It looks like this started as an HN comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26706821) and then made it to Reddit and back to HN in this format. Can you please not do that? We're trying to avoid repetitive/recycled/copy-pasted discussions here. I wouldn't normally post something like this, but it seems to be a bit of a pattern:
Does Chess sap the intellectual potential of humanity? Does novel writing sap the intellectual potential of humanity? Does algebraic geometry sap the intellectual potential of humanity?
Just let people do whatever they want with their free time. Nerdy hobbies are treated uniquely unfairly in this respect.
A better answer to this question in reddit is "Does reddit sap the intellectual potencial of humanity?". Imagine if all those people was doing something useful, or myself instead of writing this.
Imagine if people didn't need rest, downtime, brain shut down, or activities outside of work :o
I'm a bit snide here; I object to the "hustle" culture where people are guilted or self-flagellating for having downtime. I've seen too many of my excitable colleagues go too far there and end up with burnout, relationship problems, depression, etc.
Me, I've been chooching along nicely for the past decade and will need to do so for another three decades in all likelihood, and I'm enjoying my downtime (including playing Factorio) while doing so, instead of postponing it until the magical After.
In my personal experience, yes. Absolutely yes. In a way that chess, novels and geometry do not. I think there's a strong correlation (I'll even say causation) for me between spending less time on sites like reddit and sharing/cultivating my own intellectual potential in meaningful ways.
How many Steven Pruitts are out there who, instead of contributing in some way to human knowledge are just wasting away on Reddit?
And regardless of your personal opinion on the reliability of Wikipedia, I think we can all agree that the ability to quickly find a brief overview of any subject is insanely valuable to society.
On the other hand, I know if I weren't wasting time on HN right now, I wouldn't be doing anything productive.
> Imagine if all those people was doing something useful, or myself instead of writing this.
In my personal experience, reddit/HN has never been the reason I didn't do something useful. The reason was that I just didn't want to do it, and if HN didn't exist I'd just stare at the ceiling.
Do ceilings sap the intellectual potential of humanity?
I tend to use HN as a way to hone my writing skill. I'll play with length, wording, style, etc. The karma count gives me a bit of feedback on how well I've done, and comments back to me will further hone my writing.
So, for me at least, HN provides a fertile place to be productive, but mostly as a place to play around and sharpen my skill.
Honestly, conclusory and flip answers like this strongly make me suspect that there is some truth to it. It's worth discussing beyond "Let people do whatever they want."
There is very little harm in considering this question open-mindedly, and yet the defensiveness is so reflexively strong -- even as a bunch of the people who play them will very frequently themselves step back and joke about how much time some of these suck out of their lives.
So yes, we actually SHOULD encourage people to reexamine their patterns and consider if some (not all, some) of these hours could be put to a different or better use.
You're so right. It's extremely strange how most replies here and on reddit take the "100% it's not a problem" stance. The real answer would require actually doing surveys of
1) the value, learning, and art generated by games
2) the cost, judged according to each individual player's own value system.
And then weighing the strength of each effect. Note that I am judging according to the individual's values, not my own. Example: the rate at which people say "I wish I could stop playing game X" or the rate they suffer regret after a play session, or a year after quitting playing. I personally am really glad I found factorio, but not very happy about my time playing diablo 2.
Surely there are hypothetical examples of games which could be created, or addictions conscious beings could be vulnerable to, which would force defenders of freedom to admit that it's at least conceivable that there are situations where "bad" things exist, which we'd be better off without. Not saying we are in that state now, or what we should do if it happened. Just pointing out that acting as if there are no costs at all isn't addressing the opponent's position, even though we know there are lots of people who claim otherwise.
In general, people get extremely defensive when it comes to entertainment, shown in its mildest forms with arguments about which movie is better, which band has the AOTY, to how well these things intertwine with politics (like adding fire to fire), and its more extreme forms on the debate about whether video games cause violence or porn causes sexist attitudes. Part of this is likely the fact that it feels really good to play video games and watch porn (and I say this as someone who does both) - perhaps more than food. People just don't want to hear criticism, because it sets their mind into cognitive dissonance mode.
A question worth asking is what a 'better use' is to that person and to what extent (and why) that differs from your idea of a 'better use'. For example, I personally don't think chess is much better than a game like Starcraft or Factorio. I don't think billiards is any better than chess. I don't think English literature is better than philosophy. I don't think science is as good as maths.
