Atomic Nerds

My little girl is all Ch.’d up.

…Whoops, wrong photo, and it has an extra dog to boot. This is probably the right one.

According to the AKC, she has a lovely properly proportioned head, a nice topline, and great rear angulation. Of rather more relevance to me is that she’s an athletic varmint-killer whose nice structure protects her from injury, possibly the cleverest dog I have ever owned, and a sweet-natured and rock-stable clown. She is definitely opinionated but makes this known with vocal dramatics rather than physicality, and nothing humbles her more or faster than banishment- she doesn’t need people to give her something to do or amuse her at all times, but she craves to be part of the family at all times. Still, she’s watchful for strangers and for strange animals, and even has a special bark to warn us about snakes.

In tangential news, her hips and elbows are very sound under x-ray, her retinas clear, and while her thyroid hasn’t been tested (yet), her coat is thick and glossy, her energy levels fine, and her weight and condition fit. Not that this is in any way currently relevant.

Daniel Sarewitz over at Slate has identified a problem, and the problem is that there are very few Republican-identified scientists. Let’s join him in analysis and see if what he thinks is the problem, is the problem.

It is no secret that the ranks of scientists and engineers in the United States include dismal numbers of Hispanics and African-Americans, but few have remarked about another significantly underrepresented group: Republicans.

I can’t say as I regard a direct representation comparison between race and political philosophy as the world’s most promising start, but let’s grant him the point about minority in and of itself.

No, this is not the punch line of a joke. A Pew Research Center Poll from July 2009 showed that only around 6 percent of U.S. scientists are Republicans; 55 percent are Democrats, 32 percent are independent, and the rest “don’t know” their affiliation.

Or as I would put it, 39% either refuse categorically to associate with either party or refuse to involve themselves in politics period, but that’s not the point of the article; the point of the article is that Blue Team has a bunch and Red Team only has a handful. The linked poll, by the way, is interesting reading all on its own, and the questions themselves are very telling in a way this article largely misses.

This immense imbalance has political consequences. When President Obama appears Wednesday on Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters (9 p.m. ET), he will be there not just to encourage youngsters to do their science homework but also to reinforce the idea that Democrats are the party of science and rationality. And why not? Most scientists are already on his side. Imagine if George W. Bush had tried such a stunt—every major newspaper in the country would have run an op-ed piece by some Nobel Prize winner asking how the guy who prohibited stem-cell research and denied climate change could have the gall to appear on a program that extols the power of scientific thinking.

Okay, look, I find the Democrats’ self-lauding claim that they are the party of “science” pretty annoying too, but I seriously cannot get upset that a Democratic president is going to appear on Mythbusters. As little as I think of Obama, any president is a role model to children, and Mythbusters is an excellent show that really does promote critical thinking and the idea that science and engineering are dynamic and exciting and fun. I would have been just as thrilled if Bush had done it, and even if he had and the partisan press had tied itself in knots the people watching- the children among them- would still have gotten the message that the president also thinks that science is awesome.

As members of that partisan press tend to easily forget, only they and a pretty small minority of the public give a shit to the degree that they get themselves in a lather over things like this. Hell, the Pew study he linked in and of itself shows the very large gap between the public at large and scientists in the degree to which they even connect science and politics at all.

Yet, partisan politics aside, why should it matter that there are so few Republican scientists? After all, it’s the scientific facts that matter, and facts aren’t blue or red.

No. They aren’t. Politics is about policy, and science is about fact, which is itself value-neutral. Everyone involved would do well to remember this at all times, particularly the author of this article. Science is conducted by scientists, who are humans with political thoughts and preferred policy ideas based on those, which does have an impact on how science and politics interact.

Well, that’s not quite right. Consider the case of climate change, of which beliefs are astonishingly polarized according to party affiliation and ideology. A March 2010 Gallup poll showed that 66 percent of Democrats (and 74 percent of liberals) say the effects of global warming are already occurring, as opposed to 31 percent of Republicans. Does that mean that Democrats are more than twice as likely to accept and understand the scientific truth of the matter?

