Politics... sorry, not going there on this site.
History? One does not "generate" knowledge of history. One discovers it. And failure to check reality in history gets you nonsense like "Europeans wanted spices to cover up the flavor of rotting meat".
That seems more of a philsophic stance of semantics and epistemology rather than a true or meaningful insight. I'm not sure if the distinction is worth making though as this sort of semantic distinction you make could easily be applied to other fields where you or others may otherwise claim to "generate" knowledge. So what does this distinction contribute to this discussion? The bold below?
I agree with Aldarc in that I don't see the importance of this distinction.
If I discover a hitherto unpublished book by Newton with an unexpected result in it, I discover some new mathematical knowledge. If I discover a hitherto unpublished manuscript by Hobsbawm, I discover some historical knowledge. When Newton sits down and works out his stuff, he is creating new knowledge. When Hobsbawm wrote his anlayses of the 19th and 20th centuries, he was creating new knowledge.
The verbs I've suggested aren't the only tenable ones, but they do draw a significant distinction, between
learning of someone else's research and
doing one's own.
Your repeated reference to "counting things" is emotionally loaded, dismissive, and specious.
Then you have misinterpreted me. Some of the most important advances in human knowledge have been the result of careful counting (and sometimes associated measurement). Astronomy is an example.
The most interesting social scientific researcher into judicial decision-making that I've ever had the privilege of interacting with described his work as "counting things carefully". (His intention was to contrast with generalising from a less-than-total count.) The last funding application I submitted was for salary to pay RAs to count things. (In my case, occurrences of certain terms - and hence associated concepts - in particular texts.)
My point is simply that counting things is not the only way to generate knowledge. Ron Edwards does not count things, in his writing on RPGs. That does not mean that he is not generating knowledge about them.
In another active thread, on RPG salaries, it
seems to have emerged that median salaries in Australia are significantly higher than in the US.
Learning that fact requires, among other things, careful counting.
Explaining that fact is also possible - but it cannot be explained by counting. Other methods - eg of the sort developed and applied by Weber - are necessary.
when your theorizing interacts with how humans, broadly, act and think, it will include counting things, because humans have a lot of variability. Failure to do so gets you Freud and Jung, who, it turns out, didn't actually know a lot about how or why people thought of felt as they did.
There are researchers who count who also produce dud results - the phlogiston theorists weren't making mistakes in their measurements! Of course measurements
matter to the explanation of combustion, but they are not all that matters.
How humans, broadly, act and think is crucial to explaining the difference in median wages between the US and Australia. As I said, no one will explain that difference via a method that is confined to counting, not even if supplemented with allied techniques of measurement and statistical generalisation.
How about focusing your criticism on Ron Edwards then? It looks all too easy to lose sight of that topic at the current trajectory.
There are interesting avenues of inquiry into 4e that are not yet fully explored. I'll suggest two:
* Is it possible to reconcile the maths of combat with the maths of skill checks? Does this require abandoning AC as a defence? (
@AbdulAlhazred has done more work on this than anyone else I know; but that might be a reflection of the state of my knowledge.)
* Are players able to initiate a skill challenge? Or is this solely in the domain of the GM?
On that second point, but also kinda implicating the first, here is a quote from
Edwards' campaign document:
Skill challenges bearing significant risk count as encounters . . .
Anything with consequential risks counts: foes, environment, social situations, and more. If you avoid it, i.e., find a way not to engage, then it doesn't count, but skillful evasion does, i.e., converting a fight into a skill challenge. Formal skill challenges use different rules from combat, but an encounter can shift from one to another depending on what happens in it, e.g., fighting as a tactical component of getting past and away from a foe. . . .
[Skill challenges] can be initiated through players' announcements rather than GM planning – in other words, have your characters do motivated and skillful things, especially big things, and you level up with less fights. . . .
What you can't do is dodge "around" fictionally-legitimate fights via Skill Challenges – if and when an adversary decides you need to die, he or she or it will take action to make that happen.
What's the difference between
skilful evasion and
dodging around?
And whereas, in 4e as in other forms of D&D,
I shoot an arrow at it tends to invoke the combat mechanics by default, how does a player initiate a skill challenge?
