Good evening, Rust community.
I am a solo player, but I believe that whether you’re like me or you live in a 2x2 with ten other zergs, our love for this game means we share more in common than the distance between our playstyles would suggest. I, like many of you, am drawn to the thrill of PvP and the gripping excitement of a high-stakes raid. My pulse quickens when I hear footfalls in grass, and I strip off my armor and weapons when I hear the beating of helicopter blades. I enjoy this game as much as all of you, and with 2.8k hours, I’ve been a member of this community since 2013.
But despite our love for this weird, idiosyncratic, murder-hobo sandbox that unites us, I am not here to commiserate, and nor am I hear to comment on what I think needs to change about the game’s mechanics. Because something else is deeply wrong in the world of Rust, and it has nothing to do with Facepunch’s Roadmap.
Rust provides us with an amazing suite of creative tools with which we can do basically anything, and yet there’s a clear pattern in servers that don’t specifically encourage a particular type of play. People are awful. Just awful. The community has crystallized around the idea that the only acceptable way to play the game is “build an eyesore, tech to AKs and C4, be a racist dick, and evict everyone around you while hurling abuse.” Originality is untouchable “role-playing”. Creative bankruptcy and rampant bigotry—the shit in the Rust sandbox—is everywhere. If you want to play the game or be part of the community, you can’t escape it. Not on the island and not even in this subreddit.
The best of us are nowhere to be found and the worst are full of passionate intensity.
How did this happen? Who’s to blame? Earlier in the game's life, especially before the experimental rebuild that became the contemporary game, a thousand flowers bloomed. Creativity, despite the much more limited toolset, was everywhere. Rust is a game without a win-scenario, and it seems players have forgotten that they can choose their own endgames. In the old days, players built structures and communities that served endgames more interesting than evicting everyone in sight or ruining the fun of other players through abuse.
Some of us, I’m sure, are just having a laugh. Some of us are young and don’t have the life experience to know better. Certainly some of us are more responsible than others, but the truth is—we all share responsibility. Every time someone abuses a player over vo
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Biological altruism is of keen interest to evolutionary biologists. To be clear, biological altruism has a specific meaning - behavior by an individual that increases the fitness of another individual while decreasing the fitness of the actor. This doesn't include relatives. A human running into a burning building to save a cat - that's altruism.
On way this concept is examined in via game theory. Here I'm using a classic, the Hawk-Dove game. Imagine an island where the only food is this a huge root that takes two people to harvest. There are two tribes on this island, hawks and doves. When two hawks dig up a root, they fight over it winner take all. When it's two doves, they split it equally. Thus we can say that when a hawk meets a hawk, given a 50/50 chance of winning, the average payoff is 1/2R - F where R is a root/resource and F is the damage done by fighting. We can write this h->h:1/2R-F. With two doves its d->d:1/2R. We see the dove strategy is more efficient. On a mixed island, you might expect doves to die out, but they actually don't - watch:
hawks green, doves blue
Now we're going to add a third tribe, crows. Crows fight with hawks and share with crows and other doves.
dove blue, hawks green, crows red
Interesting, right? Adding crows makes doves the dominant population.
What's the point? This is an attempt to show that pacifist philosophies prosper much more with protectors who do not abjure violence. I content that this tend explains how Buddhist monasteries developed martial arts (the Shaolin monks being first, according to legend.)
This is done with a simple Python script. If you want the scripts or if you want me to teach you how to do this on your computer, send a message.
Pardon the oddly specific nature of this question but it's been on my mind lately and I haven't found any examples through google or the SEP. What I'm wondering is whether anyone has suggested that behaving by standards of moral realism (I chose utilitarianism because it is an easy moral system for me to understand as a layman) is the best way to live ones life regardless of whether she believes she ought serve others or herself, or regardless of whether she measures the value of her actions, identity, and life by how she affects/improves the world and its other inhabitants or exclusively by her own well-being. My motivation for thinking about this idea involves the concept of reciprocal altruism (as defined and studied by biologists and anthropologists) and its importance to a species as social as homo sapiens.