Frankly? It very possibly does, and this goes right back to the way questions are worded and the difference between science, policy, and belief. If you traded the question of “climate change” for a carefully worded question about whether natural selection produces changes in life over time and you got a similarly polarized result along political lines it absolutely WOULD represent a case in which scientific reality was accepted much more by one party than the other.

Or could it be that disagreements over climate change are essentially political—and that science is just carried along for the ride?

Not really. The discussion of the facts and methodologies of climate science among climate scientists barely resembles the public debate. Disagreements about what climate change will ultimately and absolutely result in are scientific, disagreements about what policies we should implement to cope with it are political, and disagreements about whether the climate changes at all are pretty much a “people who have got their facts right versus people who have not”.

This is why I keep harping on how questions are worded and how important this is. If I had been polled, I would have responded to the question in the Pew survey- a choice between “the Earth is getting warmer due to human activity” and “No solid evidence Earth is getting warmer” with the former. Excess CO2 really does have a warming effect, there really is a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere than there would be without human activity, and we are certainly warmer than we would be without it. This is as mundane a set of statements scientifically as “blankets produce insulating effect on humans”. The actual point of relevant climate science is how much extra warming CO2 alone can provide (every scientist agrees it has a point of diminishing returns), what other factors will retard or speed further warming, and whether this will be, in the larger picture of climate over time, a small effect largely absorbed by more important driving variables or a critically large one that does the driving.

For 20 years, evidence about global warming has been directly and explicitly linked to a set of policy responses demanding international governance regimes, large-scale social engineering, and the redistribution of wealth. These are the sort of things that most Democrats welcome, and most Republicans hate. No wonder the Republicans are suspicious of the science.

And in a beautiful demonstration of my own point, the author thinks that questioning the science is a completely rational and natural result of questioning the policy agenda leftists have pushed as a reaction to the science.

Think about it: The results of climate science, delivered by scientists who are overwhelmingly Democratic, are used over a period of decades to advance a political agenda that happens to align precisely with the ideological preferences of Democrats. Coincidence—or causation?

Actually, policy wonks advance their political agenda over a period of decades and use the results of climate science to do it, often dramatically reworked and sometimes actively and deliberately misrepresented. Reading the scientific review section of any given year of IPCC reporting versus the policy recommendations is an excellent representation of this process, as the two documents’ only resemblance to each other at points is that they both assert there is a climate that is subject to change.

Here’s a couple more things to think about. Republicans accept denying the central theory of biology and actively pushing its elimination in public education as a valid political position in their platform, while Democrats, while frequently misunderstanding it, accept it as scientific reality. Democrats use the results of climate science to justify a leftist agenda, whereas Republicans are willing to deny the results of climate science rather than discuss them and how they would fit in their own policy agenda. Very few scientists are willing to identify as Republicans. Coincidence- or causation?

The only thing more galling than seeing your discipline warped and used for political ends is being told your discipline is lies and to come back when you have something they want to hear.

During the Bush administration, Democrats discovered that they could score political points by accusing Bush of being anti-science. In the process, they seem to have convinced themselves that they are the keepers of the Enlightenment spirit, and that those who disagree with them on issues like climate change are fundamentally irrational.

From what I’ve seen to my chagrin, those that disagree with them on climate change are often willing to aid this bit of branding by being fundamentally irrational. One of the reasons scientists and those that think themselves scientifically literate are so reflexively willing to dismiss climate skeptics- which covers everything from people skeptical of the catastrophic anthropogenic scenario to the “climate never changes without a meteor” people- is that they do contain an awful lot of blatant cranks, including many who are anti-science cranks in general.

