Tbh, these artist renditions are almost completely made up. They are made up, because the press won't print a "We found a piece of bone shrapnel and we guess it might belong to a dinosaur", but they totally will print a nice image of a dinosaur from Jurassic Park, no matter if it's truthful or just purely made up.
Science is hard and getting proper science published in regular non-scientific press is even harder, unless you make crap up.
That's why the fake "chocolate helps you loose weight" study made it into every newspaper front page in existence, while the reveal by the author that the study was faked was completely not covered at all. (He did that to expose how easy it is to get fake science published. He just didn't expect how little anyone in media cared whether the science published is actually science.)
Real science is hard. Fake science is easy. Debunks and negative peer reviews are just not published. Hence, there's a huge amount of garbage science floating around and hardly anyone disputes it. Because of blind, unquestioning, religious faith in science.
There's a website (can't be bothered to google it right now), where they reconstruct modern-day animals from their bones as if they were dinosaurs. It's ridiculous.
That's why I think that most of paleontology is just speculative nonsense. You get these nice pictures of dinosaurs in their natural habitat, then you read the paper and it turns out, all they have of that dinosaur is an imprint of half a knuckle bone.
Astronomy is similar. You get pretty images of exoplanets with clouds, continents and oceans, and then you read the paper and all they had was periodic flickering of a star when the planet orbits in between the star and us.
At that rate, they could just also invent a space faring dinosaur civilization from the same fragments of information and it would be just as grounded in reality.
I got way too many versions of Monopoly gifted over the years and all of them ended up on our local second hand app.
I don't know why you'd gift anyone Monopoly. I mean, everyone who wanted to have a copy already has one, but apparently people with no creativity still gift them.
You seem to have a very narrow and incorrect definition of the word faith, that you place so much faith in, that you don't even seem to want to look it up in a dictionary.
Your faith in your definition of the word faith goes so far, that you just repeat your incorrect definition and completely shut out any reasoning or any sources that might say otherwise.
Theevidencesayssomethingelse, but your faith in your definition of that word makes it impossible for you to consider any other option.
Assassins Creed 1 came out in 2007, less than 20 years ago. It was mindbogglingly fresh and innovative back then. An open world where you can't just run anywhere you want, but also climb anywhere? And your character dynamically climbed up walls, finding places to hold onto everywhere? That was amazing back then. It was the first game that even attempted anything like that, and it was really, really good. AC only became lame when they started doing the same over and over again with little change.
Similar story with Far Cry. FC1 came out in 2004, only FC2 was also released in that decade (2008). Both FC1 and FC2 were doing something new, fresh and genre-defining. Looking back from now, yes, these games look like everything else that followed it, but because these games defined it.
But in this decade we saw a lot of other genre-defining games, like Warcraft 3 (2002/2003), WoW (2004), KOTOR (2003), Bioshock (2007), Crysis (2007), Fable (2004), Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009), Portal (2007) and also a lot of AAA flops that happened due to too much experimentation and shooting for the stars, like Spore (2008).
And most of the games I listed above don't have a piss filter.
Seriously, Monopoly is one of the worst games in existence.
But that's expected, since the game it cloned was actually two games, the one was like the current Monopoly, the other one had a property tax system and that one was so balanced that the game never ended. Both games were not made to be played for fun, but to show how different taxation systems lead to different outcomes. They were serious, non-fun games on purpose.
Damn, thanks for the insight. I just read the wiki article and the source claiming the marketing budget of that game, because I couldn't believe it, and the name Niantic was somewhere in there, so I figured Niantic did what Niantic does. Apparently, it's not even that.
It's ridiculous, seriously. Monopoly is a horrible game in it self, and I thought everyone and their dog was already sick of it, but I guess I'm just projecting.
Or pumping the equivalent of the GDP of Samoa into the marketing of some stupid mobile game version of this really bad board game really does something.
Yes, being "safe" means you won't make the next Minecraft, where a hobby budget turns into the best selling game of all time. But it also means that the people who buy every instalment of Fifa or Assassin's Creed will also buy it.
These popular franchises almost always turn a calculable profit as long as they don't experiment and do something new that bombs.
