Also it depends what the goal is. Does one need to be in a bicycle racing team to be a serious cyclist? They probably do if they want to race, since the best training is the activity itself. However, I don't want to be a racer. I just want to feel the way I do from extended aerobic exercise.
Peer review seems like gaming, for better or worse. -----Original Message----- From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$ Sent: Monday, November 1, 2021 10:49 AM To: friam@redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM] lurking Excellent! I agree completely. When behavior like Blue Sky thinking is encouraged ... rewarded, even ... you end up with Blue Sky thinkers unaware of their own ignorance. I watched both these vids during my workout this morning: "Why ignorance fails to recognize itself" Featuring David Dunning https://youtu.be/ErkhYq13VVE How the U.S. Keeps Losing its Wars https://youtu.be/SmpkdPm9eeQ Both are good examples of the dark side of gaming. And the statistification of work environments has successes as well as failures. Thanks to Deming <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming> et al for the horror show that is Amazon. But I don't blame gaming. Gaming is older than God. It's maximizing/optimizing that's to blame. Gaming is objective-neutral. In some sense, so is maximizing, just a little less neutral (by 1 dimension, I guess). Given that we're embedded in a wannabe meritocracy, gaming is miscast as maximizing and maximization is fixated on merit. And merit is fixated on clicked Likes and money. On 11/1/21 10:26 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > I actually don't believe all gamers are lumped into one category. You > argued against two of my so-called lumpings, after all. I see more dark > sides to gaming. Some companies now advocate for pair programming. Can > more eyes see bugs faster? Sure, in some circumstances. But how many cars > have two steering wheels? And who really appreciates a back seat driver? > The goal of pair programming is not unlike one of the goals of coding tests. > They want to see how easy it is to task a person on small things, and how > responsive they will be to suggestion, and how quickly an outcome will come > from that suggestion. These technical and social interaction tests are > kinds of games. "Agile" is a sort of rulebook for the game. Would one > think a great writer could be identified through these tricks? Any good > idea I have had came to me when I was alone and my mind was wandering. The > desire of managers to quantify this sort of competence and cooperativeness is > understandable, but I don't think it is predictive to find people that can > create actionable new ideas. > > Meanwhile, there are the charismatic types who claim to have great new ideas, > e.g. Elizabeth Holmes, but not real specifics on how to do it. Perhaps if > Theranos had more bone pickers amongst their investors and staff there would > not have been such a spectacular failure. Almost every boss I've ever had > is to some degree like Elizabeth Holmes. Their business is manipulating > people in the face of ambiguity. It is amazing to me how people will sit > quietly while they pat themselves on the back. > > -----Original Message----- > From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$ > Sent: Monday, November 1, 2021 9:56 AM > To: friam@redfish.com > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] lurking > > Right. But by citing the gamer glossary, I'm attempting to point out that > gamers *are* playful. The speedrun is an excellent example. Some earnest game > maker(s) put together what they think is an interesting and fun, often a bit > collaborative, fiction. A typical gamer plays the game "blind", having the > "fun" the game maker intended. I agree with you that this isn't really > *play*, not in the loaded sense you and SteveS were using it. It's simply > following along with the author's intent. It always involves a lot of things > like suspension of disbelief. In written fiction, that's psychological. In > video games, it's a willingness to overlook artifacts and bugs like > ill-fitted textures or a failure in constructive geometry, as well as > inconsistencies in the "lore". > > But after that blind playthrough, gamers ... being gamers ... will start > playing, actual play, in the sense you mean it. Such play is, in software > words, an attempt to find the edge cases. Here, the willingness to overlook > the bugs becomes a focus on the bugs ... "cheesing bosses" ... using exploits > to win at PvP, etc. While this is play, it's not the best play. The best play > is when the edge cases are plugged by other players as is done in MMOs. > You're trying to exploit a feature while they're blocking your exploit, > perhaps with another exploit. This is no different from 2 tiger cubs learning > the relationships between their body, the other cub, gravity, etc. > > So, lumping all gamers into the category of dolts who only follow the > storyline isn't accurate at all. I've never met a gamer who does that. Even > in the worst cases, say, where people claim to be big fans of trash fiction > ... they do play with it at least a little bit. Harry Potter is a great > example, just off the tail of Halloween. > > And lumping all gamers into hyper-competitive maximizers isn't accurate > either. Yes, some gamers are just jerks. My dad was a classic example. He'd > throw a hissy fit if my mom screwed up a hand and they lost at bridge. His > competitive obsession prevented him from understanding the larger game ... > the meta-game. Most gamers are not like your caricature ... even those who > explicitly game the system so that they win. In office games, it's often > enough to simply signal to the gamer that you know