Meanwhile, many Republicans have come to believe that mainstream science is corrupted by ideology and amounts to no more than politics by another name. Attracted to fringe scientists like the small and vocal group of climate skeptics, Republicans appear to be alienated from a mainstream scientific community that by and large doesn’t share their political beliefs. The climate debacle is only the most conspicuous example of these debilitating tendencies, which play out in issues as diverse as nuclear waste disposal, protection of endangered species, and regulation of pharmaceuticals.

Read as: “Republicans ceded their ground with science and scientists as eagerly as Democrats claimed it”.

How would a more politically diverse scientific community improve this situation?

The cart doesn’t go in front of the horse, Sparky. The question you should be asking as “how would a Republican party more willing to dump the intellectually indefensible improve this situation?”.

First, it could foster greater confidence among Republican politicians about the legitimacy of mainstream science.

It’s not the purpose of science to make Republicans politically comfortable. I would in fact suggest that it is precisely this attitude that produced the current situation.

Second, it would cultivate more informed, creative, and challenging debates about the policy implications of scientific knowledge. This could help keep difficult problems like climate change from getting prematurely straitjacketed by ideology. A more politically diverse scientific community would, overall, support a healthier relationship between science and politics.

No argument with this part, but I’d also turn it around to “Republicans welcoming science without passing the bare results through an ideology filter first would create a much healthier conservatism”.

I agree with most of the rest of the article even if I think the author has his premises and priorities rather backwards, so the last bit I’ll fisk is from the very last bit of the article:

In lieu of any real effort to understand and grapple with the politics of science, we can expect calls for more “science literacy” as public confidence begins to wane. But the issue here is legitimacy, not literacy. A democratic society needs Republican scientists.

No, the issue is both, and includes the legitimacy of intellectual conservatism. A democratic society doesn’t need Republican scientists any more than it needs Whig scientists. You’ll note that the supposed overwhelming majority enjoyed by the Democrats among scientists is 55%- a bare five percent over “just half”, and I personally consider that a testament to the overall diversity of the scientific community given the self-inflicted handicaps to conservatism among academic scientists that I’ve been harping on. What they’re unwilling to identify as is Republican, and not being a Republican isn’t remotely the same thing as being a partisan liberal.

You want the discussion of science and policy to include your team more? Your team needs to stop actively running the fuck away from it first. You want a publicly credible, strong alternative to leftist-driven scientific policy? Be a legitimate alternative.

Short and highly speculative: through a spate of watching subtitled movies in various foreign languages (Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Thai, among others), sitting in an audio stew of these various and often unrelated tongues has started to make me wonder about various human exclamations that we may or may not classify as words but seem to be universally understood and always seem to have the same meaning and emotional context. There may be thousands of variations across the globe for the noise a dog’s bark makes, which is always a pseudoword that attempts specifically to mimic a sound but does so filtered through the tones a given language possesses, but some non-words don’t seem to vary remotely as much.

Among this family of human universal vocabulary I’d put:

“Awwwww (lilting)” = “so cute/sweet!”

“Awwww… (down note)” = disappointment, sympathy

“Oh!” = surprise

“Oh?” = interest

“Oi!” = “hey, you!” or just “HEY!”

“WHOO!” = “I am very excited and probably also quite drunk!”

“nah (vowel used depending on tonal background)” = refusal/negation

“hah (as above)” = affirmation/approval

“AI!” = unpleasant surprise

“Aaaah” = pleased approval

Am I totally off base? Somewhat off base? Got any cultures where similar noises mean something totally different? I’m sure linguists have addressed this SOMEwhere…

So the President’s most recent press conference was about the tax cut/employment benefit compromise bill, with which nobody was entirely happy and no one was entirely disappointed, which is basically the definition of “compromise”.

Faced with a option a, play it like a victory was won for letting more people keep more of their money during a recession and also make sure no one unemployed is left out in the cold and his administration is totally awesome for rising above petty partisanship to benefit the American people, and option b, play it like he just won a brave victory by keeping the evil Republicans from cutting off unemployment against a Congressional disadvantage, he went with option c, throw a petulant tantrum. Well played.

