Adam's House o' Fun

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2008-11-01T18:08:22Z

Check out my fly desktop and work area. Kneel before my awesomeness:

Vaccines and the Rave board

2008-10-24T23:07:48Z

It's a slow Friday at work. I've managed to get on top of all of my tasks and projects by the end of this week, and I have been very busy lately, so I do not feel too guilty to be enjoying the downtime and writing a blog entry. Hopefully my sins do not cost me dearly!

Anyhow, my friend Graham has, for some odd reason, taken it upon himself to debate some loonies over at Victoria's local rave board. I don't blame him for it - like the XKCD cartoon shows, when someone states ridiculous theories and ludicrous claims, then claims everyone else is an idiot for not buying into it, it's hard not to bite. And, above all, it makes me proud when my friends show skeptical attitudes. After all, I think that skepticism and critical thinking are some of the wisest traits someone can possess, so it's nice to see those reflected in my friends.

Reading through the posts, I saw one that stuck out like a sore thumb, as the vaccination controversy has been raging for a while:

To Vaccine or not?

They're giving out free flu vaccinations at my work this week. Personally, I am opposed to vaccinations. I can see their worth for extreme cases (for example the small pox vaccine in the 1800's) but I don't see how people who are young and healthy would risk increased chances of alzheimers (due to combining mercury with aluminum and formaldehyde and then injecting it in your arm) and ultimatley damaging your immune system to fight off things naturally.

I'm curious what everyone else thinks about this?

I'm also looking for reading material on the subject that anyone has.
The post was already responded to by people, most of them offering poor advice, some of them offering good advice, and, as usual, one of them by resident wingnut "mike" telling her to "avoid getting injected with anything at all ever, the consequences will be worse in the longrun than anything in the short term" (Mike has obviously never suffered through smallpox).

Due to the large volume of responses, I find it difficult to reply to this person that may be asking an earnest question (I phrase it that way because she may just be looking to have her own opinion confirmed for her).

On the surface, this seems like a good question. Hey, at least she's asking it right? Right off the bat though, we've got a problem. She's asking a board devoted to raving in Victoria. I have no problem with the rave scene in Victoria, and it's been a huge part of my life for ten years now (much more so in the earlier part of that decade than now). However, is this really the best place to go for medical advice?

The next is the major problem with the post - seeing their worth for extreme cases, but risking alzheimers. First of all, vaccines aren't given out for things that aren't worth vaccinating. The flu shot might be considered a vaccine, but if it is, it's a temporary one at best. Most vaccine's are given to you to cover you from infection for a longer term, usually upwards of a decade until you need to get another shot.

Second, this person is simply repeating misinformation that she's probably heard as a result of the large-scale lunacy being put out by the anti-vaccination crowd. Vaccines do in fact use some small doses of aluminmum, though nothing that is considered to cause long-term effects. You can read more about it here on Wikipedia, or other reputable sites, such as Quackwatch. Large clinical studies have been done showing that aluminum-containing vaccines do not have any evidence of being a serious health risk, or to justify changes to immunization practice. Formaldehyde? I don't see any reputable links stating that vaccines are mixed with formaldehyde, but perhaps I'm just missing the right links. Any comments directing me in the right direction would be good.

Third is the most common misconception about vaccines - that they daamge your immune system, or that they weaken it by not training it to fight off the problem. This is based on a poor understanding of how vaccines work. Our immune system is an impressive thing, capable of adapting to and fighting off millions of different types of contaminants, viruses, and bacteria in our body. One thing that our immune system has evolved is the ability to strengthen and get better at fighting the same contaminant the next time it comes around. This makes sense - you've learned from the battle, next time you can use that knowledge to beat it more swiftly. When you are administered a vaccine, you are given a dead or sterile version of the infecting agent, such that it still triggers your immune system's response, but does not have the ability to actually infect you and start replicating itself at your expense. Incidentally, the flu shot works the same way, and when someone tells you "I don't get the flu shot becomes I always get the flu because of it", they are incorrect.

Getting vaccines does not harm your immune system or make it weaker. It strengthens your immune system, and basically gives it a chance to spar with the bacteria without the risk of you getting harmed in the process. Vaccines are a positive thing, and possibly one of the most substantial medical advances our society has ever created.

What about the flipside? What's the harm in not getting a vaccine? Well, there are a couple. Part of this problem is what is called herd-immunity. When enough of the population are vaccinated against a given infectant, it becomes very difficult for that thing to propagate itself, as it ends up getting killed too quickly. Smallpox and Polio are both in this situation, and have almost dried up as a result of immunization. Some people, unfortunately, will not have their immune system develop this proper response, and the vaccine for a given contaminant simply will not work for them. These people rely on herd immunity in order to stay safe. When you choose not to vaccinate yourself or your child, you decrease the level of her immunity. If enough people stop vaccinating, we end up with a weak level of herd immunity, and then the people that wish to be rendered immune, but cannot be, will fall victim to the infectant.

What else? Well, it's irresponsible. You should vaccinate your children, because you have a responsibility to them, and it's the safe thing to do. Just because someone is "young and healthy", does not mean that they cannot fall victim to an infectant, or that they will be able to fight that illness off. If you have the opportunity to dramatically increase your or your child's chances of fighting off an illness, shouldn't you take that opportunity?

Most important of all, learn about reputable sources to look this stuff up. I recommend:

PubMed

A great resource to search for all published medical studies. This is a great place to go and look up random claims people tell you about, and to determine for yourself how legitimate a quoted study is.

QuackWatch

Probably the best place to go when you have medical questions that you're unsure of, or are facing claims made by people around you that you may doubt. QuackWatch is an excellent resource, and a great way to dig down to the truth.

Skepticality's Forums

Skepticality has a good set of forums, with intelligent members. People will be more than happy to help you out with any questions you may have and any claims that you may have heard. Don't be scared off by skeptics - use them as a resource, or better yet, join us! These forums, I guarantee, will be a much better source of information than your local rave forum.

Zeitgeist Addendum - "It turns out we may have gotten some stuff wrong guys.."

2008-10-21T05:11:24Z

A few weeks back a friend of mine recommended that I watched Zeitgeist, a documentary that I later found out was pretty much just a potpourri of most of the larger, current conspiracy theories. Although I thought the movie was quite poor, I did enjoy the opportunity to watch it and apply critical thinking to many of the claims made. You can read that review and analysis here if you haven't already seen it.

Well, the makers of that film are back, and they've put out the sequel, Zeitgeist Addendum. This time a different friend recommended the movie to me, in a mass e-mail. Now, let's cover some things off right at the start. I hate mass e-mails telling me to do something. They raise an immediate warning flag, simply because of the consistency with which the claims that seem to get forwarded around are completely fallacious and pseudoscientific. At least my friend apologized for the mass e-mail, but... that doesn't get you off the hook. I wrote him back and asked him what he thought about the first movie, and why this one would be different. His response was that Addendum offered a possible solution to the problems that are put forward in the film. Well, let's find out how well that holds up to scrutiny. Cock one eyebrow, clench your teeth, and read on..

The movie starts out using many of the same techniques we've come to know from the first movie. Compelling music is played over top of, clips from random speeches. The editing and production, as before, are done well, which is important whenever you want to get your message out there, regardless of how valid your message may actually be. This is definitely one of the positives about the movie.

The first attack begins with an unstated major premise as the movie starts talking about how monetary policies have reached religious proportions, and represent unregistered interests of a great majority of the population. The unstated premise here is that the majority of the population has the knowledge, or even the desire, to really drive something as gnarly and complex as the economy. There is no doubt that many of us would like to see our country's economy run properly, but that does not necessarily mean that we would be adding value by simplistically letting the public, for the most part uneducated in finance and economics, steer this machine.

The film tells us that economics are generally viewed with boredom and confusion (as are many other disciplines that require expertise and specialization to fully understand, such as physics, chemistry, biology, etc.). We are told that "The complexity of economics is a mask designed to conceal the most socially paralyzing structures humanity has ever endured". Unfortunately, this really doesn't reflect reality. Anyone that has spent any time looking into the latest financial crisis understands that the complexity is absolutely baked in to something that represents the sum total of all of the interactions and exchanges that make up our existence. Imagine every single way that you spend money throughout the day. All of these exchanges. Now imagine that amount being multiplied out to the whole population, and then try to convince yourself that tracking, accounting for and managing that mess doesn't need to be complex. Hmm.

The film then enters into a half-baked explanation of how new money is injected into the economy, including a discussion of how US treasury bonds are created, and how they add towards inflation. I say this explanation is half-baked because it misses a lot of the finer details. This is not my area of expertise, and I don't want to get bogged down trying to explain the process. However, the conspiracy skeptic has already done an excellent job analyzing these kind of claims and the whole money is debt angle (the main proponent of moving away from a money-based system is the republican senator Ron Paul). I highly recommend his review here.

