Games are a pretty interesting category of software in that they're possibly the only interactive software a user would voluntarily use for its own sake.
Anti-games policies and agreements seem pretty suspiciously like "you can write any software you please as long as nobody ever uses it". Perhaps open source software development was only ever allowed under the assumption that open source software could never build a userbase competing with parent companies.
Competition could be pretty broadly scoped -- a hobby game could be dangerous to a tech company if it makes no money and has no special proprietary technology but concentrates enough technical acumen and useful experience in its developers/audience that they could recruit internally to found new companies.
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Philosophy student/artist with broad web development / full stack / hosting experience.
Studied / collaborated on ML research projects in the past, but no professional work there yet.
Great with copywriting, documentation, testing/debugging, business case studies, applied epistemology.
Unexpectedly became totally disabled while working an interim job to fund art projects,
looking for absolutely any remote positions / non-manual-labor to forestall immediate homelessness.
Hit me up for detailed resume, social media, samples of work, or my organic chemistry / traditional illustration portfolio.
References to hiring processes that lean on coding samples, objective measures of programming skill, or are accomodating to non-traditional backgrounds would be really appreciated!
I think many (most?) "Digital natives" already found a superior answer to these problems; pull people you're actually friends with (defined by whether they'll join your small group chat) into small group chats, and blog the daily experience of life mostly into those small chats.
Solves many privacy problems (but not all), avoids Dunbar number violations, and gives a genuine source of social attention (which humans need) from people who are more involved in your life.
Getting enough social attention (and giving enough in turn) seems to calm a kind of anxiety that might otherwise suck people into social media.
I wonder if the same effect holds true if a team is made up of mostly confident/brash people, or if safety-to-project-yourself can be trained and elevated independent of any other aspect of social environment.
Maybe improv classes or subsidizing employees to exhibit art or publicly perform music?
False dichotomy. You can be confident, brash, and rude to each other all day long, as long as everyone is in on it and everyone is socially intelligent enough to know each other's boundaries.
The problem is when people tell themselves "that's just how I am" and don't have a high enough EQ to notice that they're coming across as jerks.
Everyone is different and everyone requires a personal touch. It's important for people to understand how to get along with those who aren't exactly like them.
Didn't mean to assert a dichotomy, more wondering whether the size of the effect of importance of emotional safety for expressive freedom varies with some kind of external measure of confidence
Yes, and maybe practicing public speaking can make [those who otherwise might not say anything], participate more in meetings and letting others hear their good ideas
There are plenty of shy musicians and theatre performers. When you're on stage you've been explicitly given permission to perform a role, makes it possible for people to put their shyness aside
Maybe the improv world is different, I've never done improv (yet)
Seems like a bold prediction that most (maybe any?) grocery stores have the level of corporate organization or even level of education to even consider a "secret order substitution to prole cart-pushers who will then have to answer customer service calls asking why their order was amended to add a more expensive item".
Someone down the line has to actually act out the 'evil algorithm', and will then have to actually interact with the aggrieved customers.
In a third party delivery service I imagine it would be trivially easy to get the line workers to betray the customer / rest of the organization, but there are also none of the incentives to, for example, try to dump low velocity items through deliberate substitution errors.
Maybe we have different experiences but you talk as if substitutions are not a regular part of the process - I'm not a massive delivery shopper but in the pre-Covid era it was almost unheard of to get a delivery without at least one item substituted when you forget to deselect substitution. I switch amongst three of the major chains and the experience is basically the same.
Also I don't think your approach need be how it's enacted. You could quite easily run a set of adjustments against the restocking priories to see which had the least negative effect on profits and that would likely result in this kind of substitution the way it's observed. This wouldn't even need one to put on a "let's do evil hat", couched in these terms it comes across as perfectly reasonable.
Substitutions are omnipresent in my experience, but I view that as a symptom of almost all stores having really profoundly bad inventory tracking (do the developers for the web platform even know whether they have any items on the shelf at all?) so even with ordinary infrastructure hiccups I'd expect there to never be completely filled orders.