Not everyone wants to be an intellectual; many people (due to other factors in life) can barely find the time to care enough (with either depression or work sapping thir creative energies). "Reexamining patterns" is good. Saying that someone is a bad person (in a moral sense, as some have done) is not. It doesn't take into account individual situations. Philosophers have argued we 'should' reexamine all kinds of things, from our political conceptions to who we decide to date.
A more interesting and controversial question might be: "Does American football in college, an extremely expensive sport which causes incremental permanent brain damage, sap the intellectual potential of humanity?"
Probably not. Most football players aren't that smart to begin with[0] and most important intellectual advances are made by a small minority of people.
What's the most significant intellectual contribution of any athlete? I can't think of one without really stretching. It's not like tennis players are making great intellectual contributions and football players are the only athletes who are absent.
If you're talking about the opportunity cost of watching college football instead of doing something more productive, then maybe, but most (virtually all) of the extremely smart people I know do not spend much time watching sports.
[0]: I'm not saying they're dumb, they're just not geniuses
The “intellectual potential of humanity” is such a misnomer. Does it mean not allowing people to do what they would want to do in order to achieve some societal goal? I could say a lot about people who work in advertising for example.
Some people are obsessed with computer games and will spend enormous amount of time which could be better spent otherwhere if not for that addiction. I'm talking from my own experience. I can't experiment by living in another world without computer games, may be I would destroy that time in the other fashion or may be I would write some useful code, who knows.
But just blindly dismissing that kind of reasoning is not wise in my opinion. Casinos eat money from victims and they are regulated. Computer games eat time from some victims and time is quite important asset as well.
Of course just like some people can reasonably spend some little money to get some enjoyment in casino, other people can reasonably spend some free time in computer games without compromising on more important activities. But not everyone have iron will and iron grip over himself.
+1. It is absurd to simplify intellectual energy to a measurable quantity as if our brains are batteries hooked up to one giant electric motor. Brilliance is a mysterious thing, but we know it comes from unexpected places. An intellectual jungle of games, arts, and culture seems more fertile than the homogenous, sterile ivory tower.
Definitely. A sillier example, I find Minecraft can be useful to get me back in the zone if I'm feeling unfocused. Building systems and overcoming design limitations does require thought. Having to concentrate on something that's easy to concentrate on helps get you in the right "mode" so to speak.
Reddit, however, I find draining. There's always a risk of getting sea lioned by a particularly toxic user. Conversation tends to be very one-sided also.
How many of those people do have intellectual potential that they waste in Factorio or Eve Online? How many of those people ended there because they played games? And how many started gaming because they were fed up with their lack of potential?
Maybe majority of gamers would been the type who would waste themself in a pub or on some other meaningless thing otherwise? I don't think it's so easy to answer those aspects without hard numbers.
Yeah, I'm blown away when I watch videos of people smashing Dark Souls 3 while almost never dying. Then I think of the 2000+ hours it must have taken to achieve that level of muscle memory and expertise.
Then again, they are making money with their Twitch streams and walkthroughs simply by being Souls experts. So who am I to say they are wasting anything?
> Does Chess sap the intellectual potential of humanity?
arguably, yes. it's a closed universe which at best provides entertainment for outsiders, unlike writing fiction which can inspire even revolutions, to say nothing of enriching minds and widening the emotional and intellectual horizons of individual readers. not sure if you were being serious about higher mathematics.
Okay, that's some wonky high brow elitism. I'm trying to break into fiction writing as a career and even though I'd like to prop up writing's value in society, you're going too far.
First off, everyone needs fun hobbies to distract them from their day to day. While many gravitate to hobbies similar to their career, it should never be a requirement. Its whatever recharges your batteries. However you achieve that, whether chess, reading, woodworking or nature walks, it doesn't matter. Again, as a fiction writer, the academic elitism of it really pisses me off. Not all entertainment needs to broaden your horizons. It first has to entertain and make you lose track of the miserable real world. Teaching you something is second on the list. Not first. Shoving the "it must enrich you or it's not art" is the most heinous elitist gatekeeping there is. This is the exact reason people dont like reading. Being told, "you're not reading the right books" turns people off, thus will never read said books.
the question reduces to something like "is society entitled to the brain cycles of particularly smart people?". if so, then one can criticize just about anything smart people spend time thinking about that doesn't create material returns for their communities.
I think A LOT of people i play with end up having jobs that don't engage their creativity at all. The end up playing games and building gorgeous bases and interesting complex setups.
Does D&D do the same? The amount of time spent on thinking about games, writing the story, etc is non-trivial.
The thing that all games share is that "losing" isn't gonna hurt your life. I'm not gonna lose my house because I blew up my factorio factory. I don't have to finish it. I don't have to play it every day.
