How Computational Review of Chess Games Revealed Narrativ...

Paradoxically, when other top players wrote about games in magazines and newspaper columns they often made more mistakes in their commentary than the players had made at the board. Even when the players themselves published analyses of their own games they were often less accurate than when they were playing the game. Strong moves were called errors, weak moves were praised. It was not only a few cases of journalists who were lousy players failing to comprehend the genius of the champions, or...

 Estimating Technical Progress

Overestimating the potential upside of every new sign of tech progress is as common as downplaying the downsides. It's easy to let our imaginations run wild with how any new development is going to change everything practically overnight. The unforeseen technical roadblocks that inevitably spring up are only one reason for this consistent miscalculation. Human nature is simply out of sync with the nature of technological development. We see progress as linear, a straight line of improvement. ...

 The Immersive Fallacy

According to the immersive fallacy, this reality is so complete that ideally the frame falls away so that the player truly believes that he or she is part of an imaginary world. [...] In the case of play, we know that metacommunication is always in operation. A teen kissing another teen in Spin the Bottle or a Gran Turismo player driving a virtual race car each understands that their play references other realities. But the very thing that makes their activity play is that they also know th...

 Computer Models as Play

There is, indeed, an "art" to worldplay in the social sciences that fuses narrative with analytical technique. There is also a kinship with the arts in the relationship between imagined world and reality, a point brought home by political scientist and ellow Robert Axelrod. In the early 1960s the teenage Axelrod won the Westinghouse kience Talent Search for a very simple computer simulation of hypothetical lifeforms behaving in an artificial environment. Ever since, he has worked on the appli...

 The Consensus of Cyberspace

In the real world the empty page might scare the writer. as the blank screen might intimidate the programmer, but now individuals found themselves in the position of having to "boot up" an entire universe of meaning, without any easy reference to the constellation of familiar objects that tend to reinforce the tentative definitions obf newly ereated artifacts. Say, for example, one wished to create a chair in cyberspace, circa 1985. The most that can be said is that this "chair" won't look ve...

 Anecdote of Shamans Responding to Star Trek

DI for documenting his journey to shamanism in the 1994 book Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of African Shaman. He writes about the proverbial dive into the rabbit hole as he was studying with the elders of his community and balancing his newfound wisdom with his Western education. Some paints a picture of a different path to knowledge that contradicts the norms of Western conventions. According to him. the Dagara have no word for the supernatural. "For us, ...

 The False Promise of WWW Enlightenment

Never before have so many people been connected together in an instantly responsive network through which memes can spread faster than natural viruses. But the notion that taking the whole world online would create a utopia of netizens, all equal in cyberspace, was always a fantasy—as much a delusion as Luther’s vision of a “priesthood of all believers.” The reality is that the global network has become a transmission mechanism for all kinds of manias and panics, just as the combinati...

 It’s Okay to “Forget” What You Read

What we get from books is not just a collection of names, dates and events stored in our minds like files in a computer. Books also change, via our mental models, the very reality that we perceive. You can think of mental models as psychological lenses that color and shape what we see. Some of this is genetic or cultural (Americans focus on very different parts of a picture than the Japanese do), but much of our perception is also shaped by experience — and experience includes the book...

 Socrates on How Written Word Will Destroy Memory

or this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; th...

 Chances We are Living in a Simulation

The strongest argument for us being in a simulation probably is the following. Forty years ago we had pong. Like two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were. Now, forty years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it’s getting better every year. Soon we’ll have virtual reality, augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of ad...