One doesn't need to supply a counter-argument to note that an initial argument is flawed. Thinking that one does is also a fallacy.
For example, were I to claim that the moon was made of cheese, it is immaterial to the rationality of that claim whether or not you could make a compelling counter-argument. All you need to do is point out whatever makes my argument wrong.
Okay then, put up or shut up. Let us say that I have just said the moon is made of cheese. Point out what makes that argument wrong WITHOUT, and this is important, making a counterargument. You are free to define "counterargument" however you wish, but be advised that MY definition is "persuasive discourse intended to contrast, oppose, or refute other persuasive discourse" and you must state yours or I will apply mine.
While you're working on that, let me talk about tautologies. Tautologies are statements of equivocation. Here are some examples.
F = ma
the number of ways to pick N objects from a set of M, order unimportant = M! / N! (M - N)!
systems within a society = adaptation, goal-seeking, integration, latency
If you accept a tautology and you know that one side of the equation is true, you know that the other side of the equation is also true. Tautologies work with ideas other than equations too. For example:
The cities in Ohio are a subset of the cities in the United States.
For all statements A, B, and C: If "if A and B are true, then C is true" is true, and "A and B are true" is true, then C is true.
In fact if you buy modern cognitive research people are actually bang on about the set/subset relationship and the whole system is really built of set/subset relationships. Equivalence is just a way of saying that each side of the equation is a subset of the other side, for example.
Tautologies don't necessarily work all the time. For example, if you know a city is in the United States then you know nothing about whether it's in Ohio or not. But often they can be way to get more knowledge out of the same amount of information. Want some knowledge? 'course ya do.
For tautologies to be useful, several things have to hold. First, you must understand what the operational parts of the tautology represent - what the "F", "m", and "a" stand for and what those words mean. Second, you must map parts of the tautology onto the stream of information and get enough from it so you can apply the tautology to the rest. Third, and most importantly, you must accept that the tautology applies to at least some things that you do not currently know.
Done with that not-counterargument yet? No? Have an interlude.
Raven Crowking said:
Following a flawed syllogism does, indeed, lead to fallicious logic. However, following a flawed syllogism is not the only form of fallacy.
Riddle me this, Bat-nuisance: if you were to make a portmanteau of the words "fallacious" and "delicious", what would it be?
And we'll pick up after this message from our original poster.
Raven Crowking said:
As soon as we leave the fallacious reasoning behind, we can stop pointing it out.
For tautologies to be useful, they must deal in some part with things you do not know. Is the most useful tautology one that deals with everything you do not know? Well, "everything is everything" is a tautology, but it doesn't provide any new knowledge as such. Once you have ascertained that something is a part of everything, this tautology tells you that... it is a part of everything. Thanks, tautology. That's real helpful there.
No, the most useful tautology is one that takes knowledge you can get and turns it into knowledge you want.
I won't go over all the ways to try and make those kinds of tautologies here, but some easy examples of starter tautologies include: something that is true now will be true forever; something that is true now has always been true; what is true for several objects is true for some category to which they belong in common; truths applying to some category of objects are themselves a category with some thing in common.
Note: starter tautologies. When you form a tautology which includes things you do not already know, you can never entirely prove it true until you know everything it might encompass. But you can very easily prove it false, by presenting true information to the tautology and showing that it produces false results. And then you abandon your tautology as no longer useful, or you split it into two tautologies - an amended version of the original and one about the conditions under which the original failed - and try to make them both as useful as possible.
And of course, because you are human, you will attempt to learn things from other people, including their tautologies. Including the conditions under which they fail. Including the conditions under which yours fail. Two people each putting up one proto-tautology and learning about the differences in their results and the conditions under which they fail - now that's an argument.
Now I know this may come as a surprise to you, but humans are not entirely rational creatures. Sometimes they do pursue rational goals in rational ways. Other times they use rationality to further the pursuit of subjective goals - and can ask other people to check their rationality even if they disagree on their goals. Sometimes they follow tradition, doing things for no reason other than they have been done that way, and not willing to examine them. Other times they follow their emotions.
Some of the things humans can do don't help themselves or other people learn about tautologies and failure conditions. They can be irrational, in which case they don't feed into tautologies. They can be irrelevant, in which case they have no relation to the tautologies in the argument. Or they can be unuseful, in that while they do relate to the tautologies in the argument, applying them to said tautologies does not result in more useful tautologies.
And because people were seeking useful tautologies, they began to classify these unhelpful statements. The they in this case is a line stretching back from Aristotle, and they gave the classifications names to help people remember them.
These classifications, like all tautologies, are not perfect. "But yesterday you killed a man with your bare hands!" while of the form of an attack on character, can also be an attempt to request more specifics on the statement "I have always believed all human life is sacred and should be treated with respect." "More people like it!" while of the form of an appeal to the populace, is also a legitimate response to "why should we renew this program for another year of broadcast, instead of its midseason replacement?"
