The Tangled Cultural Roots of Dungeons & Dragons

November 4th, 2015

Jon Michaud laments how Michael Witwer’s Empire of Imagination fails to untangle the roots of Dungeons & Dragons:

We get just a paragraph on Gygax’s unhappy stint in the Marines, for instance; the idea that boot camp might have had some bearing on Gygax’s lifelong effort to re-create combat conditions in tabletop games never seems to cross Witwer’s mind. Likewise, there are only passing mentions of Gygax’s years of work as an insurance underwriter. But one needs only to browse the Advanced D. & D. “Player’s Handbook” or the “Dungeon Master’s Guide” to see how similar the books’ numerous charts are to actuarial tables.

They really do resemble actuarial tables, don’t they?

Posted in Games | No Comments »

America-Lite

November 4th, 2015

Bill Kristol has a conversation with David Gelernter — who doesn’t mention surviving a mail bomb from Ted Kaczynski, by the way:

Gelernter describes America-Lite, where the past and future are blank and there is only a big now:

I’m a teacher of college students. I’m lucky to be at one of the best colleges in the world, at Yale. Our students are as smart as any in the world. They work very hard to get here. They are eager, they’re likable. My generation is getting a chip on its shoulder, we always thought we knew everything about every topic, our professors were morons, and we were the ones who were building the world.

My students today are much less obnoxious. Much more likable than I and my friends used to be, but they are so ignorant that it’s hard to accept how ignorant they are. You tell yourself stories; it’s very hard to grasp that the person you’re talking to, who is bright, articulate, advisable, interested, and doesn’t know who Beethoven is. Had no view looking back at the history of the 20th century — just sees a fog. A blank. Has the vaguest idea of who Winston Churchill was or why he mattered. And maybe has no image of Teddy Roosevelt, let’s say, at all. I mean, these are people who — We have failed.

[...]

They know nothing about art. They know nothing about history. They know nothing about philosophy. And because they have been raised as not even atheists, they don’t rise to the level of atheists, insofar as they’ve never thought about the existence or nonexistence of God. It has never occurred to them. They know nothing about the Bible. They’ve never opened it. They’ve been taught it’s some sort of weird toxic thing, especially the Hebrew Bible, full of all sorts of terrible, murderous, prejudiced, bigoted. They’ve never read it. They have no concept.

Posted in Education | 3 Comments »

10,000 Hours with Reid Hoffman

November 3rd, 2015

Ben Casnocha’s description of Reid Hoffman makes him sound like the Superman-analog of Kurt Busiek’s Astro City, the Samaritan, who laments that he has no time to enjoy life, because there’s always some good he could be doing:

Every decision has tradeoffs: when you choose to do one thing it means you choose not do some other thing. When you choose to optimize a choice on one factor, it means necessarily suboptimizing on another factors. Reid faced tradeoffs in his life that were heavier than the ones you or I face. Imagine you could meet anyone, from the President of the United States on down. Do almost anything you can think of — from saving the local opera company from bankruptcy to traveling to the farthest outposts on earth in total luxury. A small number of humans have virtually no constraints on their decision-making, and Reid is one of them. When Reid chose to fly to Las Vegas and speak at this event, the list of things he chose not to do with that time was very, very long.

Astro City Life in the Big City

Often, Reid wrestled with these tradeoffs. Author E.B. White once captured the essence of why. “I wake up in the morning unsure of whether I want to savor the world or save the world,” White said, “This makes it hard to plan the day.”

For some, savor is the easy answer to the task of planning a life. For those with no constraints, the plan is often straightforward: they put their name on a few buildings of their alma matter, buy a pro sports franchise, and call it a day. For the 99% of people with resource constraints, they might bag a 9–5 job, accumulate vacation days as diligently as possible, retire early, and maybe donate to their friend’s Walk Against Cancer. Reid likes to savor, albeit not hedonistically. Savor for him means arriving at intellectual epiphanies; it means spending time with friends.

