Thoughts on “After Blue(Dirty Paradise)”

This is a French movie, and from the start it made me feel the way I think the CRPG Addict feels when he comes across a French RPG:  the movie is going to be weird and I’m not going to be sure whether that’s because of the culture gap or because the director/writer was trying to make a weird movie.

The premise here is that there is a world that I think is described as a paradise, that a group of human colonists fled to from Earth in the hopes of fleeing the problems of that world.  Settling on this world, they soon discovered that only women could live on the planet, and all the men died off.  The heroine of the story is a young girl who is a bit of an outcast in her village, but she saves a woman who was buried up to her neck in the sand, and once she frees her the woman kills her “friends” and leaves.  This rouses the village against her and her mother and they send her off to kill the woman in revenge.  They travel to the woman’s hideout, and wait for her there, meeting with an artist and a couple of other women.  The women then bring back the head of the woman they are supposed to kill for pay, but then the young girl still sees her … and then so does her mother.  But they insist that they killed her, and return to the village, only to find that the woman had been there before them and killed everyone in the village.  And yet it turns out that the young girl and the mother can see all the villagers, and so they come to understand that the woman was indeed actually killed and that the reason they saw her was that they inherited a strange ability that the woman also had to see and interact with the dead, which they talk about using to make things better.

The biggest issue is that this planet is supposed to be set up as a paradise and that they were supposed to have set up a better social structure, but none of that is the case.  The planet itself is much more hostile than it might have seemed, with flora and fauna that is hostile and poisonous and a climate that isn’t all that great at the best of times.  They even need masks to survive the mountains and mines that they are going into.  Even worse, the social structure isn’t all that great either.  There’s a militia that thinks the best way to kill a criminal is to bury them until they die (likely drowning) and the village is crazy enough to send a hairdresser out to kill a hardened criminal just because her daughter saved her life at some point.  As they go through the world, the world seems anarchic, with various kinds of criminals and bounty hunters and decadent people running around.  This isn’t in any way a paradise and they aren’t any better than what they would have left behind.

Much of the movie reminds me of “Logan’s Run” or perhaps “Slipstream”, where most of the plot seems to be there just to allow us to explore the world and see the various odd things that make up that world.  But this world isn’t creative enough to justify that sort of journey.  The movie seems more interested in adding sexual scenes than in exploring the social context, which makes the journey scenes pointless and boring.

The idea of the special power that lets them see the dead and how that might shake out is interesting.  There is an interesting implication that the woman having this power drove her insane, but the young girl and her mother are able to react differently and use it for good instead.  However, the movie doesn’t do anything with it other than hint at this right at the end.  Given that, the movie pretty much wastes the one good idea that it really has, leaving us with little to hang onto as we watch the movie.

I will say that the movie seems to move well-enough, but other than that the characters aren’t that interesting and so the movie isn’t all that interesting.  That being said, as per usual the movie was surprisingly entertaining for a movie that was seriously flawed.  As such, I didn’t hate the movie, but have absolutely no reason to watch it again.  Neither the idea nor the world are developed enough to make the movie worth watching again, and the characters aren’t interesting enough on their own to watch again either.  At the end of the day, the movie just isn’t all that entertaining.

What Makes an RPG an RPG?

So, I found a comment exchange on what makes an RPG an RPG on the CRPG Addict, and the Addict himself says this:

There is no plot-related element that could make a game “not an RPG.” Whether a game is an RPG comes down to its mechanics, and there is no possible argument that you could make that excludes Skyrim from that definition.

But a reply to that said this:

The video Ethan mentioned illustrates bad PC dialogue options (in fact most of the dialogue only has a single option down each branch), forcing the player to commit to saying something that doesn’t really fit the character you might envision. I don’t know the whole background story. It looks like the game is forcing you to lie in that conversation, but I’m not sure if the lies are because the character is supposed to really believe them or if it’s in character to hide the truth.

Which might have a point.  While the CRPG Addict has his own definition of what makes an RPG that works perfectly well for his project and isn’t unreasonable, I’ve long felt that he focuses too much on mechanics and so things like there being an inventory than on it being a game that you can actually roleplay, which one would think would be a prime requisite for being an RPG.  His focus on mechanics would also sometimes exclude some things in JRPGs, for example, that don’t aim for character advancement or the choice thereof and instead focus on building a really good story.  So, then, what do I think makes an RPG an RPG?

In musing about this, I came up with two principles:

1) An RPG is a game where you take on a role in a world.
2) In an RPG, the abilities of the character matter more than the abilities of the player.

The second one is pretty much stolen from the CRPG Addict, and it’s an important one.  See, the first one works, but it would apply to general adventure game as well.  In an adventure game, I could easily take on the role of Sherlock Holmes, say, but outside of perhaps some hints I’d be the one solving the mystery, not the character of Holmes.  And we could see that if Holmes just solved all the puzzles for the player, it would make for a boring adventure game, but you might end up playing a role as you’d be playing as Holmes, taking on and rejecting cases and treating people a certain way.  What really makes it the case that you’re taking on a role in a world instead of simply having an avatar is that the abilities of the character that you’re playing determine your success or failure, which provides that layer of abstraction between you the player and the role you’re taking on.

What is important about the first one, though, is that you are indeed taking on a role.  There is obviously going to be variation in how freely you can play that role, and in how much the game facilitates you playing that role, but you are playing the role of that character and are not just a player of a game.  This playing a role might require you to think about what is going on in the character’s head even though the dialogue doesn’t support it, as I did for my Corran Horn character in the original “Knights of the Old Republic” where he was very upset by being lied to about his past but responded to Malak’s taunting that it didn’t bother him at all because he refused to let Malak know that his taunting was getting to him.  There was no explicit dialogue options to indicate that, but I was able to play that role on my own because it didn’t lock me into a role at all.

