Over the past year or so, I've built my own system of agents that behaves almost exactly like this. I can describe what I'd like built before I go to bed and have a fantastic foundation in place by the next day. For simpler projects, they'll be complete. Because of the reviews, the code continually improves until the agents are satisfied. I'm impressed every time.
This is the most compelling reason (unless you really need the range of fiber) - 10GbE can be really power hungry. Each 10G switch port that is in use adds something like 1-5 watts to the power budget. 1 watt is reasonable but most switch hardware isn't nearly that efficient. That could mean 10 watts for every single link if you're using 5 watts at each end. Multiply that by several links and it starts to add up really quickly.
I read much of that guide. I was initially led to believe that I have aphantasia. I certainly don't see things that don't exist - that would be an hallucination. I can imagine and describe it in vivid detail if I want, but it's not there - I don't see it in the same way I see the physical reflection of light on surfaces.
Similarly I don't hear sounds that are not produced by difference in air pressure hitting my ear drums. Again, that would be an hallucination. But I can certainly imagine sounds, again in great detail, including musical melodies and different instrument timbres.
Then, I get to the part about dreaming. I don't dream often, which also seems like a sign that I have it. That said, on some of my dreams, all sensations feel very real. Images, sounds, conversations, faces, colours, emotions... Those are hallucinations for all practical purposes though.
Except the fact that I have those vivid dreams seems to say I don't have aphantasia.
Not that it will make a lot of difference in my life, but where does that leave me? :D
It leaves you with not having aphantasia! I rather suspect quite a lot of people who believe they have it simply differ on the level of literalism they're willing to use to describe their imagination than those who've led them to believe they have it.
That's what I always assumed from reading about it in the past, where it was mostly "I can't imagine things in my mind". Well, I can certainly imagine things.
Now, the guide in the top comment talks about actually seeing things. I don't. As in, really not at all, for any interpretation of "seeing" I can think of.
I wouldn't even describe it as fuzzy - it's just not an image at all, it's more abstract thought and abstract perception.
Can you sit back and picture something at all? Like if I said "imagine the exterior of your house" would you actually imagine that or would you just be unable to do that at all?
I've been trying to work out for a while how much aphantasia I have, and I think it might help to give more detail to your instruction, and then your follow-up question.
If you said that to me, I would imagine the exterior of my house. But one of the things I am trying to work out is whether my definition of "imagine" is different. I would think of, and sort of see different details of the house at different times. Sort of like picturing one part at a time, but perhaps more like remembering than picturing. I know the overall layout, but I don't know if I literally "see" it.
I've tried a few times to actually _see_ something in my mind, and there have been moments, usually when I'm close to falling asleep, where I have actually seen something vividly. So much more vividly than usual, that I remember thinking that if this is what other people can do easily, then sketching must be far easier than for me - you'd just copying down what you see in your head!
Edit:
I remember thinking the illustration on the Wikipedia page might be a good way to think of it. I picture things with less vividness/detail, so I'm not sure whether I really see them.
> But one of the things I am trying to work out is whether my definition of "imagine" is different.
Yeah that's where I'm at as well. I can answer yes to that question but I'm not sure my answer means what GP might interpret from it.
> Sort of like picturing one part at a time, but perhaps more like remembering than picturing. I know the overall layout, but I don't know if I literally "see" it.
Similar here, though in my case I wouldn't necessarily call it "remembering". I can "picture" a completely made up house and it will "appear" similarly in my mind.
> there have been moments, usually when I'm close to falling asleep, where I have actually seen something vividly
Same, or during actual dreams.
> I remember thinking the illustration on the Wikipedia page might be a good way to think of it.
If you mean the one with the apple inside the heads, it doesn't help me at all. I can't relate to any of the pictures in it. :D
Your comments, and your other reply to the parent post I was replying to, really resonated with me.
I think by default I imagine things the same way as you - not images, not words, but just knowing how something is. I think perhaps that is similar to what I called remembering. When I think of something that way, I can think of, for example, a whole house. But I don't see anything.
But, if I try to picture something instead, as an actual image, I can actually picture smaller specifics parts of something. I think when I do that I am actually doing what people are talking about when they say they are picturing something, or seeing something in their mind's eye. All I get then is like an outline, or faded details, and I can only do small details at a time. Between a 3 and 4 in the Wikipedia representation of aphantasia. It sounds to me like you aren't able to switch to seeing something at all.
A while ago, after reading about someone curing their aphantasia, I thought about this a lot, and I think at the time I suddenly remembered something that made me think I could picture things clearly when I was a child. I also know that I see things when I dream, so I decided I should be able to get the ability back.
I used to try quite often to picture things in my mind, and would do some of the tricks like having eyes open a crack, and just waiting to recognise things in the patterns on my eyelids, etc. Occasionally I would suddenly see something as if it were really there. Like a 2 on the scale. The one thing I remember now is that I saw an entire chair, well enough that I could have sketched it. Have you tried often, or I guess practiced?
Edit: I tried some of the things this person described. They took a Better Living Through Chemistry approach that I didn't want to try though, so I skipped all drugs/chemicals/teas:
I can imagine it, yes. But there's no images. Not in practice, at least. I don't see the shapes and colours, but I know how they are. It's more abstract thought than image per se. It's not words either, so it's very hard to describe.
I feel in my gut that this is fad-driven internet bullshit, and I would like to learn less, if it were possible.
> Dr. Adam Zeman, a neurologist from Exeter, receives a patient who can no longer imagine — known as patient MX. MX goes blind in his mind’s eye after undergoing surgery.
