video games

Will we ever have the space opera future?

pnrj ethics, futurism, personal, science and academia, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

May 22 JDN 2459722

Space opera has long been a staple of science fiction. Like many natural categories, it’s not that easy to define; it has something to do with interstellar travel, a variety of alien species, grand events, and a big, complicated world that stretches far beyond any particular story we might tell about it.

Star Trek is the paradigmatic example, and Star Wars also largely fits, but there are numerous of other examples, including most of my favorite science fiction worlds: Dune, the Culture, Mass Effect, Revelation Space, the Liaden, Farscape, Babylon 5, the Zones of Thought.

I think space opera is really the sort of science fiction I most enjoy. Even when it is dark, there is still something aspirational about it. Even a corrupt feudal transplanetary empire or a terrible interstellar war still means a universe where people get to travel the stars.

How likely is it that we—and I mean ‘we’ in the broad sense, humanity and its descendants—will actually get the chance to live in such a universe?

First, let’s consider the most traditional kind of space opera, the Star Trek world, where FTL is commonplace and humans interact as equals with a wide variety of alien species that are different enough to be interesting, but similar enough to be relatable.

This, sad to say, is extremely unlikely. FTL is probably impossible, or if not literally impossible then utterly infeasible by any foreseeable technology. Yes, the Alcubierre drive works in theory… all you need is tons of something that has negative mass.

And while, by sheer probability, there almost have to be other sapient lifeforms somewhere out there in this vast universe, our failure to contact or even find clear evidence of any of them for such a long period suggests that they are either short-lived or few and far between. Moreover, any who do exist are likely to be radically different from us and difficult to interact with at all, much less relate to on a personal level. Maybe they don’t have eyes or ears; maybe they live only in liquid hydrogen or molten lead; maybe they communicate entirely by pheromones that are toxic to us.

Does this mean that the aspirations of space opera are ultimately illusory? Is it just a pure fantasy that will forever be beyond us? Not necessarily.

I can see two other ways to create a very space-opera-like world, one of which is definitely feasible, and the other is very likely to be. Let’s start with the one that’s definitely feasible—indeed so feasible we will very likely get to experience it in our own lifetimes.

That is to make it a simulation. An MMO video game, in a way, but something much grander than any MMO that has yet been made. Not just EVE and No Man’s Sky, not just World of Warcraft and Minecraft and Second Life, but also Facebook and Instagram and Zoom and so much more. Oz from Summer Wars; OASIS from Ready Player One. A complete, multifaceted virtual reality in which we can spend most if not all of our lives. One complete with not just sight and sound, but also touch, smell, even taste.

Since it’s a simulation, we can make our own rules. If we want FTL and teleportation, we can have them. (And I would like to note that in fact teleportation is available in EVE, No Man’s Sky, World of Warcraft, Minecraft, and even Second Life. It’s easy to implement in a simulation, and it really seems to be something people want to have.) If we want to meet—or even be—people from a hundred different sapient species, some more humanoid than others, we can. Each of us could rule entire planets, command entire starfleets.

And we could do this, if not right now, today, then very, very soon—the VR hardware is finally maturing and the software capability already exists if there is a development team with the will and the skills (and the budget) to do it. We almost certainly will do this—in fact, we’ll do it hundreds or thousands of different ways. You need not be content with any particular space opera world, when you can choose from a cornucopia of them; and fantasy worlds too, and plenty of other kinds of worlds besides.

Yet, I admit, there is something missing from that future. While such a virtual-reality simulation might reach the point where it would be fair to say it’s no longer simply a “video game”, it still won’t be real. We won’t actually be Vulcans or Delvians or Gek or Asari. We will merely pretend to be. When we take off the VR suit at the end of the day, we will still be humans, and still be stuck here on Earth. And even if most of the toil of maintaining this society and economy can be automated, there will still be some time we have to spend living ordinary lives in ordinary human bodies.

So, is there some chance that we might really live in a space-opera future? Where we will meet actual, flesh-and-blood people who have blue skin, antennae, or six limbs? Where we will actually, physically move between planets, feeling the different gravity beneath our feet and looking up at the alien sky?

Yes. There is a way this could happen. Not now, not for awhile yet. We ourselves probably won’t live to see it. But if humanity manages to continue thriving for a few more centuries, and technology continues to improve at anything like its current pace, then that day may come.

We won’t have FTL, so we’ll be bounded by the speed of light. But the speed of light is still quite fast. It can get you to Mars in minutes, to Jupiter in hours, and even to Alpha Centauri in a voyage that wouldn’t shock Magellan or Zheng He. Leaving this arm of the Milky Way, let alone traveling to another galaxy, is out of the question (at least if you ever want to come back while anyone you know is still alive—actually as a one-way trip it’s surprisingly feasible thanks to time dilation).

This means that if we manage to invent a truly superior kind of spacecraft engine, one which combines the high thrust of a hydrolox rocket with the high specific impulse of an ion thruster—and that is physically possible, because it’s well within what nuclear rockets ought to be capable of—then we could travel between planets in our solar system, and maybe even to nearby solar systems, in reasonable amounts of time. The world of The Expanse could therefore be in reach (well, the early seasons anyway), where human colonies have settled on Mars and Ceres and Ganymede and formed their own new societies with their own unique cultures.

We may yet run into some kind of extraterrestrial life—bacteria probably, insects maybe, jellyfish if we’re lucky—but we probably ever won’t actually encounter any alien sapients. If there are any, they are probably too primitive to interact with us, or they died out millennia ago, or they’re simply too far away to reach.

But if we cannot find Vulcans and Delvians and Asari, then we can become them. We can modify ourselves with cybernetics, biotechnology, or even nanotechnology, until we remake ourselves into whatever sort of beings we want to be. We may never find a whole interplanetary empire ruled by a race of sapient felinoids, but if furry conventions are any indication, there are plenty of people who would make themselves into sapient felinoids if given the opportunity.

Such a universe would actually be more diverse than a typical space opera. There would be no “planets of hats“, no entire societies of people acting—or perhaps even looking—the same. The hybridization of different species is almost by definition impossible, but when the ‘species’ are cosmetic body mods, we can combine them however we like. A Klingon and a human could have a child—and for that matter the child could grow up and decide to be a Turian.

Honestly there are only two reasons I’m not certain we’ll go this route:

One, we’re still far too able and willing to kill each other, so who knows if we’ll even make it that long. There’s also still plenty of room for some sort of ecological catastrophe to wipe us out.

