SuddenDownpour

Palworld has brought back a Pandora's Box that Pokemon let open in Black/White: Does Team Plasma have a point? Is the player in Pokemon/Palworld an evil entity just for playing?

Some preliminary context for those unaware. Pokemon Black/White's version of an evil team was Team Plasma, which argued that Pokemon trainers were evil for capturing Pokemon and forcing them to fight alongside them. While the game gave us the character of N, who is honest and sincere in his ideas and intentions, Team Plasma is presented as an hypocritical boogeyman that wants to force all other trainers to free their Pokemon, but secretly this is only a ploy to make sure no one can oppose them when they attempt to grab power for themselves.

Palworld has its own take on the idea: out of the different hostile factions, we find early on the Free Pal Alliance, which similarly argues that capturing pals and forcing them to do your bidding is evil, and we find again that their leader really commits to the idea, but her underlings are constantly attacking pals in the wild and sometimes even putting them in cages.

Perhaps surprisingly, the Pokemon fanbase was very defensive of this idea, often repeating the arguments provided by the games that captured Pokemon like the companionship anyway, dismissing the fact that wild Pokemon violently resist being captured unless you force them into submission to accept the Pokeball. The fact that you forcibly push them into a situation where their previous freedom to choose not to associate with you gets overwritten by a newfound willingness to obey means that they're being effectively brainwashed - if we were to apply our real life standards to this situation we would say without a doubt that the situation is exploitative and we're wiping our ass with the idea of consent. Palworld is even more "in your face" about this, given that the brainwashing mechanic of Pokeballs/spheres does not only work on the mons, but on humans as well. The general reaction of the Palworld community seems to be acknowledging that it's fucked up, but nonetheless jumping straight to the fact that the Free Pal Alliance are hypocrites as a whole or even calling them a parody of PETA.

My position here is: should these games even address the ethical dilemma? Once you put the ethics into the game's narrative, the designers are basically forced into going to "Yes, but" territory, since acknowledging the ethical issue leads you to the conclusion that the game only allows you to play as a morally dubious character at best, but given that that would be unwise from a marketing pov (at least for Game Freak), the narrative ultimately has to twist the argument into some sort of fallacy (The Pokemon actually want to be captured/The Free Pal Alliance is full of hypocrites anyway), which in my opinion is actually the heinous design decision, since you're pushing the player into twisting the moral dilemma in a way, thus training moral hypocrisy, rather than the much healthier position "Yes, capturing Pokemon/Pals is evil, but it's a game so no actual sentient creature is being harmed".

Both Pokemon Black/White and Palworld hint at the idea of human-Pokemon/Pal association out of free will through the character of N and the Free Pal Alliance, who do not capture their creatures, but rather they choose to cooperate with them out of real free will, but this option is mechanically impossible for the player (save, arguably, for rare exceptions where Pokemon freely join you through through scripted events). This ends up cementing the ludonarrative dissonance where the player has to justify themselves into thinking that what they're doing is morally acceptable, despite being presented with actually ethical in-lore alternatives that they just do not have access to. It is understandable that, from a game design perspective, the Pokemon/Palworld developers do not want to spend significant effort into reworking the mechanics of Pokeballs/spheres, which are already effectively fun for their gameplay loops, but that leads them into the position where Team Plasma and the Free Pal Alliance have to become caricatures of their actual ideas, which on the other hand is a waste for their respective lores.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my rambling. My Chikipis have already laid all the eggs I need for baking cakes, so I'm off to butchering them for meat, bye.

Crosspost from Reddit

The article collects the reactions of representatives from multiple countries to the provisional ruling, including South Africa, Israel, the US and some other Western and Muslim countries.

I will take no questions, thank you.

Monotropism is a theory of autism that posits that the main functional characteristic of autism is a cognitive configuration that prefers to have less channels of attention. Despite the fact that there's very little discussion about it, it is incredibly consistent regarding what we know about autism, and it might help us understand ourselves a little better.

According to this theory, autistic brains are better wired to pour as many resources as possible in fewer tasks to focus of attention on, in contrast to allistic brains that would prefer to distribute resources among more different tasks at the same time.^1^

How well does this theory in more concrete aspects of life? Let's use communication as an example. People typically use plenty of tools to communicate: verbal language, tonality, hand and facial gestures, etc. If you were to define these as physical problems, this is, tasks that must be approached and worked through by a cognitive mechanism through material means, working according to algorithms of some sort, each of these tasks would have to be separated into individual problems, along with other functions such as coordinating the information gained through each of these processes to build a somewhat coherent whole that allows you to communicate back. If your brain works faster through individual tasks, but cannot handle as many tasks at the same time, it will have a tendency towards ignoring the least useful ones.^2^

If you'd prefer a more down-to-earth metaphor, imagine communication is a card game where polytropic players are receiving one card of each category (verbal language, hand gestures, facial expression, etc.) each round, while monotropic players receive as many cards each round, but they can only belong to one category. Naturally, the monotropic player is heavily incentivized to choose verbal language, because that's the main pillar of communication for contemporary human beings. If you were to give this player the form of a human child, you'd get a kid that uses language with a lot of precision and is probably using more technical words than you'd expect at their age, but doesn't look at your face and often has a very unchanging tone. You can even link this with the double empathy problem, and argue that, since communication is a cooperative two-way problem (problem understood as a task to solve), information flows better when both players are using the same channels of communication in similar intensities (this is: using more technical language isn't that useful if the other person doesn't understand it; using facial gestures isn't useful if the other person isn't looking at your face).

