The recent political developments have given us much cause to think about health insurance and its value. Unfortunately, all public discourse on these subjects is based on fear and emotional appeal rather than arguments containing concrete and comparable values that ought to appeal to a Slashdot nerd. So, after some thought, I have endeavored to discover a method of assigning a real dollar value to an insurance premium. While insurance companies undoubtedly have calculated exactly how much selling a policy is worth to them, I have not seen any numerical analysis of how much buying a policy is supposed to be worth to the consumer. And here is my attempt at doing exactly that.

Computing the value of a risk reduction

First we must state that health insurance by itself does not save any lives, but rather allows customers to purchase treatments that they could not otherwise afford, which may then extend their lives by curing whatever illness that endangers them. Each illness has a statistical risk associated with it, with definite numerical values collected by the census bureau and other similar organizations. By curing the illness, a treatment reduces your risk of death from it by the statistical amount of its incidence. For example, if I have a 2%/year chance to have a heart attack, but have health insurance and am able to purchase treatments that enable me to survive it 50% of the time, then my chance of death due to a heart attack becomes 1%/year, twice lower than if I were uninsured and could not afford any treatment.

Now to ask the core question: what is the value of reducing my risk of death by 1% this year? If the risk were higher, like 100%, you might be able to say that you would give everything you have to reduce it, and be right. But would you do so for a 10% risk? 1%? How about 0.015%, which is your chance of dying in a car accident this year? Nobody seems to worry much about that. Or how about the 0.002% chance of getting killed while crossing a street? This shows that we really care about 100% risks and do not care at all about risks less than 0.01%, but says little about the ones in between or about how to place a specific value on a particular increase or decrease.

What we want is a formula that takes in the risk difference and outputs a monetary value for it. Why focus on money? Everyone says that money can not buy happiness, but it certainly can buy an insurance premium, which is what we are trying price here. Would you agree to give up all your income and receive only the basic necessities of life in exchange for a guaranteed lifespan of 100 years? I thought not. It would be a long life, but it sure would not be any fun to live. This sets bounds for any insurance premium you pay to reduce your risk of death to somewhere between zero and your total income. Additionally, this way we can get some objective value for the value of your remaining life. We can all agree that with all other things being equal, a ten year life is worth more than a five year life. If we add the above criterium of higher income in general leading to a higher quality of life, a ten year life on $10k/year is not quite as good as a five year life at $40k/year. I am going to apply a flat value rate of years*income. If you wish, for example, to value more years higher than more money or vice versa, you are welcome to redo the calculations with those additional factors. The important thing is to have some definite way of measuring life value and argue about methods and numbers instead of trying to compare things by handwaving over vague generalities.

Slashdot journals can not have any pictures, so fire up your imagination and draw a graph of population over time assuming a constant death rate of 1%/year. I am going to use some arbitrary population N, even though for the purpose of buying insurance I am only interested in my own chances, because like most people, I have difficulty thinking of myself as 0.8 of a person. So I am going to assume a population N and then divide the results by it to reach a meaningful personal metric. In the graph you have so far imagined, at the end of the first year 1% of the population will be dead. If N=100, then 1 man will die the first year.

In the second step, imagine another group of people with a death rate of 2%, where out of N=100, 2 men will die. Plotted on the same graph, the 2% line will slope more steeply and intersect zero at 50 years, while the first line will intersect it at 100, giving average life expectancies of 25 and 50 years respectively. Now, let's suppose you happen to be one of the poor shmucks in the second group. How much would you be willing to pay to join the first group for one year?

To visualize this choice, draw another 2% line from the value of the 1% line at 1 year. This will be your line if you buy membership in the 1% group, follow their line for one year, and then stop paying and go back to your original group. The area between the original 2% line and your new detour is your life benefit in person*years. Multiplied by your annual income, it will give the monetary value you receive from the membership. That value is equal to the difference between the rates, dr, mulitplied by N and your life expectancy at the time of purchase. This is the group value, so divide by N to calculate your share, equal to dr*t. Observe how the older you are, the less benefit you can expect from the risk reduction, because you would not have quite as much time left to live anyway. In this example, dr is 1% and t is 25, giving the maximum membership fee of 25% of your income. This is the breakeven value, where the fee absorbs all the benefits you incur from the switch, making the transaction economically unfavorable.

V = dr * M * t

The monetary value of a risk reduction is equal to its numeric value multiplied by your annual income and by your life expectancy at the higher risk.

Estimating my own risk

Now I would like to see how the above formula applies to the value of health insurance. Or, in other words, I shall try to compute the maximum premium I should be willing to pay to reduce my health risks. To do this, I first need to first see what those risks are. Then I will need to compute the actual expected risk reduction, keeping in mind that the risk will not be reduced to zero (insured people die too). I am going to assume a free market health care system, where if you can't pay, you don't get treated. (In the US, the ERs are legally obligated to treat you for free, effectively giving everyone insurance for life-threatening use, and making this whole calculation pointless) I am also going to assume that the purchased insurance is comprehensive, paying for absolutely everything. (Computing the optimal coverage amount for variable-cost insurance is left as an exercise for the reader) I'm also only going to look at treatments too expensive to purchase with my own money, which basically includes any kind of surgery. The cheaper treatments, like antibiotics and other common drugs, can be easily purchased without insurance.

I'm also going to have to make guesses as to how each particular risk affects me, because there are no statistics for "% that would have died if they had no health insurance". Remember that not every injury that you go to the hospital for would kill you if you treated it yourself to the best of your ability or not at all. Deep cuts, for example, require stitches to heal cleanly, but will generally not kill you without them. If you clean them out and stop the bleeding (both tasks you can do yourself for free) it will almost always heal, though it may leave an ugly scar (which is the reason you want the stitches). Broken bones will usually mend if immobilized and you could, with the help of a friend, realign the bones, mix the plaster, and make the cast yourself. Again, the outcome may be worse than what you'd get at a hospital, but you'll live and probably not end up with a physical disability. After all, people have been fixing broken bones since the stone age; it isn't rocket science. See "Where there is no doctor" book for more examples of health problems you can treat yourself.

Finally, for the purposes of this article, many of the guesstimates below are to be considered specific to my situation. Feel free to calculate the value for yourself. The numbers here indicate what I personally belive my risks to be, and it is these personal beliefs that determine what I believe health insurance is worth to me, which is the number I am trying to semi-objectively calculate.

What are the major possible risks I need to be concerned with? The CDC publishes mortality data for the US population. According to the Table 9 of the 2006 data, the overall death rate for my age (white male, 33) is 106/100000, or 0.11%/year. Most people have insurance, so this defines the lower limit on my risk of death. Before buying insurance it will be higher. From table 7, my current life expectancy is 45 years. Table 9 further lists my top causes of death as accidents at 37, suicide at 12, homicide at 11, cancer at 8, and heart disease at 9, accounting for 71% of all causes. What are the benefits of health insurance for each of these?

Accident rate of 0.037%/year includes 0.015% motor vehicle accidents. Being a careful driver, I assume that the only car crashes I'll be in, are the ones caused by somebody else, in which case my health care, if any, would be paid for by the car insurance of the driver at fault, so having my own would probably not be beneficial. Regarding the remaining 0.022%, I have no idea how to guess which injuries would be fatal without treatment. Having never had an injury requiring a hospital visit, I can't even imagine what it might be. Lacking data I'm going to assume a 50% probability of survival (which really seems rather high) and the resulting increase in the accident rate by 0.022%.

Suicide obviously receives no benefit from health insurance. For homicide, I would say that if somebody wanted to kill me, he would very likely succeed, rendering any medical assistance pointless. Both of these numbers are extremely unlikely in my neighborhood; I don't think we've ever had a murder here. Very few people know I exist, and nobody at all hates me enough to kill me. Killing myself is also something that I am not going to do. So, I'm going to put up zero risk gain from no health insurance here.

Cancer statistics are available from the American Cancer Society. 1.4 million people get cancer every year, and 0.56 million die, so treatment increases survival chances by a factor of 2.5. However, this likely is too high for me because one of the most common types of cancer is breast cancer, and it is fully treatable most of the time. It is also not one I'm likely to have, and the rest are usually fatal whether treated or not. So I'm going to lower my risk increase to 2x, an absolute value of 0.008%. By the way, it is interesting to note that cancer mortality rates have not changed at all since 1940 (see the historical rates table at the above reference), which seems to indicate that all these modern treatments are not making much difference after all and leaves one to wonder what's really curing all those cancers.

Final entry is for heart disease. The relevant statistics can be found here. When people die from heart disease, they are dying from some type of heart attack. A million people have heart attacks every year; half of them die regardless of treatment. Half of those who die, die in the first hour, before reaching the hospital. Of the survivors, an additional 16% will die within a month. Hence, with treatment, only about a third survive. I'll increase my risk by 50%, increasing the absolute risk by 0.004%.