And two, most people are remarkably boring. We already live in a world where one could go to work every day wearing a cape, a fursuit, a pirate outfit, or a Starfleet uniform, and yet people don’t let you. There’s nothing infeasible about me delivering a lecture dressed as a Kzin Starfleet science officer, and nor would it even particularly impair my ability to deliver the lecture well; and yet I’m quite certain it would be greatly frowned upon if I were to do so, and could even jeopardize my career (especially since I don’t have tenure).

Would it be distracting to the students if I were to do something like that? Probably, at least at first. But once they got used to it, it might actually make them feel at ease. If it were a social norm that lecturers—and students—can dress however they like (perhaps limited by local decency regulations, though those, too, often seem overly strict), students might show up to class in bunny pajamas or pirate outfits or full-body fursuits, but would that really be a bad thing? It could in fact be a good thing, if it helps them express their own identity and makes them more comfortable in their own skin.

But no, we live in a world where the mainstream view is that every man should wear exactly the same thing at every formal occasion. I felt awkward at the AEA conference because my shirt had color.

This means that there is really one major obstacle to building the space opera future: Social norms. If we don’t get to live in this world one day, it will be because the world is ruled by the sort of person who thinks that everyone should be the same.

Men and violence

pnrj book reviews, core principles, current events, ethics, personal, politics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr4 JDN 2459302

Content warning: In this post, I’m going to be talking about violence, including sexual violence. April is Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month. I won’t go into any explicit detail, but I understand that discussion of such topics can still be very upsetting for many people.

After short posts for the past two weeks, get ready for a fairly long post. This is a difficult and complicated topic, and I want to make sure that I state things very clearly and with all necessary nuance.

While the overall level of violence between human societies varies tremendously, one thing is astonishingly consistent: Violence is usually committed by men.

In fact, violence is usually suffered by men as well—with the quite glaring exception of sexual violence. This is why I am particularly offended by claims like “All men benefit from male violence”; no, men who were murdered by other men did not benefit from male violence, and it is frankly appalling to say otherwise. Most men would be better off if male violence were somehow eliminated from the world. (Most women would also be much better off as well, of course.)

I therefore consider it both a matter of both moral obligation and self-interest to endeavor to reduce the amount of male violence in the world, which is almost coextensive with reducing the amount of violence in general.

On the other hand, ought implies can, and despite significant efforts I have made to seek out recommendations for concrete actions I could be taking… I haven’t been able to find very many.

The good news is that we appear to be doing something right—overall rates of violent crime have declined by nearly half since 1990. The decline in rape has been slower, only about 25% since 1990, though this is a bit misleading since the legal definition of rape has been expanded during that interval. The causes of this decline in violence are unclear: Some of the most important factors seem to be changes in policing, economic growth, and reductions in lead pollution. For whatever reason, Millennials just don’t seem to commit crimes at the same rates that Gen-X-ers or Boomers did. We are also substantially more feminist, so maybe that’s an important factor too; the truth is, we really don’t know.

But all of this still leaves me asking: What should I be doing?

When I searched for an answer to this question, a significant fraction of the answers I got from various feminist sources were some variation on “ruminate on your own complicity in male violence”. I tried it; it was painful, difficult—and basically useless. I think this is particularly bad advice for someone like me who has a history of depression.

When you ruminate on your own life, it’s easy to find mistakes; but how important were those mistakes? How harmful were they? I can’t say that I’ve never done anything in my whole life that hurt anyone emotionally (can anyone?), but I can only think of a few times I’ve harmed someone physically (mostly by accident, once in self-defense). I’ve definitely never raped or murdered anyone, and as far as I can tell I’ve never done anything that would have meaningfully contributed to anyone getting raped or murdered. If you were to somehow replace every other man in the world with a copy of me, maybe that wouldn’t immediately bring about a utopian paradise—but I’m pretty sure that rates of violence would be a lot lower. (And in this world ruled by my clones, we’d have more progressive taxes! Less military spending! A basic income! A global democratic federation! Greater investment in space travel! Hey, this sounds pretty good, actually… though inbreeding would be a definite concern.) So, okay, I’m no angel; but I don’t think it’s really fair to say that I’m complicit in something that would radically decrease if everyone behaved as I do.

The really interesting thing is, I think this is true of most men. A typical man commits less than the average amount of violence—because there is great skew in the distribution, with most men committing little or no violence and a small number of men committing lots of violence. Truly staggering amounts of violence are committed by those at the very top of the distribution—that would be mass murderers like Hitler and Stalin. It sounds strange, but if all men in the world were replaced by a typical man, the world would surely be better off. The loss of the very best men would be more than compensated by the removal of the very worst. In fact, since most men are not rapists or murderers, replacing every man in the world with the median man would automatically bring the rates of rape and murder to zero. I know that feminists don’t like to hear #NotAllMen; but it’s not even most men. Maybe the reason that the “not all men” argument keeps coming up is… it’s actually kind of true? Maybe it’s not so unreasonable for men to resent the implication that we are complicit in acts we abhor that we have never done and would never do? Maybe this whole concept that an entire sex of people, literally almost half the human race, can share responsibility for violent crimes—is wrong?

I know that most women face a nearly constant bombardment of sexual harassment, and feel pressured to remain constantly vigilant in order to protect themselves against being raped. I know that victims of sexual violence are often blamed for their victimization (though this happens in a lot of crimes, not just sex crimes). I know that #YesAllWomen is true—basically all women have been in some way harmed or threatened by sexual violence. But the fact remains that most men are already not committing sexual violence. Many people seem to confuse the fact that most women are harmed by men with the claim that most men harm women; these are not at all equivalent. As long as one man can harm many women, there don’t need to be very many harmful men for all women to be affected.

Plausible guesses would be that about 20-25% of women suffer sexual assault, committed by about 4% or 5% of men, each of whom commits an average of 4 to 6 assaults—and some of whom commit far more. If these figures are right, then 95% of men are not guilty of sexual assault. The highest plausible estimate I’ve seen is from a study which found that 11% of men had committed rape. Since it’s only one study and its sample size was pretty small, I’m actually inclined to think that this is an overestimate which got excessive attention because it was so shocking. Larger studies rarely find a number above 5%.

