Most of you are confusing what some guy thought vrs what the general public and the church actually believed. Yes some of them put together that the shadow of an eclipse would look like a flat line if the world was really flat ( at some times of the year ) and it explained why you always saw sails before the ship but they couldn't prove it or get the larger parts of the population to beleive it
These same people also thought that everything could be solved by thought alone and there was no need to test things so....
Most of you are confusing what some guy thought vrs what the general public and the church actually believed. Yes some of them put together that the shadow of an eclipse would look like a flat line if the world was really flat ( at some times of the year ) and it explained why you always saw sails before the ship but they couldn't prove it or get the larger parts of the population to beleive it
These same people also thought that everything could be solved by thought alone and there was no need to test things so....
I never said the general population believed the world was round for thousands of years; I was said weknew that it was round for thousands of years, which - considering the pronoun we was being used to reference mankind - is true. The same thing could be said of evolution in today's world, although I'm not really interested in a religion versus science debate; some people might deny it, but the scientific community knows it. I don't know what the general population believed to be true, but I do know what the scientifically-minded among them knew to be true.
I don't know whether any MMO has had a spherical world, but I know of at least one game that has. Actually it had a very large number of them. The game was Spore. You started on a small section of a world, but eventually the area you could access expanded to include the whole planet. So, it is technically possible to do it.
Most of you are confusing what some guy thought vrs what the general public and the church actually believed. Yes some of them put together that the shadow of an eclipse would look like a flat line if the world was really flat ( at some times of the year ) and it explained why you always saw sails before the ship but they couldn't prove it or get the larger parts of the population to beleive it
These same people also thought that everything could be solved by thought alone and there was no need to test things so....
I never said the general population believed the world was round for thousands of years; I was said weknew that it was round for thousands of years, which - considering the pronoun we was being used to reference mankind - is true. The same thing could be said of evolution in today's world, although I'm not really interested in a religion versus science debate; some people might deny it, but the scientific community knows it. I don't know what the general population believed to be true, but I do know what the scientifically-minded among them knew to be true.
For microevolution, sure. Macroevolution is a different matter and far from proven. The problem is that some things are simply hard to measure.
Sometimes there are widely believed scientific theories that simply lack evidence for a while that later arrives; the example of the Earth revolving about the Sun from earlier in this thread is one. Special relativity was first proposed in 1905, and widely believed not that long after that, but didn't really have solid evidence in its favor until sometime around the 1970s. Or to take a more recent example, they just recently found evidence in favor of the Higgs boson. And sometimes widely believed scientific theories end up getting tossed out as simply wrong when the evidence finally arrives. See, for example, ether as a medium for light to propagate through.
Some things are just plain hard to get good data on, so even theories that are very nice for theoretical reasons and may even become widely believed still lack conclusive evidence. For example, general relativity. Astronomy has many such things, as it's hard to get good data on what distant stars that we can barely see do over the course of long periods of time. Most of psychology and macroeconomics fall into these categories as well, if you're even willing to count them as sciences.
But macroevolution, more so than any other theory that I can think of, gets tangled up in the issues that science can't prove its assumptions. Criticism is usually based not in carefully weighing scientific evidence, but rather, in claiming the scientific assumption that whatever you're looking at (in this case, the existence of life as we see it today) must have a purely natural explanation is inaccurate here. That's not a scientific debate, really; it's more a debate of philosophy about science. The nearest comparison that I can think of comes from mathematics, where some set theorists don't believe in the axiom of choice.
To bring this back to MMORPGs with an imperfect analogy, suppose that all MMORPG designers believed that, all else equal, shorter loading screens are better than longer loading screens. Programming methods that lead to longer loading screens than necessary would become regarded as bad. But then suppose that someone comes along and says, no, in this case, it's good because longer loading screens are better here, as we're going to give them a voiceover and a cutscene or some such. That challenges the underlying assumption and moves the debate from "how can we make loading screens shorter?" to "should we make loading screens shorter?" That is, it's a debate about whether the underlying assumptions are correct.
As for what the average serf believed about whether the earth was flat or round or some other shape a thousand years ago, a lot of people probably didn't believe anything at all. It would be kind of like asking random people today, "Do you believe that Makhachkala is the capital of Dagestan?" If you pushed for a yes or no answer, you might be able to get some people to say yes and others to say no. But that would mostly be people guessing, and people who didn't know would really mostly believe that whatever most people who actually know something about Dagestan think is the capital are probably correct. Some political polls do stuff like this, and really only demonstrate that if you ask goofy questions, you can get goofy results.
