8 ms·

I mean, part of this is probably also some degree of us intuitively knowing the answer. If you have a friend group of 10 people, 4 of which regularly work out.

I mean, part of this is probably also some degree of us intuitively knowing the answer. If you have a friend group of 10 people, 4 of which regularly work out. You will probably notice that those 4 friends have less body fat and are more toned than the other 6. At that point, if a study came out saying that working out had no impact on body physique, you'd reflexively question the results. That might sound ridiculous, but lots of people here grew up playing "violent" video games through the 90s-00s, and had large friend groups who did the same. And it's pretty likely that, for most of us, none of our friends ended up with violent or aggressive tendencies. Anecdotes are not scientifically rigorous, but they aren't completely useless either. If violent video games caused measurable increases in aggressive behavior, people who were around a large cohort of people playing these games would notice this fact in action. Just like they'd notice that friends who eat a lot of cake tend to be larger than the one who don't.

umvi 6y ago
There's some truth here, but it's important not to use anecdotes too much to guide intuition because the sample size is often too small and too biased. For example, I have a group of 10 friends. All 10 of them (including myself) got covid, and we all agree it is no worse than the flu. I mean, yeah, we couldn't smell or taste for a few days, but we all recovered within a week. Therefore... I should reflexively question covid studies saying how dangerous it is because in my own experience it's not even worth making a fuss over? Maybe to some degree, but the fallacy I committed by relying on my anecdote to guide my intuition is that me and all my friends are young, fit, healthy people. My group of friends didn't include the elderly or immunocompromised or morbidly obese, etc.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  To put it a different way, the people who grew up to be violent individuals are probably not posting on HN, nor working at companies with people who post on HN, so the fact that everybody on HN isn't violent, despite playing violent video games is only weak evidence against there being a correlation. In fact, I would be surprised for there to be zero correlation (even assuming there is no causation), as it is a reasonable assumption that naturally violent people are more likely to play violent video games.
  - tomp 6y ago
    > as it is a reasonable assumption that naturally violent people are more likely to play violent video games. It's also a reasonable assumption that people who naturally want to avoid actual violence play violent video games instead. This paranoia against violent video games was obviously fake from the start, and such a typically American thing - in line with the American puritan view that blowing up people in films or broadcasting police car chases is a-OK but (female) nipples or saying "fuck" is a big NO NO.
    - skrebbel 6y ago
      > a typically American thing Not only. Eg in Germany there's long been an enormous stigma against violent video games. I haven't talked with German gamedevs for some years so maybe this loosened up since. But basically, if you worked in gamedev you preferred to tell your neighbours and acquaintances that you work "in IT". If they would find out you work on video games they'd pretty much fully cut you out of their lives. (Note, to my anecdotal experience this is a purely German thing. I don't know other European countries where the same stigma exists)
      - jmchuster 6y ago
        FPSes are cool in the US because of how we glorify our victories in WW2 and the Persian Gulf. I'd imagine it might be opposite in Germany for the same reason.
        saluki 6y ago
        This is true in board games. German board games rarely involve combat or taking over territory. Where there are lots of classic American board games with these themes.
        verst 6y ago
        Most German PC games seem focused on trade / mercantile or historical themes. There are also some popular simulation and role playing genres. - Anno Series (I just picked up Anno 1800 yesterday) - Fugger / The Guild 1-3 / Patrician etc - The Settlers / Die Siedler - Games set in the Dark Eye (role playing framework similar to D&D but more popular in Germany) universe.
- gregmac 6y ago
  > There's some truth here, but it's important not to use anecdotes too much to guide intuition because the sample size is often too small and too biased. In a community like HN there's also kind of a "meta-anecdote" that emerges. If there was a link, you'd expect to see at least someone posting an ancedote about how their friend got into violent games and then became violent themselves; instead it's mainly the opposite. I'm still not arguing this observation is scientifically rigorous in any way whatsoever, merely that multiple ancedotes can be more useful than a single one. There could be other reasons such as those that are violent or hang out with those that are don't post on HN - but that also hints there is something more to it then just or even the violent games themselves.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    >In a community like HN there's also kind of a "meta-anecdote" that emerges >multiple ancedotes can be more useful than a single one Sure. But that meta-anecdote based narrative can be highly biased based on the community that forms it. A forum with an large respresentation of hospital doctors and a forum with a large representation of convenience store owners are going to have completely different meta-anecdote based narratives on whether packing heat is good or bad.