This is one of the reasons why I think the Persona games are probably the best roleplaying games I’ve ever played.  Yes, the plot is linear and you don’t get very many options that change anything, but the options you do get allow you to express a personality.  But more importantly, the rest of the game really is just you playing a role.  You decide who you want to hang out with, who you want to date, and how you want to approach it.  You can even mess it up and have to take more time to build the relationship with them.  There are entire S-links that I never do because my characters simply cannot stand those characters and have no interest in hanging around with them.  While plot-wise and even personality-wise there’s limited freedom, what you do in your spare time and who you associate with are all defined by you, as you play a role.  In the same manner, a game like “Missing:  Since January” allows you to play a role as yourself in that situation, even though the situation is defined … but it would run afoul of the second principle since all of the puzzle solutions come from you, not from the character.

And playing a specific character works as well, like in “Shadow Hearts” or “Suikoden III”.  The main characters have specific personalities and you can’t change them much, so you have to step into their shoes and play their role throughout the game.  So that’s stepping inside a role in the same way as stepping inside Sherlock Holmes would be.  But their skills and abilities matter more to the outcome than the skills and abilities of the player do.  This is not an action game or a puzzle game where you have to solve the puzzles.  This game has tactical combat where the skills and abilities that you’ve paid to level up for them and even who is paired with them — for special attacks — are the key to winning those battles.  Thus, the character’s abilities matter more than the player’s abilities.

I think that the CRPG Addict’s focus on mechanics tends to fall into second principle — which makes sense, since as I said I stole it from him — as it ends up being the character’s level, skills, abilities and inventory that matters and determines the outcome (and even, to some extent, how the game plays).  You don’t need full-on choice in outcomes or dialogue if you are playing as a defined character whose abilities matter to the outcomes.  So that it’s linear or railroaded isn’t really an issue.  But if the game makes it impossible for you to play the role because it forces the player to do things that even a fully-defined character wouldn’t do, then that could end up making it not really be an RPG, even if it just failed at trying to be one.  The more open the game is, the more forgiving we have to be for railroading the character, but anything that the game defines as part of the character had better be treated consistently, or else it would fail to allow us to play our defined role and thus would fail the first principle, which would allow us to make a case that because of that failure it isn’t really an RPG anymore.

So I do think that there are plot-related aspects that might make an RPG not an RPG, but unless they totally screw it up or ditch it entirely that is going to be quite difficult to do.  It will be much easier to fail on the mechanics to the point where the player’s abilities are what matters instead of the character’s, and so much easier to fail on the second principle than the first.

Thoughts on “Benson”

So after finishing off “The Dick Van Dyke Show”, I switched over to watching “Benson” on CTV Throwback.  “Benson” was a show that I watched as a kid that was a spinoff from “Soap” — and done by the same creator, I think — which I had watched for the first time a few years ago.

The premise is that Benson Dubois, the butler from “Soap”, comes to work managing the household of a state governor who is a cousin of Jessica Tate from “Soap”, who recommends him for the job to give her cousin a hand.  The governor is a bit loopy, so much so that it’s a puzzle how he got elected in the first place.  He’s also a single father, raising a young daughter in Katie after his wife died.  Benson also immediately clashes with Kraus, the woman who manages the kitchens and maids who has survived multiple governors and plans to survive this one, and resents Benson’s attempts to manage the household and save money.  As the series progresses, Benson advances to become the Budget Director for the state, and finally to Lieutenant Governor.  There are some other characters, starting from one guy who was the Chief of Staff and was replaced in season 2 by the more familiar Clayton, and a secretary named Marcie who was replaced at about the same time.  There was also a Press Secretary who was played by Ethan Phillips.  Since Clayton was placed by Rene Auberjonois, that meant that you had Odo and Neelix on the same show.  The series ends with Benson and the Governor facing off in a race to become the next governor of the state, and ends on a cliffhanger as we never find out which of them won.

The most interesting thing from my perspective is how different my approach to this series was from “The Dick Van Dyke Show”.  My main feeling about that show was that it was neither really good nor really bad, which meant that I ended up dragging it out a bit.  With other things that I wanted to do and with no reason to either sit down and watch it because it was so good or rush through it because it was so bad it was just too easy to let other things cut into my viewing time for it or even replace it entirely.  But with “Benson”, the opposite was true.  Sure, the things I wanted to do ended up sliding out a bit and so ending earlier, but I also looked forward to watching “Benson” every night and so even quit what I was doing a bit early so that I could.  I definitely enjoyed this series more than “The Dick Van Dyke Show”.

A big part of the reason is Benson himself.  Robert Guillaume does a wonderful job portraying someone who is more than willing to snark at the things that he sees as stupid and annoying and so drive a lot of the humour and yet is also clearly someone who cares about people, both the people in the mansion and people in general, which follows him as he goes through his various promotions.  The worst episodes were the ones where Benson is more panicked and cowardly and the best ones are the ones where he acts cleverly to get what he wants from people who don’t want him to have it, or to fix problems for the people he cares about.  Benson is competent and snarky and yet flawed enough to sometimes get in over his head and needs advice from other people.