Personally I hate games that make me build and design, I already overload on that at work, so for me a lot of my game time is more action-based games. Things I don't get to do during my work time. Does that mean I want to go learn how to shoot an arrow off a running horse? No. Does it mean I want to learn how to fly a helicopter? Nooooot that much. But I sure as hell enjoy flying a helicopter without the fear of death in a game.
Is there any grind-catch in chess, like in addictive videogames? And why novel writting, but not reading? Both are seen as intellectual, but reading I'd say has far higher chance to end in brainless consuming, wasting intellectual potential.
there could be an argument here though. it’s not so obvious. Chess might be because all the chess players only contribute to advancing chess. novel writing is obviously different, it means sharing knowledge so it contributes to whole humanity.
Well, by being bad at chess I was motivated to code up a chess engine for the first time. Does that mean being bad at chess is good for my intellectual potential? I learned a lot about chess programming...
> Does Chess sap the intellectual potential of humanity? Does novel writing sap the intellectual potential of humanity? Does algebraic geometry sap the intellectual potential of humanity?
All hobbies are "dorky" in a way (maybe except sports-related hobbies like hiking), they're considered especially so if one is obsessive about this hobby. Non-art hobbies, in my experience, are more likely to be classified "nerdy" as opposed to "dorky". I should note that, at least in the US for people in mid 20s, in the last few years (maybe thanks to Covid) "dorky" or "nerdy" sort of stopped being pejorative. Even in dating apps, it's normal for people to write stuff like "the dorkies things about me is... thinking about programming/gaming/drawing all the time" etc.
I would guess "dorky", "nerdy" are more mildly self-deprecating than pejorative nowadays. But this could change wildly from one area to another.
I think some of us older folks have a hard time shaking the notion that gaming is nerdy. When I was a kid, you didn't tell people you played video games. Today it's a streamed e-sport in which people make huge sums of money. The transition was, I think, surprisingly fast and very unexpected back then.
As a kid I said I played Secret of Mana on a weekend (SNES) and for the rest of that school year I was taunted and called "Secret Banana", haha. How far we've come. Or have we.
Certain types of games, like factorio and eve online, are firmly nerd games. We make jokes in grand strategy game circles about how few not "traditional nerds" play these games. I still have not seen proof of a SINGLE woman who plays grand strategy games.
These kinds of games are the most uniquely intellectual outside of puzzle games, programming games, and even more difficult strategy games.
I have been helping one kid with a programming class and one thing I've noticed is that they often lack a certain approach to problem solving that I personally developed by playing video games. They also played video games but far fewer and definitely less of the harder problem solving ones. It is entirely possible I liked the games because I already had the talent and the games didn't build the talent, but until we get a definite study on the correlation and causation my bet is going to be on them sharpening the skill.
After a certain point it does begin to sap. This is the nature of all entertainment. A few good books can enlighten a mind but too many books can result in someone who reads but never does anything with the knowledge. Even one doing math for fun can end up spending all their time solving math puzzles that are created just to be math puzzles and which don't tie into any greater discoveries.
I think this is fine. First, the system is far too hard to control so I don't see any way to improve it that wouldn't wreck the system. Maybe minor suggestions to diversify entertainment a bit and to be sure to share your experiences with a like minded community, but these are small tweaks and not massive overhauls.
I also don't think we can predict when something will produce the best results. Even if 9 of every 10 kids who get heavily drawn into math problem solving end up just wasting time solving math problems that exist just for the sake of math problems, that last 1 might get into applying the problem solving to novel fields of math that expand the total knowledge of humanity. If one is too heavy handed in optimizing that they'll risk destroying the ability for that 1 who goes further. I doubt we can be sure that trade off is worth while.
> Even one doing math for fun can end up spending all their time solving math puzzles that are created just to be math puzzles and which don't tie into any greater discoveries.
Numberphile had a good take on 'recreational maths' with their video on the loops and strings in pi. Dr. Crawford has a good bit near the end (~12:30 mark) on how these techniques lead to bigger discoveries. The 'playing' around and the methods generated often lead to much deeper truths in math, and serve as very good practice for new mathematicians.
Ability to divide a problem in smaller problems recursively until you have problems that are more manageable while avoiding being overwhelmed by the overall problem. Anyone who has played a new 4x game blind likely has experienced a sort of information overload that can deter someone from learning the game at all. With experience, I learned to break down the new information and UI into parts that closely match existing experience, with verifying that the match does hold, and then slowly expand my knowledge of each area until I've figured out how to play the game. Often this involves playing against the easy AIs until I have the basics and then working my way up the chain until the level of optimization and understanding ceases to be fun.