> Media outlets like the New York Times report the findings. This leads to an outpouring of new discoverers.
My gut feel has always been that it is just a language thing where some people think that when others imagine things that they literally see it right in front of them _the same way_ they see real things.
Like, when I imagine a scene or object in my head, I am not literally seeing it. It's like some vague in-between thing. And that people who claim to have aphantasia just have a higher bar for what it means to "see" something.
Though I'm open to being corrected if there's some concrete experiment that can be performed that shows definitively that some people can not imagine things _at all_.
Maybe you have aphantasia as well. I had without knowing it.
Some observations:
Someone told me to close my eyes and think about "an apple at a table".
Then I was told to open my eyes and tell what color the apple was.
The question didn't make sense to me:
I only thought about about the concept of "an apple on a table". When my eyes are closed it is black. Absolutely black. Blacker than a Norwegian winter night with cloud cover and no moon. There is nothing.
Until then I thought all this talk about seing things was just a metaphor for what I had also done.
But when I talk to others they will often immediately say it was green or red. Because they saw it.
Two extra observations:
Sometimes just before I fall asleep I can sometimes think images of stuff that doesn't exist: think 3d modeling with simple shapes.
And just after waking up I can sometimes manage to see relatively detailed images of actual physical things.
Both these only last for a few seconds to a few minutes.
I also have this mostly when I'm half asleep and have had some very 4K sharp lucid dreams as well, including seeing leaves on a tree up close and feeling the texture.
Under normal circumstances, my imagination is also colorless and is more about spatial layout and shapes. Like an untextured 3D model.
It's hard to describe. I think there's more nuance here. When you ask "What colour was the apple?" then I can "fill in" the colour and imagine a "red" one. But it's more like the details are filled in "on demand" or "lazilly" rather than "ahead of time". And like I said, it's not the same thing as actual visual hallucination.
It is helpful to have someone engage, for sure. I have a question for you: if you look at a 3d object that you can only see one side of, can you make inferences about the other side of the object? Can you rotate it in your head? Could you quickly be able to tell whether an object will fit in a particular hole, without actually trying it?
> if you look at a 3d object that you can only see one side of, can you make inferences about the other side of the object? Can you rotate it in your head? Could you quickly be able to tell whether an object will fit in a particular hole, without actually trying it?
Obviously I cannot know for sure what the other side looks like without seeing it, but I can make a reasonable guess and yes, I can mentally turn around objects in my head to see if they fit.
I also enjoy woodworking and repairs and other activities that force me to think 3D, but I believe it would be much easier if I could think in images.
Yes. Or maybe rather understand. For me it was a lightbulb moment just like my realisation of exactly how bad my colourblindness was: what is next to impossible for me to see (red drawings on woods in maps) was chosen by someone who thought it stood out.
I'm at least pointing out that I now know personally that there are multiple levels of visualisation, from me just "feeling" what it would mean to rotate a 3d object (it works, I can absolutely determine if it will fit but it is absolutely not visual) up to some close friends of mine that see vivid pictures of faces and can combine them with eyes closed.
For me who cannot see images except what I physically see it certainly is interesting to hear people describe remembering peoples phone numbers as text that they can see (I remember the feeling of myself saying it, not the sound) or memorising my name by mentally putting the image of ne next to their image of their brother who has the same name as me (!)
It really is funny, because I can draw. For example the famous "draw a bike" thing seems weird to me because I can't see myself making any of the mistakes from any of the drawings. Not because I can see a bike, but because I know it.
I really wish I could occupy your brain for a few minutes to see just how much of this is language. There's an amazing effect in this conversation where I remain convinced that basically everything I've heard could come down to definitional differences, and yet it really could come down to a radically different subjective experience between us, and I have no real way of knowing.
I know if I close my eyes now there is nothing visible.
I also know if I have a good night's sleep and wake up late on Saturday I might be able to see images of things I am working on in the garden or elsewhere.
So I know seing nothing is my default and I know that seing something vividly can be possible.
I can draw better than most people, but have nearly zero internal visualization. I learned to draw by direct observation, committing the patterns to memory, and repetition.
As a result, I have excellent (if I do say so myself) drawings from life, some shockingly good portraits in oil, and also I can reproduce a few cartoon characters (which I’ve practiced extensively) almost perfectly. BUT, ask me to draw my mom from memory, and I can’t do it, like at all. I have, really, no idea what my own mom looks like.
I don't think that makes sense. Most people struggle to draw even with something to copy right in front of them. Seeing something is insufficient to draw well. It's also not necessary in order to draw well.
I don't draw impossible bikes. Because I know what bikes are. That is what I mean. Not that I can make nice or even photographically correct images of them.
Patient MX there is quite persuasive. Lots of neuroscience discoveries start with somebody having some brain damage and losing a facility of some kind. However, most of the people claiming aphantasia, or the extreme opposite, are not brain damaged. At least not literally.
It would also be more valuable information if some area was damaged that was known to cause the effect.
My gut feel is that people's experiences can be quite different. V.S. Ramachandran's books have nudged me to take these things more seriously.
I think visual imagination is also related to spatial rotation abilities. For example can you imagine yourself in your hometown, then imagine an "animation" as you (from a first-person perspective) fly up vertically, then turn in various directions and sort of feel where the landmarks are in the mind's eye? Or does that sound nonsense to you? Would you agree that being faster at certain tasks (that require a visual scratchpad - e.g. imagining a tabletop and being told what happens e.g. add a triangle on the left, add a square halfway overlapping the triangle etc) indicates that someone has more vivid imagination?
