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A video game community filled my nephew's final days with joy

theguardian.com

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Re: A video game community filled my nephew's final days with joy

#61

Post by ianai »

ianai wrote: post #53
sdegutis wrote: post #34

Or alternatively, these are very important days in a person's life where serious thought and reflection might actually be needed, in the event that there really is something after this life, and our decisions in this life do actually have consequences on that. But instead, this person was offered constant distraction until the very end.

Without medication I suffer from around 31 migraines in 31 days. Opioids wouldn’t hardly touch the pain. They’d just make it so I didn’t care I was in so much pain. Distraction is sometimes the only way to get pas pain. Further, I’ve been able to seemingly forget about the pain when laying with friends. That’s absolutely what we should all be doing for each other - meaningful, supportive connections for one another.

“Laying with friends” was supposed to be “laughing with friends”. Autocorrect fails again.

Re: A video game community filled my nephew's final days with joy

#62

Post by rubinelli »

Retric wrote: post #56
clmul wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You presume that by believing in a God you're not living life in the best way you can, but is there really an objective (non-religious) "best way" to live life? I would assume that for the average religious person, the way they live their life feels just about right (barring any intrinsic human shortcomings).

If following a religion has zero downsides in life, then it needs no justification. However, the act of trying to justify religion suggests it’s not inherently optimal. So, the actual counter argument to Pascal’s wager is this. If there are some true god(s) that care they might have an actual objective scale, but as it’s unknowable any sacrifices for a specific religion are unwise. In other words we don’t know if the…

We promote and justify all kinds of actions and attitudes that are not immediately beneficial, like eating properly and exercising. For the religious person, a virtuous life is in itself a reward.

Re: A video game community filled my nephew's final days with joy

#63

Post by hobs »

scotty79 wrote: post #47
Arbalest wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pascals wager is garbage, it underestimates the time, effort and thought cost if there is no god. What sort of reflections would otherwise be meaningful? All the regrets they have? It's a kid, he had cancer, what could he have done differently?

Also Pascal wager is wrong because it assumes that believing in god is free or almost free, but if there's no god then the only thing you have is your life and by believing in god you are giving up the only opportunity to live your life the best way you can. Instead you taint everything you got with twisted and wicked thoughts like the one user 'sdegutis' presented: "Kid should suffer more before he died. Because sup…

It's not "wrong" its literally a foil to respond to logical reasoning of religious belief(and establish rational approaches generally ended in madness.)

Pascal was trying to show other ways to christian faith, and how absurd dealing with infinities of uncertainties were.

The wager has had many criticisms over the years, but I would say misunderstanding it as a logical and faithful argument for the existence of god is the most prominent one.

Re: A video game community filled my nephew's final days with joy

#64

Post by mncharity »

vijayr02 wrote: post #41
krilly wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? These days the guardian is known for its poor fact checking and misleading headlines

Well you could argue they would do better with more resources. Anyway: the Guardian is just one paper. Support independent journalism, whether it's the NYT / WSJ / WaPo / FT / your favourite non-clickbait news platform.

I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of a local hacks-and-hackers (journalists and programmers) group...

How can one best support journalism, if its brokenness is systemic?

Consider a supermarket-checkout tabloid of the "UFO aliens tattooed my baby!" variety. It seems unlikely that any plausible level of resources will yield high-quality journalism. But perhaps the BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed News pair is a counterargument.

Consider the NYT, with its view of the world as a competition between ideas, rather than between economic and political interests. More resources won't fix that.

Also apropos the NYT, for decades I wished for better coverage of the role of subculture group-think in governance failures. I excused that NYT's lack of it as resource limitations, and hoped for reallocation someday. Then Trump, and there was lots of coverage of group-think among his supporters, and still a dearth of it about its role among elite. Resource limitations weren't the bottleneck.

So yes, marginally better funding might yield marginally better journalism from the the Guardian / NYT / WSJ / WaPo / FT / etc. More reporters, fact checking, foreign bureaus, conferences, etc. But...

They still won't be tracking their failures, searching for root causes, and pursuing continuous process improvement. It won't change journalism's culture of obliviousness to decades of learning in other industries about how to organize processes for consistently high quality.

