• 3 Posts
  • 3.28K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

help-circle








  • I say this a lot, but all humans are heavily biased towards believing their in-group. For some people that’s basically all that matters. I feel like authoritarians, right wing authoritarians, are especially prone to this. Facts and figures don’t matter. It’s the emotional core of “fit in with the group” and “outsiders BAD” that’s driving it, and all the justifications come afterwards.

    I don’t want to say anything like they’re like animals or subhuman, because this behavior is extremely human. We all do it to some extent. It’s just for some people it’s so dominant, and their in-group is so dangerously stupid, it’s a real problem for all of us.




  • I took a like journalism 101 course in college as an elective, and we had a couple lessons on this. One of them, the teacher gave us a bunch of websites and was like “Tell me which of these are legitimate.” Some were crackpots, some were satire, some were just weird news. When we went over the assignment in class, we talked about strategies for figuring it out.

    I think a lot of people never had that class, or they slept through it.

    Sometimes I’m really optimistic about humanity, but sometimes I remember the stupidest kids from school. No attention span. No curiosity. A lot of them are probably out in the world making decisions right now.


  • Group membership matters to all of us. It’s like one of the primary drivers of belief. We might think we’re rational and cool logical people but that’s a lie. We trust people we see as being in-group, and we trust facts from them.

    For some people, like many republicans, it’s also the only thing that really matters.

    This may have been a viable strategy in like 3000BCE when you had to stick with your group of idiots, because otherwise you’d be left for dead or worse by the enemy tribe. It’s not really a solid strategy in 2025CE.

    But that’s really the whole problem. People (often but not always republicans) put their group membership ahead of everything else. This is happening like deep in the emotional part of their psyche. There’s no easy fix. You’d probably have to get them to join some other group and see that as primary, like maybe appeal to their sense of being American, but it’s going to be hard when there’s a lot of them. It’s like gravity, they all pull each other into the group.

    I don’t know how to fix this.








  • It’s not as difficult as people say it is, but it’s harder than the average game that wants you to win.

    Games like Skyrim generally aren’t very hard. They might show you scary things like a big troll or dragon, but they’re mostly paper tigers. You can always pause the game and eat 90 cheese wheels to heal, or save scum, or whatever. On top of that, the default numbers are such that you can probably take a beating before you go down.

    Elden Ring, and other fromsoft games, don’t generally do that. The big knight with the big axe will probably kill you if he hits you a couple times, and then you go back to the checkpoint to try again.

    But there are so many ways to deal with that problem. Just run past the knight. Dodge. Get a big shield and block. Use ranged attacks. Use a spirit ash. Summon a whole other player. Cheese it with poison. Fuck off and come back with more levels/upgrades/trinkets

    Players that just repeatedly try one approach over and over and over are going to have a bad time. There’s a field boss right after the tutorial. Some people will see it and spend hours fighting it. That shit is pretty hard when you’re basically naked, have the minimum amount of healing, and no other tools. Just walk away. It’s a really hard game if you insist on playing it in ways that maximize hardness