you want to learn philosophy? except maybe not really.

i bet you couldn't even learn super smash bros melee. that's a challenge.

if you can't learn smash bros, i doubt you'll ever learn philosophy.

if you managed to learn smash, you would have used various methods of learning successfully. you could then re-use some of them for learning philosophy.

if you learned smash, you would have dealt with details. you would have done precise thinking successfully. you could use that for philosophy.

but maybe it's too hard for you. playing smash well requires being able to research information online, understand it, and apply it.

playing smash well requires patience at appropriate times.

playing smash well requires effective practice. you have to practice in such a way you get better.

playing smash well requires succeeding at things you were bad at initially. you will be very bad at lots of the game initially. you'll have to change that.

playing smash well requires asking questions productively.

playing smash well involves running into players who are better than you, and seeing really plainly and clearly they are better than you. no excuses, no denials, you're outclassed. and it involves watching games from top players and learning from them and aspiring to be better.

playing smash well requires learning to do some thinking and situation-handling quickly.

playing smash well requires learning new terminology and physics. the terminology is easier than in biology or philosophy. the physics is much easier than the real physics.

playing smash well requires persistence and effort.

playing smash well requires strategy. you have to think about strategies well and implement them.

playing smash well requires good use of testing. is something a good idea? test it out. you can test out lots of your ideas and see how it goes. to make progress you'll need to choose useful tests, and learn from the results. smash allows doing lots of tests quickly, so if you fail at first, you can try again cheaply.

playing smash well requires discussing smash in a productive way.

playing smash well requires objectivity. biases don't win games. myths you tell yourself (like strategy X or character Y is really great – when actually they aren't) don't win games.

playing smash well requires initiative. no one will hand you smash skills. you have to pursue them.

learning smash requires creative practice techniques. play some slow paced games. play some games where you focus on doing one or two things right and autopilot the rest.

learning smash requires developing some autopilot strategies that you can perform with little attention. but you need to be able to turn them on and off. and you need to be able to make changes to them as you get better.

learning smash requires forming habits but then dropping or improving them as you make progress.

learning smash involves making mistakes and and then fixing it and not making those mistakes anymore.

learning smash involves making many tiny improvements which add up to big progress overall.

learning smash requires judging ideas on their merits, not by how fancy the writing is. there's lots of good ideas about smash that are written casually. here's an example written by a player (MaNg0) who some consider to be the best ever: "My summary for this matchup is..Shielding is your best frienD!!!This match is all about spacing! U gotta like run to them shield but space it.. then fair out of shield..Not much really to say about this match... BEtter Spacing and PATIENCE Wins .."

learning smash requires learning from criticism. if you never seek out criticism, you'll get stuck. if you dislike criticism instead of appreciating it, you'll get stuck. if you don't understand what to do with criticism, you'll get stuck.

if you don't have the initiative, persistence and ability-to-learn to play smash well, you'll never get far with philosophy (which requires far more of those skills).

if you think smash is too much work as a step forward, you'll never get competent at philosophy, which is far more work.

if you're too busy for smash, you'll never get competent at philosophy, which takes far more time.

if you don't want people to see your smash mistakes, and want to learn it all alone in private, you will fail at both smash and philosophy.

if you silently ignore this, you will fail at philosophy.

Smash is available on Windows and Mac for online play.

I've noticed most people move on from fights in a way I find weird. Like they'll just seem to forget about it, and act like it never happened, without solving the problem. Others don't do this.

I had an idea about the difference in perspective.

Most people fight in an emotional way. Once the emotion fades, the issue is usually done for them. Sometimes the issue is unignorable and they can't do that, but they can ignore a lot, even if it's very unreasonable and self-destructive.

By contrast, I think some people look at problems more logically. So e.g. sleeping, or relaxing with the TV for 2 hours, doesn't change it.

This can lead to conflict. One person can no longer be emotional and want to act like a problem never happened. They don't want to revive bad emotions by focusing on that problem. And the other person can logically see the problem still exists and want to try to cooperatively solve it.

https://mariannetalbot.co.uk/2016/05/27/disability-rights/

Until I cared for my parents (both of whom had dementia), I had never given much thought to caring, or to those who do the caring. Having become a carer myself I realised that there was a whole wealth of experience to which I had previously been oblivious.

Twist: Talbot's job, as a Director of Studies, is basically to care for children [1]. She's never given this much thought. Maybe because she doesn't see the students as human beings.

Twist: Talbot's job, as a philosopher, is to think abstractly. her expertise is supposed to be something like not being oblivious without personal experience.

I admit to being glad my caring days are over. But I wouldn’t have missed them for the world.

It was so great that she'd never ever do it again. What a typical and transparent lie.

[1] her job is a lot more like "care for children" than a typical teacher. here is the intrusive and nasty stuff a "Director of Studies" does:

The job involves, "a level of academic support not routinely provided by [most] other universities." The whole description is a big "WE CARE!" (and therefore we meddle). It's paternalistic and overbearing (and disgusting and evil).

BTW, I tried to check what her job is (the linked description is from a different person with the same job title), but Talbot is too stupid to answer a simple, direct question. It's really fucked up – but typical – that an educator doesn't answer the question asked. How that frustrates students!