But even if we suppose that it’s really 11%, that leaves 89%; in what sense is 89% not “most men”? I saw some feminist sites responding to this result by saying things like “We can’t imprison 11% of men!” but, uh, we almost do already. About 9% of American men will go to prison in their lifetimes. This is probably higher than it should be—it’s definitely higher than any other country—but if those convictions were all for rape, I’d honestly have trouble seeing the problem. (In fact only about 10% of US prisoners are incarcerated for rape.) If the US were the incarceration capital of the world simply because we investigated and prosecuted rape more reliably, that would be a point of national pride, not shame. In fact, the American conservatives who don’t see the problem with our high incarceration rate probably do think that we’re mostly incarcerating people for things like rape and murder—when in fact large portions of our inmates are incarcerated for drug possession, “public order” crimes, or pretrial detention.

Even if that 11% figure is right, “If you know 10 men, one is probably a rapist” is wrong. The people you know are not a random sample. If you don’t know any men who have been to prison, then you likely don’t know any men who are rapists. 37% of prosecuted rapists have prior criminal convictions, and 60% will be convicted of another crime within 5 years. (Of course, most rapes are never even reported; but where would we get statistics on those rapists?) Rapists are not typical men. They may seem like typical men—it may be hard to tell the difference at a glance, or even after knowing someone for a long time. But the fact that narcissists and psychopaths may hide among us does not mean that all of us are complicit in the crimes of narcissists and psychopaths. If you can’t tell who is a psychopath, you may have no choice but to be wary; but telling every man to search his heart is worthless, because the only ones who will listen are the ones who aren’t psychopaths.

That, I think, is the key disagreement here: Where the standard feminist line is “any man could be a rapist, and every man should search his heart”, I believe the truth is much more like, “monsters hide among us, and we should do everything in our power to stop them”. The monsters may look like us, they may often act like us—but they are not us. Maybe there are some men who would commit rapes but can be persuaded out of it—but this is not at all the typical case. Most rapes are committed by hardened, violent criminals and all we can really do is lock them up. (And for the love of all that is good in the world, test all the rape kits!)

It may be that sexual harassment of various degrees is more spread throughout the male population; perhaps the median man indeed commits some harassment at some point in his life. But even then, I think it’s pretty clear that the really awful kinds of harassment are largely committed by a small fraction of serial offenders. Indeed, there is a strong correlation between propensity toward sexual harassment and various measures of narcissism and psychopathy. So, if most men look closely enough, maybe they can think of a few things that they do occasionally that might make women uncomfortable; okay, stop doing those things. (Hint: Do not send unsolicited dick pics. Ever. Just don’t. Anyone who wants to see your genitals will ask first.) But it isn’t going to make a huge difference in anyone’s life. As long as the serial offenders continue, women will still feel utterly bombarded.

There are other kinds of sexual violations that more men commit—being too aggressive, or persisting too much after the first rejection, or sending unsolicited sexual messages or images. I’ve had people—mostly, but not only, men—do things like that to me; but it would be obviously unfair to both these people and actual rape victims to say I’d ever been raped. I’ve been groped a few times, but it seems like quite a stretch to call it “sexual assault”. I’ve had experiences that were uncomfortable, awkward, frustrating, annoying, occasionally creepy—but never traumatic. Never violence. Teaching men (and women! There is evidence that women are not much less likely than men to commit this sort of non-violent sexual violation) not to do these things is worthwhile and valuable in itself—but it’s not going to do much to prevent rape or murder.

Thus, whatever responsibility men have in reducing sexual violence, it isn’t simply to stop; you can’t stop doing what you already aren’t doing.

After pushing through all that noise, at last I found a feminist site making a more concrete suggestion: They recommended that I read a book by Jackson Katz on the subject entitled The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help.

First of all, I must say I can’t remember any other time I’ve read a book that was so poorly titled. The only mention of the phrase “macho paradox” is a brief preface that was added to the most recent edition explaining what the term was meant to mean; it occurs nowhere else in the book. And in all its nearly 300 pages, the book has almost nothing that seriously addresses either the motivations underlying sexual violence or concrete actions that most men could take in order to reduce it.

As far as concrete actions (“How all men can help”), the clearest, most consistent advice the book seems to offer that would apply to most men is “stop consuming pornography” (something like 90% of men and 60% of women regularly consume porn), when in fact there is a strong negative correlation between consumption of pornography and real-world sexual violence. (Perhaps Millennials are less likely to commit rape and murder because we are so into porn and video games!) This advice is literally worse than nothing.

The sex industry exists on a continuum from the adult-only but otherwise innocuous (smutty drawings and erotic novels), through the legal but often problematic (mainstream porn, stripping), to the usually illegal but defensible (consensual sex work), all the way to the utterly horrific and appalling (the sexual exploitation of children). I am well aware that there are many deep problems with the mainstream porn industry, but I confess I’ve never quite seen how these problems are specific to porn rather than endemic to media or even capitalism more generally. Particularly with regard to the above-board sex industry in places like Nevada or the Netherlands, it’s not obvious to me that a prostitute is more exploited than a coal miner, a sweatshop worker, or a sharecropper—indeed, given the choice between those four careers, I’d without hesitation choose to be a prostitute in Amsterdam. Many sex workers resent the paternalistic insistence by anti-porn feminists that their work is inherently degrading and exploitative. Overall, sex workers report job satisfaction not statistically different than the average for all jobs. There are a multitude of misleading statistics often reported about the sex industry that often make matters seem far worse than they are.

Katz (all-too) vividly describes the depiction of various violent or degrading sex acts in mainstream porn, but he seems unwilling to admit that any other forms of porn do or even could exist—and worse, like far too many anti-porn feminists, he seems to willfully elide vital distinctions, effectively equating fantasy depiction with genuine violence and consensual kinks with sexual abuse. I like to watch action movies and play FPS video games; does that mean I believe it’s okay to shoot people with machine guns? I know the sophisticated claim is that it somehow “desensitizes” us (whatever that means), but there’s not much evidence of that either. Given that porn and video games are negatively correlated with actual violence, it may in fact be that depicting the fantasy provides an outlet for such urges and helps prevent them from becoming reality. Or, it may simply be that keeping a bunch of young men at home in front of their computers keeps them from going out and getting into trouble. (Then again, homicides actually increased during the COVID pandemic—though most other forms of crime decreased.) But whatever the cause, the evidence is clear that porn and video games don’t increase actual violence—they decrease them.

