yawaworhtttt

There's a bit of a Naked Emperor situation going on right now. Since Chinese manufacturers can make passable proxies (counterfeits), most people don't notice them from across the table and under two sleeves. Among people who do notice, most of them don't care. Among people who do notice and care, there's still a bit of nervousness about the whole thing because they know that if everyone using (knowingly or unknowingly, e.g. because they were sold one) proxies got called out, they'd be afraid of the number of people who'd be disqualified and it would undermine a lot of faith in the secondary market.

The truth of the matter is, a lot more people are playing counterfeits at tournaments than everyone'd be ready to admit. Hell, a pro player got disqualified recently for playing with one, despite pros getting their cards from sponsors.

Most of the decisions regarding reprints and the reserved list are influenced by a small clique of card hoarders, collectors and other stakeholders in bed with WotC execs and resellers, and they are known to whine a lot whenever a reprint takes place. Like, a lot. For instance, Fork is on the reserved list, but Reverberate was printed (although it does not exactly do the same thing, it is almost identical to Fork in practice, thereby not breaching the reserved list promise), and there was a huge outcry among these people. This is despite the fact that both cards see zero play in competitive formats. They just feel entitled to treat cards as stock options because of a non legally binding promise made by WotC in 1995, and because of them the older formats are simply dying out due to lack of new players. I have zero empathy for the hoarders.

All people I know who play MtG have an extensive collection of old cards worth tens of thousands of dollars. All of them wish the reserve list gone and the cards reprinted to hell. They care more about being able to actually play the game with human opponents who can afford it rather than masturbating over a triple sleeved A+ graded beta Lotus. Hell, even big card stores such as StarCityGames or ChannelFireball want it gone too, because holding such fragile assets worth that much ($300+ pieces of cardboard) is a liability that sees limited transfers.

Yeah, they've pretty much buffed creatures and nerfed noncreature spells. Savannah Lion and Kird Ape used to be huge, now even Nimble Mongoose (a 3/3 "can't be targeted" for G) is deemed underpowered by current Legacy standards, and downright unplayable in Vintage.

They've also much pushed the Planeswalker type, and you see plenty of them in Legacy/Modern/Standard; apparently it's a deliberate design decision to make sure that the characters featured in their lore see play at competitive tables.

On the other hand, older noncreature spells are still king among their kind. Lightning Bolt, Dark Ritual, Brainstorm, Swords to Plowshares and Glimpse of Nature aren't getting dislodged any time soon.

MtG is relatively inexpensive if you play Limited formats (Draft, Sealed, "you play what you open") or newer Constructed formats (Standard). For older formats, which I unfortunately find the most fun, your best bet is online. WotC has an official client (Magic Online) which is Windows-only, bug-ridden and requires you to rebuy your whole collection. There are free alternatives such as xmage or cockatrice.

What if I actually wanted the ability to get a thing going and quickly working within a few lines, while also being able to spell things out as needed when the use case arises? Crazy I know.

I was taking into account the human factor; most people are simply not willing to kill another human being in cold blood, whether it's sheer empathy or the risk of getting caught.

Reviews and escrows are a thing in the drug world. Generally speaking everything with drugs is easier:

-It's easier to manufacture your own drugs than commit murder

-It's easier to go unnoticed by law enforcement manufacturing, selling or buying drugs than going unnoticed with murder

-Enforcement authorities around the world are much more willing to cooperate with each other when it comes to solving murder rather than busting someone's MDMA lab

-The market for drug consumption is much larger than the market for hitmen (fortunately!) and it's easier to reach out for the former audience rather than the latter

-There are much more third parties willing to act as escrow for drug trade rather than hitmen services

-There's a moral case to be had about leaving drug use alone (victimless crime and all that), as opposed to murderers or murder instigators which are universally reviled; there are much fewer people willing to engage in a hypothetical hitman market than there are with a drug market

-A review system can actually work with drugs because of the large demand and relatively risk-free aspect for buyers; a good seller can quickly build a reputation, while a bad seller will get buried by bad reviews. Can you imagine a hitman customer writing an Amazon-style review over the person he had murdered?

>And to be clear, I'm not saying murder for hire on the Internet is a thing; I'm just mildly surprised nobody seems to have done it yet, especially now that cryptocurrencies have pretty much solved the largest problem of how to get paid.

There just isn't enough demand for it to be worth the risk and hassle. As I said, any hitman stupid enough to set up a front store is begging to be busted by undercover cops posing as "customers".