In the early seasons, Katie is a character that is used really well.  Her most common use is to provide humour with how she acts older than her age, commenting on things in ways that someone her age shouldn’t but in a way that shows that she’s been involved in politics and so understands it.  But her most important use is to show a softer side to people as they show that they care about her.  This is important for Benson as he becomes her confidant and gets into the good graces of the Governor by helping her with her problems, but it is actually even more important for Kraus.  Kraus fights with Benson a lot and is a pretty harsh character, and it would be easy for us to think of her as a bad person given that we are inclined to like Benson as he’s the main character.  And yet she gets a number of scenes where she is very kind and nice to Katie, which shows that she isn’t as hard a person as she might seem, which then shows that her clashes with Benson are not her being mean just to be mean, but are clashes of attitude and a feeling that they are getting in the way of each other doing their jobs.  This base is incredibly important for later when they clearly become vitriolic best buds and she even becomes his trusted assistant at the end.  It would have seemed to happen too quickly if they hadn’t used that base of her being nice to Katie to show that she’s not a bad person at all, just someone who clashes with Benson.

Katie doesn’t get used as much in the last couple of seasons, but I do have to say that Missy Gold, even from a young age, did a really good job with that character, being believable even as she played a character more worldly than a child that age should be.

I remembered the Governor himself as being, well, a goofball and an idiot, but in actuality he was smarter and more principled than I remembered.  Yes, he told irrelevant stories a lot of the time, and he often didn’t really get the things he should have, but the show gave him a good reason for that:  he wasn’t really a politician, at least at first.  The party needed someone honest and he fit the bill, and he maintained his principled attitude throughout the show, and often showed cleverness in seeing hidden traps in things and how they’d violate his principles, and he was also always willing to stand up for his principles.  This made him a more interesting character than a mere simpleton even as it allowed him to act stupidly to drive the humour.

I actually liked both Marcie and her replacement in Denise.  Marcie was competent and relatively nice, but early on had that character trait of desperately trying to find a man which considering how smart, nice and pretty she was strained credulity.  She worked better when she finally found someone, but then moved away and out of the show.  Denise was a bit more ditzy, but it was less that she wasn’t smart and more than she didn’t see things the same way most other people do, and was explicitly incredibly gifted at mathematics, which is what got her the job.  She was also incredibly nice, which is why I didn’t care for her relationship with Pete, the Press Secretary, who was selfish, cheap and often insulting to her.  Early on, he asks her out, she accepts, but then has to cancel because she has to cover for someone else, and he takes it poorly to her face and then gripes that no woman would date him.  The problem was that he had acted like a jerk towards her and her excuse wasn’t merely an excuse, and she herself didn’t care for what he had said to her.  If he had accepted it graciously and then simply griped to Benson about how women don’t really want to date him so that Benson could set him straight, then that would have been one thing, but instead he acts like a jerk and yet we’re expected to think that he would work with a nice person like Denise.  And he doesn’t get any better, for the most part.  Making all of this worse is that he meets Denise right after she comments that she’s single because she’s looking for someone special, which spawns the reaction of “And you think that’s Pete?!?”.

Clayton works well as a foil for Benson since they have completely different and clashing attitudes and backgrounds, and Clayton is given lots of opportunities to show that he’s not completely self-absorbed and is willing to help people out at times, and also that he can rise above his own feelings of superiority to do things that someone with his inflated ego wouldn’t normally do.  However, in the later seasons the show makes the mistake of having the governor seem frustrated with him and even to strongly dislike him, which begs the question of why he even keeps him on as Chief of Staff.  Yes, Clayton was established as being very good at his job, but in the later seasons the governor never really says that Clayton can be annoying but is good at his job, and so the show just seems to start picking on him in the later seasons, which is all the worse because, again, in earlier seasons he had proven himself willing to help them out when they needed him and it seemed more like a clashing personalities issue than him being a bad person, which makes those things seem to be a bit mean.  Admittedly, the last two seasons are where they started to run out of ideas, which makes it a good thing that it ended when it did.

Ultimately, though, “Benson” is a good show.  Some episodes are clunkers, but most of them are good and they even have arcs which was a rarity for a non-soap opera sitcom, and even though some of them drag a bit they still basically work.  The characters, even the annoying ones, still mostly work and provide decent humour.  At the end of the day, I could definitely see myself watching this series again.

Pancho Sisko Diary: Names For Sale

So why did he agree to this side mission?  He was getting paid.  That’s it.  Credits are credits.

Anyway, he arrived at Hutta and heard the details of what was stolen from the secretary of the Hutt who sponsored him, who swore she had nothing to do with it.  The guy who was selling it, though, was an idiot, giving himself no protection from the people who wanted to buy it from him.  This started off a firefight, and again, Sisko is a damn good fighter.  So he ended up getting the list back, and then went back to tell the secretary that he knew she’d been involved and then … he didn’t kill her.  I don’t know why.  He didn’t get extra credits out of her.  She didn’t sleep with him.  I’d say that he was getting soft but then he’d probably bitch-slap me over it to prove that he wasn’t.  Maybe it’s Mako’s influence?

He’d probably say that there wasn’t any point to it, and that he wasn’t really mad about it, and she promised to stay quiet so why bother?  But he’s not that lazy.  He just wasn’t mad at her for doing that, I guess because it didn’t impact him personally.

Then again, it looks like that Blood character had a role in this, which ticked off Mako.  But, again, he seems less and less bothered by Blood.  He wants to see him dead, but doesn’t have a full-on hate for him that he normally has for people who constantly cross him.  I don’t get it.

Anyway, he got paid by the Huntmaster and was able to get back to the Great Hunt, heading for the desert next.

I in the Sky 13

There’s 57 channels and nothin’ on …

Once everyone else had left, Chantal and Joy cuddled together on the sofa in front of the TV.  Some mindless reality show was on, but neither of them were paying any attention, and instead were lost in their own thoughts.  Finally, Joy asked, “Mom?  Why is this person doing this to me?”