The parent article has brain scans showing different activations in control brains vs aphantasia vs hyperphantasia. Also when people self report that their experience has qualitatively changed that seems like a pretty strong indicator that’s at least a range.
The fact that some people report aphantasia and some people don't implies that their brains are different but it does not imply that the reason the brains are different is aphantasia. For example, aphantasia has some comorbidity with autism, probably because autism leads people to interpret expressions in different ways.
So you’re saying you think people who report aphantasia see mental imagery but don’t think of it as imagery? And that the brain scans indicate difference but not around mental imagery?
Yeah essentially, or alternatively neither group has visual imagery. I think it fundamentally comes down to phenomenology being very hard to express in language.
That’s why the self reports seem valuable to me. If someone says “I’ve never seen something in my minds eye” and then they do dmt and say “oh shit I can see things in my minds eye now I totally get what people mean now” it seems to imply there’s a spectrum of visualization capabilities. There’s also people who’ve gone in the opposite direction due to injury.
But people who do dmt are also liable to say "oh shit I can see the machine elves, I totally get what people mean now". Which is not to say that their reports are unreliable, just inscrutable.
Honestly, your meditation experience sounds more like an altered state induced by the meditation, rather than confirmation of what non-aphantasiacs experience on a daily basis. And I'm jealous you had that experience.
Whether it was an altered state or not, it showed me the ability to see vivid imagery. And the experience isn't even on the high end of reported abilities to visualise.
Yea and it seems weird to assume that since these states are possible that most humans are mistaken when for millennia they’ve talked about having mental imagery. The idea that aphantasia is just language confusion is so strange to me. As someone who has aphantasia I understand the “oh shit” moment when you realize that there’s more going on but the evidence seems pretty overwhelming to me that most people have some internal imagery.
That almost all our language about recalling physical objects talk in terms related to images in retrospect should've been a dead giveaway, and I do remember many instances growing up I found it weird, because it seemed like dumb ways of talking about things you couldn't see...
It's to the point as we see it's hard to even talk about recall without recalling such words - e.g. "imagination" itself presumes images.
I have aphantasia. I do not normally see things in my inner eye at all, but I still "imagine" things. I can draw things I imagine, even though I can't see them.
But I do see images while dreaming. It's very distinct from imagining things while awake and unable to see them.
And I have had one waking experience where I saw images as clearly as if I was looking at a photograph while awake, in a dark room, with my eyes closed during meditation. It was very different from when I'm dreaming.
This is not a "language thing". Until the experience mentioned above, I had gone ~40 years with no idea seeing things in your minds eye while awake was a thing at all.
> I can draw things I imagine, even though I can't see them.
This is what I mean though. What do you mean by "see" exactly, if not imagine? You can imagine something so clearly that you are able to replicate it on paper, yet that is not the minds eye? I also see while dreaming, in a way that is more like my day to day experience, and not at all how I would describe imagining things.
> I saw images as clearly as if I was looking at a photograph while awake
If anything this is more mind's eye clarity than I have ever experienced. My mind's eye is nothing like looking at an actual photograph.
It's super interesting to read these accounts. I have my doubts that Aphatasia is real for 99% of people who claim to have it and its a language issue.
What is imagination if not seeing the thing in your head. Do people think others LITERALLY see an object like photons are hitting their neurons directly?
Some people do report seeing things as clear as if photos are hitting their eyes. Most people report more diffuse views.
I see nothing, but I have seen once, and when I did, I did "literally" see an object as clear as if I was looking straight at it, or to be more precisely a I saw a whole scene.
This is hard to talk about because all of our terms for it involve assumptions of seeing.
But when I "imagine" something, there is unambiguously no visual whatsoever. I can't see lines, colors, points. Nothing, any more than if there was a wall between me and an object I have never seen.
But that doesn't mean I don't have knowledge of it.
> I also see while dreaming, in a way that is more like my day to day experience, and not at all how I would describe imagining things.
Then how would you describe imagining things? Because if you don't see something when imagining it while awake, then that sounds like aphantasia.
> If anything this is more mind's eye clarity than I have ever experienced. My mind's eye is nothing like looking at an actual photograph.
And yet what I experienced isn't even near the high end of reported experiences of people.
Maybe let's loop in other senses for a second. Since, presumably aphantasia doesn't apply to all senses? I can imagine the sensation of my tongue on a cold ice cream, and even the taste. But I don't _taste and feel_ it. I can imagine burning my hand on a hot stove, but I don't recoil. See how they are separate but related? The same is true for how I imagine things visually. I don't actually see them, but I imagine them. I don't know how else to articulate that seeing and visualising are not the same thing.
What you describe makes it sound like you have aphantasia.
People who don't have aphantasia do report "actually seeing" things with various degrees of fidelity, in some (less common) cases clearly enough to "overlay" on objects with their eyes open.
When I had my experience I did "actually see things". Yes, I know they weren't there, but it looked as if they were, in high resolution, full colour, with motion.
EDIT: Also, people "imagine" things with other senses or without too, and people have or don't have inner monologues, or dialogues, in their own voice, or separate voices - the breadth of inner life is very significant.
For my part, I don't recall sounds either, but I "reproduce them" in inner monologue in my own voice roughly in proportion to my ability to reproduce them out loud, but others do recall sounds as they heard them, reporting various degrees of fidelity. The same for smells. Most assumptions about how people's internal life "must" be tends to fall apart once you ask enough people.