But what he really wants to do is save. He wants to use his talent and network and money to change the world for the better and solve some of humanity’s biggest problems. He is among the most selfless and externally-generous people I’ve met in my life.

Posted in Business, Media, Policy | 2 Comments »

Good News Is Unplanned

November 2nd, 2015

Good news is unplanned, according to Matt Ridley’s The Evolution of Everything — which discusses the evolution of government:

States emerged from protection rackets in which a gang monopolizing violence demanded payment of goods and services — taxes — in exchange for promises to defend local farmers and artisans from predation by rival gangs. “Tudor monarchs and the Taliban are cut from exactly the same cloth,” summarizes Ridley.

But two to three centuries ago, the fractured polities of Western Europe provided an open, speculative space where novel ideas about property rights, free trade, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and limits on government could mutate and grow. Where those bottom-up conceptual mutations took hold, technological innovation sped forward, incomes rose, and civil liberties were recognized. Once established, liberal societies are veritable evolution machines that frenetically generate new mutations and swiftly recombine them to produce a vast array of new products, services, and social institutions that enable ever more people to flourish. So far liberal societies are outcompeting—in the sense of being richer and more appealing—those polities that are closer to the original protection rackets.

“Perhaps,” Ridley hopefully suggests, “the state is now evolving steadily towards benign and gentle virtue.” He adds, “Perhaps not.”

Posted in Economics, Policy, Science | 2 Comments »

The Plucky Young Entrepreneurial Elon Musk

November 2nd, 2015

Here’s another story of the plucky young entrepreneurial Elon Musk — and his brother and cousins:

Here’s an idea that one of five young South African cousins threw out sometime in the 1980s: What if they could arbitrage the cost of chocolate in an Easter egg? Plain old chocolate at the time cost virtually nothing, but a nicely packaged chocolate Easter egg cost about one rand. So the young cousins melted regular chocolate, molded it into egg shapes, wrapped the chocolate eggs in foil, and went around the poshest parts of their Pretoria neighborhood. And instead of selling these chocolate eggs for the going rate, they cranked up the price to 10 rand.

When neighbors balked at the price, the boys responded as they’d rehearsed. Purchasing from them, they said, would mean the buyer was supporting young capitalists. It worked.

This is not the kind of scheme most 14- or 15-year-old relatives dream up, but these were not most 14- or 15-year-olds. This is a piece of lore essential to understanding what may be the 21st century’s First Family of entrepreneurship, a family of happy capitalists intent on cracking today’s toughest problems by building businesses. Those budding teen tycoons included two sets of brothers: Elon Musk, whom you’ve likely heard of, and his brother, Kimbal, a fellow entrepreneur focused on trying to change America’s food culture; and Lyndon and Peter Rive, the founders of SolarCity. (Their brother Russ now runs the art, technology, and design company SuperUber, in Brazil.) Each family also has a sister: Tosca Musk, a filmmaker, and Almeda Rive, a competitive dirt-bike rider.

Elon may be the most famous of the clan, thanks to his mad-scientist ways and the Beatles-esque buzz surrounding the companies he’s dreamed up—from PayPal to electric carmaker Tesla Motors to aerospace manufacturer SpaceX to what remains—for now—the mere concept of the high-speed Hyperloop. But each of the Musk-Rive cousins has achieved notable levels of success. Kimbal Musk co-founded The Kitchen, a group of eight restaurants that source directly from local farmers, and The Kitchen Community, a nonprofit that’s opened more than 250 school and community gardens that impact 140,000 kids each day. Lyndon and Peter Rive founded SolarCity, the energy-service company that has a market cap of about $4 billion, after Lyndon, Peter, and Russ sold their company, Everdream, to Dell in 2007.

Posted in Business | 6 Comments »

NPR Voice Has Taken Over the Airwaves

November 1st, 2015

The New York Times calmly and gently not-quite-mocks the NPR voice that has taken over the airwaves:

That is, in addition to looser language, the speaker generously employs pauses and, particularly at the end of sentences, emphatic inflection. (This is a separate issue from upspeak, the tendency to conclude statements with question marks?) A result is the suggestion of spontaneous speech and unadulterated emotion. The irony is that such presentations are highly rehearsed, with each caesura calculated and every syllable stressed in advance.