I don't know too much about the way the restocking priorities are established, but it appears to be totally ad hoc and at the behest of the shift worker on the line at the moment your order us started from what I've seen.
The stores would need to have inventory systems fine grained enough to know that there are high margin items in stock to be swapped in to implement this kind of malicious action plan, but I think most stores (that aren't Walmart) don't even have their inventory spatially mapped at all, let alone multiple times per day to actively dump target items.
It could be appropriate to consider them cross-genre games containing elements of both soothing-slice-of-life gameplay cycles and conflict-oriented-'normal'-game gameplay cycles. Games mixing placid, relaxing gameplay loops seem to definitely hold a different overall tone even if you can't play through them without any aggression or violence.
A pure iyashikei game feels like an aspirational ideal and fairly rare.
The phenomenological impact of poor diet and harsh glycemic index ASDR cannot be overstated. 'refined sugars negatively impact mood and emotional well-being' might be one of the most rock solid universals of human nature.
All medical interventions should include the no-brainer diet, vitamins, exercise, self-esteem interventions.
As the saying goes: have you tried self-conducted sleep deprivation, exercise, improved diet, vitamin d, sun lamps, having sex, talk therapy, or any of the clinically evaluated pharmchems yet? Why not?
This reads as extremely ethically dangerous.
I'm not sure it's possible to justify any course of treatment leading towards individual neurocircuitry 'tweaks', even for an unambiguously good cause.
Harkens too closely to 'scientist seeks to cure homosexuality through direct brain stimulation' in the 1950s.
( en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Galbraith_Heath )
Isn't every treatment we have for depression some form of neuro-circuitry tweaking? Whether you're using prescription medication, electroconvulsion, psychosurgery, counselling or self-medicating with legal or illegal drugs, you're deliberately altering your brain function in the hope that it'll result in temporary or permanent changes to your feelings and behaviour. What makes this procedure more ethically dangerous than those?
>Harkens too closely to 'scientist seeks to cure homosexuality through direct brain stimulation' in the 1950s.
Let's say we lived in a world where in addition to having their sex changed, people could have their gender and sexual orientation changed. Would there really be anything wrong with that? In the 1950s, it was a forced medical procedure, but what if the wrongness came from its involuntary application and not its intrinsic nature?
Yes? Do you approve of the idea of using any combination of therapies found effective to cure people of believing in their religion, or to 'solve' political dissidents?
Intellectual freedom,literally in this case, is important.(1)
>Do you approve of the idea of using any combination of therapies found effective to cure people of believing in their religion, or to 'solve' political dissidents?
What I'm suggesting you consider is, what if it's only done voluntarily? For example I can't imagine a political dissident voluntarily subjecting themselves to belief neutralization. I have a hard time imagining how the voluntary rule could allow any of the authoritarian outcomes.
People who underestimate it actually make me angry. Not only does it take your life away, it takes it away and leaves a giant black hole, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
Is there an outside definition of medical ethics that can really be impartially compared from generation to generation?
I'm certain all previous generations thought they were acting in good faith as well.
Progress towards 'changing people's minds' is dangerous for the same reasons across all times and places.
>Is there an outside definition of medical ethics that can really be impartially compared from generation to generation?
That's a legitimate criticism of doing anything, but the problem is that it applies to, well, anything. Anything you do today could be seen as a horrifying atrocity by future generations, unless there exists some kind of boundary on what ethical stances a culture might adopt. There could be limits, but in that case there is an outside definition of medical ethics. If there isn't an outside definition then maybe in 100 years haircuts will be seen as mutilation[0].
[0] There are some cultures with strict rules about facial hair, so even though this example might sound ridiculous it actually serves to illustrate the point.
(if the study replicates), the targeted precision and long term persistence of therapeutic effects. If someone prescribes you a pill for being gay and you don't want to be cured of being gay, you could always just stop taking it later if you were able to leave the despotic regime / cruel family structure / religious community binding you.
In all three cases, you've got a specific "associative" pathway that's bothering someone and interfering with their lives, that they seek out treatment for; and in all three cases, the solution is to get their brain to just not activate that specific association any more, in effect just ripping/burning out the synapse that causes a memory of X to in turn activate emotions or memories of fear/shame/trauma/etc.
