, doctors who are inclined to cooperate and not "gatekeep" due to political pressure, and patients who are told to defect by lying to "gatekeepers" and get the drugs faster, is going to lead to disaster. Even if you're trying to implement standards in good faith here, they're just going to get instantly eroded.
Tophattingson
8mo ago
Why would this not be a conspiracy theory? A powerful group plotting to do something bad is the textbook definition of a conspiracy theory.
Tophattingson
8mo ago
Agreed. But it at least lets us skip any debates about determinism. It has already been demonstrated wrong. The absence of determinism isn't actually useful for identifying free will, however.
Tophattingson
8mo ago
In order to have the type of free will we want, determinism has to be false. That is, for a given fixed state of the universe (i.e. reality as a whole, both the physical and whatever non-physical components you believe in), there have to be multiple other possible states that could follow afterwards.
Materialist science already answered this question. Multiple possible other states can follow from a single fixed state as described here.
Tophattingson
8mo ago
Facebook initially banned any claims that COVID was man-made, which would include variations on serial passage or direct gain of function genetic modification hypotheses.
Tophattingson
9mo ago
For example, there was a large scale effort to convince the public that Covid had a zoonotic origin. Perhaps it did, perhaps it didn't. But evidence in support of a lab leak was deliberately denigrated by nearly all authority figures. There was no need to maintain a secret channel of communication. Once consensus was established, peopled picked up the signals to stay on side, and ones who didn't were punished. The best evidence in favor of a lab leak (that the pandemic started near a lab doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses) was never secret. It was just not spoken of.
Daszak et al's conspiracy to minimize belief in a lab leak was incredibly unsuccessful at preventing the spread of the lab leak hypothesis despite never being exposed in polite society. Americans overwhelmingly believe covid leaked from a lab. On the other hand, this hasn't turned into even a moderate policy response to this (such as restrictions on biolabs), let alone specifically going after the perpetrators of the conspiracy, so perhaps it was a success as far as virologists who's paychecks depend on the steady flow of grant money are concerned.
Tophattingson
9mo ago
Many claims that something is a conspiracy theory imply the equal and opposite claim that someone's conspiring to spread a conspiracy theory.
You only need one leak and if the whole thing blows open, no one wants to be left holding the proverbial gun while everyone is pointing fingers at each other.
The idea that big conspiracies can't happen because one leak is enough to stop the conspiracy in it's tracks and get everyone involved busted relies on, well, that axiom. That one leak stops it. There's even mathematical modelling of whether conspiracies are viable with this premise baked in. But in the real world, there are plenty of conspiracies where a single leak doesn't stop it from proceeding. In fact there are plenty of conspiracies where tens of thousands of leaks doesn't do anything to stop it. Obvious examples of such could fill a book so I'll just provide a few dissimilar examples.
A political example is the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart in East Germany. That this was actually being used not to protect East Germany from Fascists, but instead to stop East Germans from fleeing to the West, is a conspiracy theory involving something of great importance and implicating tens of thousands of military and political figures in a secret plot to prevent emmigration. And basically everyone knew it. Yet this did nothing to stop the conspiracy until the eve of the fall of the regime engaged in it anyway.
A military example is the Little Green Men that occupied Crimea. That these were actually Russian troops engaged in a plot to annex Crimea is a conspiracy theory involving something of great importance and implicating tens of thousands of military figures in a secret plot to invade and seize territory from another country. And basically everyone knew it. Yet this did nothing to stop the conspiracy, which proceeded to it's completion anyway.
And a medical example is Flibanserin, a drug that almost certainly doesn't work to treat a disorder that almost certainly was made to fit the drug than the other way around. That this was actually just a plot to make money off women in shitty marriages is a conspiracy theory involving something of... admittedly modest importance, and implicating thousands of researchers and clinical workers. As part of the conspiracy, the owner of the drug's IP even set up astroturfed advocacy groups insisting that the FDA needs to approve it, and that if they don't, it's because of sexism against the "female Viagra". And it's very much an open secret. Yet this did nothing to stop the FDA from approving it and it's ongoing albeit limited use.
I think my comments on electoral fraud, "pick it up, throw it in the bin", should make clear that I'm not trying any acrobatics or ambiguity here. But limiting the definition of a "stolen" election to just electoral fraud seems to lack a basis. Plenty of non-democracies "steal" elections even when the number of votes cast were not subject to fraud. For example, the Cuban election system functions on a basis of non-competitive elections. The number of candidates always matches the number of seats and therefore all candidates win their seats. Hypothetically there's a candidacy system that is subject to competition prior to the election, but actual attempts to run as opposition in these selection votes leads to intimidation. This means that all election results showing victory by the Communist Party of Cuba are "stolen", without actually requiring that fraud took place at the ballot box itself. To use another example of how elections can be stolen without requiring fraud (though there probably was fraud anyway), the 2015 Venezuelan Election gave MUD a supermajority but the ruling PSUV would later strip the National Assembly itself of legislative powers in a self-coup. So the results of the election itself weren't stolen but the outcome the election promised, that the winners of the election would have legislative powers, were.
As an aside, trying to figure out if there was any concrete definition of a "stolen" election pre-2016 turns up a long papertrail Democrats and Socialists accusing Bush of stealing the 2004 election, including in academic literature. It's interesting how the shirts on this flipped from blue to red.
Tophattingson
9mo ago
Comparing the badness of various problems to COVID isn't a meaningful basis for a response because the response to COVID wasn't driven by how bad it is.
Tophattingson
9mo ago
The steelman case for a stolen election is to take the entire "electoral fraud" bit, pick it up, throw it in the bin, and instead look at censorship. Basically you'd need to argue that some of what's come up in Missouri v Biden predates Biden's presidency and was used to sway the election in a way that'd be recognised, if it occured in the third world, as leaving the election deeply flawed at best. The second argument you'd want to make was that self-coups committed by some State Governers and institutions damaged democratic procedures before the election even occured. Then the third argument would be threat of intimidation or violence coming from riots that occured shortly before the election.
I will not elaborate further on this, however, because I think the legitimacy of a government depends on more than just whether it was elected or not.
Tophattingson
9mo ago
Do I have to beat my usual drum again? Fine.
I find Hanania is being very uncharitable to the right, and buying into an essentially progressive framing of the world.
I agree. He's just buying into it in a deeper way than you even imagine. A terminally online way, where people arguing about niche topics supposedly disrupts normalcy and is therefore maximally uncool. But is this actually relevant? If you want maximal normalcy, should you follow Hanania's advice?
When it comes to attacks on normalcy and normal life, forget Republicans arguing about sports and Democrats arguing about Trans people. Forget that an orange man and a dementia man are competing to be president. The amount of time either matters for anyone's normal, daily routine is <1% of their life. You know what did matter for seriously disrupting normal life?
Covid restrictions.
Every other policy or political event is a rounding error for your life in comparison. And for these restrictions, Democrats consistently sided against normalcy. Whether it be demanding that people wear weird clothing, sit in weird arrangements, attend or not attend certain places at certain times with certain people etc etc, and none of it was normal. The majority of political decisions affect very few people. Arguments about drug law only affects drug users, arguments about violent crime affects only the criminals and the victims. But masks? Business closures? School closures? Vaccine mandates? Each of these is broadsiding a huge swath of the population with anti-normalcy. And a few rants about WWE or NFL or Taylor Swift is never going to be equivalent to that.
NES and SNES era Mario games had something most of their contemporaries lacked. They actually controlled well and had good visual clarity, setting the standards for pretty much all later platformers with the degree of momentum and mid-air control offered. This lets the gameplay itself be the challenge, instead of wresting with controls.
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