The film covers some more ground, now approaching the topic of inflation, and implying that is solely a consequence of introducing more money into the system. Although this is definitely one of the prime causes, there are certainly other factors, such as changes in the real demand for goods and services, or changes in available supplies such as during scarcities. For more information, read the Wikipedia article on the subject. Needless to say, this is just one of the many over-simplified explanations that Addendum applys to complicated problems.

Addendum then takes a whacky (false) premise, and bulldozes forward with a ludicrous argument that hinges on that premise being true (which it isn't): Since all of the money that banks create is counterfeit and not real, (this claim is based on one court case many years back), the money that you borrow for credit cards and mortgages is invalid, and so is your debt.

The movie confuses economic policy that applies on different scales and attempts to discredit one model with the other - this is a fallacious approach, and it's not surprising that the makers have reached some of the conclusions that they have. At the macroeconomic scale, money is created out of debt, and then Addendum flips this to apply that notion of debt to the microeconomic model, focusing on people. This leads us to faulty statements like "Because money is entirely based on debt, people do what they always do to alleviate debt. They work". Wait a second here. We work to get paid and earn money. This money then becomes ours. Trying to take the macroeconomic model and apply that to microeconomics is a fallacious approach. Addendum is far from the first documentary to mix up the scales of different models, another example being the fallacious reasoning that the movie What the bleep do we know? used to try and apply what occurs at the level of quantum mechanics to our macroscopic world. This poor line of reasoning earned them a pigasus award for being the media outlet that "reported as factual the most outrageous supernatural, paranormal, or occult claims".

There's one discussions about using economics to get a hold of foreign assets, and manipulate economies for our own gains. This is certainly reasonable, and we see things like hostile takeovers, economic sanctions, and trade embargos being used on the global scale to affect the kind of change that a country feels will benefit them the most. However, we need to be careful not to commit the fallacy of the slippery slope here, like Addendum does. Affecting economics to some degree does not imply that we can completely control or steer its course. Economies are very tricky things, and in many ways represent an emergent property of millions of individuals doing what they can to make money, and earn a living. You can only predict things like this to a certain extent.

Now we are treated to a very long interview with some guy dubbed an "economic hitman" talking about assasination plots, etc. He uses many terms that throw up red flags like "lots of weird stuff was going on", and "There's no question that this person was assasinated". These throw up flags because we're not given any context or sources to back this up. Why was it no question? Is that his opinion? Was it actually investigated and determined that was the case? If so, why didn't he mention that? A lot of weird things happening coincidentally are not sufficient evidence for us to assume that they are in fact related to each other. That being said, it's important to understand that I'm not saying they were not related, just that we do not yet have sufficient evidence to make that conclusion. Remember, a good skeptic always withholds judgement until there is sufficient evidence to support it.

The movie is intertwined with many of the same cheesy techniques from the previous movie to push us towards the agenda that Zeitgeist wants us to buy into, such as showing scenes from a movie that have someone making their points for them, without citing where this is from. This has the effect of leading us to believe that we are watching someone actually state a fact consistent with Zeitgeit's agenda, but that is in fact just a scene from a movie, and not really sufficient evidence of anything. It's subtle, and sneaky. Remember, before you allow yourself to just take what you're being told in a documentary at face value, make sure you can at least determine what the source is.

Addendum tells us that the word terrorist is an empty term, and Al Qaida is made up. We've already covered off terrorism in my previous review of Zeitgeist, so let's leave this for now. We can all agree that the United States' administration has used the 9/11 terrorist attacks for a great deal of wrongdoing, but this does not mean that terrorism does not exist, or that the term is empty. Fortunately though, the film and I agree on something - the states are spending a ton of money on preventing terrorism (which has even lead to some ridiculous things like someone working for the TSA stealing over $47,000 worth of high-tech equipment from passengers), an event that may occur, rather than funnel that money into something like resistant-tuberculosis or diabetes research, both diseases that definitely are killing lots of people on a daily basis.

The movie now provides us with its own perceived truism, that efficiency, abundance and sustainability are enemies of profit. This is very simplistic. To some extent, it is true that scarcity is an enemy of profit. If you can limit supply, then the demand for the product will allow you to charge more. However, for items that have a fixed price, a large number of competitors, or numerous other situations, this model does not hold true. Artificially changing the supply or prices can also backfire on you. In decades past, when cigarettes were being smoked with great frequency, the large corporations selling them got together and agreed to raise the prices together, and thus inflate the price artificially. However, this backfired when it made room for new companies to enter the market and sell their products at a cheaper price to consumers. They grabbed marketshare from the big companies, and the larger companies realized that they would not be able to increase their profits with this technique.

Incidentally, this natural balancing is part of what led many economists to believe in the laissez-faire economic policies that have now led us to where we are. Additionally, efficiency may help lead to an abundance if you can create and extract your product faster and sell it at a consistent price, thus making more profit. If that isn't an option, you could theoretically create your product at a faster speed, and then warehouse it, in order to avoid having too much supply. Lastly, you could take the additional time and resources you now find yourself with and put that towards investing in different avenues for gain. The claim that these things are enemies of profit really is based on a fairly sophomoric understanding of the way things work. As usual, this approach is immediately appealing because it makes sense on an intuitive level. However, as soon as you start to look into it, you can see that these assertions fall apart.

A resource-based economy is advocated for in the movie. However, I don't really understand why the movie feels that this would be a solution. Watching further, we are treated to the talking head (Jacque Fresco) they've had on for the last forty-five minutes or so that we don't need petroleum, we don't need electricity. This is a facile statement. We don't technically need anything other than food and water. However, our economy and our society have evolved to make use of these resources. Just because we don't tecnically need them doesn't mean that we could just stop using them outright and everything would be fine. As awareness of the problems caused by over-use of these resources becomes greater, we are starting to see people make a shift away from this lifestyle. However, just like you can't change your own habits overnight, society and governments require time, patience, and focus in order to affect large-scale changes.

Next we're told that abundant alternative sources of energies already exist, and could easily be used and replace our current models. This is fallacious. There are many barriers to entry for making switches to alternative sources of energy. The least of which is that petroleum is an efficient source of energy that has been packed together over the course of millions of years. Yes, it is damaging to the environment, and yes, it is not a renewable resource. However, that does not change the fact that it is very cost-effective, and relatively cheap for us to extract and make use of the product. Switching to alternative resources requires setting up a supply chain to extract, process and delivery these resources (this in itself is a large undertaking, and requires a large amount of time to complete). We also need to have a good financial reason to do this, because, ultimately, we are selfish creatures. It's not because companies want to make a quick buck (even though they would love to).

If companies went through all of this effort to create alternative fuel sources, and then started to sell it, they would likely have to sell it for a higher price per unit than they can petroleum. Why? Well, to start with, because petroleum is easy and efficient. Additionally, economies of scale dictate that the massive supply chain that already exists for petroleum means that it is even cheaper to extract and distribute than is our new and burgeoning resources. If you are presented with paying X for one energy, or twice that amount for a different energy, which are you going to choose. Maybe you will say now that you would do it for the environment and pay more, but history and human nature have shown us that this is wishful thinking, and that we will ultimately move towards using whatever will allow us to accomplish our goals for the least amount of money.

Solar energy is another resource mentioned, which is definitely an option. However, the claim is made that there are many advanced mediums today that can harness one-hundred percent of the sun's energy, or a significant amount, and would be valid if they did not need to compete with existing energy sources on the market. This is true, but what does that mean? That theoretically we could just wipe out oil from the map, stop using it completely, and then use sun? The reason that these technologies are not able to get mainstream acceptance yet because of this competition is because they are too expensive to be feasible. Only time and further research will help us bring that cost down. Ending the use of oil outright will not lower the price of these technologies. Sorry, that's just the way it is.

Zeitgeist Addendum tell us that as technology grows, the need for human labour will diminish. This claim is made by the movie, which then states that based on this, the notion of the monetary based labour system is a fraud. This is pretty silly, and once again, is a simplisitic view of the way things. If you look at history, technology does in fact remove a large number of jobs for humans, and, then creates new jobs in other areas. Computers have removed the necessity for a large number of filing jobs that were filled in the past, however, this new industry has created new jobs, and that is now the reason we have people like me working in software.

Another simplistic claim: Without money, the majority of the crimes created today would not occur. A lot of us worry about crime, and wish that it didn't need to be there. However, I think that many of us understand that it is a necessary evil that comes with change, technology, and growth. As we as humans continue to grow up, we also must accept new responsibility that comes with that growth. Removing money will not change the fact that people can be greedy, hateful, spiteful, passionate, and will disagree with one another. To assume that taking money out of our society will end the majority of crime is to pull the wool over your eyes and ignore our own shortcomings.