The same applies to handling a programming problem. Larger problems can involve many smaller problems that are mostly unrelated, but students new to programming can be overwhelmed and mentally shut down because they can't solve the entire problem at once.
Once a student learns to break it down into much smaller problems, they can find the ones they know or can easily solve and separate it from the parts of the problem that requires googling around. If a teacher tells them to use a certain library, knowing how to break down the problem into smaller ones helps arrive at the problems that need the library and the ones that don't. Maybe you need to visualize the data, so knowing if it is possible generate and store the data while ignoring the entire visualization until you are ready, knowing how to handle visualizing sample data you create on the spot while ignoring how it should be created, and knowing how to merge these two partial solutions into a larger one can make a daunting problem much more manageable.
This is a skill you can learn many ways. Just doing sudoku puzzles can teach a methodology approach to problem solving of solving the bits you know and seeing how that opens up more options. Board games are another great tool that can teach similar approaches.
Even a game like Final Fantasy 12 where you can build basic programs your allies follow when fighting can help reinforce concepts like handling edge cases and the computer doing exactly what you specified. Do you keep wiping because you set heals to only happen <20% hp when the boss does 25% hp damage an attack?
Yes, but even worse it will be a local optima of the efficiency function you've chosen and people often choose very poor efficiency functions that ignore second order and higher effects.
I tend to frame this in terms of the Multi-Armed Bandit Problem. It's a trade-off between exploration vs exploitation. It's often impossible to predict beforehand which strategy is optimal for a given environment. Which, I suspect, is why progressive temperments and conservative temperments coexist.
The current economic system prevents virtually everyone in the system other than a few at the top of the pyramid from achieving their potential.
How much extra money will the people at the top centrally controlling everything make if, for example, your plumber is a more intellectually well rounded individual? Possibly a negative amount of money. So the plumber plays modded minecraft.
Some of the reddit apologists claim telecommunications will free us all, but its mostly bringing us purity spirals, cancel culture, and identity politics. If political demographic membership is more important than programming skill, such that a skilled programmer cannot be hired, that person should grind survival rations at walmart and play factorio for recreation.
There's the optimistic view that maximizing intellectual potential means curing cancer and living on mars. But the people currently at the top make a lot of money off cancer, and won't make any money off mars, but we do know "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." so in that pessimistic sense I'm glad our propaganda driven prison is not as optimized as it could be. Unleashing autonomous walking AI robots to randomly kill people in the middle east to make oil cheaper would require amazing intellectual potential but is a negative outcome, and frankly it would make the people in charge a lot more money than positive stuff like curing cancer.
People are already educated beyond the economies means to employ them. Having them pretend to work while remaining unable to employ them sounds like too much of a free lunch. Who benefits, follow the money, it won't be us. We already have too much intelligence and education to apply to our current economy, making even more structural underemployment isn't going to help. If under the current system there's 20 postdocs living in poverty trying to apply for that one paying job to cure cancer, creating a "fairer" system where 2000 people intellectually capable of being postdocs all living in poverty applying to that one paying job to cure cancer isn't going to provide statistically better results for the cancer curing program although it will make 1980 people highly dis-satisfied with life. Is it worth making 1980 people suffer if the overall program isn't more successful? Even if the program is more successful, which I find unlikely, how much torture of how many people is acceptable in exchange?
This is a great comment. We are already way too educated and self-improved as it is. Consider the 24 year old with bachelors and masters degrees who is currently working at Starbucks because there simply is no professional work available to him. Does anyone really think “moar education” is going to improve his life? If I were him and the decision was between vegging out on the PlayStation or futilely going to night school, I know what I’d choose.
We are in this spot where there is really very, very little work that needs to happen to keep society rolling along, and a glut of educated people wanting to do that work. More education, more up-skilling, and more self-improvement is not going to fix this.
Making more money isn't the only potential life improvement that is possible. Yes, there are things that a person working at Starbucks can learn that will still improve their lives, and make it more fulfilling: languages, philosophy and knowledge are often their own reward.
Further, it seems obvious to me that hunting money is a fools game. If money made people happy, at some point, then why do billionaires push for tax cuts, and more power and wealth? As research is starting to show, wealth is an emotional hunger that you can never sate.
I played an incredible amount of Runescape. Then the creators of the game ended up getting bought out by a Chinese mining and commodity's company. Slowly the game started dying as they pushed microtransactions and changed the very nature of the game. But the spirit of the game never died.