Most of you are confusing what some guy thought vrs what the general public and the church actually believed. Yes some of them put together that the shadow of an eclipse would look like a flat line if the world was really flat ( at some times of the year ) and it explained why you always saw sails before the ship but they couldn't prove it or get the larger parts of the population to beleive it
These same people also thought that everything could be solved by thought alone and there was no need to test things so....
I never said the general population believed the world was round for thousands of years; I was said weknew that it was round for thousands of years, which - considering the pronoun we was being used to reference mankind - is true. The same thing could be said of evolution in today's world, although I'm not really interested in a religion versus science debate; some people might deny it, but the scientific community knows it. I don't know what the general population believed to be true, but I do know what the scientifically-minded among them knew to be true.
For microevolution, sure. Macroevolution is a different matter and far from proven. The problem is that some things are simply hard to measure.
Sometimes there are widely believed scientific theories that simply lack evidence for a while that later arrives; the example of the Earth revolving about the Sun from earlier in this thread is one. Special relativity was first proposed in 1905, and widely believed not that long after that, but didn't really have solid evidence in its favor until sometime around the 1970s. Or to take a more recent example, they just recently found evidence in favor of the Higgs boson. And sometimes widely believed scientific theories end up getting tossed out as simply wrong when the evidence finally arrives. See, for example, ether as a medium for light to propagate through.
Some things are just plain hard to get good data on, so even theories that are very nice for theoretical reasons and may even become widely believed still lack conclusive evidence. For example, general relativity. Astronomy has many such things, as it's hard to get good data on what distant stars that we can barely see do over the course of long periods of time. Most of psychology and macroeconomics fall into these categories as well, if you're even willing to count them as sciences.
But macroevolution, more so than any other theory that I can think of, gets tangled up in the issues that science can't prove its assumptions. Criticism is usually based not in carefully weighing scientific evidence, but rather, in claiming the scientific assumption that whatever you're looking at (in this case, the existence of life as we see it today) must have a purely natural explanation is inaccurate here. That's not a scientific debate, really; it's more a debate of philosophy about science. The nearest comparison that I can think of comes from mathematics, where some set theorists don't believe in the axiom of choice.
To bring this back to MMORPGs with an imperfect analogy, suppose that all MMORPG designers believed that, all else equal, shorter loading screens are better than longer loading screens. Programming methods that lead to longer loading screens than necessary would become regarded as bad. But then suppose that someone comes along and says, no, in this case, it's good because longer loading screens are better here, as we're going to give them a voiceover and a cutscene or some such. That challenges the underlying assumption and moves the debate from "how can we make loading screens shorter?" to "should we make loading screens shorter?" That is, it's a debate about whether the underlying assumptions are correct.
As for what the average serf believed about whether the earth was flat or round or some other shape a thousand years ago, a lot of people probably didn't believe anything at all. It would be kind of like asking random people today, "Do you believe that Makhachkala is the capital of Dagestan?" If you pushed for a yes or no answer, you might be able to get some people to say yes and others to say no. But that would mostly be people guessing, and people who didn't know would really mostly believe that whatever most people who actually know something about Dagestan think is the capital are probably correct. Some political polls do stuff like this, and really only demonstrate that if you ask goofy questions, you can get goofy results.
But in every single instance there is some distinction in what some people believe to be true and other people know to be true - the distinction here being that to believe is to consider something to be true without physical evidence, while knowing is to consider something to be true wit some sort of physical evidence. Now, such physical evidence may only come to prove your paradigm if you also accept certain suppositions that may or may not be as truthful as the conclusion. Nobody ever had any physical evidence that the world was flat; nobody could have had any such physical evidence, because it's not true.
I've played games that "have a spherical world", but in reality, programming enough of the landscape to make a fully detailed environment is just too much... most of the environment is locked off in one way or another, and you explore sea locked or terrain locked locations. Only in overworld travel, usually on rails, will you see yourself cross over the edge of the map onto the other side.
It could certainly be done... but at a high cost or under limited circumstances where most of the globe your crossing is out of reach. In games where your landscape has less square footage than South Korea... it's a novelty at best.
Maybe that facinates you :]
Me personally though... I've never pondered the value of making the world truely spherical, I mean, we live in a round world, but we still use flat depictions to navigate and document our surroundings, The "roundness" of our world is not really relevant to our scale of life, we are too small to effectively experience it.
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, if they get angry, they'll be a mile away... and barefoot.