Hence, my total risk increases by 0.034% without health insurance, nearly all of it due to accidents and my arbitrary guess of how many of them are likely to kill me. The insurance value is 0.034%*45 = 1.53% of my income. Being unemployed, I'm going to use the average wage data from the BLS, giving average income of $45k/year. Subtracting 30% taxes (federal+state), leaves $31k/year disposable income. 1.53% of that is $482/year, which is the zero-gain insurance premium value. Average insurance payment in the US is currently $6400/year. Interesting, isn't it? $6400/year is 20% of my disposable income, requiring this insurance to reduce my yearly risk by 0.45% (a factor of 5 above the 0.11% total insured death risk stated above) before it becomes economical to buy.

Summary: my total risk of death would be 0.14%/year, and the zero-gain insurance premium would be $482/year.

What about later?

Ok, so I really am in the low-risk category, and my belief that nothing is likely to happen to me is justified. Obama may sarcastically call me and my kind "invincibles", but we sure got the numbers to prove it. But what will happen as I get older? How much would it be worth paying for health insurance when I'm 50 and all those bad things start happening? Let's redo the numbers.

Using the same CDC data tables as above I would have my life expectancy decrease to 29 years. The rate of death from all causes increases to 0.43%/year, of which 0.116% is cancer, 0.088% heart disease, 0.045% accidents, 0.017% suicide, 0.017% liver disease, 0.015% stroke, 0.013% diabetes, and 0.014% pneumonia and other respiratory infections, all of which account for 76% of all causes.

Following the same rationale as before, I'm going to adjust for lack of insurance by increasing death risk by 0.116% from cancer, 0.044% from heart disease, 0 from suicide, and 0.03% from accidents.

I'll increase the risk of death from stroke by 25% (absolute increase of 0.004%) because I would largely consider that the same as dying. Whether you are treated or not, you are likely to enter a state of permanent disability, failing both the quality of life and earnings potential criteria. I'll allow for a small increase in positive outcome, but would consider any stroke practically unsurvivable.

Most cases of diabetes are treated by controlling the diet. According to CDC statistics, only 27% of diabetics take insulin or other medication. The remainder, manage their disease by lifestyle changes. I'll assume a 27% increase in mortality from not being able to pay for treatment, giving an absolute risk increase of 0.004%.

Respiratory infections are treated with antibiotics, which we uninsured people can cheaply order online from overseas. So there would be no significant difference here from buying them with health insurance. Liver disease can not be cured, but some kinds of further damage may be prevented by lifestyle changes.

The resultant risk increase is 0.20%, for a total uninsured mortality risk of 0.63%/year. Value of insurance is 0.20% * 29 = 5.8% of my income. With the same disposable income of $33.5k/year, that comes to $1827, which makes US insurance still too expensive to be worth buying. At this age, cancer is the main problem, followed by heart disease.

Summary: at 50, my risk of death would be 0.63%/year, and the zero-gain insurance premium would be $1827/year.

What about other factors?

So far I have shown how much insurance decreases my risk of fatal health problems, and that it is not worth buying at current prices. But what about other things you can do to reduce the risk? What's the risk reduction that can be achieved by quitting smoking, not drinking too much, and maintaining a normal weight? And what is the monetary value of this reduction?

Googling for risk factors for heart disease and cancer turns up many admonishments to stop smoking and lose weight, but there aren't many actual numbers. The only number consistently quoted is 2-4x increase in risk for smokers. Specifically, lung cancer is almost entirely caused by smoking. (Lung cancer usually happens later than age 50, so it did not affect the risk calculations above) The other factors are stated generally, without statistics. So let's make a guess. Let's say that quitting smoking will reduce my chance of cancer and heart disease by a factor of 3 (no, I don't smoke, or drink, or overeat, but previous risk calculations did not account for that) That maintaining a normal weight will reduce both risks by a factor of 2. And that stopping heavy drinking will reduce them by 30% (drinking affects cancer more than heart disease; alcohol apparently causes a lot of damage to the body. But for simplicity let's guess that the effect is the same.) The total is a ninefold reduction of risk.

The cancer mortality rate for the uninsured 50 year old me was calculated above at 0.232% (the same as incidence). 0.232% reduced ninefold is 0.026%, for the absolute value reduction of 0.206%. For heart disease the rate is 0.132%; reduces ninefold to 0.015%, by 0.117%. Reducing drinking should also completely eliminate liver disease, for an additional reduction by 0.017%. The total reduction is 0.34%, which gives monetary value of 0.34% * 29 = 9.86%, * $31.5k = $3106. This is nearly twice as much benefit as I would get from buying insurance!

It would be wrong to say that I was disappointed with Spore. I do think it is a good game, but when it failed to live up to my expectations, it was perhaps due to them being excessively high. Spore was to be, in my mind, the last great game ever written. It was to define a whole new gaming genre and revitalize creativity in a languishing field. It was to engage the attention and the entire lives of millions of gamers, who would waste centuries on creating content for it. Unfortunately, that did not happen, and if I had to sum it up in one word, it would be "mediocre".

Spore really is fun, and its first stage, set among the primitive cells in the tide pool is the second most exciting one to play. The action is fast-paced, the graphics are adorable, and the fabled procedural animation is starting to show its considerable abilities. The little creatures show their own personalities; from the pink ciliated cells flitting about like butterflies to the giant ponderous epic creatures way out of your league, each has its ways and character. Your little cell can also acquire various attributes and abilities by killing other cells, which it can do regardless of being a herbivore or a carnivore. Eat little bits of food floating around for "DNA points" and spend them on various appendages, ranging from propulsion to weapons. If you enjoy quickie games, you will certainly love this one!

Once you get big enough in the cell stage, you get to grow legs and climb out onto dry land. The creature stage is the signature of Spore, and it is without a doubt the best stage to play. The creatures look gorgeous and their movements are smooth and lifelike. The gameplay is rather like the cell stage, surprizingly. You will spend your time wandering around, collecting upgrade parts from shiny skeletons, killing some species, socializing with others, and having an occasional break for lunch. Although you can just walk around looking at things, it probably would not appeal to the modern gamer. The environment is not very realistic and neither the ground nor the vegetation are particularly impressive on their own. The game is all about creature interaction, with the environment existing purely to facilitate that. And if fighting or dancing with critters is what you love doing, you will love this game!

This, however, is where the game "ends". The tribal stage is not nearly as interesting. It tries to do an RTS-like game, and not doing a very good job at it. The gameplay is standard fare; get resources, build stuff in your village, then get your units together and throw them onto enemy cities. You can wipe them out, or play music for them (with a kind of a pattern matching game, where you play the instruments they ask for), and they fall out of the picture.

The civilization stage is even more boring. This is the part where you design your buildings and vehicles, which you might have thought was the good part. Well, you only get one of each kind to design. You get one kind of city hall. You get one kind of factory. You get one kind of entertainment house. You will not spend any time looking at them, since the game is all about making hordes of units and throwing them at enemy cities. After you complete this stage, you will not see them at all; from orbit, the cities look like textured circles. While creature designs are something you get to spend a lot of time with, I rather doubt people will spend much time customizing the cities.

Vehicles are no better. Customizing them is not very interesting either, since at the usual zoom level you can hardly see any details. You also get only one in each category; military, economic, and religious. The three do not work together; you have to choose a single way of dealing with each enemy. There are no combined arms tactics, like you would have seen in CivCTP, for example. As an amusing aside, if you edit your vehicle, all the vehicles you have created will change. This way you can "cheat" by alternating between a firepower-heavy leviathan and a turbocharged Porshe :) This effectively eliminates any power-speed tradeoffs that the designers may have intended. But, since this stage is rather boring, I am sure you'll take what you can get. Just gather your tanks or battleships into a group, and throw them onto each city you find. If you are good, you'll be done in fifteen minutes.

The space stage is a completely different kind of game. It feels like a an adventure game, but without a plot. If you enjoy FedEx quests, scouring the countryside for hidden items, and fighting various things to get points and money, then the space stage is for you! Personally, I have found it dead boring.

So what is fun about Spore? I say it is the first two stages, and this is also where the problems start. Yes, they are quite fun to play. But they are also very short. If you hurry, you could reach the tribe stage in half an hour. Of course, it is not that you are kicked out of each stage; you can choose to keep wandering around with your vicious pack of maxed out flying pigs, killing everyone on your continent; it just gets repetetive. You see, there is almost nothing permanent in Spore. Creatures you kill off get replaced with others after a while. Your tribe migrates to another part of the continent twice, placing you into a fresh environment. And except for determining your worthless "special abilities" in the later game, nothing you do matters.