That spirit of the game was the 'Dos Equi's guy' [0]. You had all these different skills (mining, woodcutting, farming, etc.) and the purpose of the game was to have the highest level in them all, while accumulating gold and items. As I started hating the changes that where going on within the game, I slowly started to feel a sense of waste as i spent time into the game. I started to think of how i could spend my time better and it turns out this vision for what time spent valuable is directly shaped from my experiences with runescape. If you replaced those 'Skills' in-game, with real life skills and tracked your progress, you could theoretically gamify life. Take for instance cooking. It is a skill in runescape that you can perform in real life. The goal of runescape is to gain more experience and you 'Unlock' the ability to 'Cook' a certain fish or item. In real life there is no barrier to entry or immediate feedback, but you can 'learn' these skills. Turns out they aren't as fun because you can't show off to your friends that you have level 40 flute playing.
I share much of your grim assessment. It is such a vast indignity that so much of use, so much amazing awesome potential, has no where to go, while the demands to support ourselves remain so persistent & challenging.
I do have some areas of hope.
> Some of the reddit apologists claim telecommunications will free us all, but its mostly bringing us purity spirals, cancel culture, and identity politics.
The current status quo is that technology is a system for building products that consumers consume. Social media is another consumer device, another ready-made provided thing.
We don't have a very good established front for pro-humanistic technologism. Even though these social platforms are about content creation, they're through the narrow windows of what the tools provide, engagement is even more un-liberal, more constrained. The environments are artificial, we have only a small provided window of them that we can participate in, and our participation is prescriptive, via the defined channels of the software.
But that is not an inherent vice of technology nor information technology. This reliance upon adoption adoption adoption adoption, on onboarding as many as possible, as the means of measuring success has suppressed the other forms of technology that are available for us to explore: holistic technologies. Technologies that embrace all of our potential, that always leave the door open to examination & modification. Yes, this is a Free Software rant!! To quote Programming is Hard[1][2],
> No other science is as accessible as computer science, and most of its proceeds happen out in the open - computer science thrives on the internet, and although there are corners that do actual gatekeeping, most of content is freely accessible and thrives on this accessibility.
Science & code are replicable & experimental, always, it's just a question of how accessible science & creativity are. Software faces so few material constraints, so few connectivity limitations- software is malleable, and vast, and forever willing to let us explore our potential, to develop ourselves & grow ourselves. To ongoingly experiment with will & creation, all from a phone and bluetooth keyboard. If and when we are given access to participate, to find our potential!
The current facts on the ground are not nearly so sunny. The iron hold of big platform feels a prison, and virtually is, except that we can escape at any moment. Free Software missed the jump to the internet entirely. Instead Open Source became the underpinnings for great vast monoliths, huge corporate properties to emerge, that dictate digital spaces we might use, but which give us none of the libre liberty that software might so deeply let us enrich ourselves with.
So yeah, I think you're over-doing it, but sure, I think IT is playing a really crap role right now, and I think being trapped on these content-farms has made the natives do some really weird shit. Humankind can deploy none of their amazing perceptual skills, has only abstract potential on these limited, controlled, finite systems, and we never get to see the greater game as it's played: we only have what glimpses the platforms give us. "purity spirals, cancel culture, and identity politics" are not what trouble me, I am way way way more progressive, but I think there are all manners of cultural loops that society becomes bound up in, and our inability to see the knots stems from the consumeristic nature of these systems, from there not being an honest, potential-respecting, augmentative free technological basis from which to perceive, operate, & advance from, in a distributed decentralized pro-human manner.
It's not clear to me where we need to go to start changing things. Free software, not necessarily copyleft, but software made by people for people not for developers, needs to become internet relevant. It missed the connectivity revolution entirely. Social Media/Web Protocols[3] like ActivityPub give me hope, but there still feels like a great missing, that we're still on a too application-ized view of the world, trying to provide experiences, not seed the ground to allow us each to find & discover our own experiences, our own activities: too mechanistic, not computational enough. Systems like Yahoo Pipes were built more upon will & volition & watching & experimentation with computing itself, and I think that sort of componentry is key to starting to unravel some of the built up anti-humanity IT has become shrouded in.
In all, it's really down to Ursala Franklin's Prescriptive vs Holistic technologies[4]. The first, prescriptive, categorizes all technology which is definitive, which has well defined mechanisms that enact processes. These are used to control & process. For example, the control & process of gathering to a central place & then syndicating out posts people make to each other: that's a prescriptive technology. Holistic technologies are those in which the human has total control over means & materials to shape & create an outcome. In short, holistic technologies are technologies built with Free Software ethos, if not necessarily their hard copyleft politics. When humankind can share & exchange & experiment with the world about it, & learn, & form knowing exploring peers, humanity goes places: we explore our potentials, we find new things to get up to. Technology ought be a hotbed for this, for exploring our potentials, & it has gaps but it is already very far along de-pyramidizing the material/monetary order that pervades & so powerfully persists in our world, but this idea of free/pro-human software needs new initiatives & envigorated direction to maintain relevance amid our rising communicative capitalism.