We've listened to Jacque Fresco talk on and on for quite some time now. He has a lot of naive ideas that he and the makers of this movie obviously thing are worth your time, but I haven't heard anything yet that gave me the confidence that his vision is tempered with realism. Here's an example: "You see a sign on the highway that says slippery when wet. Instead of the sign, put abrasive surface on the highway, so that the car doesn't slip when it gets wet". These are the sort of statements that most of us will make from time to time when we don't have the domain knowledge that experts in their fields do. This example is a pretty simple solution, don't you think? Is it possible that there is a reason that this isn't currently done, given how simple it is? Some people may choose to jump to the conclusion of "Because the government doesn't care about its people", but maybe there's a simpler explanation, such as "We tried that, but it ended up wearing down people's tires faster and causing more accidents". Listening to this guy talk just doesn't convince me that he's tethered his optimism to the reality that we live in.

Another problem here is the claims that removing money from the equation means that people would just start being generous. People have been bartering since as long as we have lived in a social system. The monetary system just provides a way for us to have a universal item of barter for which we can then provide that to anyone. We could remove money from the equation, but you're still going to need to barter for goods and services. You'll just find it an awful lot less convenient if you don't have something I need, when you need something from me. Many of these ideas fall short because of the fact that they rely on an idealized vision of how human's interact with one another, much like extreme forms of communism do.

Woo, we were just told by the movie what success is. This is a fairly patronizing and condescending thing to do, since the entire notion of success is really subjective to the individual. Using the film's own definition of success to push its agenda doesn't really add much to the mix. We end this section with more obnoxious stand-up comedy, like they used in the first one. Again, a semi-subtle way of bashing the opposing view without actually having to back that up with any evidence.

The next bit strikes me as quite interesting - hypnotic imagery is shown on screen as narratives are played at us. This is mostly interesting because it seems fairly sneaky. If I was making a film complaining about people being treated as sheep, and how they had the wool pulled over their eyes, I would try to stay true to my own message, and avoid using tricks like this (regardless of whether or not they actually have any net effect).

Zeitgeist ends with a proposed solution, which includes a lot of gems, and by gems, I mean foolsgold. Some of these are boycotting large banks by moving your banking and credit cards to other banks. Again, this is simplistic, and completely misses how complicated and intertwined everything in the economy is. The next advice I partially agree with: turn off mainstream TV news, the notion being that these are partisan and controlled by corporations. I only partially agree because it's important to listen to all sides of an argument (hey, I'm sitting through the second Zeitgeist movie here, so at least I'm following my own advice). Just make sure you get your news from multiple locations and sources, and you will be sure that you are receiving an accurate portrayal of what is really going on.

Another item is to boycott the military. Again, this is very simplistic (do you see a trend here?) - war is no doubt a negative thing, but is it something that we can just walk away from, or is it simply part of the human condition? It is also false to believe war does not bring any benefit, as a large amount of innovation (nuclear power for example) has come from war efforts. I'm not in favour of war myself, and am a pacifist. However, that doesn't mean that I am naive enough to believe that simply boycotting the military altogether would actually achieve the proposed ends.

The last solution is to join Zeitgeist's movement. I would advocate against doing this, for the reasons that I have listen above. In short, I don't think this is a very well thought-out or well-researched movement. If you want to make a difference, do things by acting locally to solve a lot of these problems, such as reducing the amount of waste you create on a daily basis, reducing the amount that you drive, and eliminating your debt. Act locally, but think globally. Joining the Zeitgeist Movement is not going to really achieve anything. But don't take my word for it.. Do your own research and determine how you can best affect the positive change that you want to see in the world around you.

Thoe movie ends with a cheesy cinematic showing a bunch of people getting fed up and throwing down the trappings of their everyday life, and then as soon as they've done this, the world becomes shiny and colored. It's cute rhetoric, but again, doesn't really teach us anything, and is simply used as a way to push your towards the maker's own agenda.

The biggest problem with Zeitgeist Addendum is how simplisitic it's approach, questions, and proposed answers all are. Every analysis looks only at the very surface, and then draws assumptions based on that. When I was young, I always used tell my dad that if I was in a car falling off a cliff, I would wait until the last minute, and then just jump out of the car. My thinking was that the car was falling, I would just get up and jump out. It's not until we grow older, and learn about gravity, how we are also falling with the car, and why you cannot jump up to just negate your momentum, that you understand how simplisitic your perceived view was. Unfortunately, the makers of Zeitgeist have never taken the time to look any deeper than these initial naive conclusions. There is a reason that we have specialists in fields, and that is because those fields are very complex. It is understandable for people to look at our economy and want to blame economists, but honestly, they are human, just like us, and they want what is best for themselves, their friends, and their family as well. They know their stuff, and they know it well, and they will gladly try and explain to you how the economy works, and why it is so complex. It's too bad that the makers of this movie never really sat down and talked to enough of them.

On a positive note, I must admit that I'm quite impressed with how a good a job the producers of the movie did with what I assume is a limited budget. The production on the documentary is good, and it definitely makes the movie easier to watch. However, the unfortunate part of this is that someone has clearly spent a lot of time and effort to put forth such a misguided effort. In that regard the movie is a little bit saddening, as the people have their hearts in the right place (a desire to affect positive social change), but have been let down by our educational system. If we really want to see positive change in the long run, the hope lies in our education system. How can you help towards that effort? Spend the time to research claims that are presented to you (thoroughly), and be willing to offer alternative explanations to people that strike you as misguided in their thinking. Help encourage skepticism and critical thinking, rather than condescending and stomping on other people's beliefs, and above all, act locally to affect the positive change that you want to see in the world around you.

Annnnnd, now I scrub my hard-drive clean of this movie.

Nostalgia

2008-10-16T15:59:20Z

Ranked vs Player Matches

2008-10-15T21:21:07Z

Cross-posted from my VF5 Blog.

When I first started playing Virtua Fighter, I found ranked matches intimidating. I had no ranking whatsoever, so I was starting at the bottom of the barrel, and every loss that I would accrue weighed heavily on my mind. "Oh my god!", I thought, how can I be this bad?

Thinking that you suck is one thing, but having a win/loss ratio sitting on your screen as evidence of that fact is something else altogether. So, I would spend the majority of my time online playing in player matches. This offered me a few benefits. First and foremost, I would not have any idea as to how good my opponent was prior to playing them. Seeing someone with an impressive win ratio join your game can have a psychological effect right off the bat, and set you up for a loss you might not normally take. Second, without a rank showing on my opponent, I was much more willing to request rematches, and, thirdly, in player matches you can request rematches.

Rematches present a great training opportunity. The most frustrating thing in the game is having your opponent steamroll right over you, but if you really want to improve, these are the people that you need to keep pestering for rematches. As frustrating as it is, keep requesting a rematch and trying to break down their offense and see if you can hang in there. Whenever I request a rematch, I'm usually thinking about a few things before the next match starts:

How did the opponent beat me?

Was he using some move that I've never seen before, in which case I need to block more? Was I getting predictable, and letting him exploit that? What about evades? Was I using that crutch far too often? Did he beat me using only 2P?

How can I counteract the above?

If I'm being predictable, I try to figure out new ways to achieve the same effect. For Brad players, a large part of our game revolves around moving in and out of his stances. If I'm constantly using KP to enter his stance, then I know that it's time to either take a shift away from his stances and going for more juggles, or start using different strings to enter his stances, like 4P, 4PK, and 6P. Is my opponent always successfully blocking my moves? Then it's time to start mixing up my rhythm and introducing some throws and charge moves into my offense.

Was I frustrated after losing? Why?

Usually the simple act of asking myself this question helps quell my frustration. Usually I'm frustrated because I lost, and I think that I'm capable of playing better. But how can I play better? What should I be doing differently? Return to the top two questions and reiterate.

Back when I spent a lot of time practicing funk styles and dancing, many of the old schoolers would persist the following statement: "To each one, teach one". The idea is that everyone should take the time and effort to spread the knowledge, and teach someone else the tricks that you have learned moving forward. Do you find that you're on the other side of the fence, and absolutely crushing someone in player matches? If a rematch is requested, go for it again. My attitude is that I don't pull my punches when I'm playing newer players, because that will not help them improve the same way that forcing them to think under pressure will.

If you don't like aggreeing to rematches just because it's helpful to the other player, do it for yourself. It is important to play both stronger and weaker players; stronger players will force you to adapt quickly under pressure, but weaker players will allow you the opportunity to make use of the skills you have practiced, and to properly set up for the moves and combo strings that you want to use regularly. I wrote earlier that failure is only a failure if you don't learn something from the experience, and by the same token, a victory is hollow if you don't understand why you won. Make sure that you are winning because you are executing your game plan, not because you are flailing or taking advantage of a lower player's bad habits. Take playing weaker players as an opportunity to practice fixing the bad habit that drives you nuts. It is by aggreeing to rematches in player matches that I have been able to slowly eliminate some of the wreckless dodging I'm doing, and fuzzy guard consistently after connecting with the last hit of Brad's PPK string.