At the very end of the book, Katz hints at a few other things men might be able to do, or at least certain groups of men: Challenge sexism in sports, the military, and similar male-dominated spaces (you know, if you have clout in such spaces, which I really don’t—I’m an effete liberal intellectual, a paradigmatic “soy boy”; do you think football players or soldiers are likely to listen to me?); educate boys with more positive concepts of masculinity (if you are in a position to do so, e.g. as a teacher or parent); or, the very best advice in the entire book, worth more than the rest of the book combined: Donate to charities that support survivors of sexual violence. Katz doesn’t give any specific recommendations, but here are a few for you: RAINN, NAESV and NSVRC.

Honestly, I’m more impressed by Upworthy’s bulleted list of things men can do, though they’re mostly things that conscientious men do anyway, and even if 90% of men did them, it probably wouldn’t greatly reduce actual violence.

As far as motivations (“Why some men hurt women”), the book does at least manage to avoid the mindless slogan “rape is about power, not sex” (there is considerable evidence that this slogan is false or at least greatly overstated). Still, Katz insists upon collective responsibility, attributing what are in fact typically individual crimes, committed mainly by psychopaths, motivated primarily by anger or sexual desire, to some kind of institutionalized system of patriarchal control that somehow permeates all of society. The fact that violence is ubiquitous does not imply that it is coordinated. It’s very much the same cognitive error as “murderism”.

I agree that sexism exists, is harmful, and may contribute to the prevalence of rape. I agree that there are many widespread misconceptions about rape. I also agree that reducing sexism and toxic masculinity are worthwhile endeavors in themselves, with numerous benefits for both women and men. But I’m just not convinced that reducing sexism or toxic masculinity would do very much to reduce the rates of rape or other forms of violence. In fact, despite widely reported success of campaigns like the “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign, the best empirical research on the subject suggests that such campaigns actually tend to do more harm than good. The few programs that seem to work are those that focus on bystander interventions—getting men who are not rapists to recognize rapists and stop them. Basically nothing has ever been shown to convince actual rapists; all we can do is deny them opportunities—and while bystander intervention can do that, the most reliable method is probably incarceration. Trying to change their sexist attitudes may be worse than useless.

Indeed, I am increasingly convinced that much—not all, but much—of what is called “sexism” is actually toxic expressions of heterosexuality. Why do most creepy male bosses only ever hit on their female secretaries? Well, maybe because they’re straight? This is not hard to explain. It’s a fair question why there are so many creepy male bosses, but one need not posit any particular misogyny to explain why their targets would usually be women. I guess it’s a bit hard to disentangle; if an incel hates women because he perceives them as univocally refusing to sleep with him, is that sexism? What if he’s a gay incel (yes they exist) and this drives him to hate men instead?

In fact, I happen to know of a particular gay boss who has quite a few rumors surrounding him regarding his sexual harassment of male employees. Or you could look at Kevin Spacey, who (allegedly) sexually abused teenage boys. You could tell a complicated story about how this is some kind of projection of misogynistic attitudes onto other men (perhaps for being too “femme” or something)—or you could tell a really simple story about how this man is only sexually abusive toward other men because that’s the gender of people he’s sexually attracted to. Occam’s Razor strongly favors the latter.

Indeed, what are we to make of the occasional sexual harasser who targets men and women equally? On the theory that abuse is caused by patriarchy, that seems pretty hard to explain. On the theory that abusive people sometimes happen to be bisexual, it’s not much of a mystery. (Though I would like to take a moment to debunk the stereotype of the “depraved bisexual”: Bisexuals are no more likely to commit sexual violence, but are far more likely to suffer it—more likely than either straight or gay people, independently of gender. Trans people face even higher risk; the acronym LGBT is in increasing order of danger of violence.)

Does this excuse such behavior? Absolutely not. Sexual harassment and sexual assault are definitely wrong, definitely harmful, and rightfully illegal. But when trying to explain why the victims are overwhelmingly female, the fact that roughly 90% of people are heterosexual is surely relevant. The key explanandum here is not why the victims are usually female, but rather why the perpetrators are usually male.

That, indeed, requires explanation; but such an explanation is really not so hard to come by. Why is it that, in nearly every human society, for nearly every form of violence, the vast majority of that violence is committed by men? It sure looks genetic to me.

Indeed, in anyother context aside from gender or race, we would almost certainly reject any explanation other than genetics for such a consistent pattern. Why is it that, in nearly every human society, about 10% of people are LGBT? Probably genetics. Why is it that, in near every human society, about 10% of people are left-handed? Genetics. Why, in nearly every human society, do smiles indicate happiness, children fear loud noises, and adults fear snakes? Genetics. Why, in nearly every human society, are men on average much taller and stronger than women? Genetics. Why, in nearly every human society, is about 90% of violence, including sexual violence, committed by men? Clearly, it’s patriarchy.

A massive body of scientific evidence from multiple sources shows a clear casual relationship between increased testosterone and increased aggression. The correlation is moderate, only about 0.38—but it’s definitely real. And men have a lot more testosterone than women: While testosterone varies a frankly astonishing amount between men and over time—including up to a 2-fold difference even over the same day—a typical adult man has about 250 to 950 ng/dL of blood testosterone, while a typical adult woman has only 8 to 60 ng/dL. (An adolescent boy can have as much as 1200 ng/dL!) This is a difference ranging from a minimum of 4-fold to a maximum of over 100-fold, with a typical value of about 20-fold. It would be astonishing if that didn’t have some effect on behavior.

This is of course far from a complete explanation: With a correlation of 0.38, we’ve only explained about 14% of the variance, so what’s the other 86%? Well, first of all, testosterone isn’t the only biological difference between men and women. It’s difficult to identify any particular genes with strong effects on aggression—but the same is true of height, and nobody disputes that the height difference between men and women is genetic.

Clearly societal factors do matter a great deal, or we couldn’t possibly explain why homicide rates vary between countries from less than 3 per million per year in Japan to nearly 400 per million per year in Honduras—a full 2 orders of magnitude! But gender inequality does not appear to strongly predict homicide rates. Japan is not a very feminist place (in fact, surveys suggest that, after Spain, Japan is second-worst highly-developed country for women). Sweden is quite feminist, and their homicide rate is relatively low; but it’s still 4 times as high as Japan’s. The US doesn’t strike me as much more sexist than Canada (admittedly subjective—surveys do suggest at least some difference, and in the expected direction), and yet our homicide rate is nearly 3 times as high. Also, I think it’s worth noting that while overall homicide rates vary enormously across societies, the fact that roughly 90% of homicides are committed by men does not. Through some combination of culture and policy, societies can greatly reduce the overall level of violence—but no society has yet managed to change the fact that men are more violent than women.

