Hiya, I sent you a DM but the long and short of it is that I’m also in the southeastern Louisiana area and am queer and would be down to get more queer friends in the area
I’ll share it with him tomorrow as it’s pretty late for me and I have work early. I’m simply just not super confident sharing the analogy with him will stop him from quitting the hobby altogether or at least stop him from playing Pathfinder
The main issue, and I’ve said this in another comment on this thread, is that he will have a question about PF2E and his first instinct is to go to Reddit or do a google search, which turns up with results from Reddit. He then maybe sees an answer to the question he was looking for, but he also sees unneeded hate directed towards the game he loves.
He’s said that the problem surrounding PF2E is the culture of the game, and I can honestly agree with him. People can be loud when they’re negative tbh, and moreso online. And it can’t really be solved with blocking users, hiding posts, and moving on like you say it can, because he’s shared with me several posts bad-mouthing 5E in favor of PF2E and they are all from different users. Yes, Archives of Nethys has the rules for free legally, but even I had questions going into running the game for the first time. What I did was read AoN as much as I could before running the game, but I am not my partner.
I mean I criticize D&D all the time, but there’s a difference between criticizing the game and saying that the game is stupid or for babies or something (I’ve seen posts saying that 5E is for babies although those were from players of older editions of D&D).
Wizards of the Coast “running the game into the ground” is another reason he said he doesn’t see a reason in playing the game anymore, and I’ll give that one to him (although I will say that a table can simply opt to not play OneD&D and simply to just play regular 5E, I’d imagine people did that with 3.5E when 4E came along).
if he wants to continue browsing the Reddit community for Pathfinder
I’ve tried talking to him about this and he’s said that that’s how he got into 5E, by trying to ask questions and finding answers online for them. And since PF2E has such a smaller community than 5E does, there aren’t many place to go find answers to questions.
As far as I can remember, that may be possible if/when we spool our framework, however, the Lemmy devs have said that they don’t want people doing this. Do take this with a grain of salt as I know my memory isn’t great.
There is, however, still the concept of the Chinese Room thought experiment, and I don’t think AI will topple that one for a while.
For those who don’t know and don’t wish to browse off the site, the thought experiment posits a situation in which a guy who does not understand Chinese is sat in a room and told to respond to sets of Chinese characters that come into the room. He has a little booklet of responses—all completely in Chinese—for him to use to send responses out of the room. The thought experiment questions whether or not the system of the Chinese Room itself can be thought to understand Chinese or even the man himself.
With the Turing Test getting all of the media spotlight in AI, machine learning, and cognitive science, I think the Chinese Room should enter into the conversation as the field of AI looks towards G.A.I.