Comments
Most of you are confusing what some guy thought vrs what the general public and the church actually believed. Yes some of them put together that the shadow of an eclipse would look like a flat line if the world was really flat ( at some times of the year ) and it explained why you always saw sails before the ship but they couldn't prove it or get the larger parts of the population to beleive it
These same people also thought that everything could be solved by thought alone and there was no need to test things so....
I never said the general population believed the world was round for thousands of years; I was said we knew that it was round for thousands of years, which - considering the pronoun we was being used to reference mankind - is true. The same thing could be said of evolution in today's world, although I'm not really interested in a religion versus science debate; some people might deny it, but the scientific community knows it. I don't know what the general population believed to be true, but I do know what the scientifically-minded among them knew to be true.
Current Games: Guild Wars 2 - Star Trek Online
For microevolution, sure. Macroevolution is a different matter and far from proven. The problem is that some things are simply hard to measure.
Sometimes there are widely believed scientific theories that simply lack evidence for a while that later arrives; the example of the Earth revolving about the Sun from earlier in this thread is one. Special relativity was first proposed in 1905, and widely believed not that long after that, but didn't really have solid evidence in its favor until sometime around the 1970s. Or to take a more recent example, they just recently found evidence in favor of the Higgs boson. And sometimes widely believed scientific theories end up getting tossed out as simply wrong when the evidence finally arrives. See, for example, ether as a medium for light to propagate through.
Some things are just plain hard to get good data on, so even theories that are very nice for theoretical reasons and may even become widely believed still lack conclusive evidence. For example, general relativity. Astronomy has many such things, as it's hard to get good data on what distant stars that we can barely see do over the course of long periods of time. Most of psychology and macroeconomics fall into these categories as well, if you're even willing to count them as sciences.
But macroevolution, more so than any other theory that I can think of, gets tangled up in the issues that science can't prove its assumptions. Criticism is usually based not in carefully weighing scientific evidence, but rather, in claiming the scientific assumption that whatever you're looking at (in this case, the existence of life as we see it today) must have a purely natural explanation is inaccurate here. That's not a scientific debate, really; it's more a debate of philosophy about science. The nearest comparison that I can think of comes from mathematics, where some set theorists don't believe in the axiom of choice.
To bring this back to MMORPGs with an imperfect analogy, suppose that all MMORPG designers believed that, all else equal, shorter loading screens are better than longer loading screens. Programming methods that lead to longer loading screens than necessary would become regarded as bad. But then suppose that someone comes along and says, no, in this case, it's good because longer loading screens are better here, as we're going to give them a voiceover and a cutscene or some such. That challenges the underlying assumption and moves the debate from "how can we make loading screens shorter?" to "should we make loading screens shorter?" That is, it's a debate about whether the underlying assumptions are correct.
As for what the average serf believed about whether the earth was flat or round or some other shape a thousand years ago, a lot of people probably didn't believe anything at all. It would be kind of like asking random people today, "Do you believe that Makhachkala is the capital of Dagestan?" If you pushed for a yes or no answer, you might be able to get some people to say yes and others to say no. But that would mostly be people guessing, and people who didn't know would really mostly believe that whatever most people who actually know something about Dagestan think is the capital are probably correct. Some political polls do stuff like this, and really only demonstrate that if you ask goofy questions, you can get goofy results.
But in every single instance there is some distinction in what some people believe to be true and other people know to be true - the distinction here being that to believe is to consider something to be true without physical evidence, while knowing is to consider something to be true wit some sort of physical evidence. Now, such physical evidence may only come to prove your paradigm if you also accept certain suppositions that may or may not be as truthful as the conclusion. Nobody ever had any physical evidence that the world was flat; nobody could have had any such physical evidence, because it's not true.
I've played games that "have a spherical world", but in reality, programming enough of the landscape to make a fully detailed environment is just too much... most of the environment is locked off in one way or another, and you explore sea locked or terrain locked locations. Only in overworld travel, usually on rails, will you see yourself cross over the edge of the map onto the other side.
It could certainly be done... but at a high cost or under limited circumstances where most of the globe your crossing is out of reach. In games where your landscape has less square footage than South Korea... it's a novelty at best.
Maybe that facinates you :]
Me personally though... I've never pondered the value of making the world truely spherical, I mean, we live in a round world, but we still use flat depictions to navigate and document our surroundings, The "roundness" of our world is not really relevant to our scale of life, we are too small to effectively experience it.
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes.
That way, if they get angry, they'll be a mile away... and barefoot.
edit: no, no, no *mutters to myself about not getting involved in these matters on a game website* *squints disapprovingly at Quizzical*