I upvoted you, and leftist in me agrees with you.. but then I am also not so sure.
I spent a lot of time in Minecraft and Factorio, managing my virtual house/factory to perfection, while completely forgetting that I could (and in some sense, would love to) learn skills to maintain my apartment (and my parent's house).
I often wonder why is that, and I doubt that it is because somebody (or the capitalist system itself) would actively prevent me from engaging in the hobbies that are more grounded to the real world.
Lot of it has to do with the perception of freedom, and some of the perception comes from the fact you're not serious about something, and you don't have to deal with other people.
So I suspect some (if not most) people are more productive in games precisely because they do not take them too seriously. Maybe in a different economic system, if we take the stress out (and have something like basic income), we could somewhat resolve that problem, but perhaps some component of it would still stay.
Also, when you write "achieving their potential", I always remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r, who showed that we might be educating our children very much under their potential. However, his method is extremely time consuming - you would have to be a really dedicated parent to go for it (although understandably economic system might prevent it here as well). Most parents, I believe, do not have the patience for this, so they do not believe it.
And many successful computer games (like Minecraft or Factorio) are really environments that are optimized for learning via immersion. So it is somewhat understandable that in the absence of direction for the real world, kids do gravitate towards such environments.
I think it's opportunity cost and interest/emergency. If you had some woodworking tools, wood, basic skills and a project, you might do nothing with it. If your brother suddenly said " i prepurchased 3 hen, they are coming to you on your bday in two month", I'm sure you would react the same way I did and make a henhouse and improve your woodworking skills. And maybe learn basic electronic skills and automate the door if you're lazy.
>I often wonder why is that, and I doubt that it is because somebody (or the capitalist system itself) would actively prevent me from engaging in the hobbies that are more grounded to the real world.
I've thought about this and have since I was a kid who enjoyed Harvest Moon while not enjoying growing plants in the garden, something my parents didn't hesitate to call attention to.
Speaking for myself (but expecting at least some of this to generalize to others) I think there are quite a few factors.
* The immediate turn around between work and result. If I want to grow strawberries, I have to wait months from start to finish. In Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley I get results in under an hour.
* The ratio between input and output. Strawberries can take many hours of labor over those months, and while I do get strawberries (or money if I sell them) in exchange for it, the overall enjoyment per hour spent is much lower than with virtual strawberries.
* The clarity and simplicity of the rules of 'the game'. If I grow real life strawberries, there are many things that can destroy them that I have little knowledge about or that I can stop. Industrial farmers might be able to control for most of these, but as a kid with a family garden I'm at the mercy of these factors. In a game the rules are much simpler and the risks much easier to understand and account for. A game with too many risks for the reward ends up being an unfun game and I can pick a better one, but we are stuck with a single instance of reality.
* Ability to avoid what I don't like. Expanding upon the freedom that games offers, I can avoid content I don't like. For example, I don't like spiders. In real life gardening, I can't avoid them. In a game, I can either avoid them or settle for a compromise involving virtual spiders that are simplified to the point they don't activate my phobia. This can even expand to avoiding laws of man (building things virtually that would never pass legal building code) and even laws of nature (building things that would collapse in reality).
I don't think economic system plays a major role in these factors. Sure, it is related in a few areas, but even if were to pick the most optimal legal and economic systems I think the end result would still not be as good as a game because of the systems beyond our control which can't be changed.
Anecdotal and speaking in terms of EVE, but I think there is a long term benefit to these types of technical games. I used to have zero idea how, "the markets" worked in my early 20s. No explanation ever "clicked". About 10 years ago, I was introduced to EVE. Played it and mostly played the economic aspect of the game. Later I found out, even though simplified, the economics are based on real world principles. They even have a PhD to monitor the ingame economy. After one or two years of playing, got bored, moved on. I later read something on the stock market and for the most part, I could follow. I decided to re try learning economics. It was a cakewalk. I'm not saying EVE taught me econ, it just made it super easy for me to understand when I tried again to learn it.
As intros to complex concepts, I think these kinds of games have long term intellectual value. As long as you understand you only have a cartoon understanding that creates a decent jumping off point to learning the real thing.
