Expressive Gaming Update

I updated one of my posts because my friend wanted to post it on his website, which you can find here: www.ramblingwriters.com. I figured I would crosspost my update here.

Expressive Gaming

Pretty much every reasonable person has by now accepted that video games are an art form. I think it's fair to say that anyone who doesn't accept video games as a form of artistic expression has not really experienced what games are capable of. The question of whether or not video games are art has been decisively answered: yes, video games are art.

I'm Skeptical of Online Education

Recently, there's been some debate in the blogosphere about the merits of online education. The current hot thing is something called a “massively open online course,” or MOOC for short. According to wikipedia, an MOOC is “an online course aimed at large-scale interactive participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as videos, readings, and problem sets, MOOCs provide interactive user forums that help build a community for the students, professors, and teaching assistants.” The premise behind MOOCs is that they are a way for large numbers of students to take a course online at the same time, lowering the cost per student dramatically. Optimists hope that the technology behind online education will allow universities to serve far more students at far lower prices than traditional education models. This could disrupt the current trend of rapidly rising tuition costs, which are of course accompanied by rapidly rising levels of student debt.

There are two things that I believe will be shown to be true of online education:

1) Online education, once the problems have been worked out of it, will be just as good at teaching most subjects as traditional educational methods. The best approach may or may not be the MOOC, I don't know. But I don't see any compelling reason why you can't teach most courses online.

2) Employers won't care that the students are learning the material just as well online. Online degrees will be treated as second-class long after they have caught up to traditional classes in educational effectiveness.

Fallacious Fallacies

I saw a website today that had a list of a bunch of logical fallacies, meant to be used so that people arguing on the Internet can link people to whatever particular fallacy they feel has been committed (the site is right here: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com. Click on the fallacy names to see an explanation of each one).

I am extremely skeptical of the idea that this will help further useful debate online. I am actually skeptical of the usefulness of the "fallacy" frame in general. I mainly find that people who accuse other people of committing a particular fallacy are just using their "intro to philosophy" chops to bully someone who actually has a decent point.

Even when someone does commit a fallacy, pointing out the specific fallacy they made is counterproductive. Fallacies are inherently dismissive; they blow off the other person in the argument. If the other person isn't trained in the terms of logical fallacies, they're left with no way to continue their argument, because they don't really even understand the criticism.

It is almost always better, in my opinion, to rely on an actual explanation than to rely on a fallacy catchphrase. If you find yourself wanting to call a fallacy on someone, instead strip out the language of fallacy, and focus on the specific example of why they are wrong in the given case. Don't accuse someone of committing a strawman fallacy; instead, just point out how they overlooked an important part of your position. Don't accuse someone of committing an ad hominem fallacy; just ask them why they think your personal flaws have compromised your opinion on the matter at hand.

The core of honest and productive argument is engagement. Both sides have to make an effort to understand the other, and both sides have to show a certain basic respect for the other side as a person. The language of logical fallacy is highly disengaging. It is dismissive, and it shows a lack of respect for the other person.

Also, a lot of so-called fallacies are really not fallacies at all, or at least deserve more of your time than a simple dismissal. For further explanation, I'm going to go through the list of fallacies from the website above and look at each one and see whether it's really worth keeping around.