I just saw this campaign in my email box and wasn't really sure if I wanted to pledge - supporting linux pushed me "over the edge", so to speak ;)

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Quoting: tuubiA bit more seriously: I guess there's just no way for an organization you don't agree with (or any independent researcher) to publish statistics or research that supports their cause without you calling it out on an agenda. You know that's the kind of mindset that keeps the intelligent design kooks, the climate change deniers and flat earthers of the world in the dark. Of course everyone has an agenda, but both (proper) journalism and science have guidelines and a peer-review process to combat this.

There are still flat earthers?
Anyway, the problem many of those groups have is that their logic is fundamentally flawed and can easily be disproven by applying simple logic, you don't even need facts (though they help). They will still not believe you, of course, because in the end fools will believe whatever the hell they want. Reality itself cannot harm them.
Climate change deniers are often misrepresented, though. Many just claim that it isn't clear that mankind caused the change (which I agree with, there's just no clear proof that couldn't just be coincidence, we might never know). However, it doesn't matter who or what caused it, it only matters how we deal with the consequences.

Quoting: tuubiThe right way to control the growth of populations is through education, access to contraceptives and better standards of living. You might not believe it but these have actually proven to be the most effective ways to do it.

I do believe it.
But how is it helping to just cure people of ailments and give them food and clothing and send them to their daily lives again, which will just end up increasing the overpopulation, ending up with MORE people that then cannot all help any more?
At the same time, I doubt these organizations have the means to operate on a country-wide scale, also giving out education, contraceptives, etc. By that point, they'd BE the government. See my point below...

Quoting: TheSHEEEP"How could saving people ever have negative consequences?" is something I rarely see them ask themselves. It would not be a "good" thought.

Or maybe they're not idiots and they do understand this. Have you considered that? I'm sure you've never bothered checking, but they do include risks and negative effects in their public research (if not in their marketing materials, understandably) and they couldn't hide their failures even if they wanted to. These are openly discussed in their conferences and strategy papers, at least for the mentioned organizations. They're big, but they're not corporations. Their organization models make it very hard to keep any hidden agendas.

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: TheSHEEEPNow, the number of children receiving basic education and health care is exactly what I was talking about earlier. It makes the situation of those people "barely tolerable", instead of "intolerable" which would eventually lead to a change from within.

No. Education is the basic necessity for a community to start on the road to self-sufficiency in today's global society. You might swallow the idiocy even our own government is spouting currently, but inhospitable living conditions do not inspire people to fix things. They just force them to exhaust all their mental and physical energy on the struggle to survive. Pushes them deeper down the rabbit hole so to speak.

That is an absurd theory.
If reality was anything like that, events like the French Revolution or the American War of Indipendence or the Uprising of the former British Indian colonies or other similar events would have never happened.
If the majority of a people's situation becomes dire enough, they revolt in one way or another. Change under such circumstances is inevitable - if no "third party" intervenes.

Now, I might agree with the education part. Education is the surest way to enable someone to find ways out of their misery on their own.
But if you counteract at the same time by providing what the government should provide (health care), you only become part of the government, if you want it or not. And you only slow down the change that you want to bring - it is simply inefficient. I don't disagree with the goals, I disagree with the methods, if you want.
Too much helping, too little "help yourselves, here's how to".
At that point, why not go all the way and become the government? But that would be called colonialism or imperialism and isn't really to en vogue right now.
"What have the Romans ever done for us?!" ;)

Maybe the next 30 years will prove me wrong. The last 30 certainly didn't.
Of all the 3rd world countries, only few managed to truly improve their situation. Like India, or China. China even to a point where they will (in due time) likely become the primary world power - if nothing unforeseen happens and their upwards trend continues just as the US' downwards trend does.
And lo and behold - they did it all without interference from any western organisation (other than trading with them).
It is almost as if interference of those companies did not help African countries at all, maybe even the opposite...

Quoting: tuubiYou can call your arguments logical, but that doesn't necessarily make them so. We're not discussing basic arithmetic here but complex issues. Facts are necessary to make proper judgments.

Everything is based on logic. Except love, hate and morals, maybe ;)
Facts are results, they are not required to predict results, or to discuss theories.
If it was any different, there would never be any theories.

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I'd also say that it is good to play PoE 1 before 2, though not entirely required.
In the options of PoE 2, you can create your own "history" of what happened in PoE 1 - that helps to understand a lot of references made in PoE 2.

