Apparently, the giant brains at the Boston Herald are reporting that Amy Bishop, the crazy, tenure-denied, probable murderer of her brother, and now, college professors, is.....wait for it........a D&D player. http://www.bostonherald.com/news/region ... id=1233150 :roll:
Yes, I was very annoyed when I got a message across Twitter this morning about it. Drives me absolutely nuts. I wish something like this would actually cause these knuckleheads to ask somebody who actually knows something about the game.
BAH! It is time for D&D to get "dangerous" again! Everyone was freaked out back in the 80s--you didn't see much D&D stuff in mainstream bookstores. You had to go to those special hobby shops to get the creepy game.
Or, maybe do some actual research beyond finding that these people have a connection to a game. It isn't just knowing about the game's actual workings. Psychology has nothing to do with RPGs beyond the mythic forms of storytelling.
What disturbs me most is that investigators are clearly missing the obvious links in the two muder cases. Both killers were engineers or scientists! Clearly, all engineers and scientists must be locked up for their own good.. ; ) I love what passes for reasoning in a lot of "reporting". My personal favorite is reporting like this. Did none of these people take science classes in high school? Is the concept of "correlation does not equal causation" not taught anymore. Pathetic.. Andy
Thanks Rich, I forwarded this to Mike Stackpole, who defends the industry generally from these kinds of claims.
It wasn't taught in any of the schools I went to. In fact, the first time I came across it in an official capacity was in a college psychology class in 2005. Thankfully, I've done a lot of reading and the like outside of classrooms and was aware of this statistics quirk.
It's rare that it would come up in HS. They're too wrapped up in Algebra/Geometry topics. I just covered that this week in an entry-level statistics course - a lot of psych, sociology, nursing, and assorted social science types encounter it for the first time there. Not required for journalism/communication students, I don't think (unfortunately - they wind up being the ones who disseminate research outcomes to the public, often with a poor grasp of what they're reporting on).