E.g. There are writers I know with no internal monologue or dialogue. I know others for whom writing is like listening in to characters acting out scenes and just transcribing it. In some cases watching them act out scenes and just describing them.
Personally I can imagine something with such detail and depth that my eyes are effectively blacked out despite being open. I can also imagine a grayscale 2D apple fine too, so Im not completely fucked if I have an abstract thought driving a car.
Are you saying you think everyone can see basically the same amount of imagery?
I’m quite convinced it’s a real distinction. I have nearly zero visualization. The main thing for me is that I may get a fleeting glimpse of part of an image if I focus, but it evaporates instantly. I can’t hold it for any amount of time whatsoever.
On the other hand, I have very strong internal audio. I can play back music I haven’t heard for years or even decades. I hear the different instruments come in, the timbres, etc. It’s obviously not the same as music hitting my eardrums, but it is full, detailed audio which I can pause at will, rewind and pick apart. I’m told there are people that can’t hear any sound in their heads at all...
I also lost the ability to think in images after a series of surgeries at 13. I went from being a very imaginative kid with dream like states while awake to purely lexical. I stopped enjoying playing pretend with my sister basically overnight, I just couldn't see it any more.
I still do have visual dreams though they are rare, I can no longer conjure any sense of an object while awake. I have a couple images from before this (my mother's face before she died) that I can kind of almost see, idk, or I have the feeling like I'm seeing them.
Call it whatever you like, maybe there is a natural distribution, I always thought of it as the cost I paid to stay alive, my own personal brain damage even though my surgeries were all cardiovascular.
I respect you, fellowniusmonk, but all we ever get about aphantasia is self-report, anecdote, self-assessment questionnaire, subjective impression. People want me to be nice about this and acknowledge that the thing exists because they all say it does. The best I can offer is acknowledgement that you all say it does.
On the other hand, you have a special claim to plausibility because of the surgery. Oh wait cardiovascular surgery? So, are we saying anaesthetic side effects? Or brain damage from reduced blood flow maybe.
I'll note that a lot of people's impressions and feelings about ... what it's like to be alive, generally ... undergo a radical transformation at about age 13, because hormones.
As someone with aphantasia, all I ever get from people who can visualize is self-report, anecdote, self-assessment, etc.
By definition, this will always be the case until we have a deep enough understanding of the brain to diagnostically assess this.
What I can assure you is that I cannot see/imagine with my mind, and that many other aspects of my life make sense given this limitation, e.g. when people describe their experience of reading books and mental world building, it’s entirely foreign to me. Or when my brother describes his ability to create mind palaces, manipulate visual concepts mentally as if he were using CAD software, etc. it seems preposterous.
But I have to take his word that it’s something he can actually do. Such is the nature of this subject.
Until I discovered the concept of aphantasia in my early 30s, I genuinely thought that people’s descriptions of “visualization” were just a figure of speech. It was mind blowing to learn that people actually see anything more than nothing at all, and a lifetime of experiences and confusion about what other people described about theirs suddenly made sense.
I have similar feelings about those who claim to have an internal monologue or voice etc. It's all so alien to me. Outside of dreams or hynagogia, my "self" and internal experience is non-verbal, non-visual, and mostly lacking any other sensory qualia.
If "me" is rooted in any perceptual qualia, I think and experience a vague mixture of a spatial awareness, proprioception, topology, and emotion. I can barely summon sound memories like music, and this could include lyrics. This recall is very faintly rooted in auditory qualia. Like the ghost of an echo down a distance corridor. Moreso, I can "feel" such music memory as a hint of proprioception, i.e. the after-thump of bass in my body or the after-tingle of a cymbal in my ear. But it utterly lacks the presence and richness of real listening.
I can think about words and phrases I've either heard or read, or try to arrange some words to write or speak later. But they're fleeting concepts, neither visual nor auditory in quality. They're not like the sound or music memory above. They're also not visuals of typography. In fact, I've more than once had words in my lexicon that I could neither pronounce nor reliably spell. I could readily match them to parsed words when reading, but would be unable to express them.
Finally, I have a relative with schizophrenia. I've witnessed how she behaves when hallucinating and/or having delusions. She often seems to experience her thoughts as if being talked to over her shoulder, or can manifest a fear into seeing dangerous threats. Her experience seems a kind of polar opposite to mine.
I wonder how it is to be somewhere in the middle of this range. It must be different from hers, to be useful but not schizoid. And it also seems like it must be a lot more vivid and accessible than my usual experience.
If your core issue is with trying to quantify and observe others Qualia I think you're going to have a hard time.
I still have people tell me I must be faking my colorblindness, or just treat me like I'm blind. Normally teenagers, theory of mind is tough at that age.
I'm not sure nice or just a smidge of humility/uncertainty in expressing doubt.
Propagation of information pre-internet was so low people just couldn't easily triangulation on some of these things.
Fwiw I generally agree with you, my wife brought this up to me just in the last few years and I was like, oh I just thought this happened to everyone around 13 like a reverse Hook (the movie) thing.
But I can't paint or draw worth a damn sense then and she can freehand paint hyper realistic pictures. I don't see how she could do that without the imagination version of a stencil.
After I found out it wasn't a normal part of puberty I just figured it was brain damage acquired during the surgeries.
Also, from what I understand fMRI shows enough of a difference I'm inclined to believe the other people who say they were born that way.
Well, I'm an artist, but I don't insist that I can visualise things vividly, whatever that really means.