I must say I really like the improvements to the character system, especially the multi-classing.
Obviously not something for newcomers, but veterans of the genre will absolutely love to create something unusual like a warrior/mage that uses magic instead of heavy armor to buff themselves during combat.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: tuubiAnd how much thought have you put into your "common sense" for it to trump the decades of research that organizations like Unicef, the Red Cross or Médecins Sans Frontières have put into their relief efforts around the world? You're just that much smarter?

Research by organizations that could not be more lined with agenda.

They've even got the balls to publish their sinister agendas [External Link] for all to see!

See, that's the funny thing about do-gooders.
Say anything not blissfully positive about them and they immediately see a threat, lashing out.
"How could anyone think they are doing bad?!"
I never said anything about "sinister" agendas. Just that they have clear agendas and will obviously try to underline them with their own research. Therefore, their research can never be free of the claim of being biased.

Quoting: tuubiYou're absolutely right. A lot of research is invalidated by a bias (sometimes obviously so), and no single paper or report should be blindly trusted without proper peer-review. But we need to remember that claims of invalidity are just as often similarly biased. I'll still take scientific research any day over uninformed opinion thank-you-very-much.

Well, you chose to believe in what you want to.
I chose to believe only in trustworthy sources (Those without clear agendas. And those are rare) and basic, irrefutable logic.
But of course, that is only "opinion" as soon as it isn't what you think. Cute.

Quoting: tuubiWould it help if I found you lists of preventable diseases Unicef has helped eradicate through massive immunization campaigns in third world countries, like polio in India and in most of Africa? How about if I brought you a list of conflict or disaster torn regions where the doctors of Médecins Sans Frontières have indisputably saved countless lives? Maybe numbers of children that receive a basic education and health care due to Unicef's programs.

Developing cures to illnesses or even wiping them out is obviously positive, at least in the long term.
Short-term, it is problematic as the biggest problem mankind is facing is that there are simply too many of us, living too long, leading (soon) to a shortage in resources. I guess we can only hope we solve the resource problem before we have to solve the overpopulation problem, right? That is a problem many people, especially many do-gooders, choose to ignore. "How could saving people ever have negative consequences?" is something I rarely see them ask themselves. It would not be a "good" thought.
Now, the number of children receiving basic education and health care is exactly what I was talking about earlier. It makes the situation of those people "barely tolerable", instead of "intolerable" which would eventually lead to a change from within.
Of course, the elites of those countries gladly take the help - after all, it helps them maintain their current system, doesn't it?

Quoting: tuubiBut yeah, I think the burden of proof is on you, seeing as you haven't brought any facts to the table.

I don't need to bring extra facts to the table. Logic is on my side. Prove my logic wrong and you're good to go. Shouldn't be that hard if you are right. Or, of course, you could just ignore everything I say as "opinion" since that would relieve you of having to find actual arguments.

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Quoting: tuubiAnd how much thought have you put into your "common sense" for it to trump the decades of research that organizations like Unicef, the Red Cross or Médecins Sans Frontières have put into their relief efforts around the world? You're just that much smarter?

Research by organizations that could not be more lined with agenda.

I'm not saying those organizations are bad or only doing bad. That would be absurd.
However, a research with an expectation will - if in any way possible - try and reach that expectation. Results in almost all cases can be interpreted in a way that supports the expectation. The cases in which such behavior was later found out and researches turned out to be false or willfully misinterpreted is long. One can only guess how much larger the amount of researches is in which the fraud was not detected.
The last thing I'd do for the sake of argumentation is to trust in research funded/initialized/executed with such clear expectations on their outcome in mind.

Show me a non-agenda-fueled research that clearly and unmistakably shows all those "relief efforts" actually do end up doing more good than harm and I'll shut up on the matter.
I'm pretty sure you won't be able to.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: TheSHEEEPAnd naive and uninformed actions rarely to never lead to a positive result.

You base this guesstimate on what?

Logic. Common sense.

Common sense as in "many people think so." Where's the logic in that? It used to be common sense that the Sun orbits the Earth.

I don't think common sense means what you think it means.
I will help you:
Common sense [External Link]

Sure, it would be fine and dandy if that actually meant something, but the general usage is "I don't have proof but this fits what I know, it's just common sense." Common sense, in any meaning of the expression, simply does not trump proven fact or real science.