If you read the transcript, he actually made a pretty credible effort to go with a combination of option a and option b, and if he’d stopped talking at that point it would have gone pretty well… but he didn’t. It started to go downhill once the questions from the press corps passed beyond “softball” and went into things like questioning why Obama couldn’t do exactly what he wanted when he had the majority, and it started to *really* go downhill with this question:

Mr. President, what do you say to Democrats who say you’re rewarding Republican obstruction here? You yourself used in your opening statement they were unwilling to budge on this. A lot of progressive Democrats are saying they’re unwilling to budge, and you’re asking them to get off the fence and budge. Why should they be rewarding Republican obstruction?

The response to which starts off with:

Well, let me use a couple of analogies. I’ve said before that I felt that the middle-class tax cuts were being held hostage to the high-end tax cuts. I think it’s tempting not to negotiate with hostage-takers, unless the hostage gets harmed.

Winning political strategy when talking about a compromise bill you have spent the first half of your press conference laboriously reminding the press was a win for the public in general: equating the people you had to compromise with to terrorists. Extra win: stating, within your analogy, that you have to negotiate with terrorists if there’s a chance they could hurt somebody.

An alert press, by which I mean, “conscious”, picks up on this:

If I may follow, aren’t you telegraphing, though, a negotiating strategy of how the Republicans can beat you in negotiations all the way through the next year because they can just stick to their guns, stay united, be unwilling to budge — to use your words — and force you to capitulate?

I don’t think so. And the reason is because this is a very unique circumstance. This is a situation in which tens of millions of people would be directly damaged and immediately damaged, and at a time when the economy is just about to recover.

Now, keep in mind, I’ve just gone through two years, Chuck, where the rap on me was I was too stubborn and wasn’t willing to budge on a whole bunch of issues — including, by the way, health care where everybody here was writing about how, despite public opinion and despite this and despite that, somehow the guy is going to bulldoze his way through this thing.

Poor Obama. The terrorists keep saying he hates to compromise. Also the press hates him, and the health care bill was a tour de force of compromise.

He manages to get it back on the rails for awhile (save his reference to John Boehner as a “bomb-thrower”), and it goes straight to hell at this question:

Where is your line in the sand?

…So this notion that somehow we are willing to compromise too much reminds me of the debate that we had during health care. This is the public option debate all over again. So I pass a signature piece of legislation where we finally get health care for all Americans, something that Democrats had been fighting for for a hundred years, but because there was a provision in there that they didn’t get that would have affected maybe a couple of million people, even though we got health insurance for 30 million people and the potential for lower premiums for 100 million people, that somehow that was a sign of weakness and compromise.

…Notwithstanding that it doesn’t actually get health care for all Americans, burdens a significant number of Americans that were paying out-of-pocket for health care far more cheaply than the new mandated plans, but those are beside-the-point nitpicks. The point is, he got what Democrats wanted for a century.

Now, if that’s the standard by which we are measuring success or core principles, then let’s face it, we will never get anything done. People will have the satisfaction of having a purist position and no victories for the American people.

And some of them didn’t like it. Those ungrateful BASTARDS.

Note to the President: you don’t actually own progressives or Democrats. They’re allowed to say you didn’t do a very good job with health care without being ingrates, especially if, from their perspective, it’s absolutely true. (I would say it’s absolutely true from an entirely different perspective, of course.)

And we will be able to feel good about ourselves and sanctimonious about how pure our intentions are and how tough we are

It takes some serious chutzpah to lecture large sectors of the public for being sanctimonious while also telling the nation as a whole that it just doesn’t know what’s good for it.

That can’t be the measure of how we think about our public service. That can’t be the measure of what it means to be a Democrat.