“Oh, honey, ” Chantal replied.  “It has nothing to do with you.  They’re doing it to get at us, and you’re just a way to get to us.”

“But why do they hate you so much?” Joy persisted.

“I don’t know, honey. I don’t know, ” Chantal replied.

“But … didn’t you find out who it was when you were younger?” Joy asked, puzzled.

“Yeah, sweetie, but that was all settled back then, ” Chantal replied.

“Why did they want to hurt you guys back then?” Joy asked.

“Well, when we were in high school, the four of us were friends with a girl named Veronica.  And, well … people didn’t like her very much.  And so someone wanted to hurt her.  And when they couldn’t get to her, they tried to hurt us so that they could use that to get to her, ” Chantal explained.

“So you were like me:  someone being hurt to hurt someone else, ” Joy said.

“That’s right, sweetie, ” Chantal confirmed.

Joy thought for a second.  “But then couldn’t this be the same person doing the same thing again?” she asked.

“No, honey, that’s not possible, ” Chantal said.  “We don’t even talk to Veronica anymore and the person who did it … isn’t in any position to do stuff like that anymore.”

“Oh, ” Joy said quietly.

They sat in silence in the darkened living room for a few minutes, and then Joy asked, “So, who is doing this?”

“I don’t know, honey, but I swear we’re going to find out, and then they’re going to be very, very sorry for what they’ve done, ” Chantal replied.

Joy smiled.  “With you and Dad and Shannon and Alex dealing with this, that’s going to be a given.”

Chantal’s feeling of happy comfort was suddenly broken by the announcement from her phone that she had received a new text.  It was from Shannon, and it said “Amelie is back.  And so is Veronica.”

Proving History: The Historical Method

Chapter 2 of “Proving History” is entitled “The Basics”, but what’s mainly of interest here is Carrier’s description of the historical method.  Carrier outlines twelve axioms of historical analysis, which I want to go through in some detail.  As befitting axioms, some of them are obvious and seem reasonable, but some of them aren’t and even for the ones that seem reasonable at times Carrier will use them in a self-serving way.

The first axiom is “The basic principle of rational-empirical history is that all conclusions must logically follow from the evidence available to all observers.”  This one basically excludes things like personal feelings or intuitions as being primary evidence, and insists that the arguments must not include logical fallacies.  This is, therefore, a fair if unimpressive one, but to be fair to Carrier he does claim it a very basic principle.  It also works as a principle for the academic field of history, but doesn’t really hold up as a principle for what people believe is true of history or as a principle for religious believers to decide if they want to maintain a belief in a real existent Jesus.  If historical analysis proves that there was no actual historical Jesus, then everyone would need to accept that, but if it doesn’t then the personal beliefs of people could be based on things like intuitions or feelings.  To be fair, Carrier is indeed outlining what we’d want for academic historical analysis, but as always in situations like this we need to watch out for arguments that say that if you can’t establish your case to that level then you can’t even believe it true.  But ultimately as a basic principle or axiom this one works.

The second axiom is “The correct procedure in historical analysis is to seek a consensus among all qualified experts who agree with the basic principle of rational-empirical history (and who practice what they preach)”.

This one is a bit tougher to deal with, because at the outset it seems reasonable but when we look deeper there are a number of qualifiers that might cause some issues.  It seems reasonable that everyone would agree or need to agree to present arguments that are logically valid and sound and that don’t rely on evidence that isn’t available to everyone assessing the argument.  But then we might wonder if some people might consider the personal commentaries of historical figures to not count as objective evidence.  So either no one in the debate will ever argue over that, or there will be lots of arguments over what that basic principle really entails.  We can also wonder why the correct procedure is to seek a consensus rather than to build a proper argument, even if others don’t agree with you.  This then leads to a concern that “qualified” experts might be interpreted narrowly so that ones that disagree with the conclusion are somehow considered “unqualified”, especially given that often Carrier himself will claim that the only reason some experts will disagree with him is because they are motivated by feelings or intuitions or biases.  And then we can see that this principle falls directly in being an Argument from Authority, where the goal is to reach a consensus of purported experts and thus filter out any arguments from those who are not experts.  But a consensus of experts can be wrong, and a non-expert can still have the correct argument.  It is indeed the case that if all the relevant experts are acting properly and honestly and we have a valid and sound argument, we should end up with all the experts agreeing, but it’s clearly not the case that that should be our goal and so that it should be the second axiom of historical analysis.

The third axiom is “Overconfidence is fallacious; admitting ignorance or uncertainty is not”.

The first issue here is that Carrier is comparing what is clearly an incorrect or fallacious case on the one hand with a case that isn’t on the other.  Confidence is not fallacious, but overconfidence is, because the latter simply means being more confident than the situation warrants.  By the same token, admitting ignorance or being uncertain is not fallacious, but being overly skeptical is.  It’s just as much an error to claim the argument is less certain than it is as it is to claim that it is more certain than it is.  And Carrier himself falls into this with his discussion here, as he says “One thing professional historians soon learn is how much we need to accept the fact that we will never know most of what we want to know — such as about Jesus or the origins of Christianity, or anything else in history”.  First of, what suggests that this might be self-serving is that the first example he jumps to is the very one that he’s trying to argue for, so he immediately starts to imply that we don’t know all that much about the very topic that we will be debating, and so is basically trying to “poison the well” against those who think the question is settled.  He may be right that we don’t know what we want to know, but we might well know what we want to know as well.