That's a pretty strong case for player matches. Why even bother with ranking then? Jerky VFDC captured some of the essence of ranked matches for me, when I asked him for advice and he told me, "Play ranked matches against strong players. They will build up your mental endurance". Ranked matches will force you to accept that you are playing someone with a proven track record, and, with something on the line, you will find that your play style changes considerably.

Suddenly you'll notice that you start consistently falling back to your perceived safe moves whenever you are down a round in a ranked match. For the longest time, I could not shake my habit of spamming 3PP as soon as I noticed that I was getting low on life. Why? It's not a good move, but for some reason, I mentally perceived that it was safe and would get me out of trouble. Against good players, it just led me to more punishment.

One other benefit of ranked matches - you can do chores in between each match. I manage to get everything done around the house and play Virtua Fighter because I can complete everything I need to do in between each match. Yah, this is a silly reason to play ranked, but it makes a difference to me.

Train in player matches, and then put what you've learned into motion in ranked matches. In player matches you will get the opportunity to play consistently against the same person, and this will provide you many opportunities to adapt to their style, exploit their weakness, and then have the tables turned as they adapt to you. Once you feel like you're winning consistently, switch over to ranked and play there for a while. When you start to feel like you're getting stale and predictable, switch back into player and play multiple matches against people that are able to pick apart your game. You will be stronger for it.

Above all, remember the importance of requesting rematches - everytime you feel yourself getting frustrated, force yourself to reflect on why you are frustrated, how you lost, and hit that button to request another match.

That's all for now. As an aside, if anyone reading has something specific that they would like me to cover, drop a comment and let me know. I very much enjoy the opportunity to write about different aspects of Brad Burns and Virtua Fighter as a whole, and every chance to write about something is a chance to learn it a second time, as I'm required to break it down and think the whole thing through from start to finish.

Lastly, if you're looking for matches, don't hesitate to add me on XBL. My gamertag is Deathsushi, and I'm always up for games.

My crutches

2008-10-10T22:09:56Z

Cross-posted from my VF5 blog

I'm going to do something that tournament players are often not able to afford doing. I'm going to expose what I perceive my own weaknesses to be.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to Tony Familia about Brad, and some of the tricks that he finds useful. We were talking in the Shoutbox at VFDC, a chat program that everyone on the site can see from most of the pages, but Tony requested that we switch the discussion to PM. His logic was fairly sound - he didn't want to have his opponents gain too much of an insight into how to defeat him right before NYG7, a decent sized tournament and Virtua Fighter gathering (that I couldn't make).

I don't fault Tony with this at all, and would probably take the same approach if I was going to be playing in an upcoming tournament. However, I'm a firm believer in what I call the "liquid strategy" approach to gaming. I believe that if I can expose my own weaknesses to people, that will encourage them to exploit that part of my game. In turn, I will be forced to either continue losing, or adapt my strategies to adjust with what my opponents are now using against me. This process of adaptation is what makes for a strong player, and so this is what I hope to do.

Virtua Fighter can in many ways be seen as having an optimal way of playing. Although there are many different choices that you can make at any given point in the game, for specific situations, there is almost always one "best" action to take (naturally once your opponent starts to get wise to this, you will have to adapt, but let's keep things simple for now).

The flipside to moves that I use too much are moves and techniques that I use when I shouldn't. As an example, Brad is disadvantaged by 5 frames after he hits his opponent with the last kick in his PPK string (two jabs followed by a low kick). At 5 frames of disadvantage, Brad is able to perform a fuzzy guard, and avoid any throw attempt while still managing to block any mid-attack that the opponent can hit him with (for those new to the game, a fuzzy guard is performed by holding down just long enough to have Brad enter his ducking animation, then releasing down while continuing to hold guard). The problem is that I'm cheating these optimal plays, and am resorting to tricks that work against lower level players, but get me crushed against players of higher skill.

Let's get on to my crutches:

Tech-roll recovery

Almost everytime I recover with a tech-roll, I automatically input Bra'd PK string. There's a couple of reasons that I do this. The string starts with his fastest move, an 11-frame jab, meaning that it can interupt a lot of heavier moves that opponents will throw out. It is also semi-circular, which can punish a lot of people trying to evade to crush whatever rising attack I'm doing. Generally speaking though, there should never be an automatic combination or input that I'm entering upon tech-rolling, aside from holding down the guard button (and even then I should be careful).

How can you beat this? Easy, knock me down with a move that I can tech-roll, feint a follow-up attack, and then just duck and guard. As the entire combo string is high, I'll whiff both attacks right over you and find myself in the undesirable position of being about 11 frames at disadvantage. Almost enough for a guaranteed throw!

Lack of defense, too much abare

Abare is a japense term used by the Virtua Fighter community, and means (I believe) wreckless. The term is generally applied when someone attacks from a disadvantage. The greater disadvantage you have, in terms of frames, the less likely you are to successfully hit your opponent, and the more likely they are to successfully hit you.

My big problem is that whenever my opponent successfully blocks or ducks under my PK string, I instinctively either evade and attack or enter 2P. This will work some of the time, but if we go to the command list and look up how much disadvantage I have on PK being blocked, it's quite large - 8 frames. The upshot of this is that the opponent has a very large window to hit me out of either of these two approaches. What's the correct thing to do? Evade, enter a throw-escape, and guard. This will allow me to avoid being thrown, evade any initial attack (thus leaving the opponent at a disadvantage) and block and circular attack.

How can you beat this? Easy. Since I'm playing wrecklessly whenever I whiff or get a PK blocked, start by going for your fastest mid, which, at 14 frames, will crush my low punch. If I get wise to that and start evading, you can use either a circular, or delay your attack (which will cause me to enter a failed evade animation, and let you hit me successfully).

Always evading to the background

For whatever reason I always evade to the background (up on the controller). This is more a force of habit than anything else, and is generally because I find it easier to guarantee an evade with this direction. Hitting down on my controller makes me feel more inclined to enter a duck rather than to successfully evade.

Why is this bad? Because a very skilled opponent knows that some of their moves are only half-circular, and will automatically hit me when I evade in a specific direction. By adjusting their stance to ensure that the circular property of their move matches the direction that I'm evading in, they will ensure a large number of free hits against me.

How can you beat this? Determine which moves your character has that are half circular, and learn to recognize which direction they will sweep through based on your stance. Brad has a half-circular move that is the start of his Lumpini combination, executed with 4P. By learning which direction this move will come out in (circular through the foreground or the background), you can adjust Brad's stance accordingly and guarantee free hits against me when I evade up.

Reversal everytime my opponent rises

Brad has only one really useful reversal, and it's mostly only applicable in one scenario. By inputting 1P+K, Brad is able to catch mid-kicks and reverse them. The only time you can really rely on seeing a mid-kick from the opponent is when you have knocked them down. In this situation, Brad can reverse almost every rising mid-kick. This is a great boon, and really intimidates your opponents. By using good yomi, you can scare your opponents into rising holding the block button, opening up your entire wake-up game.

However, too much of anything is bad, and that applies in droves to Brad's reversal. First of all, this is a gamble at the best of times. Even if I know that my opponent will always use a rising kick, I still have to guess whether or not they will go mid or low. If they go low and I enter the reversal input, I will get hit with a counter hit, taking extra damage and finding myself at an even worse disadvantage. If my opponent elects simly to rise, I still enter the failed reversal animation, and my opponent gets to be the first one to press the attack.

How can you beat this? Easy. Just rise with low kicks. Don't feel like doing that? Just rise and wait for my failed reversal animation (Brad will raise his knee and hit his elbow against it). Once you see that, throw my ass across the ring. That's all there is to it. This is really the worst habit I have, and there is no excuse for throwing reversals out more than once or twice a match, or if the opponent really has no ability to play intelligently. Punish me for this and help me learn!

Okay, those are the major crutches that I'm currently working through. I have a lot of things that I think I do fairly effectively, but the next post I want to focus on moves and stances of Brad's that I don't use enough and would like to introduce more into my standard arsenal. Top of that list? Sway-back (4P+K+G). Stay tuned!

Finance for all of us

2008-10-09T04:22:32Z

The ongoing financial crisis is making people go mental. We haven't seen accountants jumping out of buildings yet, but a lot of people around me seem to be responding quite irationally all the same. During times like these, knowledge can be a great boon, or it can make you go crazy with stress.

I'm going to post a few of the resources that I've been checking out on a regular basis that have helped me keep my cool, and feel like I'm staying educated. If you haven't started using one, the first thing that I would recommend is using an RSS feed reader. The easiest one to start using is Google Reader. Google Reader is already enabled for you if you have an existing GMail, or any other kind of Google account. An RSS reader will allow you to subscribe to sites that you visit on a daily basis, and then view all of the updates to those sites since you last loaded up the reader. This will significantly save you time, and actually makes the notion of keeping up with a large number of websites a feasible thing to do. In my Google Reader account, I subscribe to about 40 different sites, including financial blogs, skepticial website, and friend's personal blogs. I would never be able to check these out with the regularity that I do if I didn't have a feed reader to help me.

