Metadata matters

Nobody forms a conclusion based on objective evidence alone. This is especially true when it's something related to a specialist field and we don't trust our own judgement. We don't want to start jabbing needles in our eyes - we prefer to go to an optician, to benefit from the experience of someone who's already stabbed lots of people in the eye, or better yet, has read all the medical journals describing in great detail why you probably shouldn't do that and should just use eye drops instead.

It makes perfectly good sense to trust an expert when you (a) recognise that you yourself are not an expert and (b) recognise that somebody else is. For example, dinosaurs are jolly interesting, but I don't want to go out and dig them up myself. I want the experts to do that for me. It saves a great deal of time and stops me getting all dusty.

This means that when I read about the latest argument over whether T-Rex was a terrifying super-predator or just an overgrown vulture, and I want to reach my own opinion, I have to heavily rely on metadata. Instead of looking at the bones myself through a high-powered microscope, I'm considering other evidence : specifically the qualifications and experience of the experts involved. Sure, I might well have my own preference based on the issues presented, but if the article describes the findings of Professor Sir Joe Blogs, Oxford Chair of Palaeontology, I place a lot more weight in it than if the exact same thing came from the mouth of Foul Ole Ron, professional drunk.

Buggrit, buggrit, millennium hand and shrimp.

This is all well and good when it comes to esoteric debates of little or no actual import. Jurassic Park not being a documentary, my opinion on dinosaur appetites is about as pointless a thing as it's possible to be interested in*. Less reassuringly, a very similar process affects politics.

* Just because it's pointless doesn't mean it's not worth doing. I'm a big fan of doing things just because they're cool. Hell, I research clouds of gas that don't do anything, so I know all about pointless research.

This press release describes an effort to measure how this works in the real world. Specifically, when a party changes policy, do voters shift allegiance away from that party, or change their opinion of that policy to agree with their preferred party ? Does policy drive opinion, or does opinion drive policy ?

It seems that policy drives opinion to no small degree. Party loyalty, it turns out, is not a small factor.

Slothuus and Bisgaard discovered that among those voters who backed the Liberal Party or the DPP, policy opinions overall “immediately moved by around 15 percentage points in response to their party’s new issue position,” while those of other partisan groups were mostly unchanged. By surveying the same individuals throughout the study, Slothuus said, the researchers could ensure the effect they observed at the party level wasn’t being caused by people shifting party allegiances in response to the parties’ shifts on the issues.

“We can see that these welfare programs were actually quite popular… and many of the voters of the centre-right party were in favour of these welfare programs,” Slothuus said, referring to unemployment benefits and early retirement. “Nevertheless, we can see that they reversed their opinion from supporting these welfare programs to [immediately] opposing these welfare programs.”

That they followed individuals is important. It's of course still possible that the party base has changed its overall opinion, so changing policy and bringing the rest on board, but here we see very clearly that it's not a small shift : tribal loyalty is important. Although it's certainly a popular anecdote that people oppose or support policies based on who's saying it, this is real data in support of that. And it's somewhat surprising, given how much effort politicians go to in formulating policies to win support. Why don't they just tell everyone to shut up and get on board instead ?

Presumably there are limits to how far this can be pushed. If Nicola Sturgeon decided to announce that Scotland was a dreary place and would be better off consigned to the dustbin of history, support for the SNP would crash. If Keir Starmer decided that Labour would officially endorse killing and eating poor people, Labour wouldn't last long. And for a real-world example, witness the collapse of the Liberal Democrats.

Of course, when it comes to trivial issues, it makes sense to support a party you generally align with. That is in part what representative democracy is for : having experts do the legwork. But that makes it all the more interesting that the policy shifts described in the article were major and of real importance. So I had to go and read the original paper.

It's a commendably thorough piece of work. The bottom line is that this shift in opinion is real and by far and away the most probable causal factor is the change in party stance. They were very careful to account for any confounding factors.

One thing that's key to this study, unlike previous similar cases that they cite, was that they were lucky. They didn't have to contrive an experiment or tease data from the archives. They weren't expecting any kind of policy shift of the issues they'd happened to be polling, but there was. And they sampled quite frequently, so they got to see the change in opinions happening very quickly. They also have a reasonable representative sample size (~1,200 individuals, though only 292 of which identified with a political party).