So, when confronted with clear definitions of what something I say means and how I use it, you just chose to ignore it and say "but that's not what everyone does!", just so you can continue debating? :D
I really don't care how "everyone" uses it, even if you were right (and I don't think you are). I use it by its defined meaning.

Quoting: tuubiAgain, why do you think anything that isn't a spectacular success is a failure and not just a less than perfect result.

I do not think that and neither did I say it. You are just trying to project something onto me, and I don't know where that comes from.

Quoting: tuubiAnd why would failure be more likely than some level of success when specifically talking about philantrophic endeavours or trying to do good? Cynicism?

It does not matter what you do. Do it uninformed and naive and you are more likely to fail than to succeed. There isn't a single kind of endeavour that would be exempt from this rule.
Now, I'm not talking about small stuff like helping someone up who fell down - such actions do not really require thought to begin with.
I'm talking about bigger decisions like that African charity stuff. Something with a larger scale impact that requires more thought to understand the implications.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: TheSHEEEPAnd naive and uninformed actions rarely to never lead to a positive result.

You base this guesstimate on what?

Logic. Common sense.

Common sense as in "many people think so." Where's the logic in that? It used to be common sense that the Sun orbits the Earth.

I don't think common sense means what you think it means.
I will help you:
Common sense [External Link]

In a psychology context, Smedslund defines common sense as "the system of implications shared by the competent users of a language" and notes, "A proposition in a given context belongs to common sense if and only if all competent users of the language involved agree that the proposition in the given context is true and that its negation is false."

I think you would be hard pressed to find someone to disagree with the notion that you should know what you are doing in order to produce the results that you want. Thus, common sense.

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: TheSHEEEPIf you don't know what you are doing, how likely are you to achieve what you want to achieve?

Who knows. The scope or your question is too vague and there are too many variables. Sure, the result might be negative, but isn't it more likely it has no profound effect at all? That's not the same as negative. It's just insignificant.

You wasted your (and more than likely someone else's) time.
Time is the most important resource any non-immortal being has.
I'd call that quite negative. And that is the best case scenario - of the failure cases, which are more likely than the success cases.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: TheSHEEEPAnd naive and uninformed actions rarely to never lead to a positive result.

You base this guesstimate on what?

Logic. Common sense.
If you don't know what you are doing, how likely are you to achieve what you want to achieve?

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Quoting: Doc AngeloThat means that only those people are do-gooders that are doing things that you wouldn't do. Or people who have views you don't share. You label them do-gooders as soon as you disagree with their views or the reasoning behind their actions. If I would do the same, you would be a do-gooder from my perspective.

It really just boils down to your disagreement with their views and actions. You don't like what they say and do, and you show your dislike by calling those people names. In my opinion, that's neither useful nor helpful for you or for them.

Uhm, no?
I call them do-gooders because their well-meaning actions (would) lead to negative results.
Of course I disagree with actions that lead to negative results. There is nothing positive about a people incapable of defending themselves having to be kept kicking by another party spending their resources for eternity. That is only logical.

But of course, it is so much easier to reduce what I do to name-calling instead of swallowing the bitter pill that many good-willed actions are actually harmful ones in a nice disguise.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyWhoever's right, the problem is not the intention to do good, but the possiblity that the means chosen to do it may be mistaken.

Yes and no.
It isn't the intention to do good that makes one a do-gooder. Everyone (generally) intends to do good.
But those that go about it in a very naive way are the most likely to actually create or support a negative effect.
So a do-gooder would be more identified by how naive and uninformed they act.
And naive and uninformed actions rarely to never lead to a positive result. Though they admittedly might.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: TheSHEEEPIf I actually did go out of my way to defend the poor and downtrodden Panterra people, and believe I am doing good, I would be a do-gooder.
Because that would only lead to the Panterra people never learning to defend themselves and always require someone to do it for them, it would actually be a bad result.

And what if those poor and downtrodden Panterra people actually need help to achieve basic necessities that would allow them to "learn"? I know the oft-repeated adage that "what does not kill you makes you stronger", but sometimes what doesn't kill you very effectively keeps you from getting up and helping yourself. Or ends up killing off most of your community, delaying recovery and learning by generations.

Obviously (or not...) helping them to learn includes protecting them for the time being.
But only for so long.

If the Panterra people after long years of trying to teach them turn out simply incapable of self-defence, there is no reason to further waste your resources on them.

I'm not per se against defending the weak, but it must come with the goal of making them strong, too, so that you gain an ally in the end instead of just another bottomless hole to take care of.

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