Hitmen don't actually make their service readily available* like a pizza restaurant's website, and the ones who do quickly get caught - natural selection if you will. I haven't ever heard of a case of someone getting targeted by an online hit ordered through one of those websites, which you'd expect to if even a single one of them were actually legit. Which makes sense from an economic point of view - there's much more incentive running a (relatively inoffensive) scam and making boatloads of money, rather than risking lifetime jail and committing atrocities to make the same amount of money.

As for ordering drugs, the legal consequences vary a lot depending on the country's jurisdiction. There's also such a thing as a priority list in law enforcement, and they presumably care a lot more about murders than drug use, so one will draw much more attention than the other.

*Yes, readily available. There's nothing "dark" about a website that can only being accessible through special software, it's been a thing since the days of Usenet and BBS.

I'm always wondering - how can people that are determined enough to access the dark web and buy crypto, and willing to instigate a murder, fall for such obvious scams? Do they really think the mafia hosts front sites for anyone to browse and order through? What, do they think they give discounts and fidelity cards as well?

I think the best way to explain it is with this link: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/

Pretty much all large cities are dirty. People like to stereotypically dunk on Paris but to be frank it's got nothing on London or New York. There's just something inherently filthy that comes with large concentrations of human beings. The only exception I've seen first hand is Tokyo. I guess if you're not used to large cities it must be shocking.

"There was a certain something about the air in [Ankh-Morpork]. You got the feeling that it was air that had seen life. You couldn't help noting with every breath that thousands of other people were very close to you and nearly all of them had armpits." -Terry Pratchett, Mort

You know, your arguments wouldn't sound so much in bad faith if you stopped implying IQ detractors were insecure or guilty of wishful thinking, as opposed to simply skeptical of the science behind it, especially in a field that's not exactly well known for the solidity, reproducibility and falsifiability of most of its findings.

All that said, what you said still doesn't contradict Taleb. Being able to (badly) predict a narrow range of outcomes like chess makes IQ a lousy indicator with respect to the ambition of psychometricians to elevate it as the best representative of general intelligence. Or to put it into other terms, if the best you can come up with is that, better drop the whole thing and move on to what actual hard sciences can show us (see the GGGP paper).

I'm not sure how what you're saying contradicts my point (apart from vague accusations of 'wishful thinking'). What Taleb is arguing, what I'm arguing, what the original designer of IQ was arguing and what seems to be common knowledge among everyone I know in neuroscience or medicine is that IQ is a very good predictor of life outcomes if you are mentally impaired to begin with. When you venture into the realm of >100 IQ, it loses a lot of its predictive power, which is why (where I live at least) it is mostly administered to people, mostly children, suspected of needing 'special requirements'. In that sense, it is a very good 'unintelligence quotient' but not much beyond that. It is disingenuous to argue for its general predictive power when what most people have in mind is definitely not disadvantaged children when arguing about it.

Examples of fields with hundreds of years of 'peer-reviewed research':

-Alchemy

-Phrenology

-Humor theory

-Spontaneous generation theory

-Astronomical geocentrism

-Ether theory

-Graphology

-Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis

-Astrology

all of them were once respected fields, complete with papers, journals, professorships, exams, etc.

By the way, speaking as someone in academia, you'd be surprised at how little 'peer-reviewed' means in terms of scientific validity. There's plenty of crap in Nature and Science and everyone knows about it.

Is it true though? There's plenty of evidence that IQ test performance can be learned (i.e. you score higher) with prior training. That's why it's often insisted that tests be taken "out of the blue" without any preparation whatsoever.

...wasn't that known for years outside the tiny bubble of psychometricians? They like to go on about how it's the "best predictor" for whatever, forgetting that the absolute prediction itself is pretty lousy even when at its "best" and most of it comes from obvious tail-end cases (people with IQ below 80). There's also evidence from neuroscience [1] that's what's being measured is an higher order artifact from multiple other measurements. That's the thing: as soon as you go from the abstract, cognition-as-a-black-box mental model to an actual physical one with a model of actual brain regions, IQ falls short.

Which shouldn't be surprising given how futile it should sound to try and encompass the entirety of human abstract thinking (without even being able to give a satisfying, consensus making definition of intelligence) into a single number. Imagine if people came up with a Health Quotient built on very basic medical exams and went on about how that number is the best "predictor" of your lifespan... doesn't mean the number isn't damn useless.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/23259956/