The issues they monitored were a policy to reduce unemployment benefit and abolish early retirement, both in Denmark. These were not issues of minor consequence or emotionless fiscal management :

When the new rules took effect in 2013, 34,000 individuals were falling out of the unemployment insurance system in the first year; two out of three left without any other government income support. This overnight shift in the parties’ policy position sparked intense criticism in the news media.

Due to its popularity, the early retirement program enjoyed a “taboo status in Danish politics,” and the “taboo had been kept intact by the Liberal-Conservative governments since 2001. The minor party in the center-right coalition, the Conservatives, had tried to push for this policy change from within the government, but the Liberals “had previously flatly rejected doing so,” and the Liberal Party “therefore found itself with a considerable problem explaining the party’s new position”.

So these are ideal cases. Two emotive, important issues on which official party policy was unambiguous and the shift was linear, with no indecisive flip-flopping from the leadership. And they noted that respondents correctly remembered how the party stance had changed and the policy implemented, so it was clearly communicated to voters. It wasn't that their memories had been clouded. They knew exactly what was happening.

One potential problem is that there might be some underlying event which causes a widespread change of opinion among the electorate at large, thus with policy change being a consequence of opinion change rather than a cause of it. But their sample is large enough to rule this out. True, a significant caveat is that it took place among the backdrop of recovering from the financial crisis. But there was no wider movement around either of these changes - they were sudden, spontaneous decisions. And, crucially, while those supporting the parties changed their stance, those not identifying with the political groups did not change opinion at all. Since they followed individuals, they can be certain that opinions really did change, and they're not just seeing a change in voters for each party.

Another concern is that the overall position of party members was either neutral or somewhat positive regarding the eventual change well before it happened. As I've noted many times, rallying the troops is quite a different prospect to recruiting new ones : to persuade someone to like something a bit more is a lot easier than getting them to start liking something in the first place. But even here the results are clear. The shift in preference was about the same across all party members, including those who were actively opposed to it previously. Those members didn't suddenly jump fully on the bandwagon, but they became more supportive of the policy all the same. There was no evidence of any backfire effect at all.

The shift in opinion was rapid. For the case of cutting unemployment benefit, their sampling constrains the shift to a two month period exactly coinciding with the policy change : that is, immediately after the party supported the new policy, opinions shifted. This rapid shift, coupled with the lack of change in opinion of voters not associating themselves with the parties concerned, makes it extremely unlikely that there was any other external event that could be a common cause. At most, I suppose the financial crisis could prime people for being more receptive towards the new policy than they might be at other times, but by itself, it clearly hadn't encouraged a shift in opinion whatsoever.

The change in stance was rapid, strong, and prolonged. If anything, they say, it's stronger than what's seen in more controlled conditions. And despite the criticism, opinions remained flatly constant after the switch for months afterwards (for as long as polling continued).

The only issue I can think of that isn't covered here is what steps, if any, the parties took to persuade supporters that the new policy was a good idea. But that two-month switch is astonishingly rapid given the emotive nature of political issues - again, see the Liberal Democrats after they decided to support higher tuition fees. Either the Danish political leaders must have had a truly outstandingly genius bit of argument, or party affiliation plays an enormous role in persuasion all by itself.

Of course, anecdotally this isn't all that surprising. But to demonstrate it objectively is important. As they say, it complicates the democratic process if parties quite literally, and however unintentionally, determine what people think. The ideal is that voters independently examine the evidence about major issues and then vote for the parties that best reflect their conclusions. But this shows the mirror goes both ways : the voters reflect their parties.

Why might people think like this ? One reason is the use of metadata mentioned earlier, with voters treating their preferred parties as experts to defer to. Another is identity-based politics, with political affiliation being such a strong part of people's identity that mentally it may be easier for them to switch opinions than switch parties (these two interpretations are not mutually exclusive). I would add a third prospect : that once some in party change their opinion, their behaviour towards other members changes, and a combination (usually subtle) of praise and shame can bring the rest of the group in line. But this is likely to a slight effect when it comes to such a small group influencing the opinions of a much larger one. It would have been nice if they'd gone back to at least a few individuals and simply asked them why they thought their opinions shifted.