This is how pretty much the entire internet learned basic orbital mechanics from KSP.
Years of physics, and yet I had no intuitive understanding of what was going on till I'd sunk about 40 hours into KSP - sure, I couldn't plan a real solar transfer trajectory, but I certainly have a much deeper appreciation for why things are the way they are, why rockets have launch windows and the like. There's a difference between sort of seeing an explanation written down, and realizing why you're time accelerating on the launch pad to get the Mun into the right position...
> Years of physics, and yet I had no intuitive understanding of what was going on...
The difference between knowing something and having a intuition is so LARGE it can not be overstated. That is also one of the reasons why I love 3b1b [1]. It just clicks for me on some of his videos.
I'm pretty sure I learned the basics of international politics from reading Dune. Sometimes the most effective learning technique is tricking your brain into having fun.
Absolutely. Hell, how many people self taught themselves the real life influences of Game of Thrones, Vikings, the Last Kingdom, Master and Commander, etc? Sure, not everyone, but I bet theres a bigger history enthusiast demographic because of certain shows, movies and books. I dont think a bigger demographic of history enthusiasts is bad for a society.
"Railroad Tycoon" taught the gen-x generation to read and manipulate the various standard financial reports as kids.
For some cultural reason we don't teach kids how, for example, in the long run, income statements interact with balance statements until at least their 20s and even then we limit the knowledge to a small elite, although I was an expert on reading financial reports by age 10 due to playing RRT. Certainly the math and logical concepts are not difficult for kids to learn.
Why do we intentionally limit "the masses" ability to understand how businesses are financed? Because knowledge is power... Ability to read financial reports is not much knowledge and not much power but its greedily guarded...
I’m all for basic financial literacy. I think things like how to balance your checkbook/bank account and how to do your taxes should be taught in school, and earlier, because everyone needs to do this. That said, very few people will ever have to read a financial statement in their life, and even fewer will have to produce one. This seems like a very niche skill that you’re only going to need if you run your own business, or if you go into finance or pick stocks or something. It’s fine to wait and only teach it to people going that direction in their careers.
Oh shit... I used to play railroad tycoon all the time as a kid. That and simcity. It never dawned on me until you said it, I never had an issue understanding finance reports unlike a lot of my peers. I never understood how some people were completely lost when looking at one. Damn, it's an interesting idea if those types of games really helped folks that much to understand more serious, and boring, concepts. Huh... my econ anecdote seems a lot more tame now when it comes to the implications of certain games on society.
> They even have a PhD to monitor the ingame economy
Not anymore, alas (though I seem to recall there was still a process of players explaining to him how certain game mechanics impacted the economy, like the fixed insurance prices for ships making an artificial price floor for the minerals used to make them, as well as producing inflation because of the currency appearing out of thin air during this process).
The irony of this question is that the OP is concerned about the maximum optimization of "intellectual potential" wasted by people that are seeking maximum optimization of a game system.
There is more to life than a feverish march of scientific progress. There's value in wasted time, boredom, and frivolity.
Furthermore, I'm certain that current/historic systemic oppression of large swathes of humanity contributes more to "wasted intellectual potential of humanity". And in those cases, it is actually detrimental to the person, whereas a game is usually provides benefit to a person in happiness, relaxation, or challenge.
I don't want to spend all my time being slave to productivity goals, yet there are things that worthwhile to work on according to my value. I would like to be efficient.
There are time that I decided I don't want to work more in th evening and spend my time intentionally just watching youtube instead. That wasn't procrastination.
A game like factorio, I would like to ideally spend maybe 3-4 hours per week. But if I spent like 10,000 hours cumulatively, that might be too much for me. If I spent way too much time on video games, that start to become procrastination.
My wife is a teacher and, like most people, she sometimes complain about her work. The most common complaint I hear is that students don't pay attention or do their assigned work, then turn around and complain that they haven't learned something or panic at the end of a semester and pester her for ways to improve their grade. Some of them exclaim that they are just too dumb to pass, so they wont even bother trying. When my wife advises these kids, she usually discovers that they have no (or very limited) career or academic aspirations.
I bring this up because I think a person's ability (intellectual or otherwise) is usually nurtured by a passion. People with a passion put extra effort into developing the skills required to fulfill that passion. People with no passion simply don't invest the same level of effort and so are sometimes perceived as "dumb" in comparison.
One of the ways in which my wife tries to help her students is by helping them find something to be passionate about. She talks to parents/guardians to help discover their passions and often references the Occupational Outlook Handbook to help the students and their guardians figure out what they can do with that passion economically and what to invest the most in academically.
