Ethnicity in Xenoblade Chronicles X

This is an article I wrote in 2015 about a video game.  My commenters had some insightful responses, so a few of their insights are now incorporated.

In my apartment, free time has recently become dominated by Xenoblade Chronicles X, epic Japanese RPG. The premise is explained in this video:

Quick summary: In 2054, Aliens destroy earth. Earth sends out colony space ships. One of these, New Los Angeles, crash lands on an alien planet.

Xenoblade Chronicles X offers an interesting case study of ethnicity in Japanese video games, because unlike other games which take place in fantasy worlds, this one takes place in our world (although a different planet). What’s more, it takes place in a future version of Los Angeles. Los Angeles, of course, is very ethnically diverse, so by looking at the cast we can see a Japanese interpretation of ethnic diversity.
[Read more…]

On equal opportunities and outcomes

I recently found an article interviewing Jonathan Haidt. It’s in the rather tedious “liberals are going too far and eliminating free speech” genre. I’m not going to address most of it, just this part (emphasis mine):

The left, meanwhile, has undergone an ideological transformation. A generation ago, social justice was understood as equality of treatment and opportunity: “If gay people don’t have to right to marry and you organize a protest to apply pressure to get them that right, that’s justice,” Mr. Haidt says. “If black people are getting discriminated against in hiring and you fight that, that’s justice.”

Today justice means equal outcomes. “There are two ideas now in the academic left that weren’t there 10 years ago,” he says. “One is that everyone is racist because of unconscious bias, and the other is that everything is racist because of systemic racism.” That makes justice impossible to achieve: “When you cross that line into insisting if there’s not equal outcomes then some people and some institutions and some systems are racist, sexist, then you’re setting yourself up for eternal conflict and injustice.”

Here’s the thing. Outcomes are a product of several things: opportunities provided by society, the abilities of the individuals, and random chance. I believe that people in these minority groups do not systematically have less inherent ability than people in the majority. So if we truly had equality of opportunity, I would expect that minority groups would also have equal outcomes, plus or minus some statistical noise.

Comic transcript: This Ayn Random number generator you wrote *claims* to be fair, but the output is biased toward certain numbers. Well, maybe those numbers are just intrinsically better!
Source: XKCD

[Read more…]

Linkspam: April 15th, 2017

Yeah, just finished my taxes!  So now it’s time for my monthly linkspam.

Double-Dipping Datasets – Why is it wrong to use an old dataset in order to answer new questions? Answer: It’s not wrong, I do it all the time in my research. Oh, and social scientists do it too, as in the well-known study from 2004 showing that asexuals make up about 1% of the population–based on a survey from 1990.  Nonetheless, there are some cases where it intuitively seems like using the same dataset twice sounds wrong.  HJ Hornbeck digs into some of the reasons why.

Here’s another thought.  Researchers have limited resources and can only collect so much data.  Collecting a few large datasets and using those for many purposes is fine.  But if you’re collecting lots of little sets of data, you shouldn’t be testing lots of hypotheses on each data set until you get a hit.

Trans 101: Put Down the Map – Heh, well this isn’t the kind of article that tries to explain trans issues in a simplified and accessible format.  There’s a lot about epistemology, using the “map vs territory” metaphor.  I will say that every social justice advocate should have a healthy amount of empiricism, and that’s why we encourage listening to people rather than just theorizing about them.

[Read more…]

Paper: Overbooking flights

In recent news (cn: autoplay), a United Airlines passenger was unwillingly dragged off a plane to make seats for employees. The incident was partially blamed on the common practice of airlines to deliberately overbook flights in order to make up for all the no-show passengers.

While I won’t discuss the particulars of this incident, I am willing to do something that most journalists are not: read relevant academic literature. I just picked one paper that appeared to have a sufficiently broad perspective:

Marvin Rothstein, (1985) OR Forum – OR and the Airline Overbooking Problem. Operations Research 33(2):237-248.

The basic problem is that many people who buy airplane tickets don’t show up. In 1961, the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) reported that 1 out of 11 ticket sales were no-shows. These numbers are about the same today, with 7-8% no-shows. The airlines could create wait lists to fill the empty seats, but it would be impossible to contact the wait-listed customers in a timely fashion unless they were already present at the gate.

[Read more…]

Immigration is a science issue

The March for Science happens this next Saturday. I don’t typically participate in protests, but if you’re interested there are hundreds of them occurring throughout the world. The March for Science website explains why they organize:

Science, scientists, and evidence-based policymaking are under attack. Budget cuts, censorship of researchers, disappearing datasets, and threats to dismantle government agencies harm us all, putting our health, food, air, water, climate, and jobs at risk. It is time for people who support science to take a public stand and be counted.

I’m surprised by an omission from this agenda: immigration policy. Immigration is very obviously a science issue. My advisor is an immigrant. 1/3 to 1/2 of the students and postdocs in my research group have been immigrants. The same is true of my class. The effect is so large, you hardly need statistics to show it.

Nonetheless, some statistics…

[Read more…]

Cards Against Humanity is a bad game

Cards Against Humanity is first and foremost a ripoff of Apples to Apples. The rules are identical, only the cards are different. There’s no copyright on game mechanics, you see.

Apples to Apples is a family-friendly party game, published in 1999. It had a lot of staying power; I recall playing it in college about ten years later. My boyfriend and I have an old copy on our shelf, which proudly states, “Over three million games sold!” Going by their website, that number is now 15 million.

Cards Against Humanity was published in 2011. I don’t know how many copies it has sold, but it obviously became a bigger deal than Apples to Apples.

To be honest, I was never hot on Apples to Apples. It’s the lightest of light party games, a great board game for people who don’t really like board games. Nonetheless, I appreciate it’s clever design, and I’ll talk about how Cards Against Humanity used and abused that design.

[Read more…]

Dolezal

Rachel Dolezal came to national attention in 2015 when people discovered that she was a White person living and identifying as a Black person. You can read more details in a recent New York Times article and interview.

I would question the standard liberal reaction to Rachel Dolezal–that is, that she’s a waste of space, mentally ill, and worthy of hatred. I am not playing devil’s advocate. Dolezal’s story has been of personal interest to me since I saw it in 2015, because I immediately recognized some of myself in it.

There were obviously many relevant differences between us, and many critiques of Dolezal seem justified. But it bothered me to see her receive so much hatred. Two years later, I’ve now had more time to think about it and sort out the issues.

[Read more…]