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I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

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Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#261

Post by dalke »

bermanoid wrote: post #246
einhverfr wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gender is entirely a social construct very loosely tied to biology but not at all determined by it. I personally think the same thing is probably true of sexual orientation (which really is sexual attraction to gender not necessarily the same sex ). I would add that many anthropologists don't think people are born with a gender.

Gender is entirely a social construct very loosely tied to biology but not at all determined by it. This doesn't sound plausible. [tl;dr: If evolution didn't build in a powerful urge to make our gender behavior match our reproductive sex, then it made a huge error and missed a very easy and effective optimization.] It may be the case that gender could be very loosely tied to biology in a philosophical or theoretical…

"If evolution didn't build in a powerful urge to make our gender behavior match our reproductive sex, then it made a huge error and missed a very easy and effective optimization."

That's not how evolution works! Evolution works at the level of genes, and not individuals. It's easy to construct a model where a 10% gay population ends up being overall better for a population. Consider this made-up hypothesis: gay people are better at caregiving than non-gay people, so a population with gay people ends up with healthier adults who are able to have more, and healthier, children. For this scenario, gayness won't be "optimized" away because that leads to worse reproductive success for the population of genes involved. Nor is the presence of gay individuals "damage", because the result is an evolutionarily better population than one without gay individuals.

As another example, why does Down's syndrome exist? By your logic, shouldn't evolution have optimized that case away? That it hasn't means that changing how the 21st chromosome works is much harder than the impact of having a 1:733 failure rate. Why do you assume that any genetic component to being gay would be easy to change, without having negative consequences elsewhere in the population?

So your error is the belief that evolution emphasizes the reproductive success of individuals, when it deals instead with the reproductive success of genes. Some individuals don't need to reproduce so long as the overall gene population reproduces itself.

BTW, 100 years ago, pink was a boy's color, and young boys wore dresses too. Quoting from http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/When-Did-Girls-St... "yet social convention of 1884, when FDR was photographed at age 2 1/2, dictated that boys wore dresses until age 6 or 7, also the time of their first haircut. Franklin’s outfit was considered gender-neutral."

Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#262

Post by rmc »

gavanwoolery wrote: post #214

Wait...a toy that is oriented primarily towards boys? It must be evil! In that case, Barbie is evil, GI Joe is evil, Transformers are evil, My Little Pony is evil, etc...

Yes, a toy that teaches bad things is evil.

Bad things including: "You are a boy, you must be tough and strong" or "You are a girl you must be pretty and not good at maths"

Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#263

Post by soonerjm »

ugh wrote: post #178
potatolicious wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at modern Lego kits - this is no longer really possible. Half of the pieces are now completely custom pieces that will only ever fit in one way. Gone are the Lego kits where just about all the pieces will recycle into your future creations.

That’s complete and utter bullshit. Stuff like that used to happen (the dark late 90s and early 2000s) but not anymore. And even during that time (which was during my childhood) I always found a cool new way to use the special pieces. I actually always loved having special pieces I could repurpose in some way. This meme needs to die. It’s not based in fact. Case in point: http://city.lego.com/de-DE/Products/Default.a…

Strongly stated, but I agree. When I first started buying Legos for my eldest a few years ago, I was initially turned off by all the special pieces they include in kits nowadays. I thought they'd be a deterrent to building his own creations. In practice, it hasn't been a problem at all. He's always excited to build the model on the box, but it's never together more than an hour or two before he's torn it down to create his own things. Which is awesome, since I think that's where most of the fun and a lot of the value of Legos comes from.

Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#264

Post by aaronmorey »

twodayslate wrote: post #168

What is wrong with Nerf? I love the new stuff they put out. I would have loved a Nerf Sword when I was a kid!

My questions is, what changed about Nerf? I'm not all that old, but most Nerf guns today just seem to be more powerful and more stylized versions of what they were making when I was a kid.

Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#265

Post by gbog »

narrator wrote: post #191
hvass wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give peo…

The Chinese gov is a bit more hands on regulating the morality and frivolity of TV. Even totally apolitical TV shows like match-making shows, which they feel degrade the moral character of the citizenry, are taken off the air by fiat. For example: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07...

True. I'm sure it is the same in Singapore. It is likely a (valuable?) relic of Confucianist paternalism. I'd like to know if it is similar in Japan and Korea.

Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#266

Post by einhverfr »

bermanoid wrote: post #247
sunahsuh wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your grandparent post took the argument farther than just saying that evolution has given men and women certain tendencies or proclivities (as an aggregate, allowing for the massive range of individual differences that are possible). You flat-out claim that men and women have brains that are hard-wired a certain way. If there's anything evolution has given us as humans, it's brains that are amazingly adaptable and pl…

You make an apparently logical assumption based on what you understand of evolution and biology (and how the human brain works) but I proffer that there's a fair amount of evidence that those assumptions might be wrong. (For instance, we have this recent study questioning the widely-held belief that men are by nature better at spatial reasoning: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/women-math-science... ) The pr…

On top of that, you have an epistemological problem. How can you separate culture and biology in something like this without repeating the same experiment in a wide range of people in different types of cultures?

Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#267

Post by barrkel »

maximusprime wrote: post #179
HotKFreshSwag wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who work at corporations have consciences. They are not run by robots yet. Corporations consist of people with kids of their own. They are human beings. They are not without blame just like the parents.

It's not immoral to give the public what they are asking you for.

Giving the public what they're asking for has no necessary relationship with morality at all. Simply because it's what they're asking for doesn't mean it's moral either.

For the downvoter(s), a thought experiment: lynch mobs.

Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#268

Post by sili »

nostromo wrote: post #53

When I see these stories taking companies to task over why they sell what they do, I always wonder why nobody holds consumers to task. For example: why doesn't Lego sell to girls? Why doesn't Barbie have more realistic features? Why don't car manufacturers offer an electric vehicle? Why doesn't McDonalds sell salads instead of fries? Why do record labels offer such crappy music? It's easy to blame the companies -- bu…

I don't think companies are of the hook here, especially large ones who control large segments of their industry. It might be hard for them sometimes to change what consumers want, but at the same time they often are the ones resisting change. Often times change in market preferences means that the company has to do extra work and spend extra money to adjust and offer new products. Sometimes they see that it would be cheaper to disrupt the change instead. Marketing and lobbying, as others have pointed out, are tools they use for that purpose.

Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#269

Post by bmelton »

WickyNilliams wrote: post #255
JonnieCache wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second episode of Charlie Brooker's current Black Mirror series of scifi dramas contains elements of Network, but set in a future dystopia where people sort of live inside an ipad that's stuck running farmville. It's a lot better than I've just made it sound. In fact, it's incredible, and terrifying. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Black_Mirror_... Also highly recommended. To be honest the whole th…

I watched this last night, really good viewing. Especially poignant was the ending where the protagonist traded in his morals for a comfortable life and fame. It evoked feelings of disappointment that he was so cheaply bought off, the same kind of disappointment i felt at the end of 1984 when Winston was re-educated. In some ways it was a case of reductio ad absurdum, but the more you look how popular culture is evol…

I know this isn't a movie forum, but typically, when discussing movies, one doesn't start off with a spoiler of the ending.

Thanks a ton. :-\

Re: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

#270

Post by WickyNilliams »

bmelton wrote: post #269
WickyNilliams wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watched this last night, really good viewing. Especially poignant was the ending where the protagonist traded in his morals for a comfortable life and fame. It evoked feelings of disappointment that he was so cheaply bought off, the same kind of disappointment i felt at the end of 1984 when Winston was re-educated. In some ways it was a case of reductio ad absurdum, but the more you look how popular culture is evol…

I know this isn't a movie forum, but typically, when discussing movies, one doesn't start off with a spoiler of the ending. Thanks a ton. :-\

Oops! It's not really a twist or anything, but yeah that was a bit of a faux pas. Pardon my stupidity!
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