Death Is Bad

The previous post got me to thinking about my old raiding days. I used to play World of Warcraft. The highest-end content required huge sacrifices of time and a lot of skill to complete, and resulted in rewards of the best weapons and armor available. Every few months this content was made much easier, so that less dedicated players could get those same rewards without nearly as much effort. At first this was met with howls of protest from the elites. Why should the unwashed masses get the same rewards as them for much less effort?

Eventually everyone stopped complaining. Partly because there was no use complaining, if you wanted to keep enjoying the game you simply accepted this and moved on. But also because the elite raiders realized they had gotten something for their efforts – they’d gotten the use of that top-end weaponry for months before anyone else. This gave them an advantage in all things, and it gave them a head start on everyone else when newer, harder dungeons were released.

The cyclical nature of the game really drove something home for everyone who has played it long enough: No gains are permanent. The world is always growing and expanding. Your opponents are evolving. And you must continue to strive and evolve as well, or you will be left behind.

The sexually-strict I spoke of the other day did gain something from their abstinence*. They gained freedom from those consequences while they existed, and the status of virtue to be had while it was offered. They feel, like many people do, that Gains Should Be Permanent. That once a certain amount of effort has been put in and a certain objective has been achieved, they need not struggle anymore. Anyone who’s ever cleaned their home should realize how futile that thinking is. Life is a constant struggle against entropy. You can never rest on your laurels for long. The world changes, and all the accolades and advantages you won in the past helped you for that time. It may have helped you a LOT, and maybe for a LONG time. But eventually that passes, and you must accept falling from the status of the elite, or continue to strive. No living off your Tier 2 Set for the rest of your days.

*well, the older ones did anyway. The young ones who have been hobbled by an ancient tradition are rightly bitter about it, but their aiming at the wrong target. Shed the old religion, don’t try to force the world back into the deplorable condition that made that religion adaptive.

While we’re on the subject of transparency, here’s another example: David Petraeus, the director of the CIA, resigned after an investigation uncovered that he had been involved in an extramarital affair.

Who gives a damn if Patraeus was having an affair? I don’t know enough about him to know if he was a good or bad CIA director, but I don’t think who he was sleeping with has any bearing on that. If everyone acknowledged their own sexual history instead of trying to bury it and feign piety this wouldn’t be an issue.

It was said that an affair makes him susceptible to blackmail. It wouldn’t if this had been in the open from the beginning.

There’s been some odd comments about “lack of judgment”. Really? He was the director of the CIA, and he had an long-term affair with a person he had a close relationship with. That says quite a lot about the quality of his judgment, in my opinion. As director of the CIA he could be banging three new women every weekend. THAT would show a lack of judgment. This? The only major issue is that he didn’t clear it with his wife first. And I can sorta forgive him for that – he got married 37 years ago, back in the sexual dark ages. Same way you can forgive a 57-year-old gay dude for being in the closet.

In a more sane society he’d just introduce the world to his mistress and go back to work. In a transparent society he wouldn’t even have to do that. Instead he’s forced to retire. /sigh

Many people seem to think that their vote doesn’t matter much, because unless their vote happens to be the one that breaks a perfect tie then the outcome of the election would’ve been the same whether or not they voted. This is dumb.

There aren’t any real exact ties once you get more than a few hundred votes. There is too much noise in the system. Some votes are mis-read, some ballots are lost. Some people accidentally punched the wrong hole or read the wrong name, some ballots are hard to make out, and sometimes simple counting errors are made. How many times have you counted up the cards in your deck and not gotten the number you expected? Not often, but occasionally. Even computers can be glitchy.

There errors are random and so they don’t make much difference to the final count – they basically balance out over the long run. But they make getting an exact count impossible. If a vote is close enough to be within a tenth of a percent or so, it is essentially an irreconcilable tie. And let’s face it, when the population is THAT evenly split between candidates, an election is of no use. You might as well flip a coin, it’d be just as fair.

So an individual vote is not important because it might be the magical vote that actually makes the difference. Each vote is important because it gives its side a little more weight in this balance. The further the result is from a 50/50 split, the more clear and meaningful it is. If your vote pushes your favored side from 54.32% to 54.33%, that has made the result that much better for you. Go vote, because in the end the actual person sitting in the seat may not make a huge difference, but the weight of public support for one side or the other helps steer the future.