This is all very interesting in terms of psychology. But it may not matter a fig in terms of policy : if party loyalists change their minds, that says nothing about how voting share changes. In these cases the answer was "very little", about 2-3%. So these quite radical policy shifts made little difference to party allegiance. But we perhaps shouldn't expect it to, since individual policies don't always have much impact on voting intention.

Whatever the exact cause of the shift, that political parties may such a large role in shaping opinion is interesting by itself. I cannot think of any issues where I've suddenly changed my mind as a direct result of politicians changing theirs... but I expect that's because the Labour party told me everything was fine and there was no need to worry. Phew, for a minute there I was really worried.

EDIT : A hypothesis. In accordance with the principle that you cannot reason people out of positions they haven't been reasoned into, perhaps these two examples where people took a stance on a more-or-less purely emotional basis, not a rational one. It follows that if they initially adopted (or opposed) the policies based largely on emotion, then they could be persuaded to change their stance based wholly on what other people were doing. If so, then the same would not hold for other policies on which they had formulated their opinion more carefully. The difficulty with this hypothesis is that it seems unlikely that so many people would happen to have adopted both favourable and unfavourable opinions of the policies in this way; one would have thought that at least some of them, especially given the sample size, ought to have been more rational. Yet I cannot escape the strong feeling that, though I've certainly had irrational factors play a major part in influencing my, I myself have never acted this irrationally about policy - and I don't think I'm exceptional in that regard either. Indeed, I don't think I know a single person who is utterly committed to every policy of their preferred party.

The Multi-Dimensional Moral Matrix

Recent events compel to revisit Jonathan Haidt's concept of the moral matrix. I've covered this a few times before, but it's worth trying to draw some different ideas together.

The concept is that a person's moral world view is governed by how much they value five key attributes : care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity. Liberals value care and fairness most of all whereas conservatives prefer loyalty, authority and purity.

This system is fine as long as we restrict its use to understanding people's ideologies and not morality itself. The actual moral outcomes of these different viewpoints are almost entirely context-dependent. For example, authoritarianism has a great deal to offer in an emergency while "fairness" (or more accurately reciprocity) doesn't really come into it. If a ship's heading towards an iceberg, you want the captain to immediately overrule any objections and steer it away, not sit down for a protracted discussion about who's in charge. Likewise, "care" is great during a humanitarian catastrophe but pretty useless if someone's holding a gun to your head.

Purity, however, is perhaps where things come unstuck. Certainly this is something that people do value to different degrees, but in what sense that can be said to be anything related to morality is something I haven't been able to determine (suggestions welcome*). It highlights very clearly that this system is about world views, not morality itself.

* The only thing I can think of is from an online psychology course, reminding the audience that people have great difficulty defining why incest is so icky whilst being of the very firm opinion that it is.

The moral matrix (though perhaps it's more of an ideology or political matrix) is useful in reminding us that people can have perfectly decent, honourable intentions but reach different conclusions due to their different innate values. But it's at best highly incomplete when it comes to morality proper. If, for example, you genuinely thought that your freedom and democracy were threatened, would you not think that taking direct violent action was morally justified ? Democracy was, after all, born in blood. Yet while you might sincerely believe that your action was moral, whether you actually were acting morally or not depends firmly on context.

There were two recent comments on social media that made my blood boil. One was that we should "condemn ALL the violence", including that of Black Lives Matter protestors, which is plainly ludicrous - and wasn't helped by the same person linking to a site called "hang the censors" without any apparent embarrassment (I've explained the asymmetry of the issues before so I won't do it again). The second, by another*, was that the recent events in America were not an attempted coup** but a "protest gone sideways". Yes, because it's all so easy for a protest to go sideways if you come armed with guns and pipe bombs and maps of the building you're planning to accidentally storm in a fit of pique. The only interpretation of this that makes any sense is if the rioters were actually crabs.

* A much more respectable fellow, I think, but completely wrong in this particular instance.
** Albeit with piss-poor prior planning, as befits the stupidity of its instigator.