I'm looking at the brain scans in the article now. It's good that it's got 'em. Do they really mean what they're presented as meaning? It shows that some people, when told to imagine things, activate a bunch of brain regions. Some of those are also involved in actual looking, though not with clear purposes. Then there's also
areas to do with memory and salience. I'll say that the people in this group are having a more emotional experience when they imagine. They give more of a shit, they pay more attention. I'm not sure that this qualifies as a skill, or an ability, or "seeing". But heck, what's seeing anyway?
Ed Catmull surveyed people at Pixar, and there wasn't a particularly strong correlation in their staff between ability to draw and aphantasia or not - they had artists with aphantasia such as Glen Keane, who created Ariel[1]
For my part, while I'm not a great artist by any means, there was absolutely a time where I was well above average at drawing, despite aphantasia.
People struggle to draw things that are right in front of them - being able to see what you draw is not inherently a huge asset.
Obviously because each person is different a/b tests are somewhat impossible for qualia issues. All I have is access to my pre/post expierence. It seems aphantasia can be intrinsic or emergent and since mine developed potentially through damage or re-wiring during surgery I wouldn't be suprised in the slightest that the pathways and compensations are different or non-existent for my case but not for others.
>all we ever get about aphantasia is self-report, anecdote, self-assessment questionnaire, subjective impression.
Is there any other way to get information on what people see internally?
The idea that great artists, for example, don't have dramatically different visualization than people who report not seeing sharp images or images at all seems like the theory in need of proof.
You can't just say the evidence is subjective so you're right. The evidence only ever could be subjective.
Did I say I'm right? I assume we're all wrong in ways yet to be discovered, that's my default position on everything. And I've modified my viewpoint slightly just now: I accept that there are loose groups of people who experience imagination differently. So I'm being decently open-minded here, what do you want, blood?
The only basis we have for assuming you're a self-aware sentient being is also your self report.
For my part, I have experienced both aphantasia - for my entire life - and seeing images clearly. Once, during meditation. No drugs involved. No health issues. Not during puberty.
The two are not remotely alike.
I also see images regularly while dreaming. That is different from both experiences.
I personally found out about my aphantasia when reading an article in Scientific American titled “When the Mind’s Eye is Blind”. A whole lifetime of experiences clicked into place.
So it’s not surprising that there would be an outpouring of new discoveries after more people learn of the concept.
Learning about aphantasia is how I learned people experience anything other than nothing visually in their mind’s eye.
Good question, I couldn't quite put it in words, but it's the popularity that bothers me. It could be popular because everybody's having great insights, but it could also be popular because everybody's greatly persuaded by a fashionable media buzz. On the internet, discussions like this always turn into a love-in where everyone reports anecdotal experiences and gets treated with esteem for being part of the community of believers. Back in the 90s I was briefly on a mailing list for people who had done the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator test so we could all report how INTP we were (that's the sensitive nonjudgmental intellectual one). It reminds me of that.
It's popular because most of us had never heard about it until a few years ago, and for a lot of us a whole lifetime of experiences suddenly made sense.
I always wondered why people would talk metaphorically (because I assumed they must do, because clearly you don't see things that aren't there other than while dreaming... or so I thought) about images of people they knew fading, or forgetting what they looked like.
And then suddenly I was told it wasn't metaphorical.
And then a few years later I had my one experience of seeing vivid imagery outside of a dream.
It also keeps coming up because people get all weirded out at the thought that this is a thing, and start insisting the distinction isn't real.
But having experienced both: Imagining things without visuals and with is nothing alike.
And I knew that before the experience I mentioned too, because images while dreaming is also wildly different from how I imagine things while awake.
Aphantasia makes a number of testable hypotheses and can/has/continues to be dealt with as a serious scientific question. But instead of taking the time to do even the bare minimum of research, you trust your gut to tell you that it's bullshit. Classy.
I'm digging around in the Wikipedia article on "burden of proof", quick, head me off at the pass before I quote it.
Heh, it mentions "burden tennis". It all devolves to who's got the status quo on their side and who's making the extraordinary claim, or not. I can see why fistfights are a popular way to resolve disagreements.
Google scholar has 5000+ hits on the term, I'd suggest starting there. Once you've completely your meta-analysis proving that it's all "bullshit", let us know. That's how science works. You think your 10 minutes scrolling wikipedia substitutes for decades of research? Surely, since you and your gut feel so strongly about it, the evidence should speak for itself.
It's not decades of research, the term was coined in 2015. There's a vague reference to something similar earlier but it doesn't constitute pre-existing research. It's an extremely recent phenomenon to research it.
it is, it's unfalsifiable nonsense because nobody actually "sees" things in their "minds eye", when someone imagines something it's just a generic default instantiation of whatever, the properties might list "red" and "cube" but the individual doesn't "see" the red cube.
It's just another way for attention seekers to feel special.
The exact same thing happened to me with League of Legends. I was inexplicably banned for cheating, despite never having done any such thing (and despite regularly playing on three accounts (this is fully permitted), the other two of which were not banned!) Their support people repeatedly said "we reviewed your case and the ban is correct", etc. all the while giving zero information about what I did so I could correct it. I have a couple of the rarest skins in the game, and have played thousands of hours since 2009. I only play ARAM, so the suggestion I was risking my account of great sentimental value by cheating at the most casual mode in the game is beyond ridiculous. Anyway, nothing in gaming has ever stressed me out more. I got unbanned solely because of a contact in the industry who had it looked into, and the ban was inexplicably lifted. I still play, but I think about the false ban almost every time, and League will probably be the last competitive multiplayer game I ever put any time towards. Part of me doesn't want to play it anymore because I dread that happening again. :(
I feel that. I'm not against playing video games, but I'm uneasy about getting too attached to virtual property, considering it's controlled by a gaming company who has no obligation to you and no inclination to keep games alive beyond their shelf life.
