The World's Largest Social Laboratory: How Videogames are Saving your Life

Those of you who choose to squander their days in a banal and wizard-free existence may not be familiar with MMPORGs - Massively Multi-Player Online Roleplaying Games. MMPORG players inhabit a game world and, through a fictional character, negotiate a complex, ever-changing, and challenge-filled terrain. This world is not their own, but is shared by other human-controlled avatars, who constantly interact with one another. In case you presumed that these were relatively small affairs, the World of Warcraft "universe" boats a population of 11.5 million players.

Back to real life. MMPORGs are a ridiculously potent tool for social scientists. In September 2005, World of Warcraft engineers introduced an enemy character with the power to pass a "Corrupted Blood" spell. Anyone in the enemy's area could contract this debilitating spell and spread it, contagiously, to others. The disease was meant to remain restricted to one region of the game, but a coding error let it spread across the Warcraft universe.

Chaos ensued.

The millions of human players reacted as they would to a real life epidemic. Quarantines were set up, old haunts were abandoned, long-time allies chose between loyalty and self-interest, infected characters were sent to mingle with enemy clans, etc. In fact, the gamers' collective reactions are an amazing study of how human populations adapt to epidemics. The only difference between this "study" and actual human experiments is that, in a digital world, every single step of every individual's activity is tracked and recorded online. We know, step by step, how millions of individuals separately and collectively faced a rampant disease.

Wow.

See here for some economic applications. Wave of the future, bro.

I Always Thought They Just Emerged From the Earth's Core

1. Every shul has them. This is where they come from. But the question remains. Who orders them?

2. The pronunciation. Really? Is this a joke? Don't you make these things?

I Don't Curse too Much

But this is fucking chilling.

God, I want to make movies.

The War of Northern Aggression

What was once just an extended rant by Chavruta, and a talking point featured on Curb, is now a recent development in Sino-American affairs.

Basically: the Civil War was fought to keep the Union whole. Who the heck cares? 600,000 dead for that?! (No: they didn't fight it to end slavery. They thought it because slavery was becoming an issue strong enough to tear apart federalism.)

A Chinese official recently likened his nation's violent opposition to Tibetan independence with an appeal to Lincoln.

Lincoln played an incomparable role in protecting the national unity and territorial integrity of the United States.

It's widely known that Obama esteems Lincoln as his political model. And, of course, Obama personally benefited from Civil War abolition:

Thus on this issue we hope that President Obama, more than any other foreign leader, can better, more deeply grasp China's stance on protecting national sovereignty and territorial integrity

Man. Tibet may be another story . . . but I think they might understand the Civil War better than we do . . .

Secular College Campuses: What they Don't Tell you

Search the entire Jewish world and name the one context where you can find nashim tzidkaniyot, careful to daven mincha and maariv with a minyan?

Secular college campuses.

Translating Judaism: Parsha Names

First in a series.

I'm really interested in how the Jewish experience is altered by being processed through an English speaking mind.

There's no way that tefillot mean the same thing to an American and a native Hebrew speaker, even if the American *knows*, in an intellectual sense, the meaning of the words. The Israeli speaks natural *words*, the American speaks in symbols.

That's just an example. Today's story:

There's something strange about the third column in this chart.

Unnatural, almost eery, sort of corny. What's it like for a native Hebrew speaker? There must be a difference between hearing "mikeitz" and . . . . . . . . . . "at the end of".

Spinoza on the Parsha

You know that scene in Behalotekha* where two men begin prophesying in the camp, and Joshua implores Moshe to incarcerate them?

(*Behalotekha: winner of the "Most Annoying Parsha Name to Transliterate" award? Just a thought.)

Moshe responds:

הַמְקַנֵּא אַתָּה לִי; וּמִי יִתֵּן כָּל-עַם יְהוָה, נְבִיאִים--כִּי-יִתֵּן יְהוָה אֶת-רוּחוֹ, עֲלֵיהֶם.