I've mentioned before that if we're constructing a truly moral matrix, respect for the truth has to be included in there somehow. These comments reminded me of two other key factors.

First, a moral person should be able to overcome their own bias. If, according to your own standards, data indicates a viewpoint contrary to your existing one, then your belief should shift towards it and away from your existing stance. Note the careful wording; there is no conflict here with the fact that data doesn't speak for itself and interpretation is something that happens only within your head. And you should follow a similar progression not only with regards to specific conclusions, but how you evaluate information as well. When you learn about different fallacies, you should then take account of them.

Second, a moral person needs a degree of analytic intelligence, to be able to draw the correct conclusions (at least according to their own standards) from the data. If you can't see how the presence of carrying an explosive device into the heart of democracy is the action of a terrorist, you might simply come up short here - a badly organised attempted coup is still, FFS(!), an attempted coup. There might be other reasons, but simple stupidity is a perfectly reasonable explanation at this point. It's true that calling people stupid won't help persuade them, but that's not the goal here.

The "moral matrix" has some real use in reminding us that people genuinely think differently from one another and that those viewpoints are not innately moral or immoral. A true moral matrix, however, would have to be rather different. It would have to include compassion, certainly, and fairness also - but likely greatly expanded beyond the simple idea of reciprocity. Loyalty, for instance, is only sensible when someone acts fairly; being loyal to someone actively trying to harm you is not moral but daft. Likewise authority : having trust in an expert in an emergency is very different from wanting a strongman in power in all situations. One is fair, the other is not. Purity, as far as I can tell, would not come into it at all, while both analytical and critical intelligence would surely deserve inclusion.

So the real moral matrix would perhaps not be a set of simple sliders, but a complex, multi-dimensional parameter space. Such a matrix would have to include true malevolence, which we might, as a starting point, define as wanting to harm others who have never harmed anyone else nor had any intentions to do so, in full knowledge of the situation (this is something that neither Plato nor Epictetus believed was possible, but I'm convinced otherwise). Hypocrisy might feature in there as well. Designing such a system would be a formidable challenge that's quite beyond me.

But for all its complexity, all its shades of multidimensional grey, there are extremes which any halfwit ought to be able to identify as right or wrong. If we can't agree on those, we've reached a "fire is hot" problem, the limits of Aumann's Agreement Theorem beyond which one of us must simply be irrational and not worth reasoning with. 

We should hardly rush to jump to such a conclusion. Just as every person who checks their horoscope is hardly likely to be a Flat Earther or otherwise anti-science, so most opinions are at most warning signs. But those extremes, those positions between which the truth does not lie somewhere in the middle, most assuredly do exist. Just as someone who is a professed Flat Earther is by definition wholly irrational, so someone supporting the failed coup is not someone I ever want to interact with. Their conclusion is so manifestly wrong that we cannot possibly have any meaningful interaction, so I don't propose to try.

The Weird Wildness Of The West

I think it probably comes as little surprise to anyone here that the Western mindsight is quite different from those found elsewhere, so I won't dwell on the weirdness (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic) aspect. While the article headlines with how this came about, I found it more interesting how it notes that there are both positive and negative aspects to this. There's a lot of (quite understandable) self-loathing among certain western demographics, a desire for us all to be less selfish and more society-oriented, and yet :

In one of the videos, the child assembled a necklace that precisely matched the one made by the demonstrator in its bead colours and sequence. In the other, the child produced a necklace with a different sequence of coloured beads. When asked which child was “smarter”, 88% of adults in Vanuatu pointed to the “conformer”, compared to only 19% of US respondents. When asked why they selected the non-conformers as “smarter”, the adults in the US explained that the child was “creative”.

While there's a lot of "we must think less about ourselves and more for the good of society !" vibes bandied about, I think few westerners would think that means we must all conform - this "herd mentality" is often decried as the very thing we want to avoid. There's definitely an ironic element of "you must think for yourself and agree with me !" to all this, or, "don't conform with those people, conform with me instead !".

When asked who was better behaved, 78% of adults in Vanuatu thought the conformer was better behaved while less than half (44%) of US respondents felt similarly. Instead, most Americans (56%) thought the conforming and non-conforming children were equally well-behaved.