I do not intend to convince anyone that this statement is true, just to see what, if anything, others have to say about the idea. I'd especially be interested in reading what, if anything, professionals interested in the biological/evolutionary debunking of moral realism (from either side), or even just askphilosophers with views on the subject, have written.
"Reciprocal" means: "Shared.....by both sides", or: "A return in kind". Sounds like a "deal", to this fool!
The blockchain enables the value created as a result of a previous transaction to be known. This has consequences for the proposition of reciprocal altruism as a basis of monetary theory. I'm imagining a very fine grained valuation system that made the current assets of an investor worth a proportional amount to the value created in the world by their investment.
What would be the consequences for incentives around lending and investing? It some interesting biases, and I think some of them may be socially desirable.
I'm curious about whether criminals who are broken free from jails by people who would not benefit from it, would seek to reward their benefactors?
I just spent 5 years in prison and spent the last 2.5 years studying and practicing Buddhism.
Now that I’m out, I have come to realize that what I believe isn’t mainstream Buddhism…. I’d appreciate some help figuring out if I’m even a Buddhist, what school of thought I’m most aligned with, and if some facets of my practice are just plain ignorant.
Without further ado:
The Four Noble Truths just say suffering exists, has a cause (desire), the cause can be avoided, and the way of avoiding suffering is the 8fold path (Right speech, action, mindfulness, effort, concentration, understanding, livelihood, thought)
I put effort into following the 5 precepts, but admittedly fail frequently. I will drink alcohol, but not to excess and while I’m not vegan or vegetarian, I do try to reduce meat consumption and source things ethically. This is online with “middle path”/ avoiding extremism? FYI vegan meals are available in prison as a religious option.
I suspect this is the biggest hangup for me being a Buddhist though: I don’t believe in rebirth outside of a single lifetime, resultingly karma is just what a sociologist would call reciprocal altruism.Buddhism doesn’t require faith, so I think I’m a Buddhist regardless?
I gave up on meditating in favor of focusing on breathing during yoga.
I appreciate any insight you could share.
I will try to answer any questions you have about Buddhism within prison.
This post deals with Subboor Ahmad's "ideas" about the field of evolutionary biology. Some may know that Subboor Ahmad has hosted the young earth creationist Paul Nelson on his YouTube channel to debunk the science of common ancestry. For lengthy demonstrations of how Paul Nelson gets everything wrong (while misrepresenting every scientist he quotes like Eugene Koonin in the process), see here, here, here, and here. In these videos, Subboor had a bit of a concerning and quite ready tendency to accept literally any gibberish that Paul Nelson was spewing. In this post, I'll focus more specifically on how Subboor justifies his pseudoscientific creationism.
As a bit of background. Subboor is a Muslim creationist and apologist who has no clear expertise on the subject. Despite claiming to be a pursuing a philosophy of biology PhD at Birkbeck College (though he seems to have been pursuing it for quite a while now), he's been at this for many many years without ever getting anything he's said published anywhere reputable. So he just puts it out on YouTube and his blog. In a debate he handily lost against James Fodor at the timestamp 1:34:00+, he was asked to name a single scientific discovery / finding that would convince him that his creationism is wrong. He admitted he couldn't think of anything, and that the only way he'd accept evolution is if he literally first became an atheist. In other words, Subboor is rather open about the fact that there is no evidence that could compel him out of his dogma. Here, I'm debunking his blog post "Darwin’s biggest critics are evolutionary biologists".
https://subboorahmad.com/darwins-biggest-critics-are-evolutionary-biologists/
Subboor tries to show that the academic and public understanding of evolution is different, that real specialists think evolution is "just a theory" resting on baseless assumptions. But if that
... keep reading on reddit ➡So I initially wanted to make a post for just one of these realizations I've had very recently but then came upon the others and how it would be valuable to share so am just deciding to quickly summarize then all here. These are very simple facts or outlooks of life that I should have learned much earlier but that I did not actually internalize until just now. I hope these could be helpful to someone who is struggling with similar cognitive self-effacing traps as I was.