- Quarrelsome 6y ago
  well to put it another way; in the time that I have lived violent video games have exploded in popularity and violent crime has apparently decreased substantially. That's not to say there's causality between the two but it would definitely support the premise that violent video games at least don't encourage violent crime.
  - Natanael_L 6y ago
    I also don't think there's a strong correlation / causation, but this isn't solid proof. If there was a causation then the reduction in violent crime could be muted by a small factor due to games, while the net decrease is (as before) caused by an even larger independent factor. In other words, the net decrease could have been larger without the presence of games. What it does instead show is a maximum plausible effect size, and that it likely isn't worse than the activities which it is replacing.
- WD-42 6y ago
  What the hell? Were you all practicing CPR on each other or something?
- kbenson 6y ago
  > Therefore... I should reflexively question covid studies saying how dangerous it is because in my own experience it's not even worth making a fuss over? Should you question them? Yes. Should you let your own experience and that of a few people around you override what you see to be a rigorous statistical study because you questioned it and looked into it? No. If you look into it and have serious questions about the rigor of the study? Maybe. Is that the case in the Covid studies? Probably not. Whether this is about Covid or anything else, the important thing is to be able to asses information as it comes in and reassess your position based on the data available to you. Anecdotal data is invaluable and used by everyone every day to make decisions prior to receiving good outside rigorous data, because for many things we don't have good outside rigorous data.
- ABCLAW 6y ago
  I think there's a fetish for this "don't trust your anecdotes" reply, when the reality is more nuanced. People will trust their anecdotes because in general they are right to. They don't need a double blind study to figure out that placing their hand on a heated element is a bad idea. The question is whether the Bayesian confidence an individual places on their anecdotal knowledge is appropriate or not. In this case, plenty of people have a ton of personal experience with the subject matter, a ton of friends and colleagues with experience, and little to no evidence to suggest the contra factual is true. Does that mean they're certainly right? No. But it certainly lowers the bar to evaluating yet further evidence of the position already held; why waste the time? If a study was released that was solid evidence that games did cause a significant uptick in violence, then examination would be warranted. I know a bunch of people are going to take a contrarian position, but we operate in the real world with the same time complexity restrictions as the machines we work on. You don't need a double blind study to determine how to position your head while tying your shoelaces in the morning.
  - SkyBelow 6y ago
    The issue is there is entire areas of psychology studying when we get things wrong. If it works until it doesn't, is it really something you should be trusted? Let us not forget that confirmation bias would also apply to how we judge the accuracy of our anecdotes. Is it that we don't really have that many cases where relying on personal anecdotes betrays us, or is it that we just diminish those incidents and pay more attention to when it does go well for us?
    - ABCLAW 6y ago
      >If it works until it doesn't, is it really something you should be trusted? Depends on why you need to trust something. If the failure state is multiple nukes going off, sure throw money and time at it until your systems are bullet proof. If you've purchased new shoes and need to design a study to figure out which foot you should start with when lacing up, maybe you're going too hard. What about something more chemical in nature; say you have a family recipe you and your family love. You might tinker around with it, but do you stop making it because you are upset by the intellectual sloth of not running double blind studies on Grandma's Famous Cumin Chili? No. Unless something slaps your Bayesian priors in the face, like a news report that says Chili recipes using Cumin might cause cancer. Again, the idea is that we all come into this with Bayesian priors. You don't need (and will never get) 100% certainty to operate in the real world. I don't need to spend a few hours and $60 to go from 99.5% to 99.7% on this issue and I'm betting you don't either. We will be, and largely are wrong about a ton of things. And in the majority of cases it doesn't matter one tiny bit. Like here. This is a study about a political flogging point that is 15 years past the point it conceivably could have been made into legislation. The study will be dated by the time there's a political push for the issue to be re-examined. This is shoelace study v.2.0. We have more pertinent, more complicated and more impactful problems to study both on an institution and personal level, so why devote our limited mental processing time to this? Because you want to be "right"? Have you ever read a recipe you've done before and thought to yourself "I really shouldn't make this, because I haven't presented this foo