But they do provide useful guidelines. For example, appealing to authority is citing an acknowledged sound position, but without attempting to connect it to the argument at hand. With no connection the citation is irrelevant and unhelpful.
Cool. Imagine the poor fool wondering if he should just eat whatever food is offered, or become a vegetarian. There is no distinction, we are told, because both meat and vegetables are food.
Yes. There is no distinction between meat and food, or between vegetables and food, or in fact between food and food. At least, no innate distinction. Someone wondering, with no prior convictions, whether to eat food or eat vegetarian, is indeed a poor fool, because he is trying to make a decision that does not mean anything. But if our someone here has prior convictions, then the distinction has meaning. If, for example, he wishes to pursue a vegetarian philosophy, then obviously he can be much more sure of following his philosophy if he eats vegetables than if he eats any food, and this is because only eating vegetables is consistent with his philosophy. Or perhaps he is the son and grandson of hunters, to whom "food" means "every part of the animal" but has been advised by his doctor to eat more vegetables. Unlike most people, he does not classify vegetables as food, and so the decision means something to him.
Raven Crowking said:
Now, add into the mix the actual topic (i.e., mechanics-first or flavour-first design), and it gets truly wonky, because (obviously) this isn't a discussion where anybody is suggesting that rpgs don't create stories, but rather a discussion about what aspects of an rpg (specifically, focus on mechanics or flavour) work best toward that goal.
I.e., given the question, "Is mechanic-first or flavour-first the best way to structure an rpg to gain the greatest level of satisfaction?" the answer herein espoused is "They both tell stories, so there is no distinction."
Today has been a day of jumping to step 2 and watching it work so much so that I have often forgotten step 1.
Here is step 1. "Mechanic-first" or "flavor-first" is not a generally useful distinction to make. The important factor is ideas: both mechanics and flavor consist of ideas structured in relationships to each other. They are not identical structures, of course, but all of them are composed of ideas.
Now, I am assuming that people are equally apt at getting ideas out of the mechanics and flavor. Some people have a poor head for understanding numbers. Others are not so good with extracting ideas from text. I am also assuming that the mechanics and flavor are both equally amenable to having ideas extracted from them, though both can be obfuscatory - the mechanics we call "unintuitive", the flavor "unclear", and this does not refer necessarily to an innate failing of either but to an inability to pull the ideas out from them. It may well be that there is no idea underneath, that the mechanics are nonsensical or the flavor meaningless. But this is not true of all mechanics or all flavor.
The difference between mechanics and flavor is one of relationships. Mechanics are more often about equivalence or numerical comparison. Flavor is more often about the primal relationships, sets and subsets. And I do not doubt that different people use these relationships in different ways to tell different stories!
What I have to say is this - I find it easier to make up primal relationships, sets and subsets, than deeper ones, equivalences and ratios and the sort. I believe it is easier for humans in general, so a system written to best help a general audience would be well-served to have solid mechanics and leave flavor malleable. Why not present a solid flavor? Because then personal choices of flavor are subject to a meaningful appeal to authority.
Raven Crowking said:
Let's go back to Old and New Basketball. Following the logic espoused above, not only does it become "wrong" to suggest that, say, New Basketball is better than Old due to the shotclock, but it is wrong to even suggest that there is an "Old" and "New" basketball. Neither is fundamentally opposed to playing with a basketball on a basketball court, so if someone tries to discuss a distinction between the two, the point may be taken as nonsensical.
Colour me unimpressed by this line of reasoning.
...uh, well, yes. You suggested that new basketball was not better than old due to the shot clock. You suggested that there was no old or new basketball, and that neither were opposed to playing with a basketball on a basketball court. And I'm pretty sure you're suggesting, right now, that the point should be taken as nonsensical. And then you declare yourself unimpressed with your own line of reasoning?
Or is that
my line of reasoning? I'm sorry, I can see the antecedent stretching back from the 'this', looking for something to hook onto, but I can't see where it lands.
In the hopes that perhaps you are some mad absurdist genius and the entire point of this exercise was to elicit the few paragraphs that follow, I will be as explicit as possible, and then brace myself for my perceptions to shift as the electrodes are lifted from my head and I realize I am just a brain in a jar of Tang.
Let us consider basketball in the abstract. There is nothing there. There is nothing real until we make it so.