I would say that in an exercise like this, which basically has no consequences whatsoever, it doesn't matter unless the child was told explicitly that it's important to follow things exactly. I would only label the behaviour good or bad depending on the goal and the circumstance. Being creative when making necklaces is a lot different than when, say, designing ships. More interesting is the implication that those in Vanuatu think conformity is inherently a good thing, though again this is probably laden with situational caveats.

Unlike much of the world today – and most people who have ever lived – Weird people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, guilt-ridden and analytical in their thinking style. They focus on themselves – their attributes, accomplishments and aspirations – over relationships and roles. When reasoning, Weird people tend to look for abstract categories with which to organise the world. They simplify complex phenomena by breaking them down into discrete elements and assigning properties – whether by imagining types of particles, pathogens or personalities.

That all sounds very bad, but :

Despite their seeming self-obsession, Weird people tend to stick to impartial rules and can be quite trusting, fair and cooperative toward strangers. Emotionally, Weird people are relatively shameless, less constrained by the eyes of others, but often wracked by guilt as they fail to live up to their own self-imposed standards.

And the flip side of this :

Analyses reveal that people from societies rooted in more intensive kin-based institutions show greater conformity, less individualism, more holistic thinking, fewer guilty experiences and less willingness to trust strangers. 

Ironic that being individualistic might make you fairer towards others ! Yet it makes a degree of sense. : if you see others first and foremost as individuals, you're less likely to judge them as opposing group members. So the questions this raises for me are : (1) what, if any, is the difference between tribalism and conformism ? and (2) are societies which are more conformist even more polarised against other groups than in the Western countries ?

To the first one I would say there's a world of difference between those who say, "I want this group to be better than it is and I want you to join me in helping achieve this" as opposed to, "I want this group to be the best by making other groups worse and hurting anyone who isn't a member already". In essence, this is the difference between patriotism and nationalism. I don't know if there are more appropriate, more generalised terms though.

To the second, I don't know. Trying to improve your own group seems orthogonal to how you interact with others. But at the same time, it would seem to follow that if you see conformity as a good thing then anyone doing something different would be viewed with more suspicion, but I know next to nothing about non-western politics. It would be a wretched irony indeed if trying to get everyone to pull together for the common good led to even more hatred and division than getting everyone to think for themselves.

Still, while there's a natural tendency to insist, when you deem a certain behaviour better than others, that everyone should think and act in that way, context is often critical. Both collectivist and individualist mindsets comes with costs and benefits. The article is an important reminder that blending the best of both worlds is tricky indeed.

How the 'Western mind' was shaped by the Medieval Church

Most research on human psychology focuses on Western societies, but the way people in the West think can be traced to changes in family structures in the Middle Ages.

Review : Half Life Alyx

And now for something completely different.

I recently went on a spending spree for an assortment of VR games (thank you Steam's Black Friday sale !). Amongst those was the notorious Half Life : Alyx, widely acclaimed as the finest VR game produced thus far.

Don't get me wrong : it is a very good game, worthy of its illustrious predecessors. But it must be said that it is also, at times, as frustrating as whittling matchsticks with a pair of sharpened tweezers.

There's some mysterious, ineffable X-factor to VR games that makes them either fantastically immersive or just a clever gimmick. Alyx definitely has it. The opening scenes are probably the most beautiful of the whole game (to the extent that the ending, though good, felt just a tad graphically lacklustre). City 17 stretches before you into the distance, rendered with immense detail. You can pick up marker pens and use them to draw on things, if you want. You can tune the radio to a different station, startle pigeons, throw stuff around, smash windows, gaze wistfully into the distance, etc. The sound is spot on. The exceptionally high level of interactivity persists until the very end.

(I should also mention that I'm using Virtual Desktop to play wirelessly - settings are given at the end.)

You also get the usual high level of variety - a pleasing mixture of horror and action, creepy tunnels mixed with sunlight open cityscapes. I'd have preferred slightly more of the latter, but that's just a personal preference. All of them are beautifully rendered. The touches of humour here and there are well done. When you're in a scary environment and your guide talks to comfort you, it actually goddamn works.