Which also strikes against the rest of the quote, since he mentions Richard Nixon and Mark Twain and says that we know less about Jesus than we know about them, and we have gaps in our knowledge about them.  Maybe so, but we also know a great number of things about them.  If we interpret this principle as “Don’t overstate your confidence if you don’t have sufficient evidence to back it up”, it’s not an unreasonable principle, but we know that we can know things even in ancient history to a great degree of certainty and so might be able to settle the Jesus question if we have sufficient evidence to make a good argument.  So he seems to be introducing this to use it as a bludgeon against people who claim that have enough evidence to determine that Jesus really existed, but that doesn’t require a principle.  And given that we can know things about history, it’s pretty useless as a principle, especially given that overconfidence and underconfidence are both errors that we should avoid.

The fourth axiom is “Every claim has a nonzero probability of being true or false (unless its being true or false is logically impossible.”

This one is either completely uninteresting or just plain wrong.  Let’s take the “just plain wrong” argument first.  In line with the arguments about the previous axiom, there are things that we can just plain know, even about Jesus.  For example, we know that the statement “Jesus was born in Detroit, Michigan, United States of America” is unequivocally false, because we have records that mentioned him long before that city existed.  On the other end, we know that the statement “Julius Caesar is a man is unequivocally true.  There is absolutely no reasonable probability that the first statement is true and the second statement is false.  So the only move Carrier can make here is to argue that he can come up with some theory such that those theories could in theory fit the evidence which would technically mean that it has a nonzero probability, but we still wouldn’t even bother to take that seriously.  It turns out, then, that are a lot of claims whose probability is so low that we don’t need to bother even considering them, making this statement meaningless.

The thing is, this axiom again seems to be self-serving.  Carrier wants to say this so that he can support his Bayesian approach, and would like argue here that we couldn’t come to the conclusion that the statements I’ve listed really have a probability so low that we don’t need to consider them unless we ran the probability analysis to get that number.  But that isn’t what we do with those sorts of claims.  Instead, we look to see if we have any reason to accept that claim.  Carrier might try to spin an argument that Jesus could have been born in Detroit through some sort of time travel/alien influence/sorcery argument, but we have no reason to think that at all true.  Since his argument, then, would clearly be made up we would dismiss it on that grounds, no matter what contortions Carrier went through to establish that it had a significant probability.  This is the same issue Carrier has when he argues that Jesus being an alien is more probable than His being divine, as we have no reason to think that an alien was involved at all and so we have no reason to think an alien was involved other than Carrier’s invented probabilities.  So we aren’t using probabilities at all to filter that out, and it’s clear that Carrier’s axiom is either false or meaningless, so we have no reason to accept it.

The fifth axiom is “Any argument relying on the inference “possibly, therefore probably” is fallacious.”  This one is one of Carrier’s personal pet peeves, and while his argument is technically true, Carrier tends to overextend it to apply to arguments that are not attempt to show that the things are therefore probable, but instead are only using the bare possibility of their explanation to show that an argument that it is not possible for a piece of evidence to fit with their theory is itself not adequately supported.  Since this is what Carrier himself claims to be doing in his argument against Kipp Davis, it’s clearly not invalid, and we can easily assess invalid uses of bare possibility without having an entire axiom talking about that.

The sixth axiom is “An effective consensus of qualified experts constitutes meeting an initial burden of evidence.”  Assuming he means “burden of proof” here, this isn’t unreasonable, in the sense that we should accept what the qualified experts think is true unless we have good reason to think it isn’t.  However, Carrier clearly thinks he has such an argument for his mythicism, so it isn’t necessarily all that difficult to overcome this, and so we can again ask why this is an axiom itself as opposed to something we consider.  Anyone who goes against the consensus will think that they have good reason to oppose it, so this isn’t doing anything, at least not for historians themselves, and non-historians, as I said above, are free to use less formal methods to come to their conclusions.

The seventh axiom is “Facts must be distinguished from theories”.  Again, this seems pretty obvious, but Carrier again focuses on an argument against Christianity and, of course, ultimately we will need to validate and accept our theories as well, making this somewhat pointless.  I will note here that Carrier really should have applied these to cases that aren’t related to his own debate here to make it clear that this is how history generally works, as opposed to using it to set things up for his own preferred theory in the historicism vs mythicism debate.

The eighth axiom is “A conclusion is only as certain as its weakest premise”.  Carrier, to his credit, uses a non-Jesus historical example here, but this again is pretty banal and doesn’t seem to rise to the level of a key axiom.  He talked about finding the weakest link in an argument, but that’s basic reasoning, and so doesn’t need to be stated here, and it is possible for a conclusion to fit the rest of the evidence so well that we can use that conclusion itself to validate that “weak” premise:  the conclusion fits the evidence so well that if that premise is not true we would have to accept a different and completely unreasonable conclusion, and so we could strengthen that purportedly weaker premise because it is necessary for the stronger supported conclusion to be true.  So really, this sounds like a platitude more than a truly important axiom.

The ninth axiom is “The strength of any claim is proportional to the strength of the evidence supporting it”.  This basically means that a claim is only as strong as the evidence we have for it, which is hardly ground-breaking, although in this case unlike the last one at least it remains true when we take a closer look at it.

The tenth axiom is “Weak claims that contradict strong claims are probably false (and not the other way around).” This again seems obvious, but then I have to wonder why he feels the need to mention it.  Which, given the rest of these axioms, makes me wonder if Carrier is misinterpreting their claim there when he says that too often they appeal to a weaker argument.  Again, it could be an appeal to base possibility, which would be weaker by definition but would always rebut a claim that there is no reasonable way to make the claim fit the evidence.

