Yes, well, then, I guess that’s bad. I mean, if only we don’t do the research the lawmakers will be forced to never introduce legislation because they don’t have their singular doctored study to work from, right?

Oh.. wait..

This is politics as usual. This is public officials patting themselves on the back for cracking down on online pedophiles, while ignoring the fact that 90% of such predatory activity happens within the close family/friends social group. This is blaming Black Sabbath for disturbed children, instead of the reverse. This is trying to deal with the fact that one of the casualties of the high productivity levels of post-WWII American society has been the family, which has gone from an extended multi-generational support system to a society where even the nuclear family is largely fragmented, simply because our money-centered way of life does not recognize the value of any role that is not directly wealth producing.

They are looking for a needle in a haystack of spears.

It’s not so much that I’m missing the point as it is that I’m assuming if we, as a public, don’t care enough to do the necessary work of publicizing the counter examples and countering whatever bias the government or media brings us, we deserve what we get.

If the public wasn’t eating up the idea that games lead to violence because it abrogates their responsibility for raising their kids shittily, we wouldn’t be worried in the first place. And all things being equal, I’d rather have funded but obscure and hard to find examples that this isn’t the case, than simply saying “Nuh uh! It’s not true either!” which is what we’re effectively doing now.

One of those concerns, as the history of the early AIDS epidemic shows, is that how you spend your current grants influences the likelyhood of what happens with your next grant. Nobody has to even intend to influence of be influenced; it is perfectly natural to not fund things that don’t produce what you want, and not do things that will make your funders unhappy.

But you are missing my main point, which is that whatever any study finds, the people who will or won’t publicise it are not the scientists, but the politicians, specifically the people sponsoring this bill. And they have very clearly delineated positions on this which make me confident that they will cherry pick whatever results they can to support their position. And if that is somehow impossible, then they will do their best to simply bury the whole thing.

I have little faith in the fruit of a poisoned tree.

The FDA is a government regulatory agency. The NAS, simply, is not.

As for the CDC, it’s a closer comparison, but you do realize what “hamstrung” means for the CDC right? It means they can’t get funding. Since this bill establishes funding in the first place, I think the comparison is a bit far-fetched.

Is there the possibility for government influence? You betcha. But if it’s there it’s backroom political string pulling on wannabe politicians who want to retain their cushy jobs. And since the people this would refer to in this case are the advisory board of the NAS, that would fall under heading 1 of: We’re more screwed than you already realize.

When our science capability is bought off on the ideological level, rather than strangled off through some petty beauracratic shufflings of funding, we’re in far deeper shit than worrying about whether or not the government is gunning for videogames.

In general the NAS is high profile. It’s something that most scientists would consider a crowning achievement on their career. But scientists are funny beasts; the whole lot will turn on you if you start to compromise your scientific integrity for, well, anything. Which is good, because it keeps the lure of being appointed to something like the NAS advisory council as a lapdog pretty damned low. The last thing you want when trying to build a lasting legacy as a scientist is to have the last X years of your work called into question as possibly slanted because you were found to be pushing research findings for political reasons. It happens, sure, but [i]far[/i] less than in the political realm.

This is why the government ends up controlling science by choking funding: They can’t generally control science by controlling the scientists. Look at the whole recent NASA kerfluffle for an example.

There’s nothing in the bill that looks like they’re trying to aim funding toward specific places. They place the responsibility of portioning the money out on the head of the NAS and the IoM. In funding speak that’s as close as you get to untainted money, really. It’s in the hands of the scientists. It’s not, say, commisioning $10M to study the impact of violence in videogames secretly dressed up as a general project. And it’s certainly not all going to that one researcher at the University of Bumblefuck who’s already sold out just so he can get [i]some[/i] research money. (Unless our entire scientific infrastructure has broken down which, again, from working with scientists on a daily basis, I find exceedingly unlikely.)

It plays into the hands of the Moral Majority. Pure and simple.

“Movies do it that way” is no excuse to screw over the games industry.

If ALL the adult games have one rating, even Walmart’s not going to throw the market away and refuse to sell ANY of the 18-rated games at all.

But the CDC could do a full, fair, through study, and if the results don’t suit the interests of the politicos, it will get buried and discredited, regardless. The CDC won’t be holding any press conferences for a study like this; that is the province of politicians, who will only use such a forum for their own ends. Given the clearly stated goals of those behind this, the results of any study will at best be ignored, and most likely will be distorted beyond all recognician.

Incidently, for parents, I ran across a good book – _Killing Monsters – Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence_

Then we’re in far deeper shit than whether or not kids can play games, because you’re basically saying that the most prestigious independent scientific body in the US has been bought off. I call bullshit. I see no evidence of that in any of the PNAS articles I end up reading through regularly.

It isn\’e2\’80\’99t that I think studying games is a bad idea. It is that I don\’e2\’80\’99t think this has anything to do with studying games or making children safer. This is just political grandstanding by pandering to the ignorance of the mainstream at the expense of a minority, in this case a behavioral one.

I think the introduction of the bill is motivated for exactly these reasons. But I don’t get why, when the bill has none of this inherent bias involved, people get all pissed off. Politicians want to score points by introducing potentially useful legislation under a pretense that they hope will give them a positive slant? Yes please! Far, far better than more shitty legislation that accomplishes nothing in order to generate positive political buzz, don’t you think?

Because none of these politicians give a shit about kids, but only about getting re-elected because if they did they would tell parents to actually\’e2\’80\’a6you know\’e2\’80\’a6be a parent.

The beautiful thing about apportioning money for real, honest-to-god, scientific studies is it doesn’t matter a bit what the politicians do or don’t do once the money hits the NAS. The NAS gives it to researchers, the researchers do their research, and the results are vetted by other scientists. So yeah, I suppose if there’s a concerted conspiracy between the scientist board of the NAS, the researchers submitting proposals to do the research, and the peer-reviewed journals which send the research out to be vetted by their reviewers, you have a point. However, if there is then science in this country is so fucked we might as well give up anywa.

I’m still left wondering how many of the people who are arguing so vehemently for our rights has even taken the first step of reading the goddamn bill linked to.