- so, I have been regarded as one of the most hardcore flakes ever by pretty much everyone in my entire life. They all realize I flake on their plans an inordinate amount of times. It's pretty much become characteristic for them to recognize this. I have explained over and over that even though it is a shitty, rude thing to do to someone, that for me, it is truly not a negative expression toward them. It just isn't about them at all, and it's not even that I didn't "want to go", I just am not very reliable even with myself because I become overwhelmed at unpredictable times and in unpredictable ways.
But I truly just realized about two weeks ago, that I could just say 'No' to people. I don't have to agree to help them at this articular time, be included in their plans, make it to this and that appointment, come at this time, et c. if I truly know beforehand when they ask me that even if I am free from obligation, I am not going to be psychologically / socially / emotionally prepared to attend. I have been called a flake my entire life, but I literally just didn't realize that I could decline an invitation if I wasn't going to be able to go! I don't have to accept and then panic and disappear on the date because I am exhausted socially... I can be up front with people.
The link with this for me to to complex trauma is clear. It was not a main feature of the abuse I endured, but my mother growing up would use all of these emotional tactics to make it seem like saying 'No' to her if she were asking me to do something or get her something (for example, telling me or my twin at age 8 to get up and open her another beer) would physically or emotionally hurt her, or would be some grave insult that she had to dramatically repudiate. I am obviously glad my parents instilled some ethic or responsibility in us by teaching us to maintain our daily chores like any other kids, but that's not what I'm talking about. Growing up, my mother expected us to be available to her for anything, any "favor",
... keep reading on reddit ➡So I'm in kind of a weird situation, I have a masters degree in maths and I work as a software developer, but I've also always been interested in philosophy. I've recently been reading a lot of books, one of which is The Secret of our Success by Joseph Henrich which is about evolutionary anthropology and dual inheritance theory. I also read a book called Natural Justice by Ken Binmore, which explains how human morality could have evolved as a set of cultural practices from reciprocal altruism, and justifies the process through game theory. It reminded me of an earlier book called The Evolution of Co-operation by Robert Axelrod which shows how co-operation can evolve in the iterated prisoners' dilemma by running computer tournaments.
I want to do a PhD in which I use computer simulations to back up this thesis of the development of morality (e.g. setting up a pool of self-interested neural networks time and examining how moral rules evolve between them, evolving them using a genetic algorithm such as NEAT), and also applying my findings to moral and political philosophy.
Does this sound like worthwhile research? (or am I just yet another case of a software developer with Dunning-Kruger syndrome?). If it is, could anyone recommend schools to apply to or further books to read? I imagine it would be difficult to find a supervisor since the ideas lie at the intersection of so many different fields.
Thanks in advance for your advice :)
Reading The Selfish Gene I got a bit puzzled by kin selection/altruism. Dawkins states that, because of the proportion of shared genes, genes tend to be selected for being half as likely to be altruistic to children/siblings as oneself, one fourth as likely to nephews/nieces/grandchildren, one eighth to cousins, and significantly less likely to be so with a stranger or very distant relative.
However, given that humans beings share 99.9% of our DNA, in truth I would share not half but 99.95% of my genetic code with children, 99.925% with grandchildren, and so on. Even if some few genes could be selected for granting altruistic behavior to close kin, the overwhelming majority of genes don't make this distinction, since they're shared by all humans. In that sense, would I not be only 0.05% more altruistic to a child than a total stranger? If so, that amount seems to me very negligible, and I don't know if that would make any difference in propagation success. This is, of course, not what we see in practice.
Could anyone point to what I'm missing here? Thanks!