To be fair though, real life property is only slightly less ephemeral.
Yeah for real, my Steam account could just be erased and I instantly lose like $1000 of games I "bought" (by some vague definition of the word). As soon as online-only services started becoming more prevalent, it became quickly apparent how ephemeral they are, and how unilaterally they can be taken away from me with zero recourse. "Don't get too attached", as they say >_>
Maybe take it as a signal from universe that intense gaming is waste of life and a net loss for you? I know its harsh and double that in gaming thread, but I don't see any other way. We don't talk 3-5h a week, and it seems neither are you.
You will almost certainly badly regret when on that proverbial death bed and most probably well before that, life goes darn fast and the feeling of losing out in the most important aspect of our existence - how well we live our lives is soul crushing. Its not that gaming hard is bad per se (apart from addictions and abysmal effect on health), but you are losing on much better aspects of life which are just out there for the grab.
Or don't take my word, just check what old people regret in their lives. Sure gaming is not there yet, but it will find its place firmly among too much work and not spending enough time on family and relationships, which are consistently on top.
I play games very little, a few hours a week. I am very social and not lacking in that area -- don't worry about me lol :) I don't engage in "intense gaming", notice how I said I've played since 2009, that's 16 years ago :P
I got a false permanent ban as well. Despite the fact that cheating is damn near impossible on consoles, and the fact that I worked way too long to get to an absolutely mediocre rank (gold 1) on ranked play, and the fact that I had never even had a warning or complaint for any behavior whatsoever, they permanently banned me with no explanation.
Unlike the blogpost, I just decided I would just never spend any money on an Activision product ever again. It's what everybody should do.
>>Despite the fact that cheating is damn near impossible on consoles
Unfortunately, aim assist devices for consoles are very widespread now and a big problem for competitive gaming.
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>>I had never even had a warning or complaint for any behavior whatsoever
That's the gold standard in the industry though, you don't warn(suspected) cheaters to not give them opportunity to adjust their tactics. Sorry you got caught by this unfairly.
> That's the gold standard in the industry though, you don't warn(suspected) cheaters to not give them opportunity to adjust their tactics.
Is this supposed to do any good? The actual cheater is still getting a signal that they've been detected, because they get banned. Then they figure out how, make a new account and go back to cheating.
Meanwhile the normal user is both confused and significantly more inconvenienced, because their rank etc. on the account you falsely banned was earned legitimately through hard work instead of low-effort cheating.
>>The actual cheater is still getting a signal that they've been detected, because they get banned.
So....yes. But there are mitigating tactics around this, I really recommend looking into it because it's a fascinating topic. As the simplest thing - you don't ban cheaters the moment they are detected to not give off how you detected them. That's why Activision bans people in waves and all at once, even though they know some people are cheating and still active. Unfortunately a lot of people are paying for cheats nowadays, and the cheat makers usually have some kind of refund policy where if you get detected you get your money back - games companies want to inconvenience those buyers as much as possible, so you can't claim your refund straight away because hey, the game worked for a good while even while you were cheating, must have been something else :P
>>Meanwhile the normal user is both confused and significantly more inconvenienced
Yes, which is why the aim is to have 0 legitimate players getting caught by this, obviously.
>> Yes, which is why the aim is to have 0 legitimate players getting caught by this, obviously.
One thing this is missing is that forcing addicted players to buy again helps bring in the cash flow, so what a few legit people got wrapped up, enough buy back the equation for the shadier game companies (usually the big ones) will go ahead and never rescind a ban.
Literally no one does this in the industry, even if it sounds like a great idea on paper. Every big publisher knows that cheaters always bring negative cashflow to your company because they put off other players from playing. A single cheater in a 20 player game can put half of them off playing again, tarnishing your reputation at the same time. There is no universe in which "we'll just make cheaters buy our game again" makes any financial or any other sense - the goal is to get them to stop playing, permanently, and be enough of a pain in the ass that they never buy your game again.
>> so what a few legit people got wrapped up, enough buy back the equation
I've never seen any data that would support this. It just doesn't happen - if you accidentally ban a legit player they just get really pissed off and there's about 0% chance they will give you money again. Which is why you try extremely hard to not do that.
I used to work at a game company fresh out of college, and this is simply untrue. The company made roughly 40% of sales from cheater whales (one can imagine how much the chest makers made), and there were guidelines on repeated bans where we recognized similarities to make sure we wouldn't ban them again too early.
I left the industry because of thah and the other things like loot boxes and matchmaking for profit and to push micro transactions. It's a terrible place.
I guess you worked somewhere where that was considered a good business strategy then. I worked at a large publisher for over 10 years on couple big competitive titles and the idea always was to get cheaters off our service asap and permanently, no matter their spend(in fact we couldn't see that and it never made any impact on our engineering decisions around the problem).
>>It's a terrible place.
Some companies sure.
And yes sorry I realize I said "no one does this" - let me correct myself to say that in my experience at a couple big publishers this isn't a strategy anyone pursues because it's not worth the losses to your legit playerbase and reputation. But there might be companies that do this, I concede.