In literary circles, the practice of poets reciting verse in singsong registers and unnatural cadences is known, derogatorily, as “poet voice.” I propose calling this phenomenon “NPR voice” (which is distinct from the supple baritones we normally associate with radio voices).

This plague of pregnant pauses and off-kilter pronunciations must have come from someplace. But … where?

A primary cause of NPR voice is the sheer expansion of people broadcasting today. Whereas once only trained professionals were given a television or radio platform, amateurs have now taken over the airwaves and Internet. They may not have the thespian skills necessary to restrain the staginess of their elocution, leading to “indicating,” or overacting to express emotion.

[...]

Speaking on (the more traditionally velvet-voiced) Alec Baldwin’s WNYC radio program “Here’s the Thing,” the most influential contemporary speaker of NPR voice, Ira Glass, the host of “This American Life,” said his own colloquial broadcasting style had anti-authoritarian roots.

“Back when we were kids, authority came from enunciation, precision,” Mr. Glass said. “But a whole generation of people feel like that character is obviously a phony — like the newscaster on ‘The Simpsons’ — with a deep voice and gravitas.”

For his more intimate storytelling, Mr. Glass “went in the other direction,” he said. “Any story hits you harder if the person delivering it doesn’t sound like a news robot but, in fact, sounds like a real person having the reactions a real person would.”

I’ve been joking about the highly affected, neutered NPR voice for years, with its illusion that we’re the thoughtful ones.

You don’t have to hear even a full sentence to know, with complete certainty, whether you’re listening to NPR or conservative talk radio — where the voice is brash, masculine, and assertive. We don’t have our heads in the clouds!

Posted in Media, Policy | 2 Comments »

No Longer Tribal, Not Really Civilized

November 1st, 2015

In his Logarithmic History, Doug Jones briefly addresses empires and barbarians:

The fall of Rome involved the disintegration of the Roman state; the collapse of long-distance trade; the disappearance of mass-produced pottery, coinage, and monumental architecture over large areas; declining literacy among commoners and elites; great insecurity of life and property, and demographic collapse. The process was drawn out and played out differently in different regions. In the Middle East, central government supported by taxation never disappeared as it did in the West. In the West, the nadir was perhaps the tenth century. We might set the turning point at the battle of Lechfeld (955): a last set of invaders off the steppes, the Magyars, was defeated by the Emperor Otto, and then adopted Christianity, gave up nomadic marauding, and settled down as feudal lords in Hungary.

The fall of Rome illustrates a general lesson. The overall trend of history is for more complex societies to replace less complex. (Important note: “more complex” is not the same as “nicer.”) But the process is an uneven one, in part because military effectiveness is only loosely coupled with social complexity. Tribal peoples with states next door often react by developing states of their own, partly to defend against their civilized neighbors, partly to prey on them. The resulting societies — no longer tribal, not really civilized, but barbarian — have sometimes been more than a match militarily for their more complex neighbors. In Europe, the result over nearly a millennium was a great leveling process. Rome declined under barbarian assault, while state organization, class stratification, and Christianity spread eventually as far as the Slavic East and the Scandinavian North. (See Peter Heather’s Empires and Barbarians.)

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

A Kind of Security Blanket

October 31st, 2015

The strongest clue that someone is planning a mass killing, Randall Collins argues, is a ritualized hidden arsenal:

Most of the characteristics of mass killers — low status isolates, bully victims, school failures, gun owners, players of violent games, even persons who talk or write about fantasies of revenge — are far too widespread in the population to accurately predict who will actually perpetrate a massacre. A much stronger clue, I suggest, is amassing an arsenal of weapons, which become the center of an obsessive ritual; the arsenal is not just a practical step towards the massacre, but has a motivating effect that deepens the spiral of clandestine plotting into a private world impervious to normal social restraints and moral feelings.

