sololipsist

First of all, I was commenting on the quote out of context. That's why I objected to "the way it's phrased." I don't like the phrasing, whatever the context. There is no reason whatsoever that games need to give up mastery. None.

Reading comprehension, bro.

That being said, even in context, it's dumb. He's saying games need to stop "pandering to the player’s desire for mastery" to qualify as art. That's silly. I'm not an art relativist or anything, but this is an unnecessarily narrow definition of art: "a work must lack a specific thing to qualify as art." How stupid is that? The author just wants video games to be something they're not, and that's fine, but he is just saying whatever his judgmental gut is telling him to say, which is causing him to say stupid and patently incorrect things.

I don't like the way it's phrased like an exclusive dichotomy, and that games must stop "pandering" to mastery to "embrace" intellectual life. This reads like someone who just likes film but doesn't like videos games turning their nose up at something they view as aesthetically inferior, as if their shitty aesthetic opinions are informed by universal objective truth itself.

Yeah, absolutely, video games that enhance the emotional and intellectual lives of the audience are better for it, but games that give the audience a sense of accomplishment and reward curiosity are also better for it. There is no reason to stop doing one to do the other. Video games don't need to be movies.

> and while as a white man I experienced most likely much less of this

I think you might be less confident about this if you examine your framing. Examining your own framing is difficult, so humor me while I examine the author's framing:

'I’m not suggesting that my fellow interviewers were sexist. They weren’t even aware of their inconsistent judgment until I pointed it out. But this incident made me think that subconsciously, people are using another scale to judge women’s ability in tech. Nobody says it out loud because that’s no longer socially acceptable, but I couldn’t help but hearing it in my head: “She’s good for a woman. Even though she doesn’t do as well as that guy, she still gets the same scores because she’s in the women’s league.”'

The author is looking at a situation where a man is offered fewer opportunities, and it is framed as sexism against women. This is justified by asserting what was going on in the heads of other people (something she can never know).

Situation: Man is denied an opportunity Framing: This is sexism against a woman Evidence: Assertion about someone else's inner life

Well, we can just as easily make a different assertion, changing the evidence, which changes the framing. Why not assert that the interviewers are really thinking 'I couldn’t help but hearing it in my head: "He did the best, but he's a man. Men don't deserve positions of power because they abuse them to take advantage of other people sexually and economically. He should have a lower score."'

This changes the framing. Now the sexism is against a man:

Situation: Man is denied an opportunity Framing: This is sexism against a man Evidence: Assertion about someone else's inner life

Which framing fits the situation better.

But now you might say, "Sololipsist, that's unlikely to be the thought process. I don't know if we should make assertions about other people's inner lives." To that I say, "I strongly agree." What SHOULD happen here is that we should see evidence, which leads us to a frame that describes the situation. In both cases above, the frame leads to the evidence, which is wrong. This is a post-hoc rationalization.

Claims of sexism are a post-hoc rationalization to justify a claim. In this case, it's to justify a claim that denying an opportunity to a man is an injustice not to that man, but to women in general. Why, oh why, would you want to justify that claim in this particular case, without evidence? Why would you accept invented evidence (the inner lives of others) to justify this claim?

I suggest that it's because you've been socially conditioned to accept the frame that women are victims of sexism, but that men are not, and that this frame does not necessarily reflect reality. In fact, I suggest, in this light, that it's no more likely to be the correct frame than the opposite frame, that men are victims of sexism and women are not. Sure, you can justify the former frame with evidence, but is that evidence following from a frame?

I'm sure you accept the premise that men in the 50's lacked the appropriate frame to see how their actions and culture was oppressive to women - one of the greatest achievements of feminism, it is said, is that it provided this frame - after all, women didn't have to take power from men violently, they changed culture to get men to cede power willingly.

Maybe, as a white man, you've experienced a lot more racism and sexism than you realize, you've just been denied the appropriate frame to see it.

I'm noticing that, which is a little bit of a bummer. One of the other things I disliked about reddit is "science" or "technology" articles about things that are theoretically pretty cool if they exist, but don't, and likely never will. Like the article here about the gears for space - I just can't bring myself to give any fucks about a prototype. Put it in space and then tell me about it.

That's fairly nit-picky, though. I'll take it.

The real question is: Why should it be fair? We don't live in an ideal world, we live in the real one. A "fair" tax rate, even if fairness could be quantified and applied, might very well be a rate that causes businesses to flee the country for more favorable rates. If the goal of taxes are to increase the well-being of citizens, I don't see how driving businesses out of the country en masse with them is an the best interests of the public. I'm not saying that's necessarily the reality, but treating "fairness" as the most important consideration is, to be blunt, asinine. What are the odds, really, that a "fair" corporate tax rate is also the one that results in the greatest well-being of the citizenry?

I would sacrifice economic justice for economic prosperity every day of the week. I simply don't care if someone is "exploiting" me if that exploitation actually increases my well-being in the most important ways, and while a lot of people might disagree with that in abstract, I'm willing to be 99% of adults would make the same decision if actually faced with that dichotomy.

Jesus, I just found this place while looking for a reddit alternative, and seeing comments like these are making me soooooooooooo happy.

This is going to sound pretentious as fuck, but I'm gonna say it anyway: I'm so tired of the hoards of people passively accepting whatever headlines reinforce their extremely simple, uniform bias / value set.

Maybe this is just a reflection of the bias / value set of the crowd here, but at least it's a different one. I hope it's an indication of a higher level of general critical thinking, though.

You don't understand.

If women are better coders than men, then there are differences between the sexes. If men are more interested in coding than women, regardless of their relative skill, then there is no difference between sexes and you should shut up right now or we will fire you.

Please, correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can tell, the first author is an undergrad CS student. If I had to pick anyone to do a study like this, it wouldn't be someone who studies CS, it would be a social scientist. That being said, that doesn't preclude this from being good work.

I lost confident that this would be good work after reading the fourth sentence, though:

"Research suggests that, indeed, gender bias pervades open source. The most obvious illustration is the underrepresentation of women in open source; in a 2013 survey of the more than 2000 open source developers who indicated a gender, only 11.2% were women"

This is a textbook non-sequitur. It is trivial to show that a gender imbalance in a group or field, even an extreme one, is not proof of gender bias in that group of field; it's not even good evidence.

To be perfectly honest, after reading more of this "study," it's pathetic that this made it through peer review. Shame on this poor child's advisors.

As I suspected, PeerJ is an open-access, pay-to-play journal. I have to ask what kind of "peer-review" is involved. A science blog should have better standards than this.