EA used to advertise that the choices you make would lock you into different paths through the game. That, unfortunately, is not true. Sure, you get restricted to a specific diet; you either eat meat, fruits and vegetables, or both. This choice determines the class of mouths you get for your creature and the (mostly useless) special abilities your Chieftain gets in the tribal stage. (After the tribal stage, it does not matter at all what you creature looks like or what abilities it has) Other than that, you can completely redesign your creature at any time while in the creature stage. You might have had an incentive to avoid drastic changes if removing old parts was expensive. But Spore actually pays you for your old parts in full, encouraging radical redesign. You can buy a max-combat creature, kill kill kill, and switch to a max-social creature in a single redesign. This is definitely not evolution. Perhaps the designers were afraid that placing too many restrictions on creature design would turn people off, but that is a difficult argument to make, given how short each stage is and how easy it is to just start in the creature stage from the beginning.

The other creatures are a bit of a letdown as well. You do not have to kill everyone; you can dance and sing and lull them into an alliance. After that, they just do not do anything interesting. You get to heal at their nests, which might have been a feature, except that you also get healed at the nests of creatures you make extinct. You can get your allies to join your party, but other than visual interest, there is little point in doing so. The standard creatures were created for fun, and they are not really good at any particular thing.

What all of this adds up to is a quickie game with limited replay value, similar to the random sandbox things you can do in GTA, and I would say that Spore offers far less variety. Looking at the multitude of creatures might be fun for a while, but eventually you will get tired of it.

It is difficult to spend a week on Slashdot without colliding with a GPL advocate. Eager to spread their philosophy, they proselytize to anyone willing to listen, and to many who are not. When they collide with a BSD advocate, such as myself, a heated flamewar usually erupts with each side repeating the same arguments over and over, failing to understand how the other party can be so stupid as to not see the points that appear so obvious and right. These disagreements, as I wish to show in this article, are as much linguistic as they are philosophical, and while the latter side can not be reconciled, the former certainly can, hopefully resulting in a more civil and logical discource over the matter.

The first disagreement I wish to address concerns the statement "BSD projects are free, but GPL projects stay free". GPL advocates can not understand why the BSD advocates are not getting this point, and BSD advocates make accusations of communism, which are then argued to death by both parties. The problem with the statement above is the different interpretation of the word "project". I, and I suspect many other BSD advocates, generally separate the concept of "project" from "code". While code is what projects are made of, I do not see it as valuable as the useful product a project provides. When I write a program, be it a site scraper, or a todo program, or a UI framework, I think of my project as the entity that matters. The fact that I may have copied some code from one to another is of no concern to me.

A GPL advocate sees an entirely different situation. To him, it is the code that comes first, and the applications built from that code are a secondary consideration. Even a single line of code is precious, whether it contains a complex spline formula or i += 2;. As an aside, I would expect this mindset to be more prone to reusing other people's code instead of reimplementing it. Where I would scoff at a piece of code, call it utter garbage, and rewrite the damn thing from scratch, a GPL advocate would probably wrap the garbage in another API that he find more palatable. In my opinion, this leads to bloat from wrappers, instability from the garbage that is still there, and loss of skills. What programmer from the current generation is up to the challenge of reimplementing libjpeg? But, I digress. I am here to explain, not bash, so please excuse this little rant.

The two different viewpoints outlined above lead to different interpretation of the expression "stay free". To a BSD advocate, his project will always "stay free", and to assert otherwise is ridiculous. Once it is published, what could possibly make it go away? I have projects that I wrote fifteen years ago which are still hosted on ibiblio.org ftp site and mirrored around the world. I no longer maintain them and think them useless, but they'll persist forever, and anyone at all who wants to download them still can download them. The fact that some company can take it, write a little bit on top of it, and sell it, does not in any way affect my project.

To a GPL advocate, the project is not important; the code is important. So he looks not just at the project distributions he has made, but also of other projects that may incorporate any line of code he ever wrote. In his mind there is no distinction between his original work and its encapsulation in a derived work. He still thinks of both as "his code", and as an entity that must stay free. Naturally, any non-free derived work will anger him, because his code in it will no longer be free, even though his own copy of that code and his entire project will still be free.

The code/project distinction also leads to a different view of what it means to "use" a project, although this point is seldom argued explicitly. A GPL advocate makes a rather arbitrary and vague distinction between a human using his code and a computer using his code. Consider a situation where a user has a GPL-licensed program that converts a JPEG image to a GIF image and his own program (which he sells, or distributes under some other incompatible license) that can only view GIF images. It is legal for him and his customers to call the GPL program from the command line to convert JPEG images and then view them with his program. Suppose he gets fed up with this sequence and writes a shell script to do both operations in sequence. Is this legal? Probably. But what if he cuts out the conversion part of the GPL program and embeds it in his viewer? That would make his viewer a derived work, and so illegal to distribute under anything but GPL.

From the GPL advocate's view, this is perfectly logical. It is his code, and he wants all instances of his code to be free. The instance can not be free if it is embedded in another executable that is not free, since it can not be easily modified, which was Stallman's gripe and reason for GPL's existence. From the BSD advocate's view, the situation is absurd. His project is still free, and he does not really care how a user wants to use it. A shell script calling the converter is no different than a closed source program embedding it. They are simply different ways for a human to use the program. Whether the object code for the project stays hackable is also irrelevant, since the human's use of the project through a derived work project is just another way of use.

These different views of derived works are another bitter point of contention. GPL code can only be legally embedded in GPL projects, and if a non-GPL project wants to use GPL code, it must either not do that, or become a GPL project. This is why BSD advocates call the license viral, and thus elicit vehement denials from GPL advocates, who retort that nobody is forced to use GPL code, which lead to useless arguments over the meaning of "forced" or "viral" with no meaningful result. It must be reiterated that the GPL advocates look at code, while the BSD advocates look at projects, and the "viral" debate can only be resolved by examining both viewpoints. A GPL advocate sees a derived work as "his code" combined with some "other code" in a package, and his concern is that the package always be openable. "His code" always remains his code, and he sees any use or distribution of the whole package as a kind of use or distribution of his code. As a result, he feels justified in placing restrictions on how a user may use or distribute the derived work, even though he "owns" only a small part of the whole package. This is following the philosophy of copyright and intellectual property, which, curiously, is a favorite target of derision of these same people. A copyrighted work can never be wholly owned by the user, it is only rented, and so subject to control by the original creator.

A BSD advocate sees a derived work as his project being used by another project. The derived project is wholly owned by whoever wrote it, even if it uses other people's code. This is similar to the property laws of the real world. For example, suppose I sit on the curb and give away free lemons. A kid next door might get the bright idea to get my lemons, make lemonade, and sell it. The lemonade is clearly a "derived work", since it is made from my lemons, but it is absurd to suggest I have any right to tell him what price to put on his lemonade or how much sugar he can use in it. By the laws of private property in the real world, my ownership was relinquished at the time when I handed him my lemons. Just as I do not own his lemonade, neither do I own the derived works he makes from my BSD-licensed software.

These distinctive views of ownership combine with considerations of money, and GPL's anti-business mindset, resulting in accusations of Communism, and worse. But I'll save explaining that for another article. For now I will simply suggest that GPL advocates should change their language a bit, to make themselves more easily understood by people who do not subscribe to their philosophy. Specifically:

"BSD code is free, but GPL code stays free"

It would be better to instead say:

"BSD code is free, but the GPL ensures all derived works are also free"

or

"The GPL ensures your code will never be used by a closed-source application"

These alternatives clarify that you are talking about derived works, rather than the original project, which, of course, will always stay free anyhow. Also, do keep in mind the other points brought up in this article and make at least some effort to ensure you are speaking the same language before becoming too upset. I will never agree with your philosophy, but at least you'll know you were understood.

If you ride a bus to work, you must accustom yourself to some degree of uncertainty. The bus seldom arrives at its appointed stop precisely at 08:00:00.00, usually being a minute or two early or late, and sometimes considerably more. What would you say if I asked you when will the bus come tomorrow morning? I might even be more specific and ask whether the bus will be there if I show up at the stop at precisely 08:00:13.44. Since you, like most people, are unable to predict the future with absolute precision, you'll likely shrug and say "the bus comes around 8am, man; that's all I know".

Most people would not consider the subject any further than that, but let's see what would happen if you did just that. When the bus is twenty minutes late, it is quite natural to start wondering about the cause of such an inconvenient delay. The bus stop would likely be full of annoyed passengers at this point, who may be inclined to debate the question of why the bus is late. "Maybe the bus driver overslept", "I heard there's construction up near 135th", "Is it the daylight savings time change already?", "Is my watch fast?" This search for causes is as natural to us as breathing. Whenever something good happens, we search for its causes so that we could make it happen more often. Whenever something bad happens, we search for its causes so that we could assign blame and punish those deemed responsible so that, presumably, it would not happen again.