The eleventh axiom is “Generalizations must be supported by evidence, and that evidence must consist of more than one example (or of an example that strongly implies a general trend), and once supported, cannot be ignored.” This translates to “Support your generalizations with arguments”, which most people do, so this sounds like a pet peeve and, in line with the other arguments, is one where Carrier might be misunderstanding the purpose of the argument or the argument that is being given.  In general, we don’t need an axiom to cover off clearly invalid arguments, and that’s all Carrier seems to be taking aim at, with perhaps a corollary that we should take his generalizations seriously.

The final axiom is “When any of us cites a scholar, it should only be assumed we agree with what they say that is essential to the point we cite them of.”  This is another pet peeve of Carrier’s (from reading his posts) and so hardly rises to the level of an axiom.  Everyone who challenges him will claim that he needs to agree with them on that point or that the rest of his comments that he agrees with that point as well, and if they do it wrong we don’t need to appeal to this axiom but instead can simply point out that the argument doesn’t have that implication.

To finish off the chapter, Carrier lists twelve rules.  I’m not going to go through those in detail, but I will list them here.  For those who know Carrier’s work, see how many of them you think he himself breaks on a regular basis, or that are so qualified as to be meaningless.  For me, the fifth one about avoiding hyperbole seems the most ironic given that he has actually argued that Jesus literally being a space alien is the best interpretation of what ancient Jews actually believed.

Rule 1: Obey the Twelve Axioms (given above) and Bayes’s Theorem (articulated in the remainder of this book).  This does not mean that you must use Bayes’s Theorem in any mathematical sense, only that any historical argument you employ must not violate Bayes’s Theorem.

Rule 2: Develop wide expertise in the period, topics, languages, and materials that you intend to blaze any trails in, or else base all your assumptions in these areas on the established (and properly cited) findings of those who have.

Rule 3: Check all claims against the evidence and scholarship, especially generalizations and assumptions (i.e. don’t assume that because you heard or read it somewhere or it just seems plausible that therefore it’s likely or true).

Rule 4: Confirm that an argument follows from the original language of a text with as much assurance as from your preferred translation.  And confirm that your preferred translation fits the original context (both textual and sociocultural).

Rule 5: Phrase all your claims for optimal truth value.  Use all necessary qualifications; avoid hyperbole; do not state as fact what is not fact or as certain what is not certain; always express degrees of certainty or uncertainty when appropriate; acknowledge the difference between a speculation and an assertion; and concede when more evidence is needed.

Rule 6: Don’t conflate weakly supported claims with strongly supported claims, or confuse theories with facts or speculations with theories.  Always be explicit in your writings as to which is which.

Rule 7: Address all relevant and significant evidence against what you claim (including any relevant arguments from silence against what you claim).

Rule 8: Take into account problems of chronological development.  Everything changed over time, and documents written much later may or may not reflect earlier views or practices, regardless of what they claim.  Hence, for example, any argument for influence requires evidence not just of parallels and similarities but of the causal direction of the influence (although this works both ways:  just because one source comes later than another does not entail the causal direction runs the same way, as the later source could still be attesting a tradition that predates the earlier source).

Rule 9: Always cite your primary evidence, or cite sources that either cite the relevant primary evidence themselves or cite further sources that collectively do (primary evidence being the earliest surviving evidence in the chain of causation, e.g. a modern or medieval historian citing an ancient historian is not primary evidence if the original text of that ancient historian survives, because then that is the primary evidence).  In other words, never make controversial assertions without leaving a trail of sources and evidence sufficient to confirm those assertions are true,

Rule 10: Avoid reliance on scholarship published prior to 1950 and rely as much as possible on scholarship published after 1970.  Work published prior to 1950 need not be ignored, but it should not be relied upon if at all possible.  Except perhaps for archaeology and philology (e.g., observational reporting and textual criticism), old work should be avoided altogether or employed only when supported by later work (or your own independent verification).

Rule 11: Always report what the most recent general scholarship says on a subject, or what the current leading consensus is, if either is different from your own view.  Do not give the impression that a view contrary to the leading consensus is the consensus or that a maverick view is the normal view.

Rule 12: Admit when you are wrong and publish a correction or revision.  Constantly seek expert criticism to refine your work in this very respect.

Next up, the first chapter on Bayes’ Theorem itself.  There’s a lot to say about that, as that’s the chapter that forced me to stop reading to write that all out, so expect a few posts on it.

Thoughts on “Aenigma”

So let’s continue down the list of Shudder movies with “Aenigma”, which struck me as being a “giallo”-type of movie but isn’t advertised as such.  It’s also listed as being by Lucio Fulci who is supposed to be a known name in horror but since I don’t recognize him and the name is Italian that even more suggests that it’s a giallo movie.  Regardless, let’s see how it works.

The movie starts with a young woman getting ready for a date with her roommate and I guess her roommate’s boyfriend, but on the date itself just as things are getting hot and heavy it is revealed that all of her “friends” are watching and it was a set up.  Humiliated, she runs down the street and is chased by her friends in their cars as they mock her, until she ends up running in front of a car and is hit.  She ends up in the hospital, and what looks like a heart monitor is running and then flatlines, and it looks like they try to revive her but fail.  Then, a new girl arrives at the school where the first girl was staying, and she eventually we see a murder of someone who had taunted the first girl, and then back in the hospital the monitor starts to react, as if it was actually a brainwave monitor.  This intrigues the doctor who is handling her case.  Meanwhile, back at the school the murders continue and the new girl acts more and more like the first girl, and we know that she was just coming to the school after suffering a nervous breakdown, and so in theory it wouldn’t be clear if she was just going a bit insane or if it was really possession, except that we always see that the first girl’s brainwaves react to the killings.  As the new girl becomes more and more like the first girl, she enters into a relationship with the doctor.  She is ultimately sent away to an asylum, and her seemingly nice roommate then takes up with the doctor herself.  The new girl then escapes the asylum and returns to the school, and ends up attacking the roommate, but just as she is about to kill her the first girl’s mother disconnects her daughter causing the new girl to collapse into a coma, allowing the doctor and roommate to, presumably, live on in happiness.

