The Community is You!!!

[[Anonymous]]

@TaZ: Was that a Joke? Lol

[sinewav]

I do my best to encourage new players to stick around. I welcome them, try to teach them how to play, etc.

Fun Fact: It was Monkey who was my greatest encouragement when I developed an interest in Fortress.

This next part is important, so I am increasing the text size for dramatic effect.

Every population has unique people who, because of their consistency, can be used to gauge the community, its trends, and its social contracts (both spoken and unspoken). In Arma these are players who have incredibly consistent personalities and play regularly over many years. chrisd is one of those players. He is perpetually non-confrontational, optimistic, and cheery. He greets everyone with openness and responds with kindness when treated poorly. chrisd is a perfect example of an extreme personality and because of this he can be used as a baseline or threshold to gauge other behavioral trends. Without going into too much deatil, if chrisd thinks you're an asshole — you're probably an asshole.

[Vogue]

the females

We're not ""females"", we're women. You're not talking about animals, consider that your first lesson.

[[Anonymous]]

the females

We're not ""females"", we're women. You're not talking about animals, consider that your first lesson.

We are animals.

[ConVicT]

That active moment when Z-Man is reading a post.

[Monkey]

@sinewav
Glad to know my efforts aren't completely wasted

We're not ""females"", we're women.

You and nara may be women but I was referring to all of the females in this game, not just you two; it would be wrong to make the assumption that every female in Arma is a woman. I'd also say "males" rather than "men", in this game, for the same reason.

[Vogue]

We're not ""females"", we're women.

You and nara may be women but I was referring to all of the females in this game, not just you two; it would be wrong to make the assumption that every female in Arma is a woman. I'd also say "males" rather than "men", in this game, for the same reason.

Shut up.

https://www.google.nl/search?q=stop+say ... Ib4UqLQrGA

[Monkey]

There are females that play this game that are not women; I know of at least one, who is the daughter of another player.

[ConVicT]

Can't we just say "people" and move on?
Who the hell cares about a player's gender?

But, fun fact; tronners are more likely to play in a server in which there is a woman!

[Ratchet]

If you get a chance, read this book* and it will change your life. Be warned, it's an 800+ page beast of scientific research and not for the faint of heart. I read it. It was a rough couple days, but luckily I was out in the desert with a lot of free time.


* I happen to have an electronic copy you can "borrow."

I'd love to. Sounds interesting.

[chrisd]

I have not read the book by Pinker but I do know that it was severely criticized by Nassim Taleb. http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf

[sinewav]

I have not read the book by Pinker but I do know that it was severely criticized by Nassim Taleb. http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf

The criticism is invalid. Taleb is himself making assumptions. Pinker addresses the limitations of his research in the pages of the book. Keep in mind, it's not just Pinker who was involved in the writing, but dozens of experts making the best estimates on violence available. While I totally understand Taleb's point, it doesn't seem to match reality and seems rather semantical.

[chrisd]

The criticism is invalid. Taleb is himself making assumptions. Pinker addresses the limitations of his research in the pages of the book. Keep in mind, it's not just Pinker who was involved in the writing, but dozens of experts making the best estimates on violence available. While I totally understand Taleb's point, it doesn't seem to match reality and seems rather semantical.

We should hope, and, if so inclined, pray, that Talebs point does not match reality but I see no way this can be proven. The assertions that Taleb is making assumptions and that his point is rather semantical makes me fear that you did not really understand it. There is hardly any assumption going into this, just the obvious observation that 'number of people killed by violence' is a fat-tailed distribution. Furthermore, in a fat-tailed distribution the mean from a time-series is not just inaccurate, it most likely grossly underestimates the true mean, for instance, by a factor of 10, 100 or 1000.

[sinewav]

Furthermore, in a fat-tailed distribution the mean from a time-series is not just inaccurate, it most likely grossly underestimates the true mean, for instance, by a factor of 10, 100 or 1000.

I understood his point, but but again, these are just assumptions that don't match the facts on the ground. I also understand the use of Pareto distributions and how they differ from other distributions.

Read Pinker's book. It goes into way more detail than just presenting a collection statistical models. It gives clear definitions of how violence is defined for the purpose of the research, what and how data was collected, and explains the results in an excessively detailed and clear manner. It also covers the whole of human history. Taleb's point seems to center around the uniqueness of the 20th Century and the unproven idea that we are entering a new stage of violence. To that I say "maybe." But still, Pinker's conclusions are rock solid whether you include the last 100 years or not.

Taleb digs his heels into the ground and grafts war onto a power law. That's great, but so what? War is not the main focus of Better Angels. The book covers all forms of violence and even considers psychological violence (there is even a section on etiquette in the Middle Ages!). Taleb isn't seeing the whole picture, which doesn't make his criticism on that one point necessarily false, just irrelevant. Naturally, there are flaws in Better Angels. The book is 800 pages of a seriously complex subject. However, fat-tail errors isn't one of them.

Also, one of his replies.

[Z-Man]

You're allowed to use quotes and examples even if they would not be strictly in line with forum policies IF YOU ARE careful. That is, for example, you clearly need to be only quoting them for demonstration purposes and neither writing them because you want to write them nor using them to make the one who originally said them look bad. Best remove personal references.

Please. Post where these simple guidelines were violated and the inevitable resulting round of finger pointing snipped.