But what would happen if we denied the existence of causes? What if we restricted ourselves to looking at patterns in our observations and tried to predict the future based entirely on them, without attempting to create any causal links between separate events? Suppose I decided to use this method for predicting when the bus will show up at the stop. I would sit at the stop and whenever the bus appears, I'll record the exact time. When I judge my collected data sufficient, I'll plug it in to an Excel spreadsheet and do some statistical analysis. It would quickly become apparent that bus arrival is a discontinuous event, occurring in standard normal distributions centered close to the integral hour values, and almost never occurring in between. There is also a curious discontinuity between 11pm and 6am, when the bus never appears (although I am not entirely certain of this, as I was prone to dozing off at those times). After some tinkering, abuse of probability calculations, and a generous helping of integrated delta functions, I would come up with an impressive-looking equation that would calculate the probability of catching a bus at any time to fifteen significant digits.

I would then write a scientific paper to present my wondrous findings. It would no doubt be accepted, and its predictions would result in the savings of millions of dollars due to workers being able to catch their buses without waiting. There would, of course, be a few, who will miss the bus, but they will not be numerous, and they can not possibly blame my equations for their failures. It is, after all, impossible to predict exactly when the bus will show up - only the probability of it happening can be calculated, so a certain chance of failure will always exist, no matter how precise our theories may be. And if anyone dares to ask why this uncertainty exists, there are numerous proofs of why it is mathematically required. (Or, to put it another way, it is just the way the world works)

As you and the passengers waiting at the stop are laughing at my theory, it is worthwhile to consider what would happen to science if the approach outlined above was dutifully applied to all research. All scientists would concentrate solely on predictive modeling instead of searching for actual causes of the events they study. And the result would necessarily be stagnation of all scientific progress. All discoveries ever made by man can be traced to the search for causes. Man learned to grow wheat when he searched for causes of plant growth and discovered that plants grow from seeds. Man learned to build steam engines when he searched for causes of rattling kettles, and discovered that air and water vapor expand when heated. And man learned to make antibiotics after wondering what was killing his bacterial cultures. Learning the cause of an event is the only way to fully control the event.

You and the delayed passengers might think that the denial of causes is the province of idiots, and that it is absurd to say that something has no cause or that the universe will not permit the bus driver to consistently arrive at the bus stop at 8am, but this is precisely the sort of thinking that permeates the science of modern physics based on quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics operates on the exact same principles as the statistical bus arrival theory I outlined above. It does not try to discover causes of quantum behaviors, but rather asserts that no causes exist. Quantization of matter and energy is postulated (QM postulate 4) to explain experimental results that show quantities that appear discrete, like the photoelectric effect or the blackbody radiation problem. Nowhere in QM theory will you find any attempt to discover the cause of this quantization; the energy levels between those commonly observed are presumed "forbidden" by nature. The electron may behave as a particle or as a wave, and this duality is also causeless. What is an electron, anyway? The question itself is invalid in the QM framework.

Quantum Mechanics is extremely useful due to the accurate predictions it can yield about natural phenomena, and its value is undisputed. The problem is that without also searching for the causes of these phenomena, which is impossible under the current theoretical framework, the science of physics will not advance. It has not, in fact, produced much of anything since 1937, when the Copenhagen interpretation of QM was adopted. We might point to the laser (developed by a private individual, and predicted to be impossible by Niels Bohr), the hydrogen bomb (which did not require much knowledge of what causes fusion, just that it occurs), or semiconductors (mostly a macroscale phenomenon), but we have not achieved any greater understanding of the foundations of our universe. The only way to continue is to set aside Quantum Mechanics, recognizing it as a practical tool but rejecting it as saying anything about the nature of reality, and start from scratch. Re-examine our experimental data and come up with new hypotheses, focusing on discovering the physical meaning of our results, rather then blind prediction of their values. It is the only way to discover new phenomena, like better energy sources, faster computers, and regular bus schedules. It is the only way the science of physics and the future of our civilization can be resurrected.

The creator of Bioshock, Ken Levine, intended the game to be a commentary on Objectivism. This intention is so rare that I might even call it unique, and, being an objectivist myself, I was naturally curious to discover whether he succeeded, and whether his portrayal was accurate. Before buying the game I avidly read the interviews, including the one previously posted on Slashdot. Unfortunately, Mr.Levine had decided to be somewhat vague on the subject. His explicit statements like "I'm trying to write about what happens when real people try to do things," and "Real people aren't perfect. That's the problem with ideologies. Real people carry out ideologies. So even the best of intentions gets screwed up." seemed to imply that the game is intended as an attack on Objectivism. He has, however also denied that, so I was willing to give him a chance and preordered the game from Amazon.

What follows is a thorough review of Bioshock's plot and how it relates to Objectivism and altruism. I will have to be very detailed, so here is your ***BIG BOLD SPOILER WARNING***! The entire plot will be discussed, much like in a walkthrough and if you are the type who is bothered by such things, feel free to stop reading now. There are several unusual twists in the game, which your kind will enjoy immensely. Also, I should state that I am not fond of shooters in general (except Half Life) and that although I will try my best to avoid statements like "Bioshock is a cross between Doom and Nethack, except that Doom is more fun and Nethack has better graphics!", some of my sarcasm may bleed through. Please try to ignore it.

Now that I have played through it, what can I say about Bioshock? First of all I must admit that I was wrong. Then I simply must extol it. This game is a true masterpiece! It is the ideal to which all past works of this type have strived to reach and to which all future ones will likewise strive to live up to! It is a truly awesome piece of propaganda against Objectivism and for statism and altruism that would have made Stalin and Beria weep with joy. Lenin himself must be wiping tears from his mummified face in his mausoleum at the sheer wonder of this game. It is so good, that not a single review has picked up on it yet! But they can be excused. Unlike me, they were not raised in the Soviet Union, and so did not have enough experience with this sort of thing. To a russian, sense of propaganda is in the blood, and so perhaps only a russian can truly appreciate Bioshock for what it is.

You begin near a tall building, rendered in the style commonly associated with objectivist art; something you might expect to see on the cover of "Atlas Shrugged" or "The Fountainhead". Just inside you see a bronze bust of Andrew Ryan towering over a red banner saying "No God or kings, only man." If you are not russian, you would probably just have a vague sense of familiarity with this setting. To me this says "propaganda ahead", since I am accustomed to seeing bronze likenesses of Stalin, Lenin, or Marx in conjunction with inspirational red banners. To you it just looks sinister due to the shadowing lighting and a subconscious association with communism. The lighting does not get any lighter; don't let the reviews fool you, Bioshock is a long dark corridor, just like all the other shooters.

Do observe, however, how well you have been targeted with this setting. From reading the reviews you already know that Ryan is an objectivist, so this setting automatically casts Objectivism in a negative light. If you have been undecided before, you are now leaning towards the thought that Objectivism is bad, aren't you? Clever, isn't it? One image and bam! I must express my admiration. Stalin would have been proud. I will point out these wonderous brainwashing techniques as we go along, but for now, just get into the bathysphere and go down.

You arrive into Rapture and, as advertised, you are greeted by a spider splicer who proceeds to tear at your vehicle. Here you meet Atlas, who calls you on the radio to tell you what to do. Since you probably heard of Atlas Shrugged, you would now be assuming that he is an objectivist. The game also portrays him as an underdog in Rapture, a little detail precisely targeted at americans, who like to champion underdogs, and so are thus likely to acquire a positive view of Atlas. What? Brainwashing in favor of Objectivism? Let's not jump to conclusions yet. Good soviet citizens quickly acquire the habit of suspicion when dealing with propaganda.

Very soon thereafter you are confronted with your first puzzle - a door with a short-circuited switch. The only way to open the door is to go to the gatherer's garden and get yourself spliced. Depending on your attitude toward doing drugs, you may be eager or reluctant, but since it is either get spliced or quit the game, you choose to get spliced and acquire the lightning bolt spell. Oh, excuse me; I meant "plasmid". Please understand my confusion. Unlike most games, like, say, Nethack, Bioshock calls spells "plasmids" and calls mana "Eve". I am sure most people will still call them spells and mana though. You open the door (by shocking an already shorted, sparking switch! WTF?) and go on.

The next area is reached by a glass walkway which is breached while you are in it, creating a pretty looking flood of water you have to wade through. It is amazing how slow and graceful such a leak is, considering that you are at the bottom of the ocean, where the pressure is ~4000psi. But hey, if you can throw lightning and use it to open doors with sparking switches, should we further berate the game designers for being ignorant of the laws of physics?

From now on you'll be killing splicers and hacking machinery, and listening to creepy recordings left by previous inhabitants. There are a few instances where you will see NPCs that will talk to you, but really pretty much everything will attack you on sight. If the splicers have any significant AI improvements over Doom, I haven't noticed. If you hide and watch them (with an invisibility tonic), they just wonder around doing nothing interesting. Yes, they do run to healing stations and douse themselves in pools of water, but otherwise they keep attacking you just like in any other shooter.