I’m sure they’ve simply been waiting for you to tell them what it does, since if they are disagreeing with you they certainly can’t know. After all, they anointed you.

This is a big, diverse country. Not everybody agrees with us. I know that shocks people.

No, it’s just you.

and that means because it’s a big, diverse country and people have a lot of complicated positions, it means that in order to get stuff done, we’re going to compromise.

What happened to “I won.”?

And I don’t think there’s a single Democrat out there, who if they looked at where we started when I came into office and look at where we are now, would say that somehow we have not moved in the direction that I promised.

I have a few million people for you to meet.

Take a tally. Look at what I promised during the campaign. There’s not a single thing that I’ve said that I would do that I have not either done or tried to do.

The only term for this is “blatant lie”, but the horrifying thing is he might actually sincerely believe this to be true.

Would it be too much to point out the sea level hasn’t appreciably gone down?

The entire transcript isn’t this bad, and for the most part it’s him making the entirely boring if more than slightly hypocritical point that we live in a democracy and we have to compromise with people we disagree with to get anything done. And it wouldn’t have been at all difficult to stick with this message… but when even lightly goaded by the press (which is doing its job, and not forcefully at that) he still felt the need to lambast his own party as well as describe the other party as essentially evil and insane.

The Lightworker, he has left the building.

Oh hai expansion launch day. I’ll be in my bunk.

…Actually not that ironic as I actually spent the bulk of my day in Santa Fe and thoroughly proved why it’s a bad idea to let me wander in a brick-and-mortar bookstore. I took less than ten minutes to find three volumes I could not live without, had to be talked out of another gigantic McGee tome, and had to beg Stingray to just leave already before I spent all my Christmas gift-giving fund on other things I would positively die writhing if I didn’t bring home.

Friend Peter (who understands fully that this is nothing personal, love and kisses and Van der Hum) has posted an article and commentary that is profoundly alarmed to discover that computer games employ the sinister principles of… operant conditioning. It is very, very alarmed to discover that the principle of variable reinforcement is being deliberately designed in to computer games, that this is the same principle that makes slot machines appealing, and therefore games might actually be addictive. Gosh.

The problem with this premise is that operant conditioning in general, and variable reinforcement in particular, aren’t so much sinister hacks to the human psyche that cause dysfunction as they are basic principles of how organisms learn, particularly mammals. Variable reinforcement works because it encourages us to persist in tasks that we may fail at and to deal with a certain amount of environmental randomness; without this particular feature, foraging behavior would essentially be a non-starter. Even with this built into us at an extremely basic level as a feature of behavior, foraging animals don’t spend all their time foraging; other mechanisms related to that same complex of learning behavior kick in to discourage it, like exhaustion, satiation, and boredom. Likewise, animals don’t spend all their time seeking mates (no matter what a few wild-eyed evo-psych devotees would have you believe), playing, or otherwise engaging in rewarding or potentially rewarding activities.

The article mentions an experiment that is a classic in behavioral psychology because it serves as proof of principle and has been a classic in alarmist circles of varying flavor ever since, which is the discovery that if you give a rat a lever to press that might or might not reward it with a food pellet, it will become obsessive about pressing the lever. It’s a beautiful demonstration of the power of variable reinforcement, but it doesn’t translate to a 1:1 effect in the real world. The key point understand about the experiment, and the reason it’s proof of principle rather than a demonstration of a universal effect of food pellets and levers, is that the rat has nothing else whatsoever to do with its time. It can’t work for its food other than by pressing the lever, water and bedding and potentially mates are all provided for it with no relation to anything it does.