So: let us consider minimalist basketball: one-on-one, three-on-three, five-on-five, on an asphalt court with only enough uniform for one side to tell itself from the other. No scoreboard, no timer, people playing for the fun of it. What purpose does the shot clock have here? None. But we can do something important - we can see how often they take shots. Often it is fast. Very fast. The shot is the uncertainty, that moment of tension and trust where the ball is out of everyone's hands. And even as people cling to the familiar they crave uncertainty. This is the point of a game - any game. Uncertainty without the risk that accompanies it. It does not matter to the player that shot whether he hit or missed, but whether he was satisfied with the shot. If we place the shot clock beside the court and hire a referee to enforce it, it will likely serve no purpose, resetting before it even gets halfway. How can I comment on the timing of the shot clock with such certainty? Because the people who set the rules for the shot clock made these observations, of specific games of basketball all falling under the category of minimalist.
But now, let us introduce risk. Let us put time limit on the play, an end to the game. Let us keep score. Let us say: it is important whether your team's score is higher or lower than the other team's. The people who live in your town will care, and they will applaud you when it is higher and denounce you when it is lower. Perhaps you know some of them. Do you want them denouncing you? You will be paid to play this game, to spend your time in practice so that your team's score will be higher. Perhaps you will be paid more if you win. Perhaps if you lose it will be considered that money is wasted on you, and you will not be paid any more at all. Why is it meaningful to consider these things? Because these are the conditions of "professional basketball".
But with this risk, uncertainty becomes less attractive. When your team leads you will hold onto the ball rather than take a shot - why risk the lead? When your team trails you will try to foul the opposing team - they can only gain 1 point on the foul shot but you may gain 2 if you can seize on the foul shot to take the ball and score. Motivated not by the thrill of uncertainty but the fear of risk, the choice of what to do is already made for you. And the people watching you - they are there to live through your uncertainty, to empathize with you and feel it for themselves. It is not that they will not step in for you, they can not - you are paid to practice this game and they are not. If you are mired in risk, then this is all they feel. Why can I say these things when I was not there? Because the people who were there said them. It is written down in a book by a sports historian named Terry Pluto, and as a matter of record for the sports pages of 1954.
To this game dominated by risk - a paradox! Risk was supposed to have bled out of the game! - add the shot clock. The shot clock is not uncertainty or risk. The shot clock is a fact. If you do not surrender the ball to uncertainty within the next XX seconds, you will lose it. This is not up for debate. No longer is there an obvious choice. No longer can you mitigate the risk of losing by holding onto the ball. No longer is it a good idea to take a chance on a foul to get the ball back - this was the purpose of the foul, to discourage these chances, but that has been ignored - because the shot will happen, and then you will have a real chance. And the people watching - now they can feel the chances you take again, now they get their uncertainty back. Is the risk gone? The risks associated with losing the game may as well be. Unless you do something truly terrible there are too many people making too many choices to be sure of the impact you had. There is the risk that you will turn out to be unfit for your job and be replaced, but this is because of the nature of jobs, not the nature of basketball with the shot clock. Players making meaningful choices and having fun within the game, and more fans enjoying watching the game. This is basketball after the shot clock.
The shot clock does not fundamentally alter the nature of basketball. But a game is more than its nature - it is also its own groundwork for smooth interactions between the players. If one player plays fairly by rules other than the shot clock, but is more focused on winning the game than having fun, the shot clock will ensure that the steps he takes to win the game will not result in less fun for everyone else.
In the best case, the shot clock does not matter. In the worst case, it helps enormously. So, the shot clock is a net improvement to basketball, especially pro basketball, especially when considered as a spectator sport.
Why did I not just say this in the first place?
Haha, "just".
I chose to use this time to explain my reasons, but it is a lot of time, and because this is so long it may be hard to read in places. I usually choose to answer in short sharp statements not only to save time but to practice making a good, persuasive statement in a small amount of time. And of course, it will be more instructive to anyone who can take the things I say and from them get the ideas underneath from them, since they will be making the journey there via their path instead of mine and thus will remember it better.
Raven Crowking said:
EDIT: BTW, satisfaction and fun are not co-equal. There are a great many things in life that might be fun without being satisfying, and likewise a great many that might be satisfying without being fun. Judging everything on the basis of "fun" alone is likely to cause a great deal of dissatisfaction.
So let's try short and punchy again. Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Perhaps this is your basis? At bottom food, warmth, shelter; at top belonging, commitment, affection. Top depends on satisfying bottom. At peak, self-actualization, the greatest good. It depends on satisying all others.
Fun is extra satisfaction. It comes from making meaningful choices. Choices like how to be satisfied in all the layers but the topmost. The topmost is having the power to make all those choices.
The hierarchy is not absolute. Force of will can make you believe you are satisified when you are not. People can ignore food to the point of starvation for any reason or none at all - but if you have starved to death, you are dead and as far from self-actualized as you can be. Using force of will at other layers has other consequences - less dire, perhaps, but it has them.
When someone says "you are having too much fun" they mean "you are acting satisfied but you should not be". They may be wrong, but that is the argument they make.