One notable exception from doing nothing is that splicers mutter to themselves. In particular, the thugger splicers chant "Jesus loves me yes I know, For the bible tells me so". Just like in Doom, this is part of the atmosphere, and is expertly designed to make God fearing christians (americans) uneasy, reminding them of Hell and eternal damnation where lost souls wander in torment, forever separated from God. The dark corridors, the creepy sounds, Rapture's location in the bowels of the earth, so to speak, and this specific reminder serve to reinforce the Rapture-Hell association and, by implication, Ryan-Satan, and Objectivism-Evil as well. If at the beginning of the game you were still willing to give Objectivism a fair hearing, that enthusiasm is probably gone by now, especially in christians.

Listening to the splicers moaning about their addiction to splicing (e.g. "I don't really need it, but...") you are also reminded of your own choice to get the electric bolt. This is designed to make you feel guilty and to identify with the splicers. You are, after all, no better than they are, the logic goes. You took the Adam, didn't you? You wander around Rapture looting bodies, aren't you? Here's a quote from one player on a Bioshock forum: "I saw these splicers standing in the pool. It was pretty obvious that the game expected me to zap them, and so I did. Then, when I was down there, looting their bodies, I realized that I was doing the same thing they were." Then, of course, you feel guilty about killing them, but since you can do nothing about it except quit the game, you start to feel a little angry instead. It might not be very noticeable yet; this slight shimmering below the surface, but you'll find it if you look for it, and you'll see that it is directed at Ryan.

Your budding egalitarian notions really ought to receive some reinforcement before you get to Ryan, so the next area, the Medical Center is used for that purpose. Where an egalitarian states that all men are equal, and that no man is in any way better than another, an objectivist proposes that a man can improve himself to become a better man. To the modern egalitarian, this statement automatically implies that the better man ought to kill all the inferior men. It is also directly associated with eugenics and Nazi experiments in it. Hence, in the medical area you see an exploration of appropriate Nazi themes.

Throughout the area you learn about Dr.Steinman (notice the abundance of german names here and on later levels) and his quest to make people beautiful. As befits an objectivist, Dr.Steinman makes his own decision what "beautiful" means and proceeds to impose his grotesque views on his patients by cutting them up "like Picasso". This is probably intended as an analogy to Howard Roark, who built buildings exclusively of his own design instead of listening to his clients and giving them what they wanted. Steinman is made a doctor to increase your emotional response which is obviously much stronger in health care than in architecture.

Here you also hear from Dr.Tanenbaum, the discoverer of Adam, a former Nazi experimenter, and the creator of the little sisters, talking about her past and her work. The Nazi connection, of course, serves to help you hate what you see. By the time you finish the level you will be full of gratitude toward our own AMA for protecting us from Dr.Steinmans and the FDA for protecting us from dangerous drugs like Adam. Without our benevolent government agencies, all health care would surely turn into selfish experimentation by doctors and result in death, blood, and plenty of suffering. Oh, and all these evil doctors are objectivists. Aren't you glad that our own doctors don't follow that evil philosophy?

On this level you also exorcise your first little sister in the now infamous choice. When I first heard of this, I wondered why this was even an issue. Surely, only a sick pervert would kill a harmless little girl! But reading the posts on Bioshock forums gives an entirely different picture. Surprizingly, as much as a third of the players have chosen cold-blooded murder! Atlas, your guide and mentor, urges you to do exactly that, and if you try to leave the level without freeing or killing all the little sisters, you get a big warning from the game about how things will get "very difficult" unless you get as much Adam as possible. I did not, incidentally, find this to be true. Yes, I played with the easy setting, and yet I had over a thousand units of Adam left at the end, having found little use for magic. In fact, if the game didn't force you to take on plasmids, you could easily get by without any Adam at all.

Still, the little sister choice is one of the key points the game makes. Do you choose to be selfish and murder the child, or do you free her as an altruistic gesture. The concept of selfishness is thus reinforced as an evil choice, while altruism is portrayed as the only correct choice. Since objectivism supposedly tells you that you should be selfish, it automatically becomes an evil philosophy.

Let's go on. The next area, Neptune's Bounty, is where the smugglers live under the rule of Frank Fontaine. An objectivist would rightly wonder how there can be smuggling in an objectivist society, which, after all, is based on free enterprise and does not allow any government to make trade in any good illegal. It appears that Ryan forbade all contact, and thereby all trade, with the outside world. What are the smugglers smuggling? The game at times implies that it is Adam. But if you look in the crates, abundant throughout the level, you'll find only alcoholic beverages. Tanenbaum also mentions in a recording that they smuggled sea slugs for her, which is even more difficult to understand since the slugs are a local product.

As illogical as the existence of smugglers appears, there must have been some point they were inteded to make. I did not find out what it is, so I'll make a guess. Ryan built Rapture, and therefore owns it. Ryan doesn't like depending on the outside world. An objectivist is supposed to act in his own self-interest, which in this game is interpreted as "do whatever you want". If Ryan wants to forbid foreign trade, he can and should do what he wants and forbid it. Anybody who doesn't like it can go elsewhere and build their own city. Except that Ryan doesn't want people to leave either, and so has disabled all the bathyspheres. After playing through the level you ought to be thankful that our government would never prevent people from leaving the country or from trading with whomever we wanted. That is why there are no smugglers in America.

The next area, called Arcadia, is supposed to be a forest, with trees growing in most of the rooms. Here you learn about the evils of private property, and the forest is chosen to appeal to all the environmentalists out there. Game players do tend to be liberal, and therefore supportive of such things, so this bit of emotional targeting is likely to be quite successful. Near the beginning of the level you find a message from Ryan talking about how he owned a forest on the surface. The government made him turn his forest into a national park, but he burned it instead. The sound you are hearing in the background is the millions of environmentalist gamers grinding their teeth in hate.

The burning of the forest is an allusion to Atlas Shrugged, where John Galt and friends destroy what they have created to prevent it falling into the hands of parasites. "A man creates, a parasite asks 'Where is my share?'" says Andrew Ryan, and institutes a policy of parasite persecution. It is effectively a witch hunt with "parasites" being tracked down, tortured, and killed. Only a parasite would hack vending machines, Ryan reminds you sternly. Since you and every other player hack everything in your path, it is easy to imagine how you would feel about Rapture, where such behavior gets you the death penalty.

As you walk through the forest, a green fog descends and kills all the trees, so you wouldn't get to enjoy them. Visiting Arcadia is not free and anyone who gets in without paying is a parasite. So you go to Dr.Grossman, who planted Arcadia in the first place. She asks you for some bee spit, chlorophyll, and distilled water, and makes the Lazarus Virus from them, as millions of scientists worldwide roll their eyes. Then, in a scintillatingly delicious twist, she gets a call from Ryan who reminds her that he owns the patent on the virus and that she just used it without permission. A green fog descends and Dr.Grossman dies.

I nearly cried at the beauty of it. Here you have millions of gamers with their hard drives full of pirated games and music, and you give them an example like this! They would all shake in fear, prostrate themselves on the floor, and pray fervently to dear God and dear Government in gratitude for living in a free country where RIAA, the MPAA, or the BSA can't just send armed thugs into your house and kill you for piracy. Thank heaven we are not following that evil objectivism philosophy which evidently results in a society where you live in constant fear of death!

The level after Arcadia offers no new material, continuing to reinforce your considerable hatred of objectivism through repetition. In Fort Frolic you meet an artist, whom you help complete a masterpiece with pictures of his rivals' dead bodies. Objectivist artists kill people to create art because selfish people always end up killing or hurting others. Therefore all objectivist art must be about death and suffering.

The level after that is a preparation for your fight with Ryan, who is supposedly the boss of the game. Every shooter, starting with Doom follows the same pattern, and Bioshock is no exception. On the Haephestus level you get to open Ryan's door by blowing up the "core" with an EMP bomb. As if we could get any more stale... Amusingly, in Ryan's antechamber you see impaled people hung on the walls. A clear reference to Doom and a hint that objectivists kill people they don't like.

Finally, you go up to confront Ryan, expecting a boss fight. That's not what happens though. You see, the designers did not just want you to hate objectivism. They also want to set you on the right path. Unfortunately, you have been bad. You've been selfish. You took the Adam, didn't you? You killed hundreds of people, didn't you? And you were, at least in the beginning, tempted by the objectivist idea that you are entitled to the sweat of your brow, weren't you? You have sinned, and you must repent and receive redemption, which is what the remainder of the game is all about.