I would like to do a similar analysis of sexual assault rates across countries, but unfortunately I really can’t, because different countries have such different laws and different rates of reporting that the figures really aren’t comparable. Sweden infamously has a very high rate of reported sex crimes, but this is largely because they have very broad definitions of sex crimes and very high rates of reporting. The best I can really say for now is there is no obvious pattern of more feminist countries having lower rates of sex crimes. Maybe there really is such a pattern; but the data isn’t clear.

Yet if biology contributes anything to the causation of violence—and at this point I think the evidence for that is utterly overwhelming—then mainstream feminism has done the world a grave disservice by insisting upon only social and cultural causes. Maybe it’s the case that our best options for intervention are social or cultural, but that doesn’t mean we can simply ignore biology. And then again, maybe it’s not the case at all:A neurological treatment to cure psychopathy could cut almost all forms of violence in half.

I want to be completely clear that a biological cause is not a justification or an excuse: literally billions of men manage to have high testosterone levels, and experience plenty of anger and sexual desire, without ever raping or murdering anyone. The fact that men appear to be innately predisposed toward violence does not excuse actual violence, and the fact that rape is typically motivated at least in part by sexual desire is no excuse for committing rape.

In fact, I’m quite worried about the opposite: that the notion that sexual violence is always motivated by a desire to oppress and subjugate women will be used to excuse rape, because men who know that their motivation was not oppression will therefore be convinced that what they did wasn’t rape. If rape is always motivated by a desire to oppress women, and his desire was only to get laid, then clearly, what he did can’t be rape, right? The logic here actually makes sense. If we are to reject this argument—as we must—then we must reject the first premise, that all rape is motivated by a desire to oppress and subjugate women. I’m not saying that’s never a motivation—I’m simply saying we can’t assume it is always.

The truth is, I don’t know how to end violence, and sexual violence may be the most difficult form of violence to eliminate. I’m not even sure what most of us can do to make any difference at all. For now, the best thing to do is probably to donate money to organizations like RAINN, NAESV and NSVRC. Even $10 to one of these organizations will do more to help survivors of sexual violence than hours of ruminating on your own complicity—and cost you a lot less.

The straw that broke the camel’s back

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Oct 18 JDN 2459141

You’ve probably heard the saying before: “It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Something has been building up for a long time, with no apparent effect; then suddenly it crosses some kind of threshold and the effect becomes enormous.

Some real-world systems do behave like this: Avalanches, for instance. There is a very sharp critical threshold at which snow suddenly becomes unstable and triggers an avalanche.

This is how weight works in many video games, and it seems ridiculous: In Skyrim, for instance, one 1-pound cheese wheel can mean the difference between being able to function normally and being unable to move. Fear not, however: You can simply eat that cheese wheel and then be on your way.

But most real-world systems aren’t like this. In particular, camels are not. Yes, zero pieces of straw will not break a camel’s back, and some quantity of straw will. No, there is not a well-defined threshold at which adding just one piece of straw will kill the camel. This is one of those times where formal mathematical modeling can help us to see things that we otherwise couldn’t.

If this seems too frivolous, consider that this model need not be about camels: It could be about the weight a bridge can hold, or the amount of pollution a region can sustain, or the amount of psychological stress a person can bear. I think applying it to psychological stress is particularly appropriate at the moment: COVID-19 has suddenly thrust us all above our usual level of stress, and it’s important to understand where our limits lie.

A really strict formal model useful for engineering purposes would be a stress-strain curve, showing the relationship between stress (the amount of force applied) and strain (the amount of deformation of the object). But for this purpose there are basically two regimes to consider:

Below some weight y (the yield strength)the camel’s back will compress under the weight, but once the weight is removed it will return to normal. A healthy camel can carry up to y in straw essentially indefinitely.

Above that point, additional weight will begin to strain the camel’s back. But this damage will not all occur at once; a larger amount of weight for a shorter time will have the same effect as a smaller amount of weight for a longer time.

The total strain on the camel will thus look something like this, for exposure time t: (w-y)t

There is a total amount of strain that the camel can take without breaking its back. This has units of momentum, so I’m going to use p.

What is the amount of straw that breaks the camel’s back? Well, that depends on how long it is there!

w = p/t + y

This implies that even an arbitrarily large weight is survivable, if experienced for a sufficiently small amount of time. This may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s actually quite realistic: I’m not aware of any tests on camels, but human beings have been able to survive impacts of 40 g for a few milliseconds.

If you are hoping to carry a certain load of straw by camel over a certain distance, and need to know how many camels to use (or how many trips to take), you would figure out how long it takes to cover that distance, then use that as your time parameter to figure out the maximum weight a camel could carry for that long.

So what would happen if you actually added one piece of straw at a time to a camel’s back? That depends on how fast you add them and how long you leave them there!

The double standard between violence and sex in US media

pnrj ethics, public policy , , , , , , ,

Mar 24 JDN 2458567

The video game Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion infamously had its ESRB rating upgraded from “Teen” to “Mature”, raising the minimum age to purchase it from 13 to 17. Why? Well, they gave two major reasons: One was that there was more blood and detailed depictions of death than in the original version submitted for review. The other was that a modder had made it possible to view the female characters with naked breasts.

These were considered comparable arguments—if anything, the latter seemed to carry more weight.

Yet first of all this was a mod: You can make a mod do just about anything. (Indeed, there has long since been a mod for Oblivion that shows full-frontal nudity; had this existed when the rating was upgraded, they might have gone all the way to “Adults Only”, ostensibly only raising the minimum age to 18, but in practice making stores unwilling to carry the game because they think of it as porn.)

But suppose in fact that the game had included female characters with naked breasts. Uh… so what? Why is that considered so inappropriate for teenagers? Men are allowed to walk around topless all the time, and male and female nipples really don’t look all that different!

Now, I actually think “Mature” is the right rating for Oblivion. But that’s because Oblivion is about a genocidal war against demons and involves mass slaughter and gruesome death at every turn—not because you can enable a mod to see boobs.

The game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas went through a similar rating upgrade, from “Mature” to “Adults Only”—resulting it being the only mass-market “Adults Only” game in the US. This was, again, because of a mod—though in this case it was more like re-enabling content that the original game had included but disabled. But let me remind you that this is a game where you play as a gangster whose job is to steal cars, and who routinely guns down police officers and massacres civilians—and the thing that really upset people was that you could enable a scene where your character has sex with his girlfriend.