- ehsankia 6y ago
  To be fair we have well defined equations to decide if a sample size is large enough and to calculate the error in our errors. In the case your examples, we already know that the CFR is lower than 10%, so a sample of 10 definitely is nowhere near enough to tell us anything useful. Now if the CFR was 50% and you had 0/10, maybe it'd be worth looking into it. I'm curious though, have any of your friends had longer term effects? longer term smell/taste loss, brain fog, heart issues, memory issues, breathing issues, etc? The early reports on long term impact are at ~10-20%, so you may have 1 or 2 in your sample, but again your sample is small enough that you very easily could've had 0 too. Again, it depends heavily on what you're trying to disprove and what the rate of it is.
kiliancs 6y ago
Intuitively, it's hard to believe that witnessing and using violence doesn't have any negative effect on a person, even if in videogames. I think that rather than asking ourselves "does this have a negative impact?" we should ask "what can I do that has a positive impact?". Personally, I would never work on a game with significant violence. From my point of view, there are so many other things a human being can contribute towards the well-being and progress of humanity, and I would not feel happy with myself if I limited my contribution and my creativity to making another shooter.
- longdefeat 6y ago
  -we should ask "what can I do that has a positive impact?"- That's part of the point of this essay that was on HN last year: "Fortnite and the Good Life," which seems relevant here. https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-convivial-society-no-15 https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-convivial-soc...
  - diarmuid 6y ago
    headshot === positive impact they are just games and most (non crazy) people understand that like hansel and gretel when they push the witch in the oven - its fiction and not intended to be a guide to life
    - kiliancs 6y ago
      I think you might be underestimating the fragility of the human being in so many aspects (2020 might be trying to teach us something in that regard). Consider how alcohol has a very negative (often disastrous) effect in so many lives, even though most people start drinking thinking they understand how alcohol is going to affect them and that they can keep it under control.
      - OOPMan 6y ago
        Missing the point. Alcohol is real. Games are not.
seangrogg 6y ago
To take this even further, with the increasing popularity of games, if violent video games were linked to violence itself we should theoretically see pronounced numbers of streaming personalities (at least those involved in competitive games, which trend towards violence as a win condition) engaged in violent acts. Gaming communities such as Twitch, competitive game conferences such as Evo, events such as Riot's world finals, and establishments such as gaming bars should all have an outsized number of people ready to throw down moreso than their non-gaming cohorts. And yet gamers remain relatively docile on the whole. And while they may get heated their debates about PlayStation vs XBox are about as likely to result in fatalities as the programming community's vim vs emacs or tabs vs spaces debates.
- adamredwoods 6y ago
  There is evidence of gaming personalities committing suicide. There is evidence of gamers doxxing, and even worse, swatting.
  - mkr-hn 6y ago
    There is evidence of astronauts who've walked on the moon punching people. Does walking on the moon make people violent?
  - mamon 6y ago
    But is gaming at fault here? Or maybe "gaming personalities" are simply people for which real life sucks, so they try to alleviate their pain by gaming a lot? Maybe gaming was the thing that delayed their suicide by months/years?
  - seangrogg 6y ago
    There's evidence of academic stress leading to suicide. Does that infer a causal link between academia and violence?
    - adamredwoods 6y ago
      It could, any studies? Going back to streamers and video games, Twitch has definitely had its share of toxicity: https://gamecrate.com/how-twitch-now-holding-streamers-responsible-their-audiences/18090 https://gamecrate.com/how-twitch-now-holding-streamers-respo...
yters 6y ago
I read a story in the recent past about a 30 some year old constant gamer who lived in his parents' house who shot and killed his mother for messing with his gaming console. There is some anecdata for you.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