Ryan's level is essentially one long cutscene, where you find out that you were genetically engineered by Fontaine to kill Ryan and that you always do what you are told if the request is followed by "would you kindly". If you believe yourself to be a sinner, as explained in the previous paragraph, then this should be an enormous relief. You are not responsible for all those things you did; Atlas made you do it. Didn't he keep saying "would you kindly" all the time? And you couldn't help it! You had no choice! It's in your genes! Whew. That was close. But wait, isn't Atlas the good guy? The underdog? The resistance in the evil objectivist city? Well, it turns out that Atlas is really Fontaine, as he proceeds to tell you, gloating and sneering. As a very nice detail, his accent changes from Irish-american to that of a chicago mobster. So he is not the resistance (Irish), but a criminal (the mob). Funny how this distinction is made simply by changing your mind.

Fortunately, you have not been entirely bad. You have saved the little sisters, so a pair of them guide you to safety. You wake up in Tanenbaum's safehouse where she removes part of your genetic conditioning. You also get to see all those saved little girls playing on the floor. One of them opens the door to the sewers for you so you can go kill find some medicine for yourself and kill Fontaine. Why you should do this is not entirely apparent, since Fontaine does not threaten harm to Rapture. He was, in fact, the one who told you to stop the self-destruct sequence that Ryan activated before you killed him. So he wants to be the king of Rapture instead of Ryan. Is that really such a bad thing? Even Tanenbaum and her girls don't have much to fear from Fontaine; he has his own supply of Adam. In fact, he even offers to send you to the surface if you surrender; a choice the game will not permit you to contemplate. No, the only choice is to kill him. Wait, aren't the objectivists bad because they kill people? Oh, right, Tanenbaum says it's ok, and she has little girls, so she must be right.

So you go out and look for the antidote to your mental conditioning. While you look it wouldn't hurt to dwell a bit on how bad Fontaine is. You see, it turns out that Fontaine is a real capitalist (objectivism is the philosophy, capitalism is the economic structure it requires), collecting helpless poor people in his "House for The Poor" and then exploiting them like slaves. You also find out that Fontaine really is Atlas, which was his alias after he arranged his own death to throw Ryan off his trail. And, you find out that Ryan's mistress left Ryan for Atlas because Ryan worked too much. That's right; objectivists are all workaholics and are incapable of love or any other human emotion. Except Atlas, but he was just pretending.

After you get cured you go after Fontaine, who escapes through a door you can not open. You see, it's one of those little sister doors, with a little doggy-door on the bottom, through which a little sister must crawl to open it from the other side. At this point you might think you can call a favor from one of those girls you rescued to open it just like one of them opened a similar door at Tanenbaum's place, or hack the lock or something, but that is, of course, not a possibilty. We wouldn't want you to think that you can do something just by yourself, would we? That would be objectivist thinking. Altruists know that nothing can be accomplished without relying on others, and the others will not help you unless you are prepared to sacrifice what you hold most dear. In this game you must sacrifice your humanity.

Tanenbaum tells you that the only way to get through the door is to become a Big Daddy and escort a little sister through it. As you will find out in the course of your research, the transformation is irreversible and once you are a Big Daddy, you'll stay a Big Daddy. But, it's all for a good cause, so you do it anyway. What the good cause is, is not specified at this point. Altruists don't ask such questions; they know that good deeds are always reciprocated; somehow, someday. You get your throat ripped out by a sinister machine to install a Daddy voice box, so you can no longer speak. You get pheromone injections and you start stinking like a pile of garbage, so all humans will avoid you from now on. And finally, you put on the Daddy suit, which is grafted to your body and is not removable. Putting on the helmet also restricts your field of vision to a circle slightly smaller than the screen. You have no idea how disturbing that last bit is until you see it, but trust me, it is bad enough to make you cry.

When you are finished, you go through the proving grounds, escorting a little sister on her harvesting errand while being attacked by hordes of splicers and constantly reminded that "angels don't wait for slowpokes, Mr.B". When she is finished and goes to have some "dreamtime", she leaves you her Adam sucker, with which you are supposed to suck Fontaine dry. Ironically, you never go through that door that stopped your progress on the previous level and prompted your transformation. But there is no reason to regret your choice. Sacrifices must be pointless, or they are not true sacrifices.

The boss battle with Fontaine is just like every other boss battle you have seen. He is big, he is fast, and he is in a huge room where there is no place to hide or pick a better vantage point. Shoot shoot shoot, suck suck suck, rinse and repeat. Very boring. Eventually he's out of Adam and half-a-dozen little sisters stab him with their syringes until he is dead. Then you bundle up the girls into a submarine and take them up to the surface, where they grow up, graduate from college, and comfort you on your deathbed. Aahh. Family. Only altruists have families, so you better be an altruist. Sacrifice all you have, and people will like you, even though you can only groan instead of speaking, stink to high heaven, and have to wear a Daddy suit for the rest of your life. It's what's inside that matters, after all.

Now that the game is finished, what sort of a reply can an objectivist offer in defense of his philosophy (which, I must emphasise, is not a faith, because unlike a religeous belief, philosophical axioms are supposed to be verifiable by direct perception), after an argument was given that has no logical content to which to object? Bioshock is full of assertions, but does not really offer any arguments to support them. As I described above, the game focuses exclusively on emotional appeal to smear objectivism rather than offer any rational objections to it. Furthermore, all the assertions are based on (deliberate?) misunderstanding of the objectivist philosophy, as I will now partly discuss.

One must necessarily start by talking about selfishness and by stating that to an objectivist it has a meaning very different from the colloquial. There is a long essay explaining this. Come back when you are finished. You can also read other objectivist essays explaining logic and objective reality as the foundations of the philosophy. It will be much more clear what Bioshock is all about when you know what it is intended to criticise.

The second issue that must be addressed is the role of the state in stopping bloodthirsty people. Those who say that without the state and its police force people will just kill each other forget that it is not the job of the police to prevent crime. The police exists to punish criminals after they commit the crime. If you believe that crimes are prevented by the existence of the police and severe punishments, you need to go talk to real criminals in prison, who will tell you they don't give a damn. There is even credible research showing in plain terms that the chance of imprisonment has absolutely no effect on a person's choice to commit a crime. A full exploration of this subject, as well as the related one of contract enforcement, is a lengthy ordeal, and many other people, like Stefan Molyneux, wrote numerous articles I invite you to read.

Next issue is that of Adam and drugs in general. The state propaganda tells us that if drugs were legalized, everyone would suddenly become a drug addict. Many people disagree, observing that anyone who wants to be a drug addict now is able to become a drug addict. Prohibition did not work, and neither will the war on drugs. The only reason you need plasmids in Bioshock is to open doors. There are doors with short-circuited controls that can only be opened by shocking them with your electrobolt. There are doors blocked by flowing ice which can only be opened by using the incinerate spell. There are doors blocked by wreckage that can only be opened by throwing grenades at it with telekinesis. In the real world, you always have a choice when dealing with obstacles and the universe does not create magical obstacles in your path that can only be removed by magical means.

Then there is another piece of propaganda by the game, saying that Adam is only obtainable from the bodies of little sisters. Most plasmids are given to you for free and do not have to be purchased with Adam. You do not, in fact, need to even free the little sisters, since you can get through the game much like any other shooter, with no Adam at all. So the whole harvest/exorcise choice can be avoided entirely. The argument that the "selfish" choice of murdering the sisters is somehow more beneficial to you than freeing them is also questionable, since there really aren't that many useful spells you can purchase. The best spells, like the electrobolt, invisibility, and hacker's delight, are all given to you for free anyway.

Let's also consider why the game designers chose to make Adam a mind-altering drug, as well as a body-altering one. The reason for this lies in our culture's root in the Bible, which states that man was made in the image of God. Because of that, it is a sacrilege to suggest that a man can phyisically improve himself, and a certainty that any change must be evil, and so the work of the devil. Hence the splicers go insane and bloodthirsty because those are the properties of the devil. No beneficial body mods are allowed. Everybody is equal, and to suggest that some men are better than others is a sin. The deadly sin of Pride.

An objectivist would naturally reject this and all other such religeous nonsense. To become a better person and to improve the world he lives in is in fact the very purpose of his life. He also believes this goal to be achievable, whereas the altruists usually subscribe to the poor boy mentality and stay poor in body, mind, and money, because of it, and not because of Fontaines who exploit them in Houses For The Poor.

The theme of self-sacrifice in the last levels also deserves some discussion. The first obvious thing to point out is that it is completely unnecessary. The barrier is there only because the game designers forbid its removal by any other means. In other words, they force you into sacrificing your humanity. That rather prevents it from being an altruistic choice, doesn't it? There is a further piece of FUD in the notion that an objectivist would necessarily do the "selfish" thing (in the colloquial sense of being to one's benefit while simultaneously hurting others) and leave Rapture even if it means leaving everyone in it to die, which, of course, is not true.