Meanwhile, games like Manhunt, where the object of the game is to brutally execute people, and the Call of Duty series graphically depicting the horrors of war (and in the Black Ops subseries, espionage, terrorism, and torture), all get to keep their “Mature” ratings.

And consider that a game like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, rated “Everyone 10+”, contains quite a lot of violence, and several scenes where, logically, it really seems like there should be nudity—bathing, emerging from a cryonic stasis chamber, a doctor examining your body for wounds—but there isn’t. Meanwhile, a key part of the game is killing goblin-like monsters to collect their organs and use them for making potions. It’s all tastefully depicted violence, with little blood and gore; okay, sure. But you can tastefully depict nudity as well. Why are we so uncomfortable with the possibility of seeing these young adult characters naked… while bathing? In this case, even a third-party mod that allowed nudity was itself censored, on the grounds that it would depict “underage characters”; but really, no indication is given that these characters are underage. Based on their role in society, I always read them as about 19 or 20. I guess they could conceivably be as young as 16… and as we all know, 16-year-olds do not have genitals, are never naked, and certainly never have sex.

We’re so accustomed to this that it may even feel uncomfortable to you when I suggest otherwise: “Why would you want to see Link’s penis as he emerges from the cryonic chamber?” Well, I guess, because… men have penises. (Well, cis men anyway; actually it would be really bold and interesting if they decided to make Link trans.) We should see that as normal, and not be so uncomfortable showing it. The emotional power of the scene comes in part from the innocence and vulnerability of nudity, which is undercut by you mysteriously coming with non-removable indestructible underwear. Part of what makes Breath of the Wild so, er, breathtaking is that you can often screenshot it and feel like you are looking at a painting—and I probably don’t need to mention that nudity has been a part of fine art since time immemorial. Letting you take off the protagonist’s underwear wouldn’t show anything you can’t see by looking at Michelangelo’s David.

And would it really be so traumatizing to the audience to see that? By the time you’re 10 years old, I hope you have seen at least one picture of a penis. If not, we’ve been doing sex ed very, very wrong. In fact, I’m quite confident that most of the children playing would not be disturbed at all; amused, perhaps, but what’s wrong with that? If looking at the protagonist’s cel-shaded genitals makes some of the players giggle, does that cause any harm? Some people play through Breath of the Wild without ever equipping clothing, both as a challenge (you get no armor protection that way), and simply for fun (some of the characters do actually react to you being “naked”, or as naked as the game will allow—and most of their reactions would make way more sense if you weren’t wearing magical underwear).

Of course, it’s not just video games. The United States has a bizarre double standard between sex and violence in all sorts of media.

On television, you can watch The Walking Dead on mainstream cable and see, as Andrew Boschert put it, “a man’s skull being smashed with a hammer, people’s throats slit into a trough, a meat locker with people’s torsos and limbs hung by hooks and a man’s face being eaten off while he is still alive”; but show a single erect penis, and you have to go to premium channels.

Even children’s television is full of astonishing levels of violence. Watch Tom and Jerry sometime, and you’ll realize that the only difference between it and the Simpsons parody Itchy & Scratchy is that the Simpsons version is a bit more realistic in depicting how such violence would affect the body. In mainstream cartoons, characters can get shot, blown up, crushed by heavy objects, run over by trains, hit with baseball bats and frying pans—but God forbid you ever show a boob.

In film, the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated shows convincingly that not only are our standards for sexual content versus violent content wildly disproportionate, furthermore any depiction of queer sexual content is immediately considered pornographic while the equivalent heterosexual content is not. It’s really quite striking to watch: They show scenes with the exact same sex act, even from more or less the same camera angles, and when it’s a man and a woman, it gets R, but if it’s two men or two women, it gets NC-17.

The movie Thirteen is rated R for its depiction of drugs and sex, despite being based on a true story about actual thirteen-year-olds. Evan Rachel Wood was 15 at the time of filming and 16 at the time of release, meaning that she was two years older than the character she played, and yet a year later still not old enough to watch her own movie without parental permission. Granted, Thirteen is not a wholesome film; there’s a lot of disturbing stuff in it, including things done by (and to) teenagers that really shouldn’t be.

But it’s not as if violence, even against teenagers, is viewed as so dangerous for young minds. Look at the Hunger Games, for example; that is an absolutely horrific level of violence against teenagers—people get beheaded, blown up, burned, and mutilated—and it only received a PG-13 rating. The Dark Knight received only a PG-13 rating, despite being about a terrorist who murders hundreds and implants a bomb in one of his henchmen (and also implements the most literal and unethical Prisoner’s Dilemma experiment ever devised).

Novels are better about this sort of thing: You actually can have sex scenes in mainstream novels without everyone freaking out. Yet there’s still a subtler double standard: You can’t show too much detail in a sex scene, or you’ll be branded “erotica”. But there’s no special genre ghetto you get sent to for too graphically depicting torture or war. (I love the Culture novels, but honestly I think Use of Weapons should come with trigger warnings—it’s brutal.) And as I have personally struggled with, it’s very hard to write fiction honestly depicting queer characters without your whole book being labeled “queer fiction”.

Is it like this in other countries? Well, like most things, it depends on the country. In China and much of the Middle East, the government has control over almost every sort of content. Most countries have some things they censor and some things they don’t. The US is unusual: We censor very little. Content involvingviolence and political content are essentially unrestricted in the US. But sex is one of the few things that we do consistently censor.

Media in Europe especially is much more willing to depict sex, and a bit less willing to depict violence. This is particularly true in the Netherlands, where there are films rated R for sex in the US but 6 (that’s “minimum age of viewing, 6 years”) in the Netherlands, because we consider naked female breasts to be a deal-breaker and they consider them utterly harmless. Quite frankly, I’m much more inclined toward the latter assessment.

Japan has had a long tradition of sexuality in art and media, and only when the West came in did they start introducing censorship. But Japan is not known for its half-measures; in 1907 they instituted a ban on explicit depiction of genitals that applies to essentially all media—even media explicitly marketed as porn still fuzzes over keys parts of the images. Yet some are still resisting this censorship: A ban on sexual content in manga drew outrage from artists as recently as 2010.

Hinduism has always been more open to sexuality than Christianity, and it shows in Indian culture in various ways. The Kama Sutra is depicted in the West as a lurid sex manual, when it’s really more of a text on living a full life, finding love, and achieving spiritual transcendence (of which sex is often a major part). But like Japan, India began to censor sex as it began to adopt Western cultural influences, and now implements a very broad pornography ban.

What does this double standard do to our society?