I asked if her job was like this description. (She has chosen not to explain her job on her website or on Oxford's website. Don't students need to know?) She didn't say anything meaningful about that question, and wrote back with a very vague statement about what her job is. She did use the phrase that she "makes sure" her will is done, though, which is a major red flag for authority and coercion.

on a related note, Talbot considers the children she deals with to be no more important than animals:

(b) Humans are no more important than other animals

why? relativism and skepticism. their claim is a lack of objective foundations for any knowledge of anything:

This means the claim that humans are more important than animals makes no sense because there is no standpoint from which to make such a claim.

as usual with these things, it applies to itself. by their standards, there is no standpoint from which to make the claim: "This means the claim that humans are more important than animals makes no sense because there is no standpoint from which to make such a claim."

How would we justify such a claim? We do not, and cannot, know how important animals’ lives are to animals.

no doubt they are grossly inconsistent. they demand justification (which is impossible – or in the alternative, assigned arbitrarily) when they want to reject something. but then they lower their standards at other times to accept ideas.

We know animals’ lives are important to animals. Animals will, for example, chew off their own limbs if caught in a trap.

in addition to anti-human, they are stupid. this is a pathetically stupid argument parading as prestigious intellectualism.

a robot could be programmed to perform that action. that wouldn't prove the robot cares about its life (or is alive).

ppl find incentives very confusing.

like u say "the game design creates an incentive to do X. it punishes you with Y if you don't do X. X is bad. the game shouldn't incentivize X."

they reply "you should have done Z" or "doing X is being a jerk" or "here is a way to try to cope with the downside, Y, so you suffer less from it" or "Y is not a punishment because if you do Z then it's still possible to get a good outcome despite Y".

they get upset with you b/c you're pointing out an incentive to do something *bad***. and they read it as you advocating doing something bad.

you're actually complaining the game incentivizes doing something bad and punishes you if you don't. you don't want to do something bad and don't want to be punished either. but that's too nuanced for people.

people are also very bad about incentives when it comes to economics or laws, not just game rules. you get lots of the same problems.

say a guy is proposing a law to try to reduce pollution. you might reply, "that law you're proposing creates an incentive to pollute more because..." then people will commonly reply with things like "don't do that" or "what an asshole you are to think of responding to the law that way" or "we're trying to stop pollution here. why are you looking for ways to increase it?" or "just don't pollute anyway, you don't have to follow incentives".

i talk about the value of public criticism. i say it's important that discussion be public.

people may doubt the public is smart or capable.

here's an example:

Dec 13, 2002, the first version of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker was released to the public. It's a Gamecube game. A division of Nintendo made it.

Nintendo hired people to test the game. They looked for and fixed many bugs. They had a whole quality assurance process. It was successful enough that the game seems to work. Many people play through the game, have fun, and don't notice any bugs.

There seem to be no disasters in this game. Nintendo put substantial effort into ensuring the game worked. And yet there are dozens of disasters and the game is massively broken.

What beats a team of bug testers hired to find problems? What beats Nintendo's expensive programming and game design talent?

The public.

Only a little fraction of the public has ever cared about this game. Only a very small number of people have ever cared really strongly. And yet the public wins by a mile.

Wind Waker is very, very broken. It's packed absolutely full of massive bugs. Here's a new TAS (Tool Assisted Speedrun).

This took less than 15 years, and lots of these bugs have been known for years.

I'll briefly explain two bugs the game developers missed to give you some idea of how shoddy the game is.

When you turn while swimming the game lowers your speed. The concept makes reasonable sense. However, what if you keep turning over and over really fast? Then you get a very large amount of negative speed and can travel around the game world super fast. (So fast you can cause problems like going through islands because they aren't loaded yet.)

Negative speed was also an issue in Super Mario 64 where they put a speed limit so you couldn't just long jump a bunch to go super fast. But they only put a speed limit on your positive (forward) speed, not on your negative (backwards) speed. So people use a bunch of backwards long jumps to get high enough negative speed to clip through walls. Humans can do this. I've personally tried it and it's not all that hard. (In tons of games you can go through walls if you move fast enough because, basically, the collision detection for walls only checks if you're in the wall and blocks you a certain number of times per second, and if you get through the whole wall between checks then it doesn't block you.)

So the Wind Waker people let you swim super fast, backwards, merely by turning around. It lets you go to different islands in a few seconds. Some of the trips normally take a couple minutes of travel by boat. And note that super swims are reliably used by human speedrunners, it doesn't require computer precision.

The other Wind Waker glitch I'll talk about is Zombie Hover. When you die (no health left) the game doesn't figure out you're dead until you touch the ground. So you can fly while you're dead and the game keeps going! You fly by spamming your jump attack with your sword. If you do that fast enough then you actually gain height. This, again, is reliably done by human speedrunners and doesn't require computer precision. Then you can regain health while flying and then touch the ground without dying. You can regain health in the air by landing on a healing item (when your feet touch the top of it you're still slightly above the ground) or by using a Tingle the fairy to help.

There are similar stories with many other games. Like, in lots of games you can go through walls with techniques like wiggling in a corner, jumping into a wall at the right angle, or dropping an item behind you that pushes you through the wall.

Today, the public usually finds tons of bugs in every notable game within a few weeks of releasing it to the public. Give it a few years and the public can be very, very thorough. Not that the Wind Waker TAS is perfect. I bet they missed some major things. But it's far above what Nintendo was able to figure out.

All it takes is a few very interested people and very high quality thinking is quickly achievable. Hiring people to think is extremely ineffective compared to what truly interested people can do. Interested people need to select themselves, and material needs to be public for them to do that. People who care enough to think are amazing.