I have a degree, but not in science. Does that make me unqualified to state that the field of psychology, and most other social sciences lack the epistemic rigor of something like physics or biology and therefore are not real sciences?

I’ll repeat it, psychology is a science in much the same way that medieval medicine was a science. It may one day become an actual science much like medieval medicine became a science.

What is your field?

I’m not pretending anything, I never stated that marketing pretends to present products as they factually are. Look selling a product that no one wants is really fricking hard, no matter how much budget you have. So in order for something to sell well, people most have already wanted it. It must solve a problem, increase productivity or just fill the daddy shaped holes in their hearts, but they must want it and they cannot be truly manipulated into buying it unless you flat out lie, which is not really a good model on which to build a long term company on.

All I’m saying is that if marketing convinces people to buy a shiny poop they are in all the freedom to do so. But marketing never had the ability to manipulate people into buying something for which there is no desire. The shiny poop might fulfill some inner desire of the masses, who cares? They wanted it, they got it.

Comparing opioids to a truck or a phone is wild. I guess if opioids was something you could just walk into a store and buy without a prescription you would be somewhat right but that hasn’t been the case in a long time. The situation you describe is more about physical availability than mental availability which I think is more to the point of what we are discussing here but sure I can concede that rugged phones being less visible than the sleeker phones leads to them being purchased less often. But again, Samsung once had a mainline galaxy phone that was rugged and it didn’t do well, so maybe people really don’t want an ugly brick of a phone and want what is more aesthetically pleasant.

Let me put it this way, if you do not trust that people can make good purchase decisions. Why do we allow people to make any decisions at all? Much less participate in things so important like democracy?

Your line of thinking, that of removing completely the responsibility of the individual in a free market dynamic will necessarily take you to one or two conclusions depending on what you value more: we accept that the masses will not necessarily make the best choices available but they are absolutely free to make said choices, or that we should divide society between enlightened and non enlightened and the enlightened will dictate how the non enlightened will live because obviously these monkeys need guidance in order to make good decisions.

I flip flop between one or the other, but I always settle in the former because I can’t guarantee that I won’t be lumped with the monkeys.

Various meta analysis have found that the results of 50%+ of all studies in the field are non reproducible. It could be as high as 70%+.

Again this does not mean that it isn’t a valid field of knowledge, it just not a science yet. People somehow take offense at this because I guess they feel like I’m invalidating the field. I actually only invalidating the validity of their findings so far which is more like a “sorry, try again until you find the fundamental rules of your field”. There’s also this pervasive attitude that all fields must be a science in order to be valuable which is just not true.

The term “social science” reeks of insecurity to me because other than using the scientific method, they are not a sciences at all, but I guess academics needed a way to to defend themselves from the bullying physicists.

My personal opinion is that psychology ignores biology too much, and insists on humans as purely socially constructed beings. If they started looking more at how our biology is the fundamental mold for our psychology, they might start making real progress towards being a science. But then maybe it wouldn’t be psychology anymore.

A methodology with reproducible experiments and results.

Psychology is as much as science as medicine was a science in the Middle Ages.

That doesn’t mean we should stop pursuing knowledge in the field, but to call it a science at this point in its development is just disingenuous.

And then you don’t hire them because they have a 2 year gap in their resume and they were honest about spending that time in Thailand with a harem of transsexual prostitutes.

Is the marketing department putting a gun to your head to force you to buy anything?

I have worked in marketing, and I have a very good, almost academic understanding of it. One of the fundamental rules of marketing is that you cannot create a desire for a product, you can only create products that satisfy a desire. The big trucks are not there because the corporations forced the people to buy them, they are there because the people wanted to buy them and monkeys that we are as soon as we see many big trucks we also want one. There are small trucks in the market. They don’t sell as well as the big trucks. It’s simple free market dynamics and I really hate this pov because it makes it seem as though the corporations dictate what people want when it has always been the other way around.