The Half Life franchise is the best example of linear gameplay I've ever experienced. People criticise VR games for being labelled as "experiences", as an excuse for developing mediocre gameplay. But when it's done well, a VR... umm.... thing really is better described as an experience. The enjoyment is in being there, as much or more than actually interacting. It's a bit like visiting the Grand Canyon : the fun is experiencing the environment, not starting an anti-mining protest group or a Canyon Coffee Appreciation Society. You can do those things if you want to, but it's not necessary.

I read a negative review that criticised Alyx's linearity, but I can only imagine the poor sod had never played a Half Life game before because they're all like this. The clever thing about the franchise is that the actions are so well-scripted, and the route you have to take so naturally defined, that you don't notice it. Of course you go across that plank, of course you have to stack the crates to access the upper level... it's an utterly natural to do so, and doesn't break the immersion in the slightest. When it works well, as it does 95% of the time, it's genius.

The other 5% of the time it's utter crap.

Most of the time the scripting in Alyx is flawless. It doesn't rely on cheap jump scares, for instance - you don't have to worry about opening every single door in case there's a zombie behind it. This makes the few such examples that are present absolutely terrifying. And when you have to do something unusual, there are generally enough hints to make it reasonably obvious, but still requiring a bit of thought. Events that happen feel random even though they're obviously not.

But there's one level that kicks all that in the teeth, which, oddly, seems to be among the most popular. Basically you're trapped in this floor with a particular weird and scary blind zombie who relies on hearing. He's immune to conventional weapons and you have only a flashlight to see with. So you have to figure out a bizarre, convoluted series of processes to kill him. In the dark. With creepy noises all around you. And instant death if he hears you.

Sounds good ? It isn't. I hated that level with a passion. It wasn't fun in the slightest - a difficult battle where I stand a chance of winning, that's fun. The instant death, with no chance of survival if he catches you, was scary at first but very quickly gave way to irritation : there's no real fear when you have no hope. It soon became an ordeal not in working out a plausible way to tackle the problem, but exposing the naked script for what it was. And that just sucked donkeys. In about 15 minutes I became sick to the teeth of dying every five seconds and looked up the answer online, which turned out to be a catastrophic mess I would never, ever have figured out by myself because it just didn't make any sense. Literally, it wasn't coherent enough for me to have any chance of guessing it, much less figuring it out through logic. I don't know what the designers were thinking here, but it made me want to kick them in the gonads or something. It was awful : one of the worst pieces of gameplay I've ever experienced. It's not immersive, it's not an experience, it's just bad.

The other main frustrating aspect is the first gun you get. Loading this thing is a truly ludicrous process. You have to manually eject the empty cartridge (which at first holds a meagre eight bullets, with enemies typically taking three shots to kill), reach behind you to get fresh ammo from your backpack, insert it into the weapon, and then - for some reason - engage the ammo so it's ready for use. Okay, this is very realistic. It's also effin' boring and tiresome. Middle of a battle and you have to do all that ? Most of the time I just gave up. Being right handed but left-eye dominant, it took me a long time to get any sort of proficiency with the weapon, so the chances of me being able to both reload and fire successfully were so low I found it better to get eaten and start again from a previous save. It's just too damn easy (when you're learning) to get the buttons wrong and eject a full cartridge - and then you have to do the whole stupid thing again. Why on earth empties don't eject themselves automatically, and new ones don't automatically engage when loaded, is quite beyond me. 

What doesn't help is that you have no melee weapon - another bizarre oversight. When you run out of ammo, that's it, you're doomed. That just plain sucks. It means the game becomes hopelessly obsessed with scavenging ammo and conserving bullets. This got so tedious after a whole that I gave up and lowered the difficulty setting to the minimum, which, being a keen Half Life fan, made me feel like I'd soiled myself.

This, though, made the whole experience about a thousand times better. I overcame my shame and started enjoying it : on minimum, the game is still sufficiently challenging for me. Indeed, it's almost more of a simulation than a game.