School shooters and other rampage killers generally amass an arsenal of weapons, bringing far more to the shooting site than they actually use or need. Michael Carneal brought a total of 8 guns, wrapped up in a unwieldy bundle as well as in his backpack: a 30-30 rifle, four .22 caliber rifles, 2 shotguns, and a pistol, and a many boxes of ammunition; but he used only the pistol. The pair of 11- and 13-year old boys who killed 5 and wounded 10 on a school playground in Jonesboro, Arkansas in 1998 carried 7 pistols, 3 rifles, and a large amount of ammunition, of which they fired 30 shots.

The two shooters at Columbine HS carried a semi-automatic handgun, a carbine, two sawed-off shotguns, and almost 100 home-made bombs; they fired 96 shots from the carbine, 55 from the handgun, and 25 from one of the shotguns; their magazines held 240 rounds, of which they still had about 100 rounds, plus 90 of the bombs, when they committed suicide. In the first 20 minutes of their rampage, they killed 13 students and teachers and wounded 21. Then their emotional energy seemed to run out — they even laughed sardonically that the thrill of killing was gone. They left 34 students unharmed out of 56 who were hiding under desks in the school library, and merely taunted other students while they wandered the halls firing aimless shots, before shooting themselves 25 minutes later, synchronizing their last action with a chant: “One, two, three!”

Holmes, the Aurora killer, carried a shotgun, an automated assault rifle, and 2 handguns; previously he spent 4 months amassing equipment in his apartment, including multiple ammunition magazines and 6000 rounds, of which he used only a small part. He also constructed 30 explosives out of aerial fireworks, refilling them with chemicals, a task that must have taken many days.

Brievik had 4 guns, 2 of which he took to the island. He spent two years acquiring the weapons, since guns are hard to get in Europe, and Norwegian regulations are strict. Nevertheless he persevered through the official steps for a hunting license and undergoing training at a police-approved shooting club to get a pistol permit. To create a massive car bomb (which he used in the first phase of his attack, at a government building in Oslo), he spent several years acquiring a remote farm as a front for buying fertilizer and chemicals. He was busy in his hidden backstage, video-game training, writing propaganda, and making a fake police uniform and identification. On the island, he used his police persona to assemble the youths, ostensibly to announce precautions, before starting to shoot them at close range. He brought over 400 rounds with him, fired 186, and still had over half remaining after fatally shooting 67 persons and wounding 33. He too seemed to waver towards the end of his 70-minute shooting spree, making several phone calls offering to give himself up (at 40 minutes and 60 minutes), but then resuming shooting until the police finally arrived.

The stockpile of weapons is symbolic overkill. These guns are for showing off — both to intimidate others, but mainly to impress oneself. They are the sacred objects of the private backstage cult that builds up the rampager’s obsessive motivation to the massacre. Once at the sticking point their emotional energy never seems to carry them far enough to use all their weapons. Whether they bring all their weapons to the massacre or not, their primary significance has been during the build-up; i.e. the guns they bring are from the focus of their cult activities — they are a kind of security blanket.

To be clear about the diagnosis: I am not saying that anyone who collects guns is a potential mass killer. The crucial signs are: first, the guns are kept secret, part of a deep backstage. In contrast, most gun owners are quite open about them; they may be involved in a cult of guns but it is a public cult, visible as a political stance, or a well-advertized pastime such as hunting or target shooting. (Abigail Kohn, Shooters: Myths and Realities of America’s Gun Cultures.) It is the hidden arsenal that is dangerous — psychologically dangerous. Second, the rampage killer amasses a large, unrealistic collection of weapons as far as their actual use is concerned. This symbolic aspect sets them off from other kinds of criminal users of guns.

Posted in Crime | 3 Comments »

Everything Frightens Americans

October 31st, 2015

Everything frightens Americans, Fred Reed notes:

The United States has become a nation of weak, pampered, easily frightened, helpless milquetoasts who have never caught a fish, fired a gun, chopped a log, hitchhiked across the country, or been in a schoolyard fight. If their cat dies, they call a grief therapist.