One of the big issues with this movie is that no one is sympathetic.  This is set up as a revenge-type story, and so all of the people that she’s trying to kill are at least in some sense unsympathetic.  But then the first girl isn’t all that sympathetic herself, mostly because her attacks seem unduly cruel and even seem to target those who weren’t all that guilty of anything.  It’s also unclear what she’s after, as she seems on the one hand to want to live again and get all the things that she couldn’t get when she was alive, and also might seem to need to kill people to live, which is why she had to be killed in order to stop it, but also might just be after revenge.  The roommate might be the most sympathetic of the lot, but she’s out of focus for most of the first part of the movie and then when she actually comes into focus quite quickly takes up with her roommate’s boyfriend (and she seemed to know that) which makes her less sympathetic.  Ultimately, the most sympathetic is mostly the new girl herself, who gets shunted aside at the climax and when the first girl is killed collapses into a coma in such a way that we have to believe that her personality or soul is completely lost, which should be portrayed as tragic but is quickly ignored.

As I’ve said before, confusion is the enemy of horror, and as you can see from the above there is a lot of confusion here, starting from the first girl seeming to be dead but then I guess not dead, proceeding through confusion over the goals of the first girl and the mechanism by which she is possessing the new girl, and ending with the confusion over what the ending means for perhaps the most sympathetic character in the movie.  The horror elements aren’t bad, so you might be tempted to simply turn off your brain and follow along with it that way, but the horror and sex scenes are rather banal overall, and are too few and far between to stop us from thinking about what’s going on.

Ultimately, the movie isn’t terrible and might even be surprisingly entertaining, but outside of the famous slug scene none of the scares are that creative, and there’s really nothing beyond that to enjoy here.  I won’t call it a terrible movie, but I have no reason to ever watch this movie again.

Another List Returns

So a while ago I started filtering out the lists I used to keep because I wasn’t using them much anymore.  And then I started adding some back, like the “Reading List”, tracking what I was reading.  The reason was that even though I tended to use stacks to keep track of things like that, there was some utility to having it as a list, and also it allowed for those reading the blog who might be interested in some of the things I was reading — especially the philosophical/classic/historical works — to see what I was reading and to get some idea of what progress I was making on them if they were interested in my comments on them.

Now, I’ve resurrected “The List of Video Games”.  No, not “The List of Games to Finish”, but just “The List of Video Games”.

I had already started a list like that as a post in my “Video Games Playlist” post.  The point of that post was to write down the series that I wanted to dedicate myself to playing through and so both track my progress doing that and have one place to look for what I wanted to play.  Obviously that sort of thing doesn’t work as a stack, especially since a lot of the series are actually on GOG.  I could have kept it in a template file that I keep for planning and scheduling purposes, but the advantage of keeping stuff like that on the blog is that I can access it from anywhere.  Yes, I am unlikely to have to think about what series I’m going to play next while compiling at work, but adding things that I came across in a comment section would be.  And that, in fact, is what happened, as at Twenty Sided Shamus’ son Isaac has revived the “This Week I’m Playing” posts and sometimes there are games mentioned there that I have interest in.  And so it would be nice to be able to record that to look at later.

In addition, I had only put series in that post, and wanted to keep track of some of the single games that I wanted to play.  Which meant that I wanted a one-stop post for all of the games that I’m considering playing.  Sure, right now I’m only playing series, but if my schedule shifts around — for example, if I discover that between the normal things I want to do in an evening and the time I can watch “Veronica Mars” I have an hour or so to spare and might be able to fit some gaming in there — then I might find some time to play games, and wanted the list so that I don’t have to guess at what I wanted to play and might fit there and then forget about a game that I really wanted to play more than the game I ultimately settled on.

So I wanted a one-stop post … but a post didn’t work so well for that.  See, pages always stay on the sidebar of the blog, but posts don’t.  So I had already found that trying to find that post again to remind myself of what I wanted to play was a bit of a headache.  When it was a relatively short list of series, it worked well-enough, especially since I at least roughly had already planned out my next year of playing (Dragon Age followed by the Gold Box games).  But if I was going to put every single game and series on there as well, it would be too annoying to try to find it by searching for “list” every time.  So that suggested that a page would work better, and a page has another advantage in that it’s easily viewable by people reading the blog as well, in case they want to comment on what I am playing or am about to play.

So, again, the page is here.  If you’re interested, take a look to see what you find interesting.  Again, I’m not likely to clear the list any time soon, but these are the things that I’ll be looking at over the next few years.

Friend or Foe? Or Jerk?

I keep flipping around on which channel or channels I focus on from PlutoTV according to my mood, what’s showing, what I’m doing and what they’re showing.  Lately, in the mornings while getting ready and using Ring Fit Adventure I’ve started watching Game Show Central, which shows game shows from GSN.  They alternate through a few different shows every so often, and at one point what they were showing was an older show called “Friend or Foe”.  And I think that there are some interesting philosophical implications to the strategy on that show … which isn’t surprising, given its premise.

As per most of these shows, the big game part is answering trivia questions, but the premise is a deliberate invocation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.  They team up people who have never met before, and get them to answer the questions as a pair to earn certain amounts of money, but where it gets interesting is when one team is eliminated or gets to the end of the game and so are the winners.  Whenever there is money to be divided, the two people have to go to the “Trust Box” and decide whether they are going to individually (but at the same time) choose “Friend” or “Foe”.  If both of them choose “Friend”, then they split the money equally.  If one chooses “Foe” and one chooses “Friend”, the one who chose “Foe” gets all of the money.  And if both choose “Foe”, then they both walk away with nothing.

