Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Lord Shonus on November 29, 2019, 08:11:48 pm

Cars don't go to landfills. They go to scrapyards, where every useful part is stripped for resale and the rest is eventually melted down.

That’s good. Thank you for the information. I have no idea where I heard they were in landfills. Sorry for the incorrect non info.

To be fair, about 25% of the average car by mass does end up in landfills; outside of the metal content, it's not profitable to purify it for re-use, so it gets thrown out. So maybe you were thinking of that?

Right, but to what end? It's not like there's a debate here. There's just yelling in the hopes that one side eventually backs down, so that the other can declare victory and move on.

While I agree with you that the level of discourse has broken down completely, I don't think anyone's hoping the other side backs down so much as unilaterally deciding that nobody opposed to them is worth listening to and skipping right to gloating about how they've declared themselves the winner. Stripped of their bitterness and sarcasm, the majority of posters at either ideological extreme are saying this: "I thought everyone but me sounded stupid yesterday and I thought so again today, so HA! I told you so." The rest is mostly increasingly tired edgelord shitposting leavened with the usual ultracrepidarian error hunting by people trying to prove something to themselves.

I'm with you on leaving.

Question, can colleges just choose not to require the relics of old?

In theory, yes, and in practice many do make significant changes at the level of specific curricula, but in a way this is why they can't do so with the few specific relics that remain, the dissertation and defense foremost among them at the graduate level: the actual graduate school itself serves the needs of such a diverse group of programs that the process itself is the last common thread holding them together, and while it's a burdensome formality for STEM PhDs, that's not true across all doctoral programs. Plus which, even if you could get a whole institution behind discarding those requirements, they'd almost certainly lose accreditation over it.

So no, they probably cannot. They also should not, but that's a separate argument.

Wouldn’t nurses and doctors learn from the biochemists what things do?

Having tried to teach biochemistry to medical students before, I can confirm that they do not, but not for lack of trying on our end. 

In all seriousness, though, doctors don't tend to stay current on their own initiative, which is a huge problem. Half the pharma companies' oversimplifications are so the drugs make sense to someone who's fifty years behind the curve.

From my understanding, kobolds are reptilian because of their draconic ancestry, and thus don't have a necessity to reflect modern knowledge of dinosaurs.

Oh, sure. There's no necessity for kobolds at all, let alone updating them. I just think that, to the extent that modern paleontology has informed some modern depictions of dragons (Game of Thrones, for example) by giving them pterosaur-ish forelimb wings -- and entirely avoiding the question of the extent, if any, to which medieval discoveries of dinosaur fossils informed the original Western dragon myths -- it'd be a fun variant to take that to its logical conclusion and have more avian kobolds. 

I'm not going to sit here and tell anyone how to run their game. We have more than enough of that. There are just some things that I think would be funny or cool or useful to see in addition to what's already out there, and clucking kobolds happen to be one of them.

It's like being stuck in a crowded supermarket aisle, except when you crash your baskets into each other it can result in thousands of dollars of damage, tons of paperwork and phone calls, and maybe injury or death.

I used to be like this when learning to drive. What got me out of it was actually this old NASCAR simulator, although beamNG.drive or something like it might work better today; crashing a virtual car a lot helped me put different speeds and types of crash into perspective and realize that just because crashes are common statistically and some crashes are fatal does not mean that fatal crashes are common. It is absolutely the case that no crash is desirable, but getting a dent while trying to park or something is not the end of the world either literally or financially, and a lot more likely than suddenly swerving into oncoming traffic at highway speeds. In a larger sense, accidents are more probable when the relative velocity between vehicles is relatively (ha) low, and while crumple zones may make the damage look horrible, the way they dissipate energy is in part by literally spreading it out, so most crashes look worse than they are by design.

Anyway, crashing virtual cars helped me calm down about driving and learn more efficiently, and it wasn't expensive. Perhaps it would work for you, too.

Quote from: Trekkin on October 29, 2019, 09:59:52 am

Beyond that, if you want to learn at a hobby level, old college-level textbooks are fairly cheap and well worth it; I actually have some at my dry lab desk for reference. More than a few are (legally) free online, as well. They won't be up to date, but if you're just getting into a field of study you care more about the fundamentals anyway.

I would argue that if you have the perseverance to slug through a college level book and understand it's content you have already passed the "hobbyist" level. Lectures can be a nice guidance tool for students but are in no way a substitute for good old fashioned reading and personal research.

I'd agree as far as drive goes, but the main problem with autodidactism is the lack of an error-checking mechanism. There are people who will extol the virtues of their intellectual rigor in one breath and make elementary errors about their topics of professed expertise the next, and they love to claim they didn't need formal education because they were "smart enough to learn it on their own" or something similar. When the only person evaluating the correctness of your knowledge is you, it's very easy to pretend that all your errors are isolated incidents and your confidence in your own understanding is well-founded, because of course everything you think you know sounds right to you. It may even happen to be correct sometimes. Similarly, when there's no test at the end of the book, there's no motivation to slog through the boring parts; you can read the intro, decide it makes sense to you and you therefore understand it, skim the rest, and walk away. I have seen students do this. Examinations are an excellent tool for determining who they are.

Of course, it's fine to be wrong about the fiddly details if you just want to learn interesting things for your own amusement, which is why autodidactism makes sense for hobbyists. There are just too many ways for error to creep into your understanding without any external accountability for it to really be a sufficiently rigorous method for learning something on which you intend to depend professionally. I'd argue the same standard should apply to claiming to know anything, but that's just me being elitist.