Posted in Policy | 5 Comments »

Halloween

October 31st, 2015

I’ve written a surprising amount about Halloween over the years:

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Preschool Bad

October 30th, 2015

The most extensive and careful study of preschool to date shows a slightly negative effect in the longer term:

By the end of kindergarten, the control children had caught up to the TN?VPK [preschool] children and there were no longer significant differences between them on any achievement measures. The same result was obtained at the end of first grade using both composite achievement measures.

In second grade, however, the groups began to diverge with the TN?VPK children scoring lower than the control children on most of the measures. The differences were significant on both achievement composite measures and on the math subtests.

This more or less supports Arnold Kling’s null hypothesis that educational interventions make no difference.

Posted in Education | No Comments »

Feedback Considered Harmful

October 30th, 2015

Feedback can be harmful to learning, rather than helpful, when it’s simplistic:

Research shows the effects of feedback on learning are not always positive — and can even be negative. Our team collected and compared existing studies that looked at different methods for providing feedback in digital learning tools in order to find out which feedback methods actually improve student learning.

Digital tools, such as Improve, often give simple correct/incorrect messages to students, usually marking the answers with a tick or a cross. Research shows this kind of feedback is not effective.

Half of the studies that examined this kind of correct/incorrect feedback found that students who did not receive any feedback actually performed better than those who had received feedback.

[...]

One-third of the studies examined showed that students did not learn from being given the correct answer. Those students are more likely to disengage from the task as they can mindlessly click until they answer the task correctly without learning anything.

Posted in Education, Technology | No Comments »

Appendix N Survey Complete

October 29th, 2015

In the original Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide, Gary Gygax included an Appendix N: Inspirational and Educational Reading, and old-school gamer Jeffor has gone back and read everything in it — and drawn some odd conclusions:

Tolkien’s ascendancy was not inevitable. It’s really a fluke that he even became the template for the modern fantasy epic.

A half dozen authors would have easily been considered on par with Tolkien in the seventies.

On the one hand, Tolkien’s work is peerless; nothing else compares. On the other hand, I am a bit surprised that it took off with a semi-popular audience.

Of course, what really took off was Tolkienesque fantasy:

Our concept of “Tolkienesque” fantasy has little to do with Tolkien’s actual work. Likewise, the “Lovecraftian” stories and games of today have little to do with what Lovecraft actually wrote. Our concepts of swords and sorcery have had the “weird” elements removed from them for the most part. Next to the giants of the thirties, just about everything looks tamed and watered down.

Modern fantasy writers have read a lot of modern fantasy. The early fantasy writers read history and legends.

Times have changed:

Entire genres have been all but eliminated. The majority of the Appendix N list falls under either planetary romance, science fantasy, or weird fiction. Most people’s readings of AD&D and OD&D are done without a familiarity of these genres.

Science fiction and fantasy were much more related up through the seventies. Several Appendix N authors did top notch work in both genres. Some did work that could be classified as neither.

It used to be normal for science fiction and fantasy fans to read books that were published between 1910 and 1977. There was a sense of canon in the seventies that has since been obliterated.

Modern fandom is now divorced from its past in a way that would be completely alien to game designers in the seventies. They had no problem synthesizing elements from classics, grandmasters of the thirties, and new wave authors.

Ideological diversity in science fiction and fantasy was a given in the seventies. We are hopelessly [homogenized] in comparison to them.

The program of political correctness of the past several decades has made even writers like Ray Bradbury and C. L. Moore all but unreadable to an entire generation. The conditioning is so strong, some people have almost physical reactions to the older stories now.

Nerdy protagonists like Harry Potter or Barry Allen from the new Flash TV series are an extremely recent phenomenon. Even a new wave proto-goth like Elric was a ladies’ man.

“Nice guys” like Harry Dresden were pretty well absent from the science fiction and fantasy scene from 1910 to 1977.

The culture wars of the past forty years have largely consisted an effort to reprogram peoples’ tastes for traditional notions of romance and heroism.