The decision of whom or what to rescue in an emergency is not as altruistic as you think. Like every other choice for an objectivist, this one is also simply a question of value. Megalomaniac manipulators like Fontaine don't have much value. Tanenbaum has great skill in genetics and so has high value. The little girls have potential value for the future of the species (what's the point of building a better world, if no one survives to appreciate it?). The splicers' minds are fried so they have no value at all. So when leaving I would take Tanenbaum and the girls, but leave the splicers and Fontaine to his own devices. Killing him is pretty hard and is really not worth the effort, since he does not control the bathyspheres anyway. If he really wants to leave, he can become a Big Daddy, who can walk outside and just float to the surface. I suspect he'll just stay in Rapture and rule it, and I say that's fine with me.

In an utterly pointless calculation I have just found out that the number of grains of sand that would fit in the Universe is approximately 10 nanogoogols. This result must have some profound philosophical implications, given that it contains "10", "nano", and "google" all at once.

As noted in today's Slashdot story, teenagers today think that email is for old people. While I am sure that similar concerns have been raised about email, and the telephone, and morse code, and who knows what else, I believe this trend to be yet another indicator of the downfall of our civilization. Email encouraged point-by-point replies with quoted context, which degraded people's ability to write coherent letters. Writing a letter on paper is a very different experience from replying to an email, requiring forethought, context memory, and a touch of literary talent to compose a coherent letter that the recepient would actually enjoy reading.

While using email has not prevented me from writing mostly as I have been on paper, coherently and at length, I often receive emails of a very different character from people who have never written a letter. These people have a hard time writing anything longer than a few sentences, with a coherent paragraph being a rarity, and a well-composed argument an astronomically improbable event. Then we have people who have been raised on IM, who have difficulty composing even a single complete sentence, but make up for it by writing a lot of them. Having met several such individuals, I can further add that they have a similar difficulty in spoken communication - speaking a lot, saying very little. Finally, we have the modern teenagers, mentioned in the article, who communicate solely by text messaging on their ubiquitous cell phones. I wonder what exactly is the content of those thousands of text messages they send every month.

A better question might be whether they have any content at all. Communication used to mean the conveyance of information, but it is quickly becoming little more than a stream of random noise. A noise taking the form of stream-of-consciousness spoutings exchanged between bored people who have no thoughts. Sharing of thoughts has become sharing of environment, with a constant stream of "hi, i'm tkn th frwy nw." and "ths movi sux", blending groups of people who do not think into a single collective "mind" that does not think. There are numerous examples of the spoutings of such "minds" available on the net in the form of irc logs such as this one. I encourage you to read through it and try to find any tidbit of actual information communicated therein. If you think that's too restrictive, try looking for a justified opinion, or maybe some evidence of intelligent life. Then try to imagine any of the participants as a great writer, or a scientist, or an engineer, or a member of any sort of occupation requiring thought or creativity.

When you are finished, think about the fact that these people are our future.

For days now, newscasts have been filled with the malevolent face of Cho Seung-Hui. His shaved head, bloodshot eyes filled with hatred, and the view down the barrel of his gun, have terrified and disturbed people across the country. I too find myself profoundly disturbed by those images, although my reasons are quite different. What disturbs me the most is not his psychotic personality, not his ghoulish appearance, and not even his morbid crime, but rather the fact that not a single person in the world understands what Cho Seung-Hui really is.

We do, of course, hear various explanations of how his actions were only manifiestations of a twisted character, a brain corrupted by antidepressants, and a profoundly antisocial nature. "He was a loner", they say, sputtering the word with a finality implying that to be a crime in itself. His lengthy manifesto feeds such thoughts, portraying him as a causeless well of hatred and violence; more a beast than a human being, and everyone knows that beasts need no reasons to be evil. After all, how can any sane person commit murder? What possible provocation could have existed in a peaceful little Virginian town to offer even a slightest justification for a massacre? The only harm society gave him was the ridicule and ostracism of his classmates, and millions of other kids seem to survive like trials without much damage or even shed tears. Surely, something must have been physically wrong with his brain. Or maybe he was molested as a child and the strain of keeping such a gruesome secret finally fried his brain. Or maybe he was just born evil and the fault lay with his genes. Who has time for such philosophical musings, anyway?

Philosophy is not a popular subject in schools. Nobody really cares about centuries old musings of men long dead and decomposed, regarding the nature of the world, our place in it, and what man is supposed to do with his life. And so students sit diligently through boring classes, examining the works of Plato, St.Augustine, or Kant, sullenly wondering why the university imagines they need all that nonsense, and, after the final exam, promptly forget everything they have heard. And yet, philosophy is not a subject that can be escaped. Nobody learns a philosophy of life in school. A miniscule proportion consciously create their own, after reading a book. A few dozen people in history created their own philosophy from nothing more than some deep thought. The vast majority of us, however, absorb a philosophy of life from our peers, giving the task no thought at all.

One branch of philosophy is ethics, dealing with questions of value and custom, of the distinction between right and wrong, and the concepts of good and evil. Another branch is metaphysics, answering questions of existence, of truth, and the meaning of life. In the popular philosophy that we unconsciously absorb from society all questions are answered with reference to the public and the common good. In ethics, for example, it is right to follow the law and the established local customs. It is wrong to do the opposite. Good and evil are defined by the church and are thought to be largely equivalent to right and wrong. Value is defined by public opinion much like the price of goods is determined by the free market. In metaphysics, the truth is what is in the Bible, or, if it is not there, then it is whatever people currently say it is; the meaning of life is to help others, and existence is determined by whatever the public deems to notice or not.

The emphasis on society as the source of everything, of value, of the good, and even of existence itself, naturally forces people to wish to be part of it. The desire to exist and to have value are innate to all of us. Even animals have these desires, and those of them whose "philosophy", if it can be called that in an unthinking brain, runs along the same lines as outlined above, tend to form distinct social hierarchies much like our own. Wolves are one example of such an animal. Their natural instincts of loyalty to their pack, of unquestioning trust in it, and of belonging to a group as the ultimate goal of life, are the very traits that make dogs "a man's best friend", for it allows them to fit into our society.

But what happens when society rejects someone? This may happen for a variety of reasons, most of which amount to being somehow different. Just as a pack of gray wolves would likely eject a black one, the packs of human children reject those who are not like them. Every school has its jocks, nerds, glamour girls, the band, and the math team, all running their own separate ways. Those who are unable or unwilling to find a pack of some kind, become loners. Loners, like Cho Seung-Hui.

In the naturally absorbed philosophy of life, a man's peer group has an enormous value because it answers the philosophical questions naturally arising in his mind, sparing him the necessity of thinking too hard. It tells him which actions are right and wrong to satisfy his need for justice. It gives him an identity of a group member to spare him the necessity of creating his own. It provides him with a simple method of determining his own value, through group approval or disapproval, thereby relieving him of the necessity of finding out what his own values are. It shares with him its beliefs and opinions, to avoid forcing him to think of his own. In general, you might imagine such a community as a giant mass mind, or, to use the popular word for it: a "collective consciousness", renting to each of its members a seemingly living, thinking soul, without burdening them with the necessity of living their own.

It is, therefore, pretty obvious that a man who is cast out of his pack must either find another pack, and quickly, or to somehow create a soul for himself capable of existence without a peer group. Unfortunately, to do so he needs a new philosophy of life; a philosophy of life that allows the existence of a reality unaffected by society's opinions. But a man's philosophy is not easily changed like an unwanted garment. The effort is more akin to shedding skin. Furthermore, his present philosophy blinds him as to the actual cause of the problem, which is itself. He sees himself being rejected by society and his philosophy interprets this as murder.

Yes, I said murder. What else is a good description of ripping out a man's soul? What other word evokes the unspeakable fear a man feels when he is about to cease his own existence? Most people have never experienced this fear to its full extent, but nearly everyone has seen a glimmer of it. When your little girl tells you that other girls in school don't like her, she is feeling a distant echo of that fear. When your little boy asks you why can't he be just like everyone else, he is seeking a means of avoiding that fear. That sinking feeling in your stomach, when the girl you had a crush on for years scoffs at your timid request to go to the movies, is a fraction of the terror of death but is of the same nature.

Children are malleable. The fear of rejection is a powerful motive for conformity and most will change their ways to match their peers and be accepted into some kind of group. Many are lucky enough to be raised by a loving family, which provides them with group membership even if they are totally rejected by everyone else. Some might even have parents with real souls, who will teach them how to find personal value within themselves, how to define their identity when alone, how to judge what is right, how to form opinions and make rational conclusions from existing facts. In other words, how to live their own life instead of living second hand.

Sadly, there are some children who are not so lucky. Cho Seung-Hui, for example, did not have any way of solving his problem. His classmates had no liking for him and ridiculed his aloof manner and slow speech. We do not know what his family was like, but I would guess they were nice but distant. Girls shunned him, which is not surprizing, given his "creepy" behaviour, lack of friends, and a general impression of not being like everyone else. There was no group anywhere to take him in. Left adrift, his absorbed social philosophy gave him the full measure of the fear of death. A fear of such intensity as most people have never experienced.