they're gaming it and they > will change their tactics on the fly. Which tactics they use and how they > react to your signal can tell you what kind of gamer they are ... > hyper-competitive morons or truly appreciative of the world. > > The real problem, in my experience, are the people who play the game but > refuse to admit they're playing a game ... insist that what *they* do is not > a game or that it would be wrong, immoral, to gamify it. > > On 11/1/21 9:28 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: >> Games are indeed everywhere. Topics of inherent interest sometimes fall >> under the category of (professional) work. Approaching those topics in the >> way I would like would be much less structured if it were up to me. But no, >> work is another effing game, so I must try to keep the monsters (that is, >> some reliable fraction of my colleagues) at bay. People who care about >> nothing but maximizing their status in the organization by gaming the system >> of rules associated with the organization and their position in it. >> Play and games are not the same thing. Games are a social construct. >> The gamers are the people that impinge my ability to reflect and be >> creative. They are a source of anxiety and distraction. They work in the >> world of extrinsic motivation rather than intrinsic motivation. >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$ >> Sent: Monday, November 1, 2021 8:27 AM >> To: friam@redfish.com >> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] lurking >> >> Ouch. Your retort certainly wins the game, eh? Congrats on winning. >> >> But if you'd take a minute away from vampire bone-picking, you'd find space >> to agree that nobody swims in septic tanks. So your retort is nothing more >> than hyperbolic nonsense. If we make it more true, more real, we can say >> there *do exist* septic tank repair people. And they are often splattered >> with sh¡t. And they would not claim to *enjoy* being splattered with sh¡t. >> But if you actually hang out with such people, you'll notice that being >> splattered with sh¡t does lead to quite a bit of *enjoyment*. So to ask >> whether they enjoy being splattered with sh¡t is an ill-formed question, the >> answer to which is "yes and no". >> >> Feel free to pick yet another bone. >> >> On 11/1/21 8:02 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: >>> Glen writes: >>> >>> < or as cringy as it may be for some dork to be proud of their Poker >>> prowess, this is the world.> >>> >>> Septic tanks are part of the world too, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy >>> swimming in them. >>> >>> >>> >>> On Nov 1, 2021, at 7:20 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ <geprope...@gmail.com> wrote: >>>> >>>> Holy fire hose, Batman! >>>> >>>> I'm too ignorant and incompetent to adequately synthesize last weekend's >>>> blast of fecundity. But I did spot a thread (tapestry?) that I'd like to >>>> highlight. I'm going to list *my* bullets first. Then I'll try to decorate >>>> it with text. >>>> >>>> • gaming & play >>>> - not infinite but hyper-, or meta-, games of games >>>> - does accretion raise or lower degrees of freedom? >>>> >>>> • digitization ⇒ virtualization >>>> - parallelism theorem >>>> >>>> • corrosive memes & reconstruction with destruction >>>> - "corrosive" annealing → rigid crystal >>>> - explosive bursts → escape from local optima >>>> >>>> • preservation & provenance >>>> >>>> • ideal vs practical - universities to games to a formalized polity >>>> - corruption ← idealism >>>> - meta-games ← abuse >>>> - formal idea ⊂ dirty real >>>> >>>> Y'all left so many little bones laying all over the floor, so many bones >>>> to pick. But rather than acting like a social vampire, obsessing over all >>>> the nits that need picking, I figured I'd try to follow this one thread >>>> through the whole mess. From SteveS' challenge to Marcus on whether hyper- >>>> and meta-games are still games, to Manny's corrupted ideal of the >>>> Highlands, to Jon and Jochen's attempt to look under the provenance rug, >>>> Doug's transhumanist assertion, and EricS and SteveS' formalization of the >>>> polity, the fire hose presents to me the theme of the ideal swimming in a >>>> sea of the dirty real. >>>> >>>> The interesting games are those wherewith (incl. wherein) *more* games can >>>> be devised. All our formalizations are battle plans that don't survive >>>> contact with the enemy, including both Packer's 4 Americas and any given >>>> video game, however "nonlinear" or "open world". And to target Jochen's >>>> and Jon's disagreement directly, it *seems* fine to try to eliminate >>>> abuse, corruption, corrosive, and destructive memes. But, to a large >>>> extent, those forces are, if not welcome in themselves, inscrutably >>>> intertwined with all the other forces. It's the same machine that produces >>>> both good and bad. And that machine lives in this world, not some ideal >>>> world formalized by a (provably) myopic subset of that world. >>>> >>>> So, as cringy as is to appeal to Musk as a "great man", forgetting >>>> the armies of actual great people that came before ... and as >>>> cringy as it is to see Pepe the Frog and wonder whether it's a >>>> racist meme or just juvy gamer silliness ... or as cringy as it may >>>> be for some dork to be proud of their Poker prowess, this is the >>>> world. And it's reflectively both horrifying and miraculous that >>>> many of us can't enjoy that world in all its repulsive glory. Ha! >>>> Maybe it's not a thread, after all, but mere imputation on my part. >>>> >8^D >> > -- "Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie." ☤>$ uǝlƃ .-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - . 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