Rats are popular laboratory subjects for behavioral psychology precisely because they are very intelligent and social animals, by rodent standards; a normal wild rat is a generalist predator with a socially and behaviorally complex life. A laboratory rat spends most of its time bored out of its ratty little skull, which is why it’s so easy to get them to perform behaviors by tugging on various aspects of operant conditioning; the question isn’t “what will the rat choose to do” so much as it is “will the rat choose to do this over the option of not wasting any energy whatsoever”. Another factor complicating how the results of the study should be read is the large body of research conducted subsequently in stress and (yet more) learning behaviors- it turns out that organisms have a massive bias to being in any way in control of events, in interpreting outcomes, in choosing behaviors, and in coping with stress. Not only is the rat obsessive about pressing the lever because variable reinforcement works, it’s obsessive about pressing the lever because that is the one and only event in its life it has any control over whatsoever- which is probably also giving it a lot of stress relief*.

Dog trainers know the principle of variable reinforcement, which is why it’s good advice when training a behavior to start varying the timing and size of the proffered reward so the dog doesn’t start treating you like a vending machine and declining to perform the behavior whenever it’s not powerfully in the mood for the reward. They also know that variable reinforcement is far from enough; it helps maintain interest, but the dog may still decline the behavior if it has anything at all more interesting to do, if it’s simply not in the mood to pay attention to you, is bored with the exercise, or any other of a dozen reasons. (This is where other principles of dog training come in, like “I am your leader and what I tell you to do is not optional“, for behaviors that are already learned but the dog may be tempted for a host of reasons to blow off.) Variable reinforcement helps encourage behavior and encourage learning, but it’s far from compelling, let alone addictive. It’s just one of many principles of conditioning- or, in everyday human language rather than technical terminology, learning.

Do game designers deliberately manipulate the principles of operant conditioning? Absolutely, and some companies actually have psychologists employed for exactly that purpose. They also do it on a far more sophisticated level than the alarmist article suggests- someone with a good working knowledge of behavioral psychology can see a broad variety of techniques, patterns, and principles employed, and can also see through phases of redesign how developers put more pressure on one area or lighten it on another. Of course, someone with a good working knowledge of behavioral psychology can also see this done (or not done, and how it’s failing) in corporations developing and adjusting a management culture, teachers in a classroom, a sports team trying to have a winning season, and for that matter the structure and tenets of major religions. Behavioral psychology isn’t a way to hack humans, it’s simply a good thing to know if you want to work successfully with them. Games only stand out because the designers are in the unique position of having to design a reward system that people pay them in money and time for that gives no concrete currency. (Unless, of course, you’re a gold farmer…)

On a personal note, I find the whole phenomenon of alarmism over video games (or television, and believe it or not radio and even theater got exactly the same response in their respective times) and how they’re going to addict us and corrupt our personalities kind of bitterly amusing not just because I’m a gamer, but because I was and am an avid reader. Sure, I get all sorts of benefit from reading nonfiction and you could even conjure some from the fiction, but at the end of the day I don’t read because it’s good for me, I do it because it’s fun for me and rewarding in that operant sort of way. Finding a particularly good turn of phrase, an unexpectedly good story, a new author whose words sing for me- all of these are powerful variable-reinforcement rewards. I even had a problem with it when I was a kid; I’d blow off my homework to read a book that held my interest more, even get caught in class reading because the lesson was boring (or unpleasant) and I’d snuck in a novel. Everyone treated this as an adorable phase because everyone “knows” reading is good for children, but the truth was I was absolutely using it as an escape and socially isolating myself in the process. Now I’m an adult, much better adjusted with a much more active social life, and my gaming hobby- which is partly responsible for that greater sociability- could ruin my life! Horrors.

Now for the bit of Peter’s post I agree with:

In counseling situations, I’ve frequently encountered individuals who were socially dysfunctional, their relationships deteriorating or collapsed altogether, because of the time they devoted to computer games, either stand-alone or online. Of course, some would argue that they were dysfunctional to begin with, and their use of computer games was thus a symptom, rather than the disease itself. That may or may not be true . . . but what I think is true is that computer games will aggravate any tendencies like that.