Are you so zealous for my sake?! If only all God's people were prophets! If only God placed his spirit on all of them! (see Num 11:27-29)

Joshua sees additional prophets as a threat to Moshe's authority. Moshe, however, welcomes that possibility.

I always read this as reflecting on Moshe's love for God's people. Appointed to lead, he nonetheless realizes that having but one authority/conduit to God is not ideal: if only all Jews could share in my authority and my direct experience of God's word. These verses reflect Moses' righteousness, humility, and enlightened view of leadership. These prophets, we learn, shouldn't be punished but celebrated.

Spinoza, in a footnote to his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (n. 36), offers a radically different approach:

Moshe found his right of ruling so wearying that he preferred dying to ruling alone, as is evident from what he said fourteen verses before, "I'm not able this whole nation by myself, it is too heavy for me. If this is how you want to treat me, God, then please, just kill me instead, so I don't have to see my own misery" (11:14-15). He replies to Joshua as follows . . . "would that the right of consulting God would return to the people, so that the rule would be with them!"

Spinoza clarifies that the prophets did deserve punishment, but that Moshe simply didn't care to punish them. This scene is a symbol of Moshe's frustration, misery, and rebellion against his own authority.

What Women Want - and Stern girls get?

The Washington Post ran a nice article on the psychology of love and relationships (as seen on Overcoming Bias). Three interesting bits, before relating how this effects the frum dating world (as not covered in the Post or OB):

1. Popular opinion is that women speed-daters are more picky than their male counterparts. But one needs bear in mind that, typically, women spend the entire evening at one table, while men rotate after each round, approaching each new lady like an applicant for an interview. However, when you reverse the roles and have the women rotate, the men are more picky.

2. Friendship versus love:

When it comes to platonic relationships, if a person tends to like everyone, that goodwill is more likely to be reciprocated. But in romantic relationships, that wasn't the case. If a single guy digs all the women in the room, Finkel explains, "the women don't like him back." The turn-on, he continues, comes when a person feels "uniquely desired."

3. When asked what they are looking for in a partner, women tend to emphasize earning potential and social stature, while men tend to focus on looks (scientifically known as "hotness".) In reality though, the choices made by speed-daters don't pan out: women tend to care just as much about physical attractiveness, and men pay just as much attention to their date's financial prospects.

Why is #3 true?

Several commentators on Overcoming Bias noted that "what I'm looking for in a partner" is a long-term relationship question. But the choices speed-daters make are drastically short term (swapping phone numbers). In the long term, men and women seek different things in a partner, but when it comes to grabbing a drink on Thursday night and seeing where it leads, both sides are looking for pretty similar things: decent looks, decent income.

And, now, for the Jews out there:

Speed-daters say they prefer one thing but choose something else because, even if they all sincerely want a long-term relationship, no such "market" exists. No woman is offering herself on a twenty year basis, take it or leave it. The only "units" one finds in the "market" are short-term: a drink, a night out, a weekend away, whatever it might be. Put dozens of these small-units together and you can build a relationship of one thousand years - but as long as partners have the ability to break up whenever they want, both sides will only allow it to continue if short term goals are met. Long term goals will never be realized.

So, maybe frummers have this right. The social norms that force four or five dates to quickly transform into marriage, coupled with the great social costs of divorce, creates a long-term "market". Men and women are in fact offering themselves up for something like a "twenty year contract". One wonders: Do Orthodoxers have a tighter correlation between what they want and what they actually choose? Does this have a positive effect on the success of frum marriages? Does this explain the complaint that, compared to other Americans, shidduch daters care too much about a girl's looks and a guy's cash?

A Spurt of New Posts

It's been a long time since I've rocked and rolled. Inspired, in part, by I Swear I'm not a Blog, but, primarily, by the sweet temptation of seeing myself in writing, I hope to come up with a couple of posts of a week.

Nothing mythic or grandiose (as of yet) - just a fair spattering of Bite Size Ben (quite possibly the worst blog title in the history of alliteration). Enjoy.