Is there any journalistic platform that has a plausibly modern process story, and just needs resources to flesh it out and grow? Regardless of focus - just, is anyone doing this well, who can be funded and assisted as an exemplar? Is there any journalism foundation attempting to encourage modern processes? Is there any dinky little local paper that's made a commitment to consistently record its failures in a google spreadsheet, and to follow up on what went wrong and how their process might be improved? That I could see funding.

Marginal non-transformative improvement is nice too. With society and history being chaotic, small deltas can have large consequences. But I find the current product quality demotivating without some prospect for transformative improvement.

Re: A video game community filled my nephew's final days with joy

#66

Post by em-bee »

scotty79 wrote: post #47
Arbalest wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pascals wager is garbage, it underestimates the time, effort and thought cost if there is no god. What sort of reflections would otherwise be meaningful? All the regrets they have? It's a kid, he had cancer, what could he have done differently?

Also Pascal wager is wrong because it assumes that believing in god is free or almost free, but if there's no god then the only thing you have is your life and by believing in god you are giving up the only opportunity to live your life the best way you can. Instead you taint everything you got with twisted and wicked thoughts like the one user 'sdegutis' presented: "Kid should suffer more before he died. Because sup…

that assumes that those twisted and wicket thoughts are actually the right interpretation of the word of god.

i'd be just as skeptical as you are. but that doesn't invalidate the idea. there are other interpretations that make a lot more sense and are actually helpful.

Re: A video game community filled my nephew's final days with joy

#67

Post by codingdave »

nrmn wrote: post #59
di4na wrote: post #29

o7

fyi to the downvotes: o7 is a farewell salute. https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/3sdixv/what...

Just because it has a meaning does not mean it is adding constructively to the conversation.

Re: A video game community filled my nephew's final days with joy

#68

Post by em-bee »

Retric wrote: post #56
clmul wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You presume that by believing in a God you're not living life in the best way you can, but is there really an objective (non-religious) "best way" to live life? I would assume that for the average religious person, the way they live their life feels just about right (barring any intrinsic human shortcomings).

If following a religion has zero downsides in life, then it needs no justification. However, the act of trying to justify religion suggests it’s not inherently optimal. So, the actual counter argument to Pascal’s wager is this. If there are some true god(s) that care they might have an actual objective scale, but as it’s unknowable any sacrifices for a specific religion are unwise. In other words we don’t know if the…

If following a religion has zero downsides in life, then it needs no justification. However, the act of trying to justify religion suggests it’s not inherently optimal.

let me rephrase that:

If following civil laws has zero downsides in life, then they need no justification. However, the act of trying to justify certain laws suggests that they are not inherently optimal

life with zero downsides does not exist. we need to make some compromises if we want to live together as a society. be those civil laws or a religion is a matter of choice, but we can't opt out.

the need to justify religion does not invalidate religion any more than the need to justify laws invalidates those.

as a society we still need to decide which laws we want to implement.

and as an individual everyone needs to investigate for themselves which religion (if any) to follow.

Re: A video game community filled my nephew's final days with joy

#69

Post by em-bee »

hirundo wrote: post #45

The Hermitcraft gang played Minecraft with a dying kid this season. I wonder if it was the same one, or if this is becoming a (wondeful) trend. Hermitcraft is a bunch of adults doing their best to play with the spirit of children, and they're good at it. The energy and creativity they spent playing with this kid were impressive. They seemed to get a lot out of it. In fact they should probably make a point of inviting…

i have seen other stories like this, even here on hackernews, so this was surely another one.

Re: A video game community filled my nephew's final days with joy

#70

Post by em-bee »

xaner4 wrote: post #7
mothsonasloth wrote: post #2

Great read, there are many other examples. One example I read in a Wired magazine many years back, of a World of Warcraft mass funeral and mourning in some place.

Or like the one from Norway from a few monthes ago, where the parents did not know he had friends until WOW players meet up in his funeral and a lot of players around the world mourned him in the game https://www.bbc.com/news/disability-47064773

HN threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19122079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19104044
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