Let's get more practical. If the theory is correct, it would likely follow that the very first thing you have to do in order to prevent cognitive delays in autistic babies and children would be to reduce the sensory complexity of the environment. Choosing where to focus your attention is a cognitive task, which is easily understood when you compare how capable of reading you are in your living room in comparison to a disco, where your brain has to work on filtering the music, the conversations, and the lights. If someone's brain prefers to focus on as few tasks as possible, putting them at a place with plenty of noise and lights will collapse the resources of the brain, hindering their development in an optimistic scenario or even provoking trauma in one of the worst ones.

Note that these previous paragraphs of mine are built as narratives. The site https://monotropism.org/ explains the theory at a divulgative level, references the researchers behind it and some relevant papers, and proposes some practical avenues to improve the lives of autistic people by respecting these different cognitive needs and preferences from the experience of people who have worked with the theory at a scientific level - but it should also be mentioned that monotropism has, unfortunately, received very little attention in comparison to previous theories ( mind-blindness , extreme male brain ) that had very little evidence and have since been proven as bullshit, and therefore there's relatively little research on it despite its apparent solid predictive capacity.^3^

Does any of this ring a bell to you? Can you recall experiences that could be explained through monotropism?

1: Because virtually no person focuses all their attention in one single cognitive process at the same time, and no single person places infinitesimally small amounts of attention into an infinite number of tasks, so I think it'd be more appropriate to talk about monotropism-leaning and polytropism-leaning minds.

2: While the human brain is not a computer, the physical infrastructure of the human mind is the brain, and in order to fulfill specific tasks, it must be able to compute the solution to problems in a material way, even if that material way is immensely different from how contemporary computers work.

3: It might also be noted that, as far as I'm aware, the theory of monotropism would explain autism at a functional level, but not yet at a physical one. This is, while monotropism could serve as a central piece to explain fundamental practical aspects of the lives of autistic people, there would yet not be an explanation on what's the specific neurological difference between the brains of autistic and allistic people.

cross-post from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/10264322

Spain’s much-maligned system for evaluating scientists, in which the sole criterion for career advancement is the publication of papers, is set to be overhauled under new proposals from the country’s National Evaluation and Accreditation Agency (ANECA).

The reforms, announced earlier this month, would for the first time see researchers at Spain’s public universities evaluated on a range of outputs besides papers, and would also encourage the distribution of findings via open-access platforms. Many scientists are welcoming the move, saying it will help academia move on from a system that has been described as establishing a “dictatorship of papers.”

(...)

Under the new system, ANECA wants assessments to consider a broader range of research outputs, including “publications, patents, reports, studies, technical works, artistic works, exhibitions, archaeological excavations, [and the] creation of bibliographic records.” Assessors will no longer consider only the impact factor of the journals in which scientists publish, but also details such as whether the research reaches nonacademic audiences through news reports or government documents. Papers will also score more highly when coproduced with local communities or other nonacademic authors. And in an attempt to reduce the level of public funds being spent on publication costs, assessors will take into account papers published on noncommercial, open-access publishing platforms that don’t charge author fees, such as Open Research Europe.

Spain’s much-maligned system for evaluating scientists, in which the sole criterion for career advancement is the publication of papers, is set to be overhauled under new proposals from the country’s National Evaluation and Accreditation Agency (ANECA).

The reforms, announced earlier this month, would for the first time see researchers at Spain’s public universities evaluated on a range of outputs besides papers, and would also encourage the distribution of findings via open-access platforms. Many scientists are welcoming the move, saying it will help academia move on from a system that has been described as establishing a “dictatorship of papers.”

(...)

Under the new system, ANECA wants assessments to consider a broader range of research outputs, including “publications, patents, reports, studies, technical works, artistic works, exhibitions, archaeological excavations, [and the] creation of bibliographic records.” Assessors will no longer consider only the impact factor of the journals in which scientists publish, but also details such as whether the research reaches nonacademic audiences through news reports or government documents. Papers will also score more highly when coproduced with local communities or other nonacademic authors. And in an attempt to reduce the level of public funds being spent on publication costs, assessors will take into account papers published on noncommercial, open-access publishing platforms that don’t charge author fees, such as Open Research Europe.

“Israel has the right to defend itself, but this response must respect international law,” he continued. “We must urgently stop the humanitarian catastrophe.”

Sanchez, who was making the trip with his Belgian counterpart, Alexander de Croo, also set out Spain’s position on the conflict, which includes a two-state solution, the recognition of Palestine, and a peace conference.

Sira Rego leaves her position as a member of the European Parliament to join the newly formed coalition government of Pedro Sanchez, to be appointed Minister of Youth and Childhood, as part of the party Sumar's cuota.

The politician spent part of her childhood living in Palestine due to her family roots, as her father lives in East Jerusalem. During her political career, she has consistently defended the Palestinian cause.

Google Translate link

There's a shocking amount of small companies where a sizable proportion of the workers are family of the owner. The most perplexing example was a tax consultant whose 4 employees were his wife, his daughter, his son-in-law and his sister.

I've often looked down upon this and have been quick to label it as nepotism, but if I was in a position to hire someone, wouldn't I prioritize someone I care about who was suffering to find acceptable working conditions in the labor market? Then again, this attitude generates a self-perpetuating problem where people can't access to job openings through their own merits and meritocracy, because the family members of the company owner can't find a job through their own merits and meritocracy.

This is an investiture agreement pact between the leading PSOE and its partner Sumar, with PSOE's leader Pedro Sanchez being expected to be re-elected prime minister by the Parliament this month, meaning that, while there is a relatively clear agreement that these parties are about to continue leading the government and have the intention of passing this reform, it'll take a while to be a reality.