Now this is clearly an adaptation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, where both partners choosing “Friend” gives the best combined outcome but choosing “Foe” can give one of them a significant benefit … as long as the other chooses “Friend”.  However, I think with this alteration the only reason to choose “Foe” is if you are, in fact, a total jerk.

See, in the Prisoner’s Dilemma if you choose the equivalent of “Foe” you might be doing that to try to get the least amount of time at the expense of the other person, but you also might be doing that to protect yourself.  If you think that your opponent is going to go “Foe” then if you choose “Friend” then you would end up with double the amount of time in prison than you would if you choose “Foe”.  If you want to avoid five more years in prison and think that it’s even possible that they might betray you, you had better choose to betray them first to avoid that negative consequence.  Which is, in fact, the dilemma here, which is that because the consequences of getting betrayed when you co-operate are so harsh people who don’t want to betray feel pushed into it just out of self-protection.

That extra motivation is lost in the game show.  If you think that the other person might choose “Foe”, if you choose “Foe” all that means is that you will make the game show’s producers happy as they won’t have to pay out the money that you earned and can make more profit.  You won’t gain anything from choosing “Foe”.  So about the only reason to do that if you think that they will vote “Foe” is entirely to deny them the reward from betraying, and so is entirely retributive:  you basically want to punish them for choosing to betray.  That’s a bit of a bitter and angry reasoning that doesn’t actually benefit you in any way, since this is a one-time choice.  So the only way you can gain any benefit — even just by avoiding a harsher consequence — from choosing “Foe” is if they choose “Friend” so that you can take all of the money and leave them with none.  This would be despite the fact that you have to answer the questions together and so they earned the money with you.  So to go “Foe” in the hopes of benefiting you have to be hoping that they are trusting and deliberately set out to shaft them.  So you can’t argue that you went “Foe” to protect yourself from the consequences of them going “Foe” because the consequences to you, personally, are exactly the same if you choose “Foe” or “Friend” in that case.  So in general you’d be doing that in an attempt to shaft them out of the money.

Now, someone could argue that the benefit of the money you’d gain might make the risk worth it.  Essentially, then, it’s not really a case of you trying to shaft them, but instead that what you’d lose if both choose “Foe” is less than what you stand to gain if they choose “Friend”, and so it’s a simple cost-benefit analysis.  Of course, this runs into the issue that if they are capable of doing the same cost-benefit analysis then they will choose “Foe” and you both will get nothing, but this also implies that the time to do this is when the dollar amount you have is low, so that you don’t lose too much if both choose “Foe”.  Except that in such a case you don’t benefit much either.  I’ve seen a case where they had $200 in the ban and someone went “Foe” while the other went “Friend”, and thus gained an entire $100.  Sure, they only risked $100, but they didn’t really gain anything either, so the extra benefit didn’t seem to be worth the risk.  Again, you’d have to be a jerk to do that for that small an amount when you could accept the $100 and be nice.  But at larger values, while you benefit more you also risk a lot more.  Yes, keeping all of that $10,000 would be nice, but if both just go “Friend” you each get a respectable $5000.  So ideally both should just choose “Friend” by default to give everyone their fair share and a significant payoff.  Yes, if they choose “Foe” then you’d lose that $5000 as well, but then they’d be the jerk and you wouldn’t.

Because there isn’t a significant risk if you don’t go “Foe” if your team member does, the only reason to ever go “Foe” is to take advantage of your other team member, who worked with you to earn that money.  No matter how you slice it, then, going “Foe” is a jerk move.  So it shouldn’t be that surprising, then, that there are a significant number of people on that show who have proven themselves to be jerks in front of a whole lot of people.

Pancho Sisko Diary: Bounty Hunter’s Moon

The second target took us to Nar Shaddaa.  I hate the “Smuggler’s Moon”, but for some reason he loves it.  He calls it “The Bounty Hunter’s Moon” because there were always targets to hunt here and the fact that the smuggling is going on here means that there’s no real enforcement of the law here, so he can do pretty much whatever he wants to in taking out the target.  That lack of law enforcement is why I hate it, because it means that you can get killed just walking down the wrong street.  So I’m going to hide on the ship.

Anyway, the target here was a master assassin, so someone who was really good at killing people.  He’d started some kind of security company, and the first step was to do enough destructive things to his company that he’d decide to go after Sisko.  Who was in heaven with that kind of assignment.  Along the way, Mako found the competition, a bunch of Ugnauts who wanted to use a war droid that they operated from the inside to wipe everyone out.  It wasn’t good enough, but Sisko let them live anyway if they admitted defeat after he scrapped their machine.  He said it was because they made him laugh.

Anyway, the target did come after him, but killed a friend of Mako’s who was helping them, which ticked Mako off but didn’t bother Sisko all that much.  They came face-to-face as the assassin thought that Sisko was impressive and honourable, but Sisko scoffed at that and won anyway.  Then he heard that he’d make more money if he brought the assassin in alive and did that.

So, you think that Sisko is merciful?  Well, he had a mission for the Imperial Military to find something that Revan had left behind, and found some kind of energy generator that was keeping a bunch of aliens alive.  So he took it to get paid, even though he could have taken a piece of it that would have grown into the bigger generator later.  Yeah, credits are credits.

Speaking of which, the Huntmaster says that the target list for the Great Hunt is being auctioned off and wants Sisko to get it back.  I hope that it being destroyed counts …