umvi 6y ago

There's some truth here, but it's important not to use anecdotes too much to guide intuition because the sample size is often too small and too biased. For example, I have a group of 10 friends. All 10 of them (including myself) got covid, and we all agree it is no worse than the flu. I mean, yeah, we couldn't smell or taste for a few days, but we all recovered within a week. Therefore... I should reflexively question covid studies saying how dangerous it is because in my own experience it's not even worth making a fuss over? Maybe to some degree, but the fallacy I committed by relying on my anecdote to guide my intuition is that me and all my friends are young, fit, healthy people. My group of friends didn't include the elderly or immunocompromised or morbidly obese, etc.

aidenn0 6y ago
To put it a different way, the people who grew up to be violent individuals are probably not posting on HN, nor working at companies with people who post on HN, so the fact that everybody on HN isn't violent, despite playing violent video games is only weak evidence against there being a correlation. In fact, I would be surprised for there to be zero correlation (even assuming there is no causation), as it is a reasonable assumption that naturally violent people are more likely to play violent video games.
- tomp 6y ago
  > as it is a reasonable assumption that naturally violent people are more likely to play violent video games. It's also a reasonable assumption that people who naturally want to avoid actual violence play violent video games instead. This paranoia against violent video games was obviously fake from the start, and such a typically American thing - in line with the American puritan view that blowing up people in films or broadcasting police car chases is a-OK but (female) nipples or saying "fuck" is a big NO NO.
  - skrebbel 6y ago
    > a typically American thing Not only. Eg in Germany there's long been an enormous stigma against violent video games. I haven't talked with German gamedevs for some years so maybe this loosened up since. But basically, if you worked in gamedev you preferred to tell your neighbours and acquaintances that you work "in IT". If they would find out you work on video games they'd pretty much fully cut you out of their lives. (Note, to my anecdotal experience this is a purely German thing. I don't know other European countries where the same stigma exists)
    - jmchuster 6y ago
      FPSes are cool in the US because of how we glorify our victories in WW2 and the Persian Gulf. I'd imagine it might be opposite in Germany for the same reason.
      - saluki 6y ago
        This is true in board games. German board games rarely involve combat or taking over territory. Where there are lots of classic American board games with these themes.
      - verst 6y ago
        Most German PC games seem focused on trade / mercantile or historical themes. There are also some popular simulation and role playing genres. - Anno Series (I just picked up Anno 1800 yesterday) - Fugger / The Guild 1-3 / Patrician etc - The Settlers / Die Siedler - Games set in the Dark Eye (role playing framework similar to D&D but more popular in Germany) universe.
gregmac 6y ago
> There's some truth here, but it's important not to use anecdotes too much to guide intuition because the sample size is often too small and too biased. In a community like HN there's also kind of a "meta-anecdote" that emerges. If there was a link, you'd expect to see at least someone posting an ancedote about how their friend got into violent games and then became violent themselves; instead it's mainly the opposite. I'm still not arguing this observation is scientifically rigorous in any way whatsoever, merely that multiple ancedotes can be more useful than a single one. There could be other reasons such as those that are violent or hang out with those that are don't post on HN - but that also hints there is something more to it then just or even the violent games themselves.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  >In a community like HN there's also kind of a "meta-anecdote" that emerges >multiple ancedotes can be more useful than a single one Sure. But that meta-anecdote based narrative can be highly biased based on the community that forms it. A forum with an large respresentation of hospital doctors and a forum with a large representation of convenience store owners are going to have completely different meta-anecdote based narratives on whether packing heat is good or bad.
Quarrelsome 6y ago
well to put it another way; in the time that I have lived violent video games have exploded in popularity and violent crime has apparently decreased substantially. That's not to say there's causality between the two but it would definitely support the premise that violent video games at least don't encourage violent crime.
- Natanael_L 6y ago
  I also don't think there's a strong correlation / causation, but this isn't solid proof. If there was a causation then the reduction in violent crime could be muted by a small factor due to games, while the net decrease is (as before) caused by an even larger independent factor. In other words, the net decrease could have been larger without the presence of games. What it does instead show is a maximum plausible effect size, and that it likely isn't worse than the activities which it is replacing.