Okay, one last great thing about Google Reader. By adding friend's to your account list, you can share items that you think are worth showing to your friends. Items that you share will automatically show up in all of your friend's readers, and vice versa. This social aspect makes Google Reader an especially handy RSS reader. Anyhow, onwards.

First up is the Get Rich Slowly blog. Lots of people have heard of the book called The Wealthy Barber - this blog is based on the same concept. I'm a big fan of small changes that affect you in a big way over time. Sneaking healthy food into recipes, setting aside small amounts of your paycheque every two weeks into a savings account, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, etc. This blog is based on these kind of ideas for finance. J.D., the author, also provides lots of helpful advice, and links to many other valuable financial resources.

Next is I Will Teach You To Be Rich. The author of this blog is much more outspoked, but sometimes that's what you need to hear. He's written some great articles on being intelligent with money, and managing your finanaces throughout the economic downturn that is ongoing. He's currently got a great article up related to what we're not being told by McCain and Obama, which is less relevant for us Canadians, but still relevant, and interesting to read nevertheless. The author Ramit also links into a good number of other relevant financial websites.

Third, The Long Run Blog is a good source of skeptical analysis of ongoing financial issues, including Multi-level Marketing scams (think Amway), election promises, and more. I find that some of the writers can sometimes grate a little bit on me, but in many articles the material is great, and it's certainly worth checking out on a daily basis.

The last two things I would absolutely recommend are two podcasts by This American Life. The first podcast can be downloaded here, and discusses how the entire situation that the global economy now finds itself in came to be. It's quite astonishing listening to how far up and down the entire chain of lending the problem has pervaded.

The second podcast is available here. This second podcast details what exactly is currently going on now, and what on earth that bail-out we keep hearing is all about.

Arming yourself with a bit of knowledge will go along way towards helping you deal with times of crisis. The worst things any of us can do in times like these is make rash decisions without properly educating ourselves. Read up, or talk to people that you trust. Above all, don't listen to people that tell you things like "Hey, cash is the only safe way to store your money right now" - these people are idiots.

Fitness Goals for 2009

2008-10-03T16:14:47Z

More in the realm of minutiae from our hero's blog today..

I've been playing squash competitively for four years now. I love the sport, and it's nice to have something that is both a very good method for maintaining fitness, and also a very fun sport.

On top of all that, the game has a very strong strategic component to it, and it is an extremely social sport. These are all aspects that bode well for my particular character, and help motivate me to stay focused and develop drive to continue improving.

However, I've never really approached squash with particular fitness goals in mind. The aim for me has always been to improve, but always with the main focus being that I wanted my shots to improve.

This past season I saw some reasonable improvement, though I wasn't improving quite as quickly as I would have liked. That being said, the higher up in level you improve, the more you start to see the phenomenon of diminishing returns. Greater effort for less improvement.

This year I'm taking a new approach. My goals are certainly to see an increase in my squash game, but also to set some tangible fitness goals that I can drive towards. I would consider myself a very fit person for my age. I play squash four to five times a week, I jog, I lift weights, and I also make an effort to walk or bike instead of driving whenever I can. I try to eat healthy, I don't smoke, and I drink a lot of water throughout the day.

K, that was pretty obnoxious, but necessary. Here are the areas that I would like to make some improvements towards this squash season:

Less regular drinking

Boy, do I love beer. It tastes delicious, I love drinking it with friends, and yup, sometimes I love drinking too much of it. I'm comfortable with this, it's good to have some vices. However, if I can cut back on the amount of beer that I'm drinking on a regular basis, I will be able to cut back on the number of excess calories that I'm dumping into my system on a weekly basis.

How do I intend to do this? Easy - just being mindful of when I crack a beer, and thinking about the number of calories that each beer has. This doesn't mean that I intend to stress about every single beer that I crack - just that I'm aware and mindful of them.

Cut back on excess calories and trim off some extra weight

Summer was good to me, and filled with lots of decadent eating. I'm anything but overweight, but I would like to trim down for the season and minimize the amount of extra weight that I'm carrying around. Actually, I should rephrase that. My goal isn't to lose weight. It's to turn any extra fatty tissue that I'm carrying into muscle.

To accomplish this goal, the first thing I'm doing is just taking note of the number of calories I eat every day. A little while back I posted the number of calories, on an average day, that my body is burning through. The next step is to figure out how close I am actually coming to this goal. I signed up for an account at www.livestrong.com, and their calorie calculator has a large database that you can search through (and, as an added bonus, can also suggest lower calorie substitutes if you're interested). On top of that, you can also add in exercises and have it automatically calculate the amount of calories that you are burning based on this exercise.

This a good tool. The most important thing to be careful of with something like this is to make sure that you don't take being mindful of what you're eating into the realm of neurosis. It's easy to become neurotic about the number of calories you're consuming every day, and things go downhill fast from that point.

Update: After using livestrong's daily plate calculator for a few days, I'm really impressed. They have taken a wiki-like approach to their database of foods, allowing users to manually enter an item that they have consumed, along with its nutritional information, and that information then becomes available to everyone out. I was amazed last night when I finished my glass of skim milk, and on a whim typed in "Islander Skim Milk" and saw "Comox Valley Islander Skim Milk" popup in the search results. That's a pretty obscure brand that's already been logged. Very handy.

The most important point I want to make here, from my own point of view, is that if at any point I reach a state where I've eaten more calories than I need, and I'm still feeling peckish, I'm not going to stop myself from eating some ice cream as a treat. It is important to reward yourself when you think you deserve it. All work and no play makes for a habit that won't stay.

Build more fast-twitch muscle

Fast-twitch muscle is the muscle fiber that helps your body make fast explosive movements. Squash requires both high endurance and explosive movements (think doing shuttle runs for 45 mintues), and I would like to continue to build on my legs to develop more of this kind of muscle.

Weight lifting is one way to achieve this goal, but I'm only willing to go so far, and I want to take a varied approach to exercise so that I don't get burnt out focusing on goals that are too focused. Training on the squash court is, at least in my opinion, roughly equivalent to a full session of leg workout anyhow, and so this will be act as my main way of training for this goal.

Probably most important is just to make sure that lessons don't drop off as time goes on. Although Brendan and I have a pretty good routine set up, it's easily to let things slip if you don't remain diligent.

Going to the gym is boring for me, and I generally hate the sort of people that go to them. About two years back, I bought a set of spin-lock weights. Essentially just a bunch of ten pound weights, and two dumbbell handles. I can't go much higher than fifty pounds on either side, but, I'm not really interested in going much higher. My goal isn't to be huge, it's just to suplement my fitness regime with some weight training. The other benefit of doing this workout at home is that it integrates perfectly with my other hobbies - do a set of reps, play a game of Virtua Fighter, do a set of reps, work on some design for my blog. For me, the key to maintaining a workout regime is to introduce it in a way that minimizes its disruptiveness. If working out every night means that I no longer have enough time to play squash, or hang out with Bay, guess which one I'm going to drop? I'm hoping that this approach will allow me to continue on with these goals.

So I think that's mainly it. It's interesting calculating calories. I've never bothered to do this before, and its funny to see how I stack up against the figures that are recommended by the various health authorities out there. In general, I try to eat when I'm hungry, and avoid eating simply for the pleasure of it (I really do enjoy eating, but also recognize the danger of giving into this impulse). Since the first step is simply to record what I'm eating, and not bother making any changes, I've discovered that I hit the mark pretty close (it'll be interesting to see how that changes on pizza day at work), but that my diet is definitely carb-heavy, and low on protein and, get this, fat. Weird hey? I'm still trying to figure out ways to alter this balance, but I'll definitely start to turn my eyes towards things like peanut butter instead of toast and margarine when I'm looking for a snack.

Oh yeah, and least shocking revelation of all, I'm getting too much sodium. Is there anyway for a human being these days to not consume too much sodium? This little bastard is everywhere!

Charged attacks and you..

2008-10-01T05:38:03Z

One of the things that I rarely see used in online play are charge moves. Most characters have at least one move that can be charged up, prior to releasing. Once you've fully charged the move, it will automatically execute, and usually the properties are altered in some way. Usually these are automatic guard stuns, meaning that even if the opponent blocks the movie, they will still be staggered and have their guard broken.

Using a charge move requires a little bit of finesse, and is not something that you want to use frequently. At best, the move should be used sparingly, and as a way of mixing up the rhythm of your fighting pattern.

Let's touch on that for a second. Every match in Virtua Fighter, at its core, has a particular rhythm behind it. Combo strings follow a certain rhythm and timing, and most players learn to anticipate and react based on this timing. As you get to know the characters a little better, you learn where their combos can be broken, and where you need input your own counter-attacks to recapture the advantage in a round. Good players learn to feel this rhythm, even if they're not explicitly aware of it, and to adapt to the rhythm that the opponent is using. Great players take this one step further, and learn to change up there rhythm to increase the difficulty in reacting to their actions.