Well, it’s very hard to separate causation from correlation. So I can’t really say that it is because of this double standard in media that we have the highest rates of teen pregnancy and homicide in the First World. But it seems like it might be related, at least; perhaps they come from a common source, the same sexual repression and valorization of masculinity expressed through violence.

I do know some things that are direct negative consequences of the censorship of sex in US media. The most urgent example of this is the so-called “Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act” (it does more or less the exact opposite, much like the “PATRIOT ACT” and George W. Bush’s “Clean Air Act”). That will have to wait until next week’s post.

What would a game with realistic markets look like?

pnrj experimental economics, macroeconomics, public policy , , , , , , ,

Aug 12 JDN 2458343

From Pokemon to Dungeons & Dragons, Final Fantasy to Mass Effect, almost all role-playing games have some sort of market: Typically, you buy and sell equipment, and often can buy services such as sleeping at inns. Yet the way those markets work is extremely rigid and unrealistic.

(I’m of course excluding games like EVE Online that actually create real markets between players; those markets are so realistic I actually think they would provide a good opportunity for genuine controlled experiments in macroeconomics.)

The weirdest thing about in-game markets is the fact that items almost always come with a fixed price. Sometimes there is some opportunity for haggling, or some randomization between different merchants; but the notion always persists that the item has a “true price” that is being adjusted upward or downward. This is more or less the opposite of how prices actually work in real markets.

There is no “true price” of a car or a pizza. Prices are whatever buyers and sellers make them. There is a true value—the amount of real benefit that can be obtained from a good—but even this is something that varies between individuals and also changes based on the other goods being consumed. The value of a pizza is considerably higher for someone who hasn’t eaten in days than to someone who just finished eating another pizza.

There is also what is called “The Law of One Price”, but like all laws of economics, it’s like the Pirate Code, more what you’d call a “guideline”, and it only applies to a particular good in a particular market at a particular time. The Law of One Price doesn’t even say that a pizza should have the same price tomorrow as it does today, or that the same pizza can’t be sold to two different customers at two different prices; it only says that the same pizza shouldn’t have two different prices in the same place at the same time for the same customer. (It seems almost tautological, right? And yet it still fails empirically, and does so again and again. I have seen offers for the same book in the same condition posted on the same website that differed by as much as 50%.)

In well-developed capitalist markets in large First World countries, we can lull ourselves into the illusion that there is only one price for a good, because markets are highly liquid and either highly competitive or controlled by a strong and stable oligopoly that enforces a particular price across places and times. The McDonald’s Dollar Menu is a policy choice by a massive multinational corporation; it’s not what would occur naturally if those items were sold on a competitive market.

Even then, this illusion can be broken when we are faced with a large economic shock, such as the OPEC price shock in 1973 or a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina. It also tends to be broken for illiquid goods such as real estate.

If we consider the environment in which most role-playing games take place, it’s usually a sort of quasi-medieval or quasi-Renaissance feudal society, where a given government controls only a small region and traveling between towns is difficult and dangerous. Not only should the prices of goods differ substantially between towns, the currency used should frequently differ as well. Yes, most places would accept gold and silver; but a kingdom with a stable government will generally have a currency of significant seignorage, with coins worth considerably more than the gold used to mint them—yet the value of that seignorage will drop off as you move further away from that kingdom and its sphere of influence.

Moreover, prices should be inconsistent even between traders in the same town, and extremely volatile. When a town is mostly self-sufficient and trade is only a small part of its economy, even a small shock such as a bad thunderstorm or a brief drought can yield massive shifts in prices. Shortages and gluts will be frequent, as both supply and demand are small and ever-changing.

This wouldn’t be that difficult to implement. The simplest way would just be to institute random shocks to prices that vary by place and time. A more sophisticated method would be to actually simulate supply and demand for different goods, and then have prices respond to realistic shocks (e.g. a drought makes wheat more expensive, and the price of swords suddenly skyrockets after news of an impending dragon attack). Experiments have shown that competitive market outcomes can be achieved by simulating even a dozen or so traders using very simple heuristics like “don’t pay more than you can afford” and “don’t charge less than it cost you”.

Why don’t game designers implement this? I think there are two reasons.

The first is simply that it would be more complicated. This is a legitimate concern in many cases; I particularly think Pokemon can justify using a simple economy, given its target audience. I particularly agree that having more than a handful of currencies would be too much for players to keep track of; though perhaps having two or three (one for each major faction?) is still more interesting than only having one.

Also, tabletop games are inherently more limited in the amount of computation they can use, compared to video games. But for a game as complicated as say Skyrim, this really isn’t much of a defense. Skyrim actually simulated the daily routines of over a hundred different non-player characters; it could have been simulating markets in the background as well—in fact, it could have simply had those same non-player characters buy and sell goods with each other in a double-auction market that would automatically generate the prices that players face.

The more important reason, I think, is that game designers have a paralyzing fear of arbitrage.

I find it particularly aggravating how frequently games will set it up so that the price at which you buy and the price at which you sell are constrained so that the buying price is always higher, often as much as twice as high. This is not at all how markets work in the real world; frankly it’s only even close to true for goods like cars that rapidly depreciate. It make senses that a given merchant will not sell you a good for less than what they would pay to buy it from you; but that only requires each individual merchant to have a well-defined willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-accept. It certainly does not require the arbitrary constraint that you can never sell something for more than what you bought it for.

In fact, I would probably even allow players who specialize in social skills to short-change and bamboozle merchants for profit, as this is absolutely something that happens in the real world, and was likely especially common under the very low levels of literacy and numeracy that prevailed in the Middle Ages.

To many game designers (and gamers), the ability to buy a good in one place, travel to another place, and sell that good for a higher price seems like cheating. But this practice is call being a merchant. That is literally what the entire retail industry does. The rules of your game should allow you to profit from activities that are in fact genuinely profitable real economic services in the real world.

I remember a similar complaint being raised against Skyrim shortly after its release, that one could acquire a pickaxe, collect iron ore, smelt it into steel, forge weapons out of it, and then sell the weapons for a sizeable profit. To some people, this sounded like cheating. To me, it sounds like being a blacksmith. This is especially true because Skyrim’s skill system allowed you to improve the quality of your smithed items over time, just like learning a trade through practice (though it ramped up too fast, as it didn’t take long to make yourself clearly the best blacksmith in all of Skyrim). Frankly, this makes far more sense than being able to acquire gold by adventuring through the countryside and slaughtering monsters or collecting lost items from caves. Blacksmiths were a large part of the medieval economy; spelunking adventurers were not. Indeed, it bothers me that there weren’t more opportunities like this; you couldn’t make your wealth by being a farmer, a vintner, or a carpenter, for instance.

