Price Drop Illogic

Apparently many people are unfamiliar with the idea of buying things. It's a simple system: A person pays money for goods or services, and the recipients of that money delivers that good or service.

The furor over the price cuts of the 3DS and Team Fortress 2 imply some new philosophy of shopping. The thought seems to be, "If I buy something, and someone else gets that same thing for a lower price, I'm getting screwed."

You still got a product in return for your money. You thought it was worth ten dollars, or two hundred fifty dollars, and you got it for that price. Once that transaction is complete, the relation between you and the seller is complete. You may have been ripped off*, or you may have won a great deal**. Either way, the price in the future has nothing to do with the value of your purchase in the past.

Where have these people come from, anyway? Almost every consumer product's price goes down over time, except survival commodities like Petrol and Food. When did this completely ordinary process become an outrage?

I suppose I shouldn't bother; people will complain about anything nowadays.

*If you got a 3DS
**If you got TF2

Ebert: "Games Aren't Art" Me: "Define your terms!"

"Before you would debate me, define your terms."

-Voltaire

Roger Ebert has announced that "Games aren't Art" again. There's no point in debating this, at least until people agree on definitions*. It's clear that Ebert is using the word "Art" to mean something that most people would call "High Art" or something along those lines, since he thinks that most films, books, etc. aren't art.

Ebert isn't the first person to have a backwards argument like this, (Arguing whether A is B, without defining A or B) but he should know better, since there are many comments on his blog asking for a definition, or proposing definitions of their own. I seriously wonder if he's just trolling the video gaming community.

There should never be an argument about whether A is B. Once definitions are given, it should be easy to say, "does the definition of A overlap with the definition of B?" Without definitions, all you can say is, "do the cultural associations I connect to A remind me of the cultural associations I connect to B?" Which is obviously unproductive, since no one's cultural associations are going to be identical.

The root of all of this is human psychology. Human brains don't operate with definitions, they use prototypes. When a human thinks of a Tree, they don't think, "a woody plant that has many secondary branches supported clear of the ground on a single main stem or trunk with clear apical dominance.**" Instead, they think, "something that resembles that one tree I'm thinking of." For example, a Maple Tree, or a Pine Tree.

Imagine, for a moment, a "tree" that was perfectly normal for your prototype of tree, except the branches extended into and merged with the branches of another perfectly normal tree. This "tree" isn't a "tree" from the definition above, but it's still similar enough to a prototypical tree that I think most people would accept it as one. If that same tree was really short, like six inches tall, more people would tend to remove it from the "tree" prototype and place it into something like the "bush" or "shrub" prototype. With this prototyping system, there is never a clear border between one prototype and another.

This is a harmless field of debate, but this same problem of lacking agreed-upon definitions has frozen all debate in American politics. Next time you see a political argument on television, I will bet the entire thing would be resolved if the participants were using the same definitions.

*If anyone is curious, a possible definition of art could be: "something created with the intent of appealing to aesthetics". Naturally, this doesn't separate crappy art from High Art, but I think any definition that tries to do that is hopeless.

**Thanks, Wikipedia!

Oliver Sacks and the Human Brain

Unless you've studied psychology or psychobiology, you probably assume that the human brain is a rational operator, and even people that are crazy are basically the same as everyone else. This is an easy assumption to make, as far as most people can tell, they make decisions on a rational basis.

Unfortunately, humans are anything but rational, and deviance in brain function can be more profound than you can imagine.

Many decisions that human beings made are only explained after the fact. To test this, test subjects were given electrical impulses to force motion, or given psychological "triggers" that would provoke some physical response. After doing something inherently irrational, subjects inevitably came up with "reasons" why they did this, even though they hadn't decided to do it in the first place. Imagine how profoundly deceived humans can be when we can convince ourselves, for no reason, that we decided to do something when we were compelled to against our will.

People who suffer severe brain damage can gain a new worldview that seems impossible. Oliver Sacks, a neurobiologist, has written several books on the subject. There is a woman who has suffered brain damage that has deleted her perception of the direction "Left". Somehow, she is only able to perceive the right half of her world, only applying makeup to the right half of her face, and only eating the food on the right half of her plate. To see if there is any food on her plate she missed, she must turn nearly 360 degrees to the right to recenter the plate slightly to the left.

There are those who have suffered damage to the areas of the brain responsible for sight, and have been rendered completely blind, but still believe that they can see. Despite constant failures in their imagined "vision", they are adamant. On the other side of the coin, there are those who have suffered damage to the same general area, and lose the entire concept of sight. They cannot imagine the appearance of pictures, places, or people. The entire visual world is simply gone, as thoroughly as if they had never seen at all.

Anyway, Sack's books are interesting, so check them out if you like odd psychological problems. It's odd to see the common lack of interconnectedness in hospitals in his books. He'll find a case, assume it's unique because he's never seen it before, and write a paper, only to find out that there are dozens of cases that hadn't received much attention previously. I suppose in the world of the Internet, this information is more widespread, but if not, these things need to be on the Web. We should be treating people like this with as much information as possible.