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The really annoying part of this is the author says:
“The crucial finding is that the number of violent video games you’re exposed to has an influence on your verbal aggression and hostility,”
Only to go on and say:
“It’s very important to stress that our findings are not causal,”
More than that, the study doesn’t even measure their “exposure” to violent games, it requests their three favorite games and then checks their PEGI rating.
Whew. Okay, so reading the actual research article here, and, this article is kind of trash. First off, the study group was recruited from ads posted on Reddit and Discord, notably from r/samplesize, r/narcissism and r/truegaming and Cluster B Circus, r/NPD Official and NPD Recovery 2.0 respectively. One is a place for polls, one is a gaming subreddit, and the rest are all communities for people with narcissism. So they’re skewing their sample population explicitly towards how people with narcissism that play violent games respond. Which, I think was the original intent of the study, and they bolted on the additional conclusions for a spicier publication, since the only way these numbers are meaningful is with a control group of people with NPD (narcissistic personality disorder) that do not play violent games, and even then, it only provides a correlation between people with NPD who play violent video games and increased verbal aggression (one of which was arguing if people disagree with you).
I’m beginning to feel regret for putting way too much effort into a comment, because this is a long ass article, but further in, the study states that respondents had “healthy” levels of narcissism, which goes unremarked despite their primary sample sourcing being targeted at narcissism instead of a population of gamers. I’m calling it a wrap here, but essentially this is a remarkably unreliable study to write that headline off of.
Yeah, I agree with all of their points except for SpaceX, which has been an unequivocal success that doesn’t deserve to be painted with the same brush Elon is. They revolutionized space flight, broke into the national security launch industry that was entirely captured by the United Launch alliance, and stand to obsolete the (93 billion dollar!) Space Launch System the moment the Starship is approved for commercial launches.
Dozens of Falcon 9’s exploded while testing them and especially while attempting to land and reuse boosters, so the Starship failure was all but expected. I hate Elon Musk too, but SpaceX is arguably the most successful aerospace company at the moment. Were NASA allowed full control of their money, I think it’d be better, but as it is the viability of many of their future projects hinges on SpaceX.
Yeah, in academia getting approval for primate research projects is a huge process where you need to clarify every aspect of the protocol, housing, care, and experimental operations to submit before the project can start. I’m less sure if it’s voluntary or required, but we had funding allocated for their retirement from the start. They’re smart enough and strong enough that I’d be terrified to work with unhappy and unwell primates.
Not that all research projects are have happy endings, but I don’t think corporate research has the same restrictions and oversight that academic research does, given that this even happened. I’m pretty accepting of the necessity of primate research models, but we should be doing everything we can to treat them as best we can. Withdrawing a subject from the experimental protocol should be preferred over letting an infection fester just because the implant is in the way. Just seems really poorly done on their part.
Yeah, I mean we’ve been working on brain implants of various stripes for a couple decades now, and they’re not the first to attempt motor cortex implants for paralyzed patients as a method to begin human trials, but the current state of the art for brain implants is honestly pretty… primitive. There’s no good way to avoid damaging neurons, so it’s mainly a focus on not causing too much damage while fine mapping and targeting has to be done on an individual basis.
Implants are hugely useful, and arguably the current state of the art treatment for several conditions (epilepsy and parkinsons), but we’re so far out from computer brain interfaces being useful for anything outside of dire medical needs that it’s kinda surprising they’re pushing ahead when they had so much trouble with their experimental subjects.
I worked in a brain imaging lab in college, and we had a couple of chimpanzees with brain implants that did daily research protocols. Bastards were better than me at the testing regimen, and other than some minor discomfort (water intake is restricted prior to the tests so that the gatorade reward was more attractive), they were large children that could tear your face off if they got angry. Once they got older, they would have surgery to remove the implants and retire to a primate ranch where they just got to live out the rest of their life. All of the grad students there had been working with the same chimps for years, so it’s a little alarming Neuralink had so many issues.
It doesn’t exactly engender confidence.
Yeah, next thing you know they’ll be sliding offers to the most liked people’s profiles offering the chance to become compensated daters if they go out with VIP profiles, no pressure to do anything sexual though, because that’d be illegal.
Honestly, this 500$ a month thing is just sad, because it’ll definitely work (financially), and Tinder will do some shenanigans with the algorithm to make it seem a little worth it, and it’ll just definitely not be worth it to the people paying 500$ a month.