I say "in effect", because the brain is electrochemical; and so it wouldn't seem to matter whether you blow an association away at the electrical level (by e.g. physically removing/necrotizing/calcifying the synapse-as-"wire", as ECT does; or by increasing its "resistance" by reorganizing it at a molecular level, as TCM probably does), or you do it at the chemical level (by e.g. re-training nearby junctions so the "carrier signal" feeding into the synaptic junction is too "noisy" to pass signal along, so even if the path activates, descending connections don't receive useful information from it, and so learn to ignore it; and/or by temporarily starving/blockading the ion pores it uses to receive voltage-generating ions through, starving it of its ability to work as a transistor for the signal it wants to generate—until, again, descending connections learn to ignore it, even when it comes back fully functional after removal of the blockade.)
But, as a separate ethical argument, I'd like to also point out: people do, obviously, have the right to self-modify their neuronal architecture. They must be fully informed and consenting as to the consequences of such, and must want those consequences—think them better than the alternative, than all alternatives. But then they should be allowed to do so. And, since they—as lay-people—can't do so by themselves, trained specialists should be there to help them to safely perform the modification they want to perform.
That's the same bar that a patient already has to pass, to qualify for e.g. hormone-replacement therapy targeting gender dysphoria. Medicine already has an infrastructure for ensuring patients want what they want, here. And that infrastructure (mostly coincidentally) already prevents doctors from just deciding to do these things to patients without the patient putting in the effort themselves to go through this "one thousand consent forms over a space of months" rigamarole.
(Many people might say, in fact, that the existing infrastructure sets the bar too high—for example, that doctors make demands of patients to prove specific preferences over desired outcomes of treatment that align with the "on-label" use of the treatment, rather than accepting patient requests to use such treatments for their well-known "off-label" effects. In the HRT case, many people who identify as non-binary want to get HRT for their own reasons, but some doctors don't want to give it to them, because it's only indicated for a specific kind of gender dysphoria related to wanting to achieve a clear end-state of a binary gender.)
Moral problems arise not from curing suffering being morally wrong, but the leakage of moral responsibility in medical/psychiatric practice outside of research.
Any tool to 'correct associative pathways' will be used for the conversion therapy of children, punishment of apostates by repressive states, and torture of the criminally convicted within one generation of it's inception. My primary hope for the memory reconsolidation therapies require some kind of actual moment by moment deliberate cooperation by the treated, and can't be performed without an expert (hopefully) bound by professed vows.
I don't see the argument. Pretty much anything can be used for torture. Taking tools of torture away doesn't do anything to stop torture—you can, ultimately, torture somebody (all the way into full-on brainwashing!) with nothing more than your own words and hands. That's how domestic abuse works, usually!
The ethics of state-sponsored torture (and/or state-sponsored "mind control" like conversion therapy) are fundamentally political ethics—i.e. the ethics of choosing which political "machinery" to build, where different formulations of a state can ensure to different degrees that any given (ultimately self-serving) state apparatus will be properly bound to human rights, and properly watched over by people empowered to see and report any human-rights violations that arise.
The use of psychiatric techniques as torture is the history of psychiatry. This is not some petty joke or argumentative stance.
Do you think that Henry Cotton was a problem of political ethics? Supposedly his reputation and political status were so high in his society that patients and their families actively asked for their teeth, gallbladders, ovaries, testes, tonsils, ... to be spuriously removed.
Edit: I mean to say that serious contemplation of the risks and benefits of any medical interventions should always be taken seriously regardless of how severe a medical problem might seem or how exciting a miraculous new cure might appear to be. Most miraculous cures not only don't 'work', but also caused serious harm to their subjects throughout the history of psychiatric medicine.
Competition could be pretty broadly scoped -- a hobby game could be dangerous to a tech company if it makes no money and has no special proprietary technology but concentrates enough technical acumen and useful experience in its developers/audience that they could recruit internally to found new companies.