Thousands of years ago, when humans hunted and lived in caves, fear was a rite of passage. A young hunter facing a charging buffalo with nothing but a wooden spear would have felt the full brunt of it, being forced to overcome it and strike or die a coward's death. But he would not have faced this moment unprepared. Other men would have told him what to expect. They would have trained him in the task of the hunt and showed him by their own example how to turn fear from paralysis to a delicious spice of life. Our civilized society does not prepare its children for fear. In fact, it destroys any such preparedness they might have acquired by shielding them as much as possible from any possible danger. Heaven forbid that little Jonny might get a boo-boo touching a hot stove or sticking his fingers in an electric socket! What sane parent would leave a child alone at home? The poor boy might be afraid. And who would let him walk to his friends house by the side of the road without a sidewalk? That's why we all have cars; to keep children from dangerous places.

When such a boy experiences fear, it happens suddenly and without warning or preparation, coming up on him like Death itself, brandishing a bloody scythe and turning him into an icicle of terror. Some go insane from the shock. Some become incurably depressed and spend the rest of their miserable lives on Prozac. Some kill themselves. And occasionally there will be one who will pick up a weapon and decide to go out with a bang.

What makes the wound inflicted on Cho Seung-Hui particularly terrifying is that he did not know who his enemy was. Bewildered, he lashed out randomly at the things he thought might be it. "Rich kids" might have done it! Everybody knows the rich are evil. "Debauchery" must surely be the cause of his troubles. Everyone always says it's a sin, but in college you see it everywhere anyway. And, of course, all those women must be "deceitful charlatans", playing on his hormones and then rejecting his advances. But none of that rang true. Blacksburg is as quiet a town as they come and when it comes to violence of any kind, Virginia Tech is one of the most boring places on earth. We do not teach our children to think for themselves, so how was the unfortunate Cho to deduce that his soul was being killed, not his body, and that his mortal enemy was within himself, at the very root of all his thoughts, his beliefs, and his very nonexistent self. His philosophy of life was his murderer and the cause of his crimes and of his death.

In his pictures, you can see the murderer in his eyes. Like one of those zombies seen in trashy horror flicks, Cho Seung-Hui has become a monster, a true incarnation of evil itself. "You caused me to do this!" he said, but he is wrong. The evil which murdered him, the social philosophy of life that he absorbed practically with his mother's milk, does not have a face. It was not made by anyone, despite the claims of conspiracy theorists screaming of "The System". The students who ridiculed him are not at fault. The professors who sent him to a mental institution are not at fault. The university is not at fault. The society at large is not at fault. And even the girl who rejected him, who was supposedly the last straw that ruptured his mind, she was not at fault either.

We can not assign blame for the Virginia Tech massacre because it was a crime of ommission. It happened precisely because nobody did anything. Because generations of men did not think, did not search for answers to the meaning of life, the existence of the universe, the purity of truth, and the joy of knowledge. Because instead of creating a philosophy through the process of rational thought, like befits a human being, they let it "just happen" through the calling of their genetic instincts inherited by all pack animals like them and wolves. Perhaps, some people quail when they look at the image of Cho's face because they see in his eyes what they have seen in the mirror - the gaze of a man without a soul, the beast within us all.

For months and years politicians will debate what they can do to prevent this tragedy from happening again. Some will push for gun control. Some will make us watch each other closely for signs of impending violence and report these potential murderers to the police for profilactic imprisonment. And some will simply continue the slow metamorphosis of all schools into prisons. No one will mention philosophy and its branches of ethics and metaphysics, the current popular incarnations of which deprive millions of children from happiness and drive thousands to suicide. No one will tell you how to make sure your son will not become the next Cho Seung-Hui.

But I will tell you how: give him the proper philosophy of life. Tell him that the universe is objective, and that it and he exist no matter what people say. Teach him how to place value on things, actions, and people, so that he would know how to value his own things, measure his own actions, and know what to value himself for. Teach him the art of logic to show him how to ensure that his thoughts stay real and how to determine whether they are true, regardless of other people's opinions. Encourage him to think his own thoughts instead of serving as a passive repository of the thoughts of others. Tell him that his life has great value (to himself, for a value must always have a valuer), and that his purpose is to live it. Show him through personal example that truth is peace of mind, that knowledge is joy, and that life is wonderful.

Have you always believed that companies think you are stupid when you call tech support? Well, now there is proof!

Suppose you walk into a room where a dozen people are gathered. Head for the third nearest person and engage him in conversation to determine what he knows and how smart he is. Let's leave aside for the moment the fact that you are breaking a social taboo by doing so and think about how likely this person is to be more intelligent than you are. By "intelligent" I mean "skilled at creating an manipulating abstract concepts", which is roughly what an IQ test would measure. If you have ever taken an IQ test, you can use your score to determine the answer to my question.

Suppose you are an average fellow and have an IQ score of 100. That means that half the people you meet will be more intelligent than you, and half will be less, so when you have just met some random person, there is a 50% chance that he is smarter than you. If you are not too bright yourself at, say, 85 IQ points, then there is a much higher 85% chance that he is smarter than you. If you are an average college graduate with ~115 IQ, the chances drop to about 15%. If you are a genius with a score of 145, only one in a thousand people you meet will be smarter than you, and the number will get exponentially smaller as the IQ score increases.

In view of the above numbers, consider what they say about how likely you are to become friends with this person. A friend who is more intelligent than you are is an asset; you can learn from him, rely on him to help you out with your homework, and just plain enjoy talking about far out stuff. A friend who is less intelligent than you are is a bit less appealing. He is not going to be able to discuss that great book you just read. He will not know much about things you care about and despite his good intentions he will have little to say about them. This would make your relationship a bit one-sided, with you being able to share his life without being able to fully share yours. He might become your Joey Tribbiani, who eats your food and cracks good jokes, but whom you never really take seriously. Because of this little problem, people generally tend to select friends of equal or slightly higher intelligence than their own for the most comfortable and equal relationship.

From this we may conclude that an IQ number is not just a measure of a man's intelligence, but also of his pool of potential friends. An IQ 100 man will have half the world to choose from. A college graduate's pool is one sixth of the population. A genius has a meager shot glass of less than a thousandth of the population. If you look in the WikiPedia article on IQ you'll find an interesting set of correlations. Average people of IQ 90-110 have an 81% chance of getting married before the age of 30. People with IQ >125 have only a 67% chance, lower even than the 72% chance of those with IQ 75. If I had to guess, I'd say that the number must be even lower for the poor shmucks with IQ 140 or above. A bit above that table there is another one listing correlations between IQ levels and various other things, such as the 0.4 correlation between the IQs of a husband and wife, which may help in understanding why this is so.

Let's return to the party room and consider another question: when meeting a stranger, is it appropriate to assume that he is more or less intelligent than you? Ms.Manners would insist on the former, but one look at the IQ numbers would necessarily change that answer to "it depends on your IQ". For an average person it makes sense to assume equal or higher IQ in a stranger because most of the strangers he meets will support that assumption. The higher your IQ, the more appropriate it is to assume a lesser intelligence in the people you meet, for the higher your number, the more likely you are to be right. Likewise, it is unwise to blindly accept someone's claim of stellar intelligence, since only one in a thousand such claims will be valid.

As a Slashdot reader, you are likely a possessor of above average intelligence. It may seem strange, given the general quality of comments you will find here, but true nevertheless. People of below average intelligence are far less likely to use computers in the first place, and even less likely to exhibit interests in the technological subjects commonly discussed here. Sad as it may seem, every troll and flamebait is the product of comparatively superior intelligence, from which you may infer what a conversation with a really low IQ individual must be like. "Dude, where's my car?" comes to mind for some reason.

When conversing with average folk, you may have encountered situations where you have been called conceited. As someone who consistently gets the perfect score on IQ tests, whatever it may be, I have had more than anyone's fair share of such encounters. But is it conceit to honestly assess your intelligence level when it is high? Is it arrogance to assume yourself more intelligent than the person you just met when in only one in a thousand of such encounters will you be wrong? What should you do in such situations anyway? If you are a possessor of a high IQ score, you already know what I mean; if not, I'll tell you this: I would dearly love it if everyone in the whole world was as intelligent as I am. I'd have a lot more friends in such a place and we would all have a much higher standard of living.

All you average folk keep telling us to get off our high horses and be like everyone else, but have you forgotten that the intelligent people are the ones who are the source of all technological and scientific progress? Intelligence is the source of the very civilization in which you live; without it, you'd still be living in caves, roasting rabbits by the cookfire, sleeping on vermin-infested straw, and spending cold winters shivering. If you pull all intelligent people to your level, then that is where you will return. If you are still listening, perhaps you would consider a suggestion from a conceited and arrogant man who is totally unlike yourself: join me up here on my high horse! There is plenty of room, good food, and high tech, and you see the stars everywhere you go.