WD-42 6y ago
What the hell? Were you all practicing CPR on each other or something?
kbenson 6y ago
> Therefore... I should reflexively question covid studies saying how dangerous it is because in my own experience it's not even worth making a fuss over? Should you question them? Yes. Should you let your own experience and that of a few people around you override what you see to be a rigorous statistical study because you questioned it and looked into it? No. If you look into it and have serious questions about the rigor of the study? Maybe. Is that the case in the Covid studies? Probably not. Whether this is about Covid or anything else, the important thing is to be able to asses information as it comes in and reassess your position based on the data available to you. Anecdotal data is invaluable and used by everyone every day to make decisions prior to receiving good outside rigorous data, because for many things we don't have good outside rigorous data.
ABCLAW 6y ago
I think there's a fetish for this "don't trust your anecdotes" reply, when the reality is more nuanced. People will trust their anecdotes because in general they are right to. They don't need a double blind study to figure out that placing their hand on a heated element is a bad idea. The question is whether the Bayesian confidence an individual places on their anecdotal knowledge is appropriate or not. In this case, plenty of people have a ton of personal experience with the subject matter, a ton of friends and colleagues with experience, and little to no evidence to suggest the contra factual is true. Does that mean they're certainly right? No. But it certainly lowers the bar to evaluating yet further evidence of the position already held; why waste the time? If a study was released that was solid evidence that games did cause a significant uptick in violence, then examination would be warranted. I know a bunch of people are going to take a contrarian position, but we operate in the real world with the same time complexity restrictions as the machines we work on. You don't need a double blind study to determine how to position your head while tying your shoelaces in the morning.
- SkyBelow 6y ago
  The issue is there is entire areas of psychology studying when we get things wrong. If it works until it doesn't, is it really something you should be trusted? Let us not forget that confirmation bias would also apply to how we judge the accuracy of our anecdotes. Is it that we don't really have that many cases where relying on personal anecdotes betrays us, or is it that we just diminish those incidents and pay more attention to when it does go well for us?
  - ABCLAW 6y ago
    >If it works until it doesn't, is it really something you should be trusted? Depends on why you need to trust something. If the failure state is multiple nukes going off, sure throw money and time at it until your systems are bullet proof. If you've purchased new shoes and need to design a study to figure out which foot you should start with when lacing up, maybe you're going too hard. What about something more chemical in nature; say you have a family recipe you and your family love. You might tinker around with it, but do you stop making it because you are upset by the intellectual sloth of not running double blind studies on Grandma's Famous Cumin Chili? No. Unless something slaps your Bayesian priors in the face, like a news report that says Chili recipes using Cumin might cause cancer. Again, the idea is that we all come into this with Bayesian priors. You don't need (and will never get) 100% certainty to operate in the real world. I don't need to spend a few hours and $60 to go from 99.5% to 99.7% on this issue and I'm betting you don't either. We will be, and largely are wrong about a ton of things. And in the majority of cases it doesn't matter one tiny bit. Like here. This is a study about a political flogging point that is 15 years past the point it conceivably could have been made into legislation. The study will be dated by the time there's a political push for the issue to be re-examined. This is shoelace study v.2.0. We have more pertinent, more complicated and more impactful problems to study both on an institution and personal level, so why devote our limited mental processing time to this? Because you want to be "right"? Have you ever read a recipe you've done before and thought to yourself "I really shouldn't make this, because I haven't presented this foo
ehsankia 6y ago
To be fair we have well defined equations to decide if a sample size is large enough and to calculate the error in our errors. In the case your examples, we already know that the CFR is lower than 10%, so a sample of 10 definitely is nowhere near enough to tell us anything useful. Now if the CFR was 50% and you had 0/10, maybe it'd be worth looking into it. I'm curious though, have any of your friends had longer term effects? longer term smell/taste loss, brain fog, heart issues, memory issues, breathing issues, etc? The early reports on long term impact are at ~10-20%, so you may have 1 or 2 in your sample, but again your sample is small enough that you very easily could've had 0 too. Again, it depends heavily on what you're trying to disprove and what the rate of it is.