Well yeah, it will, and if you know you have problems with time management or something to escape from, then absolutely you should not pick up an immersive game. Neither should you drink, and neither should you gamble, or party, or do anything else you have major difficulty walking away from. Not everybody with an addictive personality will latch onto the same sorts of things, they all tend to have their own individual poisons, but an easy reward mechanism is an easy and destructive way to self-medicate when you’re in psychological trouble- or, like the rat in the cage with nothing but a lever, nothing else in your life is rewarding.

All that said, I’ve got to say I find alarmism about operant conditioning and the power of variable reinforcement coming from a blogger, who is in the business of constantly trawling the web looking for something in the sea of noise worth thinking or writing about… as pure a self-designed variable reinforcement mechanism as I can conceive of… just a little bit ironic.

With all love, of course.

*Fun fact that has nothing to do with the subject of this post: stress research as a field in psychology was pioneered by a psychology researcher named Hans Selye when he observed that his population of rats in an experiment were experiencing markedly different changes, but in ways completely unrelated to the variable he was attempting to test. He managed to make the connection that the changed rats were the ones that weren’t as docile for handling that, since he was a bit of a klutz, often escaped and had to be chased down to get the injections involved in his current experiment. The bad handling and chases were stressing them out and that was a much bigger variable than the one he was testing.

The latest headline to pass my gaze: “WikiLeaks: Bribery, graft rampant in Afghanistan.”

Here’s my super sekrit zomg leak for you: Julian Assange is actually Counselor Troi.

Title of article: Avid Online Role-Players Do Not Fit Stereotypes

The content of the article, describing data gleaned from Sony’s sharing of demographic game data and recruitment of players by treating the survey as an in-game event, boils down to “online gamers’ demographics roughly match general population”. Most players are adults in their thirties rather than kids, most are about as fit or not as the population generally rather than all being hideously overweight, most are pretty much functional Americans.

Which, if you treat gaming as any other popular hobby rather than a mysterious phenomenon akin to a bizarre technology cult or pixel-delivered drug, is absolutely to be expected.

Why are most online gamers in their early thirties? Because they are the same generation that grew up when home video game consoles became advanced enough and cheap enough to be popular. They’re playing now because they’ve been playing their whole lives, and the age games were marketed to rose as they grew up because there was no reason to stop as long as there was still appropriate entertainment available.

Why do the older players and the women play more and longer than the adolescents and the college students? Because online gaming is an ideal hobby for a parent with a young child. Once the kid or kids go to bed or down for a nap or settle in with a kids’ movie, you can’t leave the house, but you ARE left largely to your own devices for entertainment- but an online game presents you with the opportunity to spend the evening hanging out with adult friends while still being available to step away the moment your kid needs you. It’s also a much more compartmentalized life- a student has homework, but the average adult leaves work at work and is more free to choose what to do with their time when work is over.

Why are there somewhat more mentally ill people but paradoxically lower levels of anxiety among the gamer population as a whole? Because gaming offers an environment that is predictable and controllable- which are two factors that have a massive lever effect on our stress levels. As the article notes, it’s a good way to self-medicate whether your stress levels are normal or pathological.

Why aren’t they all fatties? Because people play games because they’re fun and not because they’re actually addictive in the way that we understand addiction to operate; they’re able to walk away from the keyboard and choose to do something else in the same way gun nuts are able to walk off the range, birdwatchers are able to come inside, and bowlers are able to walk away from the lanes.

Why isn’t research that treats gaming as a normal hobby that operates in patterns non-unique to video games but shared with other leisure activities more common? If I had to guess, I’d say it was probably because the people with tenure are largely older than the generation that grew up with a Nintendo pad in their hands. Expect this to change.

So by way of the Associated Press, we have an interesting little article about what’s looking to be the start of serial shark attacks by an Oceanic Whitetip that seems to be specifically hunting humans. (Actually all its victims have been Russians so far, but I’m going to skip the science fiction and assume this particular hotel just has a lot of Russian clientele and that perhaps the locals are too savvy to get in the water.)