It should be obvious at this point where charge moves fit in - they offer one more way for you to mix-up your rhythm and keep your opponent from adapting to your pattern and timing.

So, how do you use them? The first step in a game like Virtua Fighter is to establish a baseline of expectation for your opponent. What I mean is that you start by using combos and moves that are generally safe, and do not provide a lot of room for your opponent to punish you. For Brad, some of these moves and combos are PPK, PP into stance, KP, and 6P. These moves provide safe options to begin your offense from, and do not leave a large amount of room open to be punished.

The reason that you want to establish a baseline of expectation using moves like this are so that your opponent becomes trained to expect them. Good strategy in Virtua Fighter 5 involves training the opponent to expect certain things, and then deviating from those expectations to catch the opponent off guard and punish them.

Our ultimate goal in setting this baseline, is to get the opponent to start robotically blocking each part of the sequence. After getting hit with the third hit in the PPK series over and over, the opponent is gradually going to become trained to block low after seeing two punches. It is at this point that we start to introduce new moves. Remember the golden rule - don't change what is working. If your opponent is not able to deal with what you are doing, then you should not change it. Let them adapt first, and then change up your gameplan.

Once you've managed to get your opponent to block each part of the sequence, mix things up by introducing a charged move. Brad's charge move fits in fairly well with the above mentioned sequence, and the new string to introduce is PP, 6, K (charge). This comes out as two punches, then entering into his ducking stance, and lastly, fully charging his knee. If you have trained your opponent correctly, they will sit their blindly waiting for the last kick, only to eat a fully charged knee and then be comboed.

Why not just use a throw instead? This is a good question - the short answer is because this is different than a throw. The long answer has many reasons. A succesfully charged attack like Brad's knee will break either standing or ducking guard. The knee will enable a combo, whereas a throw will not. Perhaps most important of all, it's good to do different things. The more varied you can make your attack, the more difficult it will be for your opponent to figure out how to deal with it.

You want to use charges sparingly, and mainly as a way to prevent your opponent from getting comfortable with any particular method of blocking. Make the opponent uncomfortable defending, and you will be one step closer to winning the match.

The alternative to fully charging is to partially delay your attacks. This will not alter the properties of the move, but it does provide another alternative to mix-up your rhythm. The ideal situation that you are aiming for is to unload your move right as your opponent realizes that they have a chance to strike and knock you out of your combo. If you have correctly judged your opponent, you will be awarded a counterhit, and can punish accordingly.

Charge moves can also provide the opportunity for good okizeme. That is - wake up games. Each time you knock your opponent down, a guessing game begins. Will your opponent rise with a mid or low kick? Will they roll away? Will they tech roll? Or will they stand up and block. When I've knocked my opponent down, I'm aiming to train them to rise and block. By punishing them for rising and attacking, you can set imbue your opponents with the need to block when they rise. Once you've accomplished this, you can start introducing charged attacks, once again, as a way to punish your opponent for rising and blocking.

Charge attacks should be used sparingly, and when the time is right, you'll feel it. I find myself using them at most once every 3 or 4 matches, simply because they put you at a high risk, and you need to know that you have got your opponent pegged correctly on their block.

That's all for now, but I'll post again soon with the other aspect of rhyhtm and mix-ups that are important - throws.

On Failure

2008-09-27T07:27:44Z

This is the first cross-post from my other blog, related to Virtua Fighter, a fighting game that I play, built with a rich-decision tree and a very well-defined, but complex strategy behind it.

Posts that I make related to Virtua Fighter 5 will all be tagged with the corresponding category, so feel free to ignore them if you don't know what the game is about, or aren't interested.

----

If there's one thing that you need to become accustomed to, in order to continue improving, it is failure.

A player that I have come across a number of times, named V MIRZA, has written in his XBox Live Bio that "I know my skill level. If you're better than me, I won't try". After the second match that we played in which he just gave up, I grew frustrated, and messaged him.

"Why do you play VF5?" I asked.

His reply was something to the effect of "Because it's a game requiring skill, is good quality and isn't flashy or stupid like DoA".

An excellent reply I thought - these are the key reasons someone should play. So "Why don't you try to actually play then?" I returned. His repsonse was telling. "I get worried that I'll lose and won't get better".

There it is. Loss and failure are funny things. In many ways, they are counter-intuitive to the way we think about improvement. If I'm improving, why do I keep failing? In every skill-based pursuit I've ever tried to improve at, I have found that the formula is inevitably one step backwards, and two steps forwards. The tricky part is that we often greatly perceive the step backwards, and only slightly notice the movement forward.

A loss only truly becomes failure when we are unwilling to take stock of why we lost, and how we can improve from it. Every single loss that you experience during your quest to improve and grow, as a VF5 player, is an opportunity to learn about your own weaknesses, and a chance to grow as a skilled fighter.

V MIRZA's comment is a common attitude. There are a lot of people out there that will avoid losing in many ways. Some players will do what V MIRZA does, and simply give up. If you've given up, you can then take comfort in the claim that your loss wasn't because you tried your best and lost, it was simply because you weren't trying. Some players will blame their losses on luck, or lag. Some players will make ridiculous comments like "I prefer fighting people with variety, instead of canned combos". This just means that they enjoy fighting people that they can beat.

If you truly want to become the best player possible, it is essential that you be willing to look at your own losses with a honest introspection. There is nothing that will provide you greater insight into how you can improve, than by reviewing your own matches, and seeing what your opponent is exploiting.

Over at VFDC, people have made complaints about a player named Unico711. Unico plays a very unique Brad. He doesn't approach Brad the same way I do, and uses a very limited moveset. The first time I played him, I couldn't understand why his level was so high - the first round that we fought, all he did was 2P me. After I adapted to that, he changed up his attack, and started using DM P+K, and full circular sweeps. And so on. People complain about the fact that all he does is low sweep spam, and DM P+K spam. But this isn't something you should ever complain about. You should either determine why you are losing to someone that is spamming moves, or look to this player as someone that you can hone your skills against. Next time you lose and are tempted to say something like this, stop yourself, and ask why you really lost. We don't lose because our opponent was "cheap" and just used 2P. We lost because we were unable to adapt to that method of attack.

One of the people that I respect the most for this approach to gaming is David Sirlin. His blog/book about playing to win advocates an approach like this one, where you do not blame your losses on something like the moves your opponent used, or their attitude, but solely focus your view inwards, and attempt to resolve any issues from there. You can read more about his point of view in his excellent book (freely available on his website), here.

That's all for now.

The little things

2008-09-24T19:30:27Z

It's the little things that get to me.. I guess I'm a fairly observant person, and as such, the minutiae that often passes under most people's radar seems to stick up on mine. Here are just a few quick things you can do to avoid looking silly to the 0.01% of the population that are like me.

Eg vs Ie

This is a common mistake that a lot of people make. Eg is used when you are providing an example, such as: There are many brands of t-shirts that the common douchebag wears these days. Eg. Xtreme Couture

Ie is used to indicate that you are providing another way to say the same thing. When you see the letters Ie, read them as saying "Also known as", or "That is to say". As an example: "Of all my friends that punch goats (Ie, Davey, Graham, and Davin), Davey definitely gets the most satisfying bleat out of them".

For all intents and purposes

Make sure you read the phrase above clearly, because it looks pretty dumb when people I work with send out e-mails that tell me what we should be doing for all intensive purposes. This is simply a problem derived from the fact that many people have heard this phrase used colloquially, but never actually read it in a book. If you think about it, it doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense to have a set of "intensive" purposes.

LOL sucks. Stop using it (lol!).

That's all for now.

Esoteric Agenda

2008-09-23T20:07:40Z

Looks like I'm following a trend here. One of the things that critical thinking is very applicable to is cinema. We documentaries are a very popular form of disseminating information these days, and for every good documentary by people like Al Gore and Errol Morris, there are poor documentaries made to support an agenda with very little fact checking and reliable research.

Filtering through these documentaries can be confusing, and rich media content like feature-length movies are very evocative.

Esoteric Agenda is the second movie that my friend recommended I watch. Based on Zeitgeist, this movie was even more of a challenge to avoid approaching with a bias. However, a good skeptic doubts, rather than denies, and so that is the approach that I have to take.

The first piece of information that is covered by the movie is the Mayan calendar. Let's get the elephant out of the room. There has been a lot of fuss made lately about the Mayan calendar, and the fact that a bunch of people believe that they predicted the world would end in December 2012. This is not in any way accurate, and even if they did make that prediction (they didn't), there is no reason whatsoever that we should place any value in this prediction.

