It seems you are Projecting. It was a hypothetical scenario to show it’s easy to prove it’s not rigged (in that scenario) which includes any programmer who works at Blizzard being able to testify about it.
It’s not my problem you see insecurity everywhere; I was answering to the nonsense “you can never prove a negative”; you can very easily prove it’s not rigged in the scenario it was open sourced.
It was a hypothetical scenario, in which the code is open sourced and players literally run the game themselves both as a client and a server (no Blizzard involvement whatsoever during the running of the code).
It’s not my problem people are moving the goalposts even inside a hypothetical scenario; it was not to show “it’s happening now”; it was to show it’s nonsense to say “you can never prove a negative”.
Hard Determinism. Everything is rigged in the end and free will does not exist.
My current belief.
Now here come the angry replies. (maybe not)
It’s nonsense to act like one can
I consider this to be self evidently false. I didn’t have to type this.
The universe just wants you to think it’s blizzard’s code, so it makes it look rigged.
It’s a sophistry used by people to sound smart in the wrong context. I proved very clearly why it was nonsense to use the phrase in this case.
It could be easily shown it’s not rigged if you run the code yourself so “never possible to prove” was nonsense.
Hard determinism says you did.
So it’s generally many many many orders of magnitude harder (more work) to prove a negative than a positive.
If people spent the time to disprove every silly thought humans come up with, we’d still be in caves trying to work out whether fire was caused by urinating on a mushroom.
Instead they came up with a simple idea, when you have a silly thought… It’s up to you to prove it!
It’s extremely easy in that scenario. An experienced programmer could probably derive what’s going on within 4 hours of first seeing the code (much easier if you give them a couple of days).
Remember I’m not saying what is possible NOW; I was answering to someone saying “it’s impossible to prove”; it’s easy to prove if the code was open sourced and we run our own servers.
Maybe they meant it’s impossible to prove in the current scenario, with the available data (though I’d argue it is possible to provide a statistical proof, and people have), rather than in your modified scenario.
Yes it is impossible to prove it as a third party NOW and no: other third parties currently can’t do it either (even if they claim they do (or rather even if others claim the third parties do)) for a very simple reason,
they just don’t have any data on the relation of the players with the company hence they have no way of knowing if INDIVIDUAL player performances are doctored(the total sum would seem “right” ).
To explain it further: third parties collecting stats see extreme variations of win rates or even card draws and any other gameplay results on individuals ANYWAY hence: they can only judge totals.
Which is why I say it’s stupid.
What “hard determinism” is saying is that the process of choosing between options, something that we as humans experience literally all the time, is an illusion and doesn’t actually exist. It is the ultimate in “don’t trust your lying eyes” arguments. Like I said, it is self-evident that it’s false.
The only reason that “hard determinism” has any popularity whatsoever is that it takes an extremely complicated thing which we do not understand, and it pretends like that thing doesn’t exist, removing the duty to understand it. It is the utmost in intellectual irresponsibility.
It’s actually self-evidently true.
Our personalities are a product of 3 forces acting upon us during our life:
a) Our genetic make-up,
b) Our upbringing (parents, caretakers)
c) Our environment (pressures, social network…)
Since our parents/ancestors literally transfer their own genes on us, and then they raise us, 66% of our personality is already up to our parents.
Now, thanks to those 66% we “choose” our own environment, our choice being dictated by values shared with us by our parents/caretakers and physical proximity, so even the environmental pressures and social network are mostly dictated by our parents.
In the end, it seems that 99,99% of what makes us “us” is given to us, forced upon us, and we didn’t really end up having any choice.
Does personality matter so much in our decision making? Yes, it does. If I know your personality I can quite accurately predict your behavior in many contexts.
It’s far from proving the determinism, but it’s a good start.
The only thing which breaks up hard determinism is quantum-ness of our consciousness which causes random oscillations in our personality coupled with quantum-ness of our environment (physically and through consciousness of others in our environment), but what is randomness, really?
I, for one, don’t believe in randomness, at all. I strongly believe that if we somehow knew all the variables which decide the output of a system, we could predict it with 100% accuracy.
And, I have a book about 4 types of randomness from Stephen Wolphram which speaks in my favor, and a legendary quote by Einstein that does the same:
God does not play dice.
Let’s add manipulating individual results while preserving the average to the list of extremely unlikely possibilities. At a glance, the computational requirements are exponential for each additional player.
Altair, the flaw in your argument is that you are acting as if I am arguing against soft determinism, when I am arguing against hard determinism. That is, I am not at all arguing against the idea that our choices are limited. I am arguing against the idea that our choices don’t exist.
The way I think of choice or “free will” is kind of like how I think of an area of a circle. Even if it’s a small circle, it could be argued that infinite points exist within that circle. Nevertheless, the circle has limits, with many points existing outside of the circle. We can’t choose things that we can’t imagine, and even some of the choices that we can imagine we have essentially no chance of picking, it’s not within our nature or personality or whatever. Additionally, we are not magicians, so even if I can imagine turning into a dragon I can’t just choose to become one. Choice is not limitless, but choice having limits does NOT mean that free will doesn’t exist.
When you say that 99.9% of what makes us “us” is forced upon us, that’s like saying that 99.9% of “the total area” exists outside of the circle. You could say that the area outside of the circle is literally infinite, and it wouldn’t matter. As long as the circle itself has ANY area greater than 0, there are infinite points within the circle. Hard determinism is NOT saying that the circle is limited to a finite area, it is saying that there is no circle at all.
I actually am a believer in soft determinism. I believe, like you do, that people are often predictable — not exactly, but to within a range that, to continue the analogy, could be imagined as a small, two-dimensional shape. But hard determinism is absurd on its face.
Also, when Einstein said that God does not play dice, he was mocking quantum mechanics. I consider that a troll comment on Einstein’s part. I’m not necessarily against troll comments, but I don’t take them seriously. Quantum mechanics is, if not a real true thing, at least a placeholder for a theory that covers real flaws in Einstein’s relativity. As relativity replaced Newtonian mechanics, some theory will eventually be proven to unite the true parts of relativity with new ideas that cover these flaws. In essence, Einstein was being stubborn and resisting progress when he said God does not play dice.
Arguing against hard determinism is pointless, because it includes the possibility that you are blissfully unaware yet destined to think otherwise.
Arguing with you about it is equally pointless, it’s either true or it’s not and both possibilities look identical 
He was dead-serious. That was his belief, just like it’s mine now.
Facts
True, but that’s only one way to look at it. The other way is that the quote holds the key to locker of progress. You can’t separate his beliefs from his contributions - one depends on the other. We just haven’t found the lock yet
There’s nothing to compute. You just don’t know anything about the relation of each player with the company; you already see wild variations of win rates; you even see other gameplay results like wild variations in how the cards are drawn. Hence you can never say “these players are doctored” because you have no way to even group them to begin with; you could theoretically group your own personal accounts; but a third party barely has 5 people working for it to trust them (maybe if they started openly asking for people to give them full access to their accounts (not just the account info(anything transactional)) but I doubt that’s happening any time soon).
The evidence strongly suggests that, if there is a God, he loves dice about as much as Dungeons and Dragons players do.
God is a D&D Dungeon master and that life is just a massive D&D game. It all makes sense now and all can be explained with a Wizard did it. That’s how we have people be rigged all the time. Their opponents were Powereful Wizards and the rest of us never played against such Wizards only the chosen few are singled out.