It’s an interesting story because the overwhelming majority of shark attacks on swimmers are likely to be either cases of mistaken identity (humans mistaken for other marine mammals), the act of a starving animal willing to risk anything, or an irritable territorial animal that has, in its mind at least, exhausted the options of telling the swimmer to go the hell away and must resort to more forceful language.

This shark, on the other hand, seems to know very well what it’s biting and seems to be doing it because it is hunting humans rather than because it’s being territorial or is starved or thinks they’re seals- eyewitnesses have seen it making investigatory circles confirming what it’s looking at, and at least one diver was circled before it went off to choose easier-looking prey a few feet over.

The shark species in question is an Oceanic Whitetip, which actually makes it all the much more likely that it has selected humans specifically as prey- because what is unusual about this story isn’t that an Oceanic Whitetip is willing to investigate, pressure, and select humans for food, but that an Oceanic Whitetip is close enough to shore to attack swimmers; they’re a pelagic species that normally dwells in the open ocean- which is actually exactly what makes them so much more dangerous to humans than the other big sharks we’re used to worrying about.

Oceanic Whitetips are members of the Carcharhinidae family, the family of big, live-bearing sharks that contains most of the species that make us nervous, such as the bull shark, tiger shark, and white shark. The white shark, that puts the fear of Neptune in us the most, is responsible for a disproportionate number of mistaken-identity attacks; they are big, open-ocean cruisers, but they make specific stops close to shore in order to hunt seals, because they are so large and have such massive energy requirements for a fish that they need a diet very high fat to survive- which means blubber, which means marine mammals. We fit the “mammal” profile, but we’re far too lean to be worth the effort to a white shark*. The usual attack pattern for whites when they get mixed up with humans is to bite and spit the human out when it realizes we aren’t what it wants- too bad for the human, given how hard a white bites…

White sharks don’t often attack humans because they are specialist predators, and they need to be to survive. A tiger shark is a big shark that is a generalist predator; they’ve been described as swimming garbage cans, and a dissection of a mature tiger shark is always an exciting adventure once you get to the stomach contents. Nonetheless, the rate of tiger shark attack is actually fairly low; they’re generalists and will eat lots of different things, but as frequent near-shore dwellers they also have a very large potential menu with a lot of opportunity. Predators tend to be inherently a bit lazy and a bit conservative; a tiger shark has a large number of things it can encounter in its environment that it can eat, which means it can shrug off opportunities that are strange and might be unpredictably dangerous. A human in the water is an odd thing; most predators would prefer to eat prey they have experience with rather than strange oddities.

Oceanic Whitetips, on the other hand, are big sharks that tend to stay out in the open ocean. The pelagic zone is actually something of a desert, in terms of things for predators to eat; coastlines and reefs are rich with life, but the open ocean is mainly empty space with instances of other big things moving through. Pelagic predators rely on schools of fish and squid for the most part, and since the spaces between available prey tend to be big, they need to be opportunists- Oceanic Whitetips are famous for their insistent investigation of strange things like humans, which divers are advised to react to by getting the hell out of the water if interest continues. They’re also famous, like their smaller blue cousins, for following ships. Oceanic Whitetips don’t normally eat swimmers thanks to their habitat- but on shipwrecks and plane crashes alone they’ve racked up a human-fatalities count that exceeds that of all other species put together, with the most infamous incident being the sinking of the Indianapolis. When opportunity knocks, the Whitetip is quick to answer.

Humans spend far more time in near contact with sharks than they realize, and fortunately for both we’re just not that appealing a meal to the vast majority of them. Hopefully this shark will be found and killed quickly- she is out of place, and her displacement makes her dangerous.

*The attacks on the Jersey coast in 1912, which was also a case of a shark deliberately hunting humans for food, was likely a young white small enough that we’d be a good meal anyway.