The problem is obviously the same as in many other industries - how do you distinguish honest legitimate players who swear they haven't cheated from people who will say anything to get you to unban them. I don't work in that department personally, but I've seen reports shared internally where the player literally went to local news station to say how unfairly they are treated and how we banned him without any info or any reason and how it's affecting his mental health and his family and he basically made a huge stink around it, and then we pull up the ban report for his account and we clearly see a screenshot from his machine where he's running cheat engine with cheats for our game enabled. Some people will just lie through their teeth to get their way. So you have to rely on what you know with absolute certainty - you detected something that is absolutely indicative of cheating? You ban them. Anything else is a no no. At least where I used to work no one used any kind of algorithm for automatic bans, those were only used for manually reviewed cases where someone would actually watch a replay of your game before issuing a ban.
Does that mean the system is foolproof? No, of course not. But banning honest paying users is a huge risk to any business - so obviously no one wants to do that, every system like this errs on the side of caution by default for that reason alone.
And obvious disclaimer - I can only comment on my own experiences, I have no idea what every company out there is doing.
> how do you distinguish honest legitimate players who swear they haven't cheated from people who will say anything to get you to unban them.
It's mostly not about the appeals process. You want to avoid the false positive accusations to begin with.
> and then we pull up the ban report for his account and we clearly see a screenshot from his machine where he's running cheat engine with cheats for our game enabled.
Hypothetically things like this can happen where someone is reusing passwords that end up in a data breach and then some script kiddie gets their hands on it and wants to dip their toes into some cheating without risking their own account. Then you have the original account holder screaming at you because they know they didn't cheat.
Or they could just be cheaters who doth protest too much.
But there are ways you can at least try to distinguish these things, e.g. did the cheating happen on the same PC or IP address the account normally uses?
> Does that mean the system is foolproof? No, of course not. But banning honest paying users is a huge risk to any business - so obviously no one wants to do that, every system like this errs on the side of caution by default for that reason alone.
It's apparently failing enough that this thread has multiple people saying they've experienced false positives, and it doesn't seem like they're interested in getting their accounts back.
Well I don't know if it's universally true for every single cheat, but cheat makers do in fact offer refunds/compensation if your account gets banned. As ths simplest example:
The intent is usually to gather data then ban in waves. If a new tool comes out and you ban a couple of players the tool authors might figure out why and update it. Let it sit a while and you can get hundreds/thousands of players who get a message to rethink their choice to cheat.
An additional benefit is that this can include multiple cheat programs and versions in one ban wave, so it may be harder to narrow down exactly what the flaw was. That's the why for no warnings (or explanations) - false positives and recourse if mistakenly flagged is another matter entirely.
> An additional benefit is that this can include multiple cheat programs and versions in one ban wave, so it may be harder to narrow down exactly what the flaw was.
That seems like it could go the other way. There are five cheat programs that each have a dozen versions and now you know that everybody using program A and D got banned, the people using program C and E didn't, and the people using program B got banned but only if they were using version 1.2 or lower and not exclusively version 1.3 where they added a new anti-detection method that A and D don't use and C and E do. Now they know what to do.
Whereas if you ban them as soon as you can detect them, the people using program B get banned before version 1.3 is even out, they have to issue all of those refunds immediately and stop getting sales because their cheat stops working now instead of months from now, and then version 1.3 may not ever get released. Now all they know is that C and E are doing something the others weren't, but that could have been any of a dozen things so A and D don't know what to change.
Doing it that way also has another major problem: Suppose you do the ban wave. Do the people using the existing known detectable cheats now get to make new accounts and keep cheating? If you ban them again right away then the cheat makers get to keep making variants until that stops happening, but if you don't then the game is back to being full of cheaters the next day and the cheat makers are still making money selling the old detectable cheats to fund the development of undetectable ones.
Yeah that makes sense, if they collaborate and share information. But more-so it avoids the case where a patch drops then people suddenly get banned - it's easier to match the exact version and what changed or is different compared to others on the market that avoided it, which I think they want to avoid most.
I think ultimately it's to avoid devoting too many resources to the arms race by breaking it up into sprints. Mass ban waves also make community impact and news, and in some cases for the regular players it refreshes the scene just for a bit by clearing the muck. They can time it to coincide with in-game events or updates too then (which often break cheats), giving a window for non-cheaters to enjoy.
I mean "then they figure out how" and "make a new account" are each doing quite a bit of the heavy lifting here.
Using Activision as the example, when they do a mass ban after you've been cheating for 4 months straight how exactly are you going to figure out how it happened?
Isn't the whole point of the ban that it's not as simple as just "make a new account?" Isn't it tied to the PS+ / XBox Gold membership, or even the physical hardware?
> Using Activision as the example, when they do a mass ban after you've been cheating for 4 months straight how exactly are you going to figure out how it happened?
How are you going to figure out how it happened if it happens after one day? There are different methods of cheating and the cheaters start favoring the ones that didn't get banned over the ones that did. The cheat makers who got banned snoop the telemetry the game is sending to detect cheating to determine if there is any detectable difference between what the game sends when their cheat is installed and when it isn't etc.
> Isn't the whole point of the ban that it's not as simple as just "make a new account?" Isn't it tied to the PS+ / XBox Gold membership, or even the physical hardware?
Tying it to a membership means they just create a new membership, which isn't a deterrent to anyone who is either only playing your game (so can cancel the old one) or likes cheating enough to pay for a separate membership in order to cheat. It might deter the people who can't afford to do that and are also using their subscription for other games, but banning them immediately instead of in waves would do the same thing.
