University Student Finds Errors in Key Austerity Paper

Woot: you need both. First rule of cognitive and behavioural science: to know what goes weird, you need to work out how it goes when it's not going weird. To work out how it goes "normally"*

Restricting your sample-set pro-actively using selection criteria tailored for more than the specific aims of the experiment? Is inviting bias (and, even if it is for the aims of the experiment: it's why peer review is so vital). <_< Passive restriction might well happen (and even be unavoidable), but it may be identifiable and, thus, quantifiable. Bias is far more insidious. And, to be avoided like the plague.

edited 4th May '13 11:47:32 AM by Euodiachloris

Well, needing both is reasonable, but since video games can only simulated one half of what you need they still fail to be an actual solution to the problem of not being able to get good experimental data on real economies. I already used the lab rat analogy, didn't I? Of course animal testing isn't useless, since rats have pretty much most of the same features as humans. But you're not going to jump straight from testing some drug on rats to selling it in pharmacies without doing some controlled human trials. In this case we might have access to rats, but no humans.

edited 4th May '13 12:21:05 PM by Clarste

Wut. That analogue flunks. Big time. <_<

Point one: it's not the problem with the type of animal you're testing that you're complaining about, but the maze. <_<

Point two: funny thing about mazes... they can be designed to provide or convincingly replicate the exact conditions you swear blind can't be done. You've got to get creative with it, yes... but, it is doable.

Quit raising your hands in the air and saying "not possible": how's about trying?

edited 4th May '13 2:27:15 PM by Euodiachloris

Okay, how do you account for selection bias in games? People choose to play games, they do not choose to participate in their local economy. How about you suggest something instead of waving your hands and claiming that you can simulate anything? Even if you can though, I'm not sure it would be ethical to. You'd have to account for the fear of death, after all.

edited 5th May '13 12:49:04 AM by Clarste

Have you seen how people react to the news of an MMO closing down? People get pretty dang invested in their characters.

Clarste, I take it you're not familiar with operant conditioning, right?

Boiled down: act and behave a certain way for long enough, you will start to feel that way. Very deeply, sometimes: hopefully without too much dissonance (this is one of the reason why actors tend to get into relationships with those they've acted with... and then go on to break those relationships up a lot, too). <_< The same behaviours will be triggered with a deep enough emotional attachments that "it's not life and death" doesn't really matter in a game scenario. If the game is immersive enough and the players invested enough... they will act in a typically stressed way when put under stress under the game conditions.

The brain is funny like that: it can very easily trick itself given the right stimuli. Heck, it does it all the time. What you're seeing right now? Isn't what you think you're seeing, but how your brain interprets the raw visual data and filters it nicely for you using a lot of feedback cues and other tricks. And, you don't even know it.

The same thing happens with emotions and mood: physical feedback is important. It's how an anxiety attack can be mitigated through breath control and deliberate attempts to slow heart-rate. You kid the brain into a different state using the physical side of the equation to trick it with. <shrugs>

Don't knock the stimuli games train the brain into taking seriously enough to respond in kind. Yes, on one level, the gamer knows it is not life and death. However, they will respond as if it is. We... can do many thinks quite honestly that seem contradictory... at the same time.

edited 5th May '13 2:31:18 AM by Euodiachloris

Ever play a game immersive enough that players fear dying in game as much as they fear dying in real life? That they'll take the threat of losing their in-game property as seriously as losing all their real possessions and becoming homeless?

Plus, what about the economically relevant activities nobody wants to put in a game? In an MMO, you can always kill stuff for money, or mine ore, or whatever. Repetitive but reliable. How would you feel about playing a game where you can lose your sole source of income, and then have to spend months or more, not accelerated game-time months, but real months, sending in applications to jobs, and every once in a while getting an interview, but getting rejected every time? If that happened to a player in an MMO, they'd probably just quit. Quitting real life is a less tenable option.

I'm not quite sure what you're getting at, since your first paragraph seem to suppose Euo's argument and then you argued against it.

Also:

Tell that to people who have attempted suicide, or knows somebody who died of suicide.

edited 5th May '13 5:03:23 PM by IraTheSquire

My point is that while games can evoke emotions, stress and so on, that doesn't mean people respond to them the same way that they respond to real life.

Obviously, people do sometimes commit suicide. That's why I said "less tenable option" in real life, not "not an option." If people gave up on life as easily as they gave up on MM Os, our species would be in very different shape.

Again... you apparently haven't looked into this: people have lost jobs, families and lives due to addictive gaming. <_< Seriously: it gets very, very real for a proportion of the population.

@ Desertopa: Ah, right. Trouble is though, for both of those rhetorical questions that you asked the answer is "yes". I've read reports of people dying from playing MM Os for several days straight.

And from memory people have sued others for cheating them of in-game items and won. There is a very good reason why some MM Os made it a requirement that you do not trade your items just to keep themselves safe.

edited 5th May '13 6:22:14 PM by IraTheSquire

Hmm, there's one scene in COD:MW 3 where your player character is shot & killed, it's a horrifying sensation even for it being a single level.

But isn't this thread about "Austerity=Eventual Prosperity" being bogus?

Let's get back on topic.

edited 6th May '13 1:32:52 AM by FrancisUno

Again... you apparently haven't looked into this: people have lost jobs, families and lives due to addictive gaming. <_< Seriously: it gets very, very real for a proportion of the population. tongue

But are those people the basis for the world economy? Because if not, then it's hard to imagine how a minority of people who become extremely engaged in a virtual economy can be used as a sample that would tell us anything about how everyone else behaves in a normal economy.

That's exactly what I meant by selection bias. The people who play games with economies are the people who want to play games with economies. You can't get anyone else to take it seriously because... they don't take it seriously. For every horror story you hear about online gamers, there are probably a hundred other players who just quit the game as soon as they got bored. And possibly intentionally screwed up the economy in their own small way as a parting gift.

And quite frankly the worst kind of game addicts are the ones who drift from game to game because they find the feeling of accomplishing things more compelling than the feeling of owning things. In real life you don't see people go "Welp, I beat the American economy. Time to start over in France."

edited 6th May '13 4:05:36 AM by Clarste

Sure I've looked into this. Hell, MM Os did a number of my family, my dad stopped doing anything else for fun for eleven years and it killed out relationship. But the proportion of the population for which this happens is small when you compare it to the number of people who take their real jobs that seriously. If we're using online games as a model for the real world population, it doesn't matter that the same forces are present, if they don't influence agents in the same way and to the same degree that they do in real life. You can create a model of the laws of physics with all the same forces, but with their strength tweaked a bit here and there, and get something that isn't a roughly accurate model of reality, but a soup of matter which doesn't even resemble the universe as we know it where nothing ever happens but explosions.

edited 6th May '13 6:08:08 AM by Desertopa

I'm going to insist that this thread return to the topic or merge into the General Economics thread.

That's fair. I'm going to bow out, since I have nothing new to say about the original topic, and I prefer not to hop into thousands-of-posts long threads.