Things do improve : you get better weaponry, with various upgrade options, that makes things a good deal easier. It also takes time to get used to moving around. This being my first big FPS in VR, I certainly didn't do myself any favours by forgetting that it's possible to move, and the more floor space you have, the more you'll enjoy this. Knowing all this, and being able to actually fire the gun with some accuracy now, I have no doubt I'll replay it on a higher difficulty setting in the not-too-distant future.

I spend just under 20 hours completing Alyx. It's a satisfying story, a true experience/game hybrid. The ending's a bit on the scripted and surreal side but it's still very good. Unfortunately here too the final level, while featuring some nice exotic weaponry, is slightly spoiled by the unfathomable aiming system. Too often I ended up blasting the wall with plasma when (to my mind) I was quite definitely aiming at the enemy soldiers. It's good, but certainly doesn't compete with the enormous payoff that is the ending to Half Life 2.

This problem, like the others, is probably not so much in the system itself so much as in the time needed to figure it out. That to me is Alyx's major flaw : it's too immersive. It assumes you actually are Alyx Vance, already a part of this dystopian world and fluent in its somewhat esoteric weaponry. So most of these criticisms are not necessarily the game designer's fault, but mine. At least, that's the impression I've come away with. I might have to post a second review after trying it again.

All in all, I give this a solid 7/10. It's an epic rendering of the Half Life world, occasionally let down by some highly questionable gameplay choices; a truly blisteringly good game obfuscated by some weird trappings. It's also on the pricey side*. I can see why the hardcore are so enthusiastic for this, but for a more casual gamer like me, it's all a bit much. Even so, it left me hungry for more... and a crowbar.

* Arguably. Most experiences that last this long cost a hell of a lot more than what I paid for this in the Steam sale, but on the other hand, it's fundamentally imaginary and limited. I remember when £40 was considered a sensible upper limit for a brand new top-of-the-range game, and I hold to that as a reasonable standard.

Virtual Desktop wireless settings

Initially I tried playing this using Oculus Link, which renders beautifully but makes it very easy to get tangled up in the cable. This became frustrating so I switched to Virtual Desktop. Initially I struggled with this - the rendering was visually perfect but with so many momentary freezes (frame dropping, I think) that it made me feel quite ill after 30-40 minutes or so. Eventually, with a lot of trial and error and Google searching, I found a combination of settings that worked. The final experience for me was almost indistinguishable from using Link - not quite, but still more than sufficient to appreciate the full graphical quality of the game and not have to go for a lie down every half an hour. Here are the settings that worked for me.

The only thing I did inside Alyx was to keep the quality settings on medium - although the frame rate seems fine on high on my system, frames are dropped often enough to become jarring. On medium, with the settings below, it's very nearly as good as running it through a cable. From what I saw, this didn't look vastly different to the high setting options.

Main Virtual Desktop settings :

The key thing here seem to be use use the H.264 codec, not the HEVC option. Not sure if "automatically adjust bitrate" does anything or not.

Virtual Desktop VR settings (captured from the Quest, can't be screenshot from the PC, hence the weird distortion) :

Lowering the "VR graphics quality" doesn't seem to degrade the graphics in the slightest, at least for Alyx. Everyone seems to bang on about the 90 Hz screen of the Quest 2, but I can't say I notice any difference even between 60 and 72 fps. Not sure if "sliced encoding" should be on here - I read somewhere that this isn't supported for Alyx., so you might want to try turning that off.  "Extra latency mode" can probably be turned off too - I turned it on to see if this would affect the frame dropping.

Virtual Desktop streaming settings :

Not sure what any of these do but they worked for me.

The most important settings seem to be the quality settings inside Alyx, the codec, and the VR quality in Virtual Desktop. Note that these do not work well for other games : Skyrim, with these settings, looks like pixelated vomit. Alyx, however, looks fantastic - very nearly indistinguishable from playing it via cable.

Also, since I have a 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz network available, I disabled the Quest's access to the 2.4 GHz network since it's basically unusable for streaming. My PC has an ethernet connection, and even though Virtual Desktop insists on warning me that it's on a different network, wireless gaming works just fine. 

Anyway, all this is what worked for me. Virtual Desktop is great, but it does take a bit of tweaking to really optimise it.