Tying it to the physical hardware seems kind of pointless. They'd just buy a new device using the money they got from selling the old one to someone who probably won't realize it's banned from that game until after the return period expires. Also, then you've banned the innocent second hand purchaser of the device instead of the actual cheater.
> This ban also ruined other games for me. If I ever did well in a game, someone would look at my profile to see how many hours I have and instantly see the red marker that shows “I am a cheater”.
I wonder if that label can be considered to be libel. Probably harder in the US, but from what I understand in UK (or just England?) the defendant must prove that it's true.
For context, (I assume) this is referencing the Horizon IT Scandal in which faulty accounting software used by post offices in the UK indicated there were financial discrepencies suggesting embezzlement, and over 900 innocent people were convicted of crimes that never happened.
Holy ….. what a fight you had to do. So glad i hardly play any mulitiplayer shooter games. I’d hate to have my insane Steam library stripped away from me.
Maybe he was banned because as a developer, he had development tools installed on his machine, which increased the odds of him being labeled as a potential cheater.
Sometimes I even wonder if other hackers could not hack the machine or other players, to install a software that triggers anti-cheat system: it becomes then difficult to lift the ban.
>Sometimes I even wonder if other hackers could not hack the machine or other players, to install a software that triggers anti-cheat system: it becomes then difficult to lift the ban.
Also I wish more "good" hackers were in games, like the guy in GTA Online I ran into once who was shooting me with a money machine gun because Rockstar are greedy assholes.
> Also I wish more "good" hackers were in games, like the guy in GTA Online I ran into once who was shooting me with a money machine gun because Rockstar are greedy assholes.
Eh? Rockstar doesn't force you to buy Shark Cards, and everyone has gotten 11 years worth of DLCs for free. Making in-game money IS an essential part of the game. You also don't have to purchase every single vehicle or other item the game offers.
During my years of playing, I've met only a few cheaters who weren't complete douchebags (though some of them did act that way towards other players). I consider the "good" cheater to be a myth.
The "eh?" should be directed back at your comment, how you casually omit that microtransactions and the incentives to purchase them have become a central part of modern game design. In the end, how much of an issue you rank this to be entirely depends on your weekly play hours. Maybe you just play so much as to have no issues to unlock best in class content from DLCs (most notably cars in GTAV).
Unfortunately, a quick search didn't yield anybody doing math like for the Star Wars: Battlefront (new) debacle.[1][2]
PS: The non-microtransactional design goal in multiplayer games will optimize for more play time.[3] How convenient to offer purchasable shortcuts.
Interesting stuff! Though I don’t get why b00lin would have to prove that they weren’t cheating. This is not a criminal case, but still. Activision was denying access to a service that was paid for.
Honestly I'd prefer it if games could permaban based on just heuristics and the EULA simply stated "tough luck, buy the game again". I'd happily pay for that, knowing my money is at least not going to some 2 year legal fight.
I get that I might be the one accused of cheating next time. But if that risk is tiny and the cost when it happens is $50 or $100 it sounds a lot more attractive than the alternative.
Also (obviously) I don't care about the account itself. I wouldn't play a game where I aggregate long term stats/items/status/whatever.
In a perfect world you just have private servers where you can have 90% effective anticheat and have humans sort out the rest.
I think stat based bans are the ultimate solution for all the client side bullshit.
If you use statistics, you will sometimes get it wrong, but in the other cases the cheaters are completely out of luck. You could offer the source code to your game willingly and it wouldn't help them very much.
If the cost of a false positive is $50 for the gamer and the chance of it happening is rare, I think many would quickly understand the value proposition from a game experience perspective.
Assuming your false negative rate is low (I.e., you have high classification margins), you can make it extremely undesirable for players to engage in unfair play. Even soft cheating like aiding teammates with streaming and discord side channels could get picked up by these techniques.
I feel like pretty much all cheaters can be detected by just looking at mouse movements vs enemy positions. If you can easily spot cheaters through a killcam or spectator view, they can be detected through a serverside watchdog, no?
Unfortunately the cheats are way ahead of this. Most modern aimbots in shooters like Counter-Strike are (intentionally) not-obvious. They give minor advantages and do tiny corrections for an already-immensely-skilled player to gain a small edge. In a game where the difference between a great player and an elite player is small, they can be the invisible difference maker.
>I think many would quickly understand the value proposition
I think thousands of innocent teenagers without credit cards will be furious. Not to mention anyone that takes a game semi-seriously and cares about their reputation after getting banned. Also, with real-dollar values tied to skins, you’re not just nuking someone’s $50 account — accounts and their associated items can be worth a lot of money.
Anti-cheats should need to be certain. They should also, however, ban the hardware ID, which lots of games companies choose not to do (because they’d lose money).
Nah, that won't do it. Even if you had a rare false positive rate, it would be significantly higher for players with a profile similar to ones that trigger bans.
It would be even worse than the bans some developers hand out now because their inherit randomness would be essentially just that. Not acceptable for any form of service.
> A native stereoscopic spherical video encoder could improve compression even more, since side by side views are quite similar in general.
Existing video formats already support this for interlacing, although you could also let inter-prediction refer to earlier parts of the same frame and get most of the benefit.
I do indeed find that interesting. Checking the paper, it does make some sense to me. It’s similar to what I said in another comment [0], the people with aphantasia do a slower, more methodical approach. It then fails for me when there are too many steps required, which is not the case for simple rotations as in the paper.
My one-person indie company released many apps, and one of them (Halftone) had over 6 million users by the time I shut it down. It's definitely possible.