As sad as it is, it actually does work out.
That's why we gamers shouldn't trust on AAA titles bringing something great to the market. If you want to play a game like you watch linear TV (plonk down on the couch/in front of the PC and to whatever to relax and waste time), then AAA is great. If you want to play something new, something exciting, something that you haven't played before, then go with lower-budget titles.
AAA is the McDonalds of games. You don't go to McDonalds for the freaky hand-crafted vegan fusion kitchen bacon burger with crazy Korean curry mayo and caramelized lettuce.
So you have to be religious to be faithful to your spouse?
No, faith doesn't refer to religion. You can have faith that your investment works, you can have faith in democracy or the judicial system, and in many other things.
In fact, if you check out what Wikipedia has to say about it, there's a whole section on "Secular Faith", which includes faith in e.g. philosophical ideas, ethics, personal values and principles and so on.
Faith is just a strong conviction or trust, that's how it's defined. And sure, you can have faith in God. But you can also have faith that the scientific method works and that the amount of published garbage studies is low enough to not break the system.
And this faith can be shaken when learning about meta studies estimating that about 30% of scientific papers are bogus, plagiarized and/or not reproducible.
Or when learning about John Bohannon, and his purposely bogus study on that chocolate helps with weight loss, which he published to show how easy it is to publish nonsense papers, and not only did this study make it onto headlines of newspapers worldwide, but his retraction of the study totally failed to get any publicity at all. He basically couldn't retract his own study from public knowledge.
And like with religious faith, learning about these issues can either lead to either increased understanding, a shaken faith in science in general or an angry counter-attack.
If you don't understand everything in every field of science (and it's impossible to do so), then you have to trust what you cannot prove. And that's literally the same thing as faith. Because it is faith. You blindly trust something without having proof, just trusting that when someone else claims to have proof, that they actually do have proof.
Yes, that's a huge issue. Another issue is that the reward for doing peer reviews is far too low, and publishing negative peer reviews comes with the risk of making an enemy in the same field, who might do your next peer review. So you only call out egregiously bad science or just rubber stamp every peer review, because there's nothing in it for you to publish a negative peer review.
I've read meta studies that said that huge amounts of published scientific studies cannot be reproduced. I can't remember the exact number, but it was >30%.
So if the published science itself is already full of garbage, how is a journalist (who is themselves not a scientist or at least not a scientist in the specific field) know what study is good and what is garbage? And even then, how many people read science journalism compared to boulevard media?
John Bohannon comes to mind, with his purposeful bogus study that claimed that eating chocolate can help with weight loss. He used overfitting and p-hacking to create a study that was purposely garbage and got it published. His goal was to show how easy it is to publish a sensationalist-but-garbage paper. This went so well that every trashy boulevard paper but also many major newspapers ran it, often as a title page news story.
In an interview he said that he got hundreds of calls, all on the level of "Which brand of chocolate helps best?", and only a single serious inquiry doubting his methods.
He published his own debunk shortly after publishing the original story, it it got pretty much no media attention at all.
He basically couldn't even recall his own bogus study, and to this day many people worldwide still believe that chocolate can help with weight loss.
But then they still need to trust the journalist. And considering how much crap science gets published even in supposedly high quality journals, and how little quality peer review happens, even the journalists don't have a scientific basis for much of science reporting.
Tbh, these artist renditions are almost completely made up. They are made up, because the press won't print a "We found a piece of bone shrapnel and we guess it might belong to a dinosaur", but they totally will print a nice image of a dinosaur from Jurassic Park, no matter if it's truthful or just purely made up.
Science is hard and getting proper science published in regular non-scientific press is even harder, unless you make crap up.
That's why the fake "chocolate helps you loose weight" study made it into every newspaper front page in existence, while the reveal by the author that the study was faked was completely not covered at all. (He did that to expose how easy it is to get fake science published. He just didn't expect how little anyone in media cared whether the science published is actually science.)
Real science is hard. Fake science is easy. Debunks and negative peer reviews are just not published. Hence, there's a huge amount of garbage science floating around and hardly anyone disputes it. Because of blind, unquestioning, religious faith in science.