There are often lots of claims made that we are supposed to believe because "it comes from an ancient civilization". This is the fallacy of argument from antiquity - that is, the belief that we should accept a claim simply because it comes from an ancient civilization or source. This is actually opposite to the way science works. As time continues to pass, we continue to test new hypotheses, and add to our body of knowledge.

If you're genuinely interested in understanding how the Mayan calendar operated, and what this misinformed claim of a prediction is based on, Brian Dunning of Skeptoid has written an excellent (and succint) explanation here.

The next claim made is that Nostradamus actually predicted the end of the age in December 2012, just like the Mayan calendar. Problem number one: there is no source whatsoever provided for this information (a pattern that will soon start to repeat itself). Problem number two: claiming Nostradamus successfully predicted something is just not going to work. Nostradamus's so called predictions were written out in a book as sets of quatrains - four lines of text for each quatrain. These were written in French, a bit of Italian, some Greek, and also some Latin thrown in. Not only that, but Nostradamus intentionally obscured the meaning of each quatrain through the use of metaphor and symbolism.

If you take an honest look at the claims made by people saying Nostradamus predicted something, you can see that the claim of Nostradamus successfully predicting something is unfalsifiable. His quatrains are frequently interpreted to fit any prediction the person stating a claim wants to make, and if an event occurs that would contradict one of his quatrains, it's simply brushed off as not being the event that was predicted by that quatrain.

The next bit is about clocks being made to imply that time is something external. I'm not even sure what the point of that is, but I do know that clocks are simply a way for us to make the passage of time something that is tangible, rather than an abstract concept. It is very difficult to get a mental grasp on a concept as illustrious as time. Clocks help us do that. I guess you could look at clocks as evil, if you wanted to, but I'm not sure why you would.

I'm now ten minutes into the movie, but so far all that I've been treated to is a speech that has been prepared by someone, along with images on the screen. There have been no sources cited, and nothing to actually back up the information that is being spewed out at me. This, in itself, is a red flag. A red flag doesn't mean that what is being said is incorrect. A red flag is just a reason to turn up your skeptical sensors a little bit higher and continue to question what you're being told.

Because this movie is produced a lot more cheaply than Zeitgeist was, it's a lot more difficult for me to maintain focus on the movie. As such, I'm switching in and out of it, and taking notes as I hear something worthy. An interesting sound bite caught my attention as I was vacuuming, and I had to turn off and rewind to listen again. That was this:

"If this is your first time hearing about the ocult, pay close attention"

First off, why aren't you paying close attention in the first place? It's almost like the makers of the film are acknowledging how dull their movie is. That aside, the insinuation is that we haven't heard about the upcoming information because it's groundbreaking news. Now, that's a little odd. First of all, why would this news only be getting revealed in a movie like this one, that didn't even make it to theatres? Maybe a better question, though, is: Why is this is the first time I'm hearing about this? Which is more plausible, that the occult is that secret, and that the only people that were able to "break the news" are the guys behind Esoteric Agenda, or that this is a pretty fringe claim being made?

Honestly, even secret societies like the Skull and Bones club of Harvard has an entry in Wikipedia documentating a lot of stuff about it. Wikileaks releases tons of information on a weekly basis that is supposed to be "highly secret", most recently the contents of Sarah Palin's Yahoo E-mail account. Ask yourself, if the occult was that serious, and had their hands in that much stuff, would they really be able to keep it that secret?

We're finally given a source, and it's an IRS document called IRS publication 6209. I opened this up to look through it, and holy man, it's huge and dense. I tried to read through some of it, but we're not told where in the document the information is that purports to show things like how we dont' have to pay income tax, income tax is illegal, we're not protected by the constitution (well, I'm not anyhow, since I'm Candian, but you get the point). For a good explanation of one of the more applicable (but still wrong and not valid) ways that income tax could be evaded, check out the Straight Dope entry on the matter here.

We're told that the CIA, FBI, NASA, and one other organization were never part fo the US govenrment, and that the government only holds shares in these organizations. I'm not even sure how shares would operate, since these are not corporations or companies, and do not have stock that would be traded around. What is true is that the FBI, based on what I was able to research on the internet, is in fact a part of the US government, but does in fact act outside of the jurisdiction of the government. The reasoning behind this is actually fairly sound, in that the FBI does in fact need to be able to do things like investigate the president and other aspects of the US government, should that be where the trail of a case leads them.

Ah, I looked up the basis for these claims, and as you would expect, they're far from watertight. First off, this entire claim, which, I think we can accept, is a very significant claim. Bordering on extraordinary. We would expect a claim like this to have some pretty significant evidence. Instead of that, we get two court cases. One of which relates to trying to determine whether an individual working for one of these organizations was in fact working for the Federal Government, or a private corporation (more of an issue of semantics than anything else), and the other case being about an attempt to determine whether or not one of these organizations could be sued under the Federal Tort Law. These cases are not the kind of cases that would determine such a massive exemption as that which they are being cited in support for. You can read the summary of the second case here. Don't worry, that's a short read. Main fact to remember? We'd need to see much better evidence before it was reasonable to just toss our chips in with this claim. Next.

Still not convinced? No worries. It turns out, these claims are actually based on an e-mail that's been getting sent around for quite some time. As it typical with this kind of thing, you can find the urban legend quoted in many many many different places, but actually finding any good skeptical writing on the item is tough. I searched and found that someone had already taken a critical walk through the whole thing. Take a look at this page and you can see that most of these claims are based on poor understandings of the law, or precedence cases. That page is available here. It's unfortunate that it's always the misinformation that seems to get passed around from inbox to inbox, rather than the corrective details. If only the makers of Esoteric Agenda had bothered to do the same kind of research I just did, they would have been able to avoid quoting fallacious material to support their agenda.

Now we get mention of the Skull and Bones club, and how meetings of these types happen often, but no word of it reaches the public, even though, we are told that major media is present at these events.

Everything I have read suggests that these events ARE secret, and media is not present. Which is more reasonable - that the media are present, but somehow are paid off enough to prevent even one whistleblower from blowing the lid off of this, or, that this information is not factually accurate? Which of those two items is more plausible? It doesn't matter what we want to believe, we have to seek out the answer that is the most plausible.

Finally we get to the first thing that I believe to be accurate in this film: The statement that "In order to win a game, you should use strategy and secrecy to achieve your victory. Why would it be any different in the global political arena."

I agree with this, but this heuristic alone does not explain anything in particular, and is simply stated to attempt to give weight to the other claims being made. Nothing about this fact actually helps us prove the veracity of the claims being made - it is simply being used to increase the mental bias that you have and to make you feel more supportive of their statements.

Now we get crappy footage of some guy that is using the strategy of a chess master to attempt to further the above. He's claiming that the one world order has patience and have been planning this for 50,000 years. Wow. If you look back at any single prediction of the future, even 50 years back, it's pretty hilarious how far off they got a lot of things. To believe that people could plan something over the course of 50,000 years is a pretty massive stretch of the imagination.

This guy also tells us that the ancients knew about astrology, which we have not forgotten. Astrology is completely pseudoscientific, and gives us nothing at all. Rolling in your beliefs with this really doesn't do you any benefit. And once again, the fallacy of argument from antiquity.

Now we're told that every US president has a direct blood line relation to a British monarch. That's quite a claim. What would we say that a direct bloodline actually means? We're told that George W. Bush is Queen Elizabeth's 13th cousin. I don't even know what a 13th cousin would be, so I looked it up. Here's what that means:

George W. Bush and Queen Elizabeth shared one great great great great great great great great great great great great grandparent. WOW. That is some loose criteria for a direct bloodline. If we're going to go back 13 generations, I bet you that I can find some pretty crazy relations that I have with various monarchs or royal families. Is this really that significant? It certainly doesn't strike me as very good evidence to support the claims that the movie makes for "only family members in the new world order get to be in control of the governments".

Another gem - we're told that the same emblems are shown on every single military uniform, such as:

Fleur De Lis
Skull

These are pretty loose criteria for emblems. There's also many possibl reasons for why the emblems could have a lot in common. To think of one, skulls would be a good emblem because they represent death, and could strike fear into the hearts of your enemy. The film doesn't bother looking into any other claims, and just jumps into the assumption that these are all indications of a new world order and a one world government. This is lame, and also falls victim to the same question that I asked of Zeitgeist. Are they really smart and organized enough to pull the wool over everyone's eyes, but make the mistake of using the same emblems on their uniforms? Come on...

Here's another classic quote: "Connecting the dots is up to you, but make your own decisions, instead of settling on the conclusions that are being placed in front of you."

This movie is guilty of exactly the kind of thing it is warning you against accepting and settling on in the quote above. Do not just accept what is being said here. QUESTION it (please).

There is an important distinction to be made here and one that both Zeitgeist and Esoteric Agenda get wrong. Critical thinking doesn't mean that you just accept the opposite point of view to that of the mainstrea. It means that you have to question claims made on both sides, and then analyze and select the best and most plausible of those claims.