Even if you managed to pull off pure arbitrage, providing no real services, such as by buying and selling between two merchants in the same town, or the same merchant on two consecutive days, that is also a highly profitable industry. Most of our financial system is built around it, frankly. If you manage to make your wealth selling wheat futures instead of slaying dragons, I say more power to you. After all, there were an awful lot of wheat-future traders in the Middle Ages, and to my knowledge no actually successful dragon-slayers.

Of course, if your game is about slaying dragons, it should include some slaying of dragons. And if you really don’t care about making a realistic market in your game, so be it. But I think that more realistic markets could actually offer a great deal of richness and immersion into a world without greatly increasing the difficulty or complexity of the game. A world where prices change in response to the events of the story just feels more real, more alive.

The ability to profit without violence might actually draw whole new modes of play to the game (as has indeed occurred with Skyrim, where a small but significant proportion of players have chosen to live out peaceful lives as traders or blacksmiths). I would also enrich the experience of more conventional players and helping them recover from setbacks (if the only way to make money is to fight monsters and you keep getting killed by monsters, there isn’t much you can do; but if you have the option of working as a trader or a carpenter for awhile, you could save up for better equipment and try the fighting later).

And hey, game designers: If any of you are having trouble figuring out how to implement such a thing, my consulting fees are quite affordable.

Games as economic simulations—and education tools

pnrj cognitive science, development economics, futurism, macroeconomics , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 5, JDN 2457818 [Sun]

Moore’s Law is a truly astonishing phenomenon. Now as we are well into the 21st century (I’ve lived more of my life in the 21st century than the 20th now!) it may finally be slowing down a little bit, but it has had quite a run, and even this could be a temporary slowdown due to economic conditions or the lull before a new paradigm (quantum computing?) matures. Since at least 1975, the computing power of an individual processor has doubled approximately every year and a half; that means it has doubled over 25 times—or in other words that it has increased by a factor of over 30 million. I now have in my pocket a smartphone with several thousand times the processing speed of the guidance computer of the Saturn V that landed on the Moon.

This meteoric increase in computing power has had an enormous impact on the way science is done, including economics. Simple theoretical models that could be solved by hand are now being replaced by enormous simulation models that have to be processed by computers. It is now commonplace to devise models with systems of dozens of nonlinear equations that are literally impossible to solve analytically, and just solve them iteratively with computer software.

But one application of this technology that I believe is currently underutilized is video games.

As a culture, we still have the impression that video games are for children; even games like Dragon Age and Grand Theft Auto that are explicitly for adults (and really quite inappropriate for children!) are viewed as in some sense “childish”—that no serious adult would be involved with such frivolities. The same cultural critics who treat Shakespeare’s vagina jokes as the highest form of art are liable to dismiss the poignant critique of war in Call of Duty: Black Ops or the reflections on cultural diversity in Skyrim as mere puerility.

But video games are an art form with a fundamentally greater potential than any other. Now that graphics are almost photorealistic, there is really nothing you can do in a play or a film that you can’t do in a video game—and there is so, so much more that you can only do in a game.
In what other medium can we witness the spontaneous emergence and costly aftermath of a war? Yet EVE Online has this sort of event every year or so—just today there was a surprise attack involving hundreds of players that destroyed thousands of hours’—and dollars’—worth of starships, something that has more or less become an annual tradition. A few years ago there was a massive three-faction war that destroyed over $300,000 in ships and has now been commemorated as “the Bloodbath of B-R5RB”.
Indeed, the immersion and interactivity of games present an opportunity to do nothing less than experimental macroeconomics. For generations it has been impossible, or at least absurdly unethical, to ever experimentally manipulate an entire macroeconomy. But in a video game like EVE Online or Second Life, we can now do so easily, cheaply, and with little or no long-term harm to the participants—and we can literally control everything in the experiment. Forget the natural resource constraints and currency exchange rates—we can change the laws of physics if we want. (Indeed, EVE‘s whole trade network is built around FTL jump points, and in Second Life it’s a basic part of the interface that everyone can fly like Superman.)

This provides untold potential for economic research. With sufficient funding, we could build a game that would allow us to directly test hypotheses about the most fundamental questions of economics: How do governments emerge and maintain security? How is the rule of law sustained, and when can it be broken? What controls the value of money and the rate of inflation? What is the fundamental cause of unemployment, and how can it be corrected? What influences the rate of technological development? How can we maximize the rate of economic growth? What effect does redistribution of wealth have on employment and output? I envision a future where we can directly simulate these questions with thousands of eager participants, varying the subtlest of parameters and carrying out events over any timescale we like from seconds to centuries.

Nor is the potential of games in economics limited to research; it also has enormous untapped potential in education. I’ve already seen in my classes how tabletop-style games with poker chips can teach a concept better in a few minutes than hours of writing algebra derivations on the board; but custom-built video games could be made that would teach economics far better still, and to a much wider audience. In a well-designed game, people could really feel the effects of free trade or protectionism, not just on themselves as individuals but on entire nations that they control—watch their GDP numbers go down as they scramble to produce in autarky what they could have bought for half the price if not for the tariffs. They could see, in real time, how in the absence of environmental regulations and Pigovian taxes the actions of millions of individuals could despoil our planet for everyone.

Of course, games are fundamentally works of fiction, subject to the Fictional Evidence Fallacy and only as reliable as their authors make them. But so it is with all forms of art. I have no illusions about the fact that we will never get the majority of the population to regularly read peer-reviewed empirical papers. But perhaps if we are clever enough in the games we offer them to play, we can still convey some of the knowledge that those papers contain. We could also update and expand the games as new information comes in. Instead of complaining that our students are spending time playing games on their phones and tablets, we could actually make education into games that are as interesting and entertaining as the ones they would have been playing. We could work with the technology instead of against it. And in a world where more people have access to a smartphone than to a toilet, we could finally bring high-quality education to the underdeveloped world quickly and cheaply.

Rapid growth in computing power has given us a gift of great potential. But soon our capacity will widen even further. Even if Moore’s Law slows down, computing power will continue to increase for awhile yet. Soon enough, virtual reality will finally take off and we’ll have even greater depth of immersion available. The future is bright—if we can avoid this corporatist cyberpunk dystopia we seem to be hurtling toward, of course.