kiliancs 6y ago

Intuitively, it's hard to believe that witnessing and using violence doesn't have any negative effect on a person, even if in videogames. I think that rather than asking ourselves "does this have a negative impact?" we should ask "what can I do that has a positive impact?". Personally, I would never work on a game with significant violence. From my point of view, there are so many other things a human being can contribute towards the well-being and progress of humanity, and I would not feel happy with myself if I limited my contribution and my creativity to making another shooter.

longdefeat 6y ago
-we should ask "what can I do that has a positive impact?"- That's part of the point of this essay that was on HN last year: "Fortnite and the Good Life," which seems relevant here. https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-convivial-society-no-15 https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-convivial-soc...
- diarmuid 6y ago
  headshot === positive impact they are just games and most (non crazy) people understand that like hansel and gretel when they push the witch in the oven - its fiction and not intended to be a guide to life
  - kiliancs 6y ago
    I think you might be underestimating the fragility of the human being in so many aspects (2020 might be trying to teach us something in that regard). Consider how alcohol has a very negative (often disastrous) effect in so many lives, even though most people start drinking thinking they understand how alcohol is going to affect them and that they can keep it under control.
    - OOPMan 6y ago
      Missing the point. Alcohol is real. Games are not.

seangrogg 6y ago

To take this even further, with the increasing popularity of games, if violent video games were linked to violence itself we should theoretically see pronounced numbers of streaming personalities (at least those involved in competitive games, which trend towards violence as a win condition) engaged in violent acts. Gaming communities such as Twitch, competitive game conferences such as Evo, events such as Riot's world finals, and establishments such as gaming bars should all have an outsized number of people ready to throw down moreso than their non-gaming cohorts. And yet gamers remain relatively docile on the whole. And while they may get heated their debates about PlayStation vs XBox are about as likely to result in fatalities as the programming community's vim vs emacs or tabs vs spaces debates.

adamredwoods 6y ago
There is evidence of gaming personalities committing suicide. There is evidence of gamers doxxing, and even worse, swatting.
- mkr-hn 6y ago
  There is evidence of astronauts who've walked on the moon punching people. Does walking on the moon make people violent?
- mamon 6y ago
  But is gaming at fault here? Or maybe "gaming personalities" are simply people for which real life sucks, so they try to alleviate their pain by gaming a lot? Maybe gaming was the thing that delayed their suicide by months/years?
- seangrogg 6y ago
  There's evidence of academic stress leading to suicide. Does that infer a causal link between academia and violence?
  - adamredwoods 6y ago
    It could, any studies? Going back to streamers and video games, Twitch has definitely had its share of toxicity: https://gamecrate.com/how-twitch-now-holding-streamers-responsible-their-audiences/18090 https://gamecrate.com/how-twitch-now-holding-streamers-respo...

yters 6y ago

I read a story in the recent past about a 30 some year old constant gamer who lived in his parents' house who shot and killed his mother for messing with his gaming console. There is some anecdata for you.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]