Zeitgeist and Esoteric Agenda also both commit the fallacy of presenting a false dichotomy. This is where you present two potential explanations for a given piece of evidence, and then argue as though those are the only two plausible explanations. In Esoteric Agenda, they make claims, and then, when their own (poor) analysis shows that it doesn't fit with the mainstream point of view, they assume that this is proof of their own point of view. This is not how science works, and not how good research is conducted.

In summary, just because the government lies about some things (and I think we can all agree that this happens) doesn't mean that what this movie claims is true.

The movie makes the claim that by searching for New World Order on Google, you will be overwhelmed by the number of people trying to get information out there. However, this amounts to nothing more than the bandwagon fallacy: the fallacious attempt to convince us that something is correct or accurate just because a bunch of people believe it. Claims need to stand up on their own, regardless of how many people do, or do not believe in them (yes, the bandwagon fallacy works in both directions).

We're told by Esoteric Agenda to look past the common claims that we are told. This is an excellent idea. However, the movie wants you to stop looking any further as soon as you arrive at the same convoluted conclusion that it is putting forth. Critical thinking is good, but only if you apply it equally to everything that you are told, rather than just the mainstream opinion.

The movie pulls a cute trick here, by stating that the points of views expressed within will be labelled with the term Conspiracy Theory, which has negative connotations, and that this is simply a means used to discredit the movie. This is a classic appeal made in many situations. Often, mainstream scientists will refer to someone that is proposing the latest perpetual motion or free energy machine (a feat that is impossible under the second law of thermodynamics - one of the most fundamental and proven laws observable in our universe) as a crank. These people will then turn around and say that they are being dismissed out of hand, and not being given a fair chance. The fallacy here lies in the assumption that that label is the only means by which they are being dismissed, and likewise, the same applies to Esoteric Agenda's special pleading. The reality is that most of the claims made in Esoteric Agenda are either ridiculously convoluted (and thus fall victim to Occam's Razor, at least until we see actual good clean evidence to support these extraordinary claims), or are patently false.

The summary? Esoteric Agenda's claims are mostly baseless, leaps in logic, or already disproven, AND the claims essentially amount to one massive conspiracy theory.

Another attempt to turn evidence against the movie's claims into positive evidence for them is the the statement that: If a global secret needed to remain hidden, but emerged among the public, embellishment and adding fiction to it would be the best way to deal with it. Again, we are dealing with the problem of falsifiability. How would you ever prove these claims wrong if you can just flip any negative evidence into evidence that supports your pet theory? Good research doesn't start with an assumption (there is a massive conspiracy), and then shoehorn the available evidence to support that answer. It starts with questions, and builds a hypothesis based on where the available evidence leads it.

Next up we get treated to some woman that is talking at a nutritionist convention, but we are not told anything about the convention itself, nor about this woman. She is every bit as dubious as the voice-over that has been narrating the movie thus far, but those two credentials (that she's a nutrionist, and at a convention) are put on the screen to suggest that she has some credibility.

We need better evidence, to support claims like this, than one lone person on the screen making claims on top of a podium. I can put a guy in a lab coat and tell you he's a doctor, and then make him claim that brushing your teeth gives you cancer. Would you question that claim? How is that any different than this woman's claim? Maybe the answer is that you want to believe in this conspiracy theory. If that's the case, you should ask yourself - what would be more rewarding, believing in a conspiracy theory bceause it's compelling theory, or because you've actually analyzed the claims it makes and determined that they are the absolutely most plausible way to explain the world arround us?

Honestly, it's alright to think that conspiracy theories are neat, and that it would be cool if there really was some power that had this kind of control, but while maintaining that line of thinking, you still need to be willing to look at each piece of evidence, on its own, and see if that evidence being presented is plausible and stands up on its own. As it stands, this lady's testimony doesn't really do anything for us without more context to frame what she is saying.

Conspiracy theory #29123219 introduced is that fluoridizing our water supply is a massive conspiracy to kill off large numbers of people. This is an extraordinary claim, so we would, again, expect to see some really good evidence to back it up. Unfortunately, we get one interview, and information provided to us by the narrator. If you do some research online, you can see that there is in fact some valid debate on fluordization. On one side, the American Dental Association states many prominent organizations that endorse this practice, include the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the American Medical Association. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to this Wikipedia article here, list water fluoridation as one of the 10 greatest public health achievements in the 20th century.

On the other hand, you've got what appears to be some decent clinical trials showing that the amount of fluoride present in water could pose health risks to people that consume large quantities of water, and to newborn babies. Fair enough, this sounds like it is worth conducting some further studies.

Does this alone provide any evidence to support that water fluoridization is being done to kill off masses of people? Nope. There's no good evidence to support this whatsoever, and it's an astounding leap in logic.

The next person shown talking and presenting claims is someone called Michael Shaw, who is talking about how the goal of the new world order is to destroy the middle class. First of all, this is a silly proposition, and would be nigh impossible to achieve. There exists a middle class because you need people to carry out certain duties. As an example, you can consider a large portion of any government bureaucracy to be the middle class. Without all of these people, there would absolutely be no "One World Government". If you think that having just one government to oversee all of the world would reduce bureaucracy, you don't understand how bureaucracy works. Secondly, I recommend checking out Michael Shaw's website, or at least a website that seems to be strongly supporting him, here. A very nice site. I wasn't able to find very much on the internet about Michael Shaw, at least the one talking in the video, but what I did find amounted to poorly thought out rants about the US government taking down our society, creating a one world government, etc.

Essentially, Michael Shaw is just one more person that holds the same views as this movie, and really doesn't offer any new evidence. His presence does nothing to lend credibility to the claims in the movie.

The last piece that I have a note about is related to the so called "Climate Change Conspiracy". The notion that climate change is being pulled over our eyes as a means to fool us further. The film even makes note that there is a petition with 19,000 scientists signed on to it that disagree with the climate change findings.

Let's take a quick tangent here. Climate change is a complicated topic, the least of which being because it is so heavily political right now. There are many different approaches to it - Is it actually happening? Is it caused by humans? Is this something that has happened in the past? Is it happening faster than most? etc. The scientific consensus is that climate change is in fact progressing towards a warmer client, and that we are responsible for that change, at least to a significant degree. There will always be fringe scientists that degree with the main consensus, and there will also always be differing opinions on what mechanism is actually causing the observed phenomenon. However, the main consensus is as stated above.

Now, This may sound like a bandwagon fallacy - just because a bunch of scientists believe something, why should I? This is a fair question to ask, and is a difficult one to deal with. In essence, the scientific consensus is an opinion that is reached, independantly, by many different scientists. We have a limited capacity of knowledge, and ultimately have to entrust certain aspects of our knowledge base to certain individuals. In this case, we have to throw in our lot with scientists that study this kind of thing on a daily basis. While it would be weak reasoning to simply follow along with one scientist, a scientific consensus has been reached independantly by the majority of scientists working in a field, and this is the key aspect that separates it from the bandwagon fallacy.

Anyhow, the claim that there are 19,000 scientists that have signed a petition doesn't hold a lot of water, without telling us how many people exist on the opposite side of the fence. Are these 19,000 just a dedicated part of the fringe? I don't know without more details. You can read more about this petition project here on Wikipedia. As that article tells, this petition has certainly had it's share of surrounding controversy.

Anyhow, the movie droned on further, but did not cover a lot of new ground. The best part about this movie, I think, is that it makes Zeitgeist look good in comparison. Unfortunately, this is a pretty bland movie that is fairly poorly produced. It doesn't really cover any additional ground that Zeitgeist didn't already try to cram into its 2 hours of screentime, and this could probably be more accurately viewed as a summary of every conspiracy theory that is currently floating around on the internet.

The bottom line is that, at the very least, we should all take this kind of information with a skeptical eye, and do some of our own research. Although writing this blog entry took me about 6 hours (8 if you include the 2 hours I spent watching the film), actually performing the research was as simple as opening up a web browser and searching for some of the claims and names that were presented on screen during the movie.

Bottom line - do your own research. That doesn't mean watching a movie like this, thinking about the fact that this goes against the mainstream and may initially seem compelling, and then throwing your chips in with this point of view. It means thinking critically about the information presented on both sides of the debate, and looking into the claims that are being put forth.

Time consuming as these kind of things are, it's actually pretty rewarding to go through a movie like this and debunk the claims, and as a result of the research that necessitates, it certainly provides the opportunity to learn a lot more on the fly. I should also mention that I'm although I thought both this movie and Zeitgeist were pretty terrible excuses for documentaries, I'd like to thank my friend Dan for bringing them to my attention. Just because I thought a movie was bad, or take the time to debunk it, doesn't mean that it wasn't worth spending some time analyzing.

If anyone else has movies of this nature that they think would be worth being put through the skeptical lens, please add a comment or e-mail me and let me know.