Tolkien and Lewis were not outliers. Writers ranging from Poul Anderson to Lord Dunsany and C. L. Moore wrote fantasy from a more or less Christian viewpoint. The shift to a largely post-Christian culture has marked an end of their approach to science fiction and fantasy.

Posted in Media | 3 Comments »

Schooling, not Learning

October 29th, 2015

If you want to find children who lack education today, the place to find them is in school:

That’s because nearly all children are in school. That’s the good news. Governments have built schools and hired teachers. Parents have seen that schooling is key to their child’s future and are sending their children to school. There has been more progress made in expanding schooling since the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 acknowledged education as a basic right than in all previous human history.

But the bad news is that hundreds of millions of children are starting school, going day after day, year after year, but not really learning. One study found that almost three-quarters of a recent cohort of youth in Zambia were innumerate and six of 10 illiterate. But only 7% of these youth had not attended school. In fact, half of those who were innumerate and a third who were illiterate had not just started school but completed grade 6. These children were being schooled but not educated. Schooling without learning is just time served. Unfortunately, Zambia is far from alone in having schooling without adequate education.

The cumulative results of international and national assessments around the world have led to a widespread recognition that, while there are disadvantaged groups still excluded from schooling, there is a global learning crisis of children already in school.

This is all terribly surprisingly to people who learned a lot in school and kept going back for more.

In India, for example, the government made a major commitment to finance elementary education. Central government spending on elementary education increased 11-fold between 2001 and 2013. Over the same period, assessments show the percentage of children in grade five who could read or do simple subtraction declined.

In Indonesia, a major commitment to increasing teachers’ salaries has led to more than $4bn in additional spending a year – but a rigorous evaluation shows almost exactly zero learning gain from students taught by the more highly paid teachers.

Posted in Education, Policy | 1 Comment »

What a U.S.-Russian War in Syria Would Look Like

October 28th, 2015

Joe Pappalardo imagines what a U.S.-Russian war in Syria would look like:

The escalation begins with a strategic sacrifice. Russian helicopters in Syria are loaded with fuel drums and flown on a flight profile that mirrors a barrel bomb mission. The Raptors take the bait, immolate the Russians in midair, and give the Kremlin a talking point about “slain Russian troops.” Now it can say the Americans fired first and cast its next steps as self-defense.

The Moskva‘s radar spots the tankers easily as they make racetrack patterns in the sky. The refueling aircraft are 135 feet long and have virtually no defenses. They fly without escorts. The Russians wait until fate deals them a good hand—one aerial refueler from Greece is heading back to its base, over the Mediterranean. Another is loitering near Aleppo, tanking U.S. fighters. All are within range of the Moskva‘s 48N6E2 missiles.

The Med is crowded with warships. The United States has four Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers off the Syrian coast, and part of their job is to shadow Russian warships. They’ve followed miles behind as the Moskva creeps along the coastline, north of their new airbase in Latakia.

And when the pair of SAMs rise from the Moskva, the crew on the bridge knows this war has entered a new, scary phase. They go into combat alert and radio to their base in Rota, Spain. By the time the news reaches commanders, the refueling aircraft are obliterated, the eight crew members onboard killed instantly.

Any tankers readying for takeoff are held on their tarmacs. Combat sorties are canceled. Airborne fighters and bombers are ordered to return to airbases. One fighter runs dry and flames out on the way and the pilots eject into Kurdish territory.

The Air Force operates more than 400 KC-135s, so in theory, losing two should not cripple an air campaign. Yet the threat alone keeps them grounded. And with tankers grounded, very few missions to support anti-ISIS and anti-Assad forces can proceed. (B-1 bombers flying from Turkey still operate over northeastern Syria, but only out of the range of the Moskva’s missiles.)

While Russia claims its right to self-defense and takes to the world stage claiming its “limited actions” are meant to deescalate the conflict in Syria, Pentagon planners are preparing a response within hours. The humiliation of the attack and forced cessation of combat missions are just too great.

Orders are passed to the American guided missile destroyers. The Mediterranean is about to erupt.

Posted in Policy, War, Weapons | 3 Comments »

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