The real disconnect is that you as an individual are alienated from the wants of the mass market, and this is all too common in online communities because guess what? People who spend time on discussion boards online do not think like the average person. Thankfully as barriers to entry dissolve even in markets like car manufacturing which used to be huge, we start getting more diversity of products, some of them tailored to niche buyers like yourself. But you cannot ask that these products be supported at the same level as the product that 80% of the people want, you have to live with the tradeoffs.

Not a science.

My critique is not of the content itself but rather it’s presentation, and its over reliance on what I can only call “millennial humor”.

I don’t think it was the lack of open world that put me off from it, as I’ve always preferred hub based games ever since Dragon Age Origins. I think it was just the writing honestly. I don’t like the whole “le soooo epic zany & ttlly rndm” writing that it shares with Borderlands. I don’t find it funny, endearing nor entertaining. It’s just annoying to me and it was everywhere at the time because millennial culture was at its height.

Then go buy the better product, it’s a free market. Whenever Apple is no longer fulfilling the expectations of their customer, they will start to lose market share to their competitors that do. So go ahead, buy that Android tablet.

Have you used a Surface Pro? It’s a terrible tablet and a terrible laptop. Thats what the iPad would be if it ran MacOS. Also the battery life would be horrendous. Maybe as an option or something but if it’s not gonna be used by a significant chunk of usersApple is not going to spend time on it. People online are not representative of the market.

If you like Apple devices you also know they are opinionated. Sure there’s no reason not to allow X or Y thing on it, but if it requires dev time why would Apple invest on something that they do not see as a priority for the device? The iPad is not aimed at developers or engineers it’s aimed at creatives and board room executives. I know many tattoo artists that use it, they have 0 complaints about the device. I know it’s widely used by illustrators as well.

And yea it’s true Android has had all those features for ages, but who gives a fuck like I said? The apps are not there and no one wants an android Tablet because of it. If those features were so good and so better than what the iPad offers people would be ditching their iPads for Android tablets, but that’s not what happens at all.

I tried giving it a chance but it just felt like a bad Fallout 3 with Borderlands writing. Got to like the third planet I think and I dropped it.

I really liked Avowed though, which elicited similar reactions.

It’s gonna be on gamepass, thats the cheap option.

Like you said, most of it is paper so I think it’s fine. I am more concerned with snacks and shit which are wrapped in plastic and aluminum foil.

Yeah I guess that’s what they’ll have to prove to win this.

This is the problem with android fans. You’ll say Android does X or Y thing and has been able to do it for years! Apple sucks!

But the reality is that it doesn’t matter because the app ecosystem for Android tablets is abysmal, so who gives a fuck about the capabilities of Android tablets if there’s nothing worth doing on them? Most Android tablet apps are still phone apps. It’s terrible all around.

And I don’t mean this in a platform war way, it’s just that it’s not a straight up comparison as it would be with Phones which are more up to par.

Terrible idea man. Can you imagine Trump being in charge of funding all of the arts? I don’t want any government with that sort of power over creative endeavor.

The current system works. You’re not paying for someone to hit copy paste, you’re paying for access to the idea that is physically embodied in the content if that makes sense. The creator decides whether you pay for that or not, and how much to pay. But many pirates don’t want to pay, don’t want to watch ad; in summary they simply believe that they are entitled to the work of the creative, which to me is absurd and outrageous.

But yeah that’s what I meant about AI training. If there are Shrek images out there that Disney willingly published and I trained an AI on it there should be no issue because it would be no different than me looking at Shrek and then making a drawing of it.

It works, it’s just not perfect because no system is. Monarchy or benevolent dictatorships are arguably the most perfect system on paper, at the very least they have the capacity to be the most efficient and bring about it the best results, but it all hinges on one man not becoming alienated from his subjects, which is almost impossible.

But yes that’s how democracy works, the majority are allowed to make bad decisions if they all agree that this is the way they want to go. Democracy doesn’t necessarily mean “everyone gets to vote “, for most of history it has been “this handful of people are allowed to vote”. Back then it was usually white rich men, today I would argue we need to return to a limited democracy but based on merit. Ie “you must be this smart to vote”. Of course the argument is that this can be manipulated to create systemic issues that purposely exclude certain groups based on things other than merit or intelligence so we return to square 1.