I think a person's "intellectual potential" is linked to their passion for a particular academic subject. I also think that intelligence is not a finite resource, but passion is.
So when analyzing the opportunity cost of games like Factorio or Eve Online, I think you must consider their effect on a person's passion. If I stopped playing games like Factorio altogether and forced myself to invest all that time into improving my software development skills, I'm confident I would quickly "burn out" - or exhaust my passion for the subject. Rather than "sapping my intellectual potential", I think relaxing with games such as Factorio from time to time allows me to replenish my passion which fuels my intellectual potential. Everything should be enjoyed in moderation of course, but I certainly don't think the existence of games like those is a net negative for humanity.
I feel like 'sap' is maybe a bit strong of a word here which might trigger many people.
I think that we shouldn't judge others' hobbies on some intellectual basis and that people need some downtime and rest. It's fine to play chess, or improvise on a musical instrument or go clubbing without thinking whether it benefits the humanity.
Also I don't think it has to be restricted to 'obsessive tinkerer' games. You can make something cool in the 'real world' or learn more without being an engineer. Arguably tinkerer games or even chess are not any better in this respect than, say, call of duty, or some casual platformer.
If I was asking the same question, I'd ask "how can we make 'real word' activities as entertaining and rewarding as games".
To elaborate: I program a lot in my free time, I love building stuff, it's very rewarding when you reach milestones and do progress.
On the other hand very often it's kinda meh. You know what you need to do, but then you spend massive amounts of time actually achieving it. You can easily spend hours and days debugging some crap, which results in a one-liner fix. This is not fun at all, it completely sucks!
Compare this to a dopamine train while playing Minecraft or SimCity or Civilisation where you're doing steady progress all the time. I can completely understand people who prefer video games to building things. But at least I know that I'm doing something that has never been done before, it will be useful for me later and other people so it wasn't all for nothing. In comparison, after playing video games all I feel is regret is that I'll never get this time back.
I'd imagine it's similar with many other 'real world' things. It's hard to push the boundaries of what you know or capable of, so brains resist it.. in comparison playing a video game is usually fun and easy since you know the drill.
Readit News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26686767
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26411589
Just let people do whatever they want with their free time. Nerdy hobbies are treated uniquely unfairly in this respect.
I'm a bit snide here; I object to the "hustle" culture where people are guilted or self-flagellating for having downtime. I've seen too many of my excitable colleagues go too far there and end up with burnout, relationship problems, depression, etc.
Me, I've been chooching along nicely for the past decade and will need to do so for another three decades in all likelihood, and I'm enjoying my downtime (including playing Factorio) while doing so, instead of postponing it until the magical After.
And regardless of your personal opinion on the reliability of Wikipedia, I think we can all agree that the ability to quickly find a brief overview of any subject is insanely valuable to society.
On the other hand, I know if I weren't wasting time on HN right now, I wouldn't be doing anything productive.
In my personal experience, reddit/HN has never been the reason I didn't do something useful. The reason was that I just didn't want to do it, and if HN didn't exist I'd just stare at the ceiling.
Do ceilings sap the intellectual potential of humanity?
At least those that already have a drive to know use reddit to sharpen their knowledge. As a research tool itself reddit is pretty invaluable.
So, for me at least, HN provides a fertile place to be productive, but mostly as a place to play around and sharpen my skill.
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There is very little harm in considering this question open-mindedly, and yet the defensiveness is so reflexively strong -- even as a bunch of the people who play them will very frequently themselves step back and joke about how much time some of these suck out of their lives.
So yes, we actually SHOULD encourage people to reexamine their patterns and consider if some (not all, some) of these hours could be put to a different or better use.
1) the value, learning, and art generated by games 2) the cost, judged according to each individual player's own value system.
And then weighing the strength of each effect. Note that I am judging according to the individual's values, not my own. Example: the rate at which people say "I wish I could stop playing game X" or the rate they suffer regret after a play session, or a year after quitting playing. I personally am really glad I found factorio, but not very happy about my time playing diablo 2.
Surely there are hypothetical examples of games which could be created, or addictions conscious beings could be vulnerable to, which would force defenders of freedom to admit that it's at least conceivable that there are situations where "bad" things exist, which we'd be better off without. Not saying we are in that state now, or what we should do if it happened. Just pointing out that acting as if there are no costs at all isn't addressing the opponent's position, even though we know there are lots of people who claim otherwise.
A question worth asking is what a 'better use' is to that person and to what extent (and why) that differs from your idea of a 'better use'. For example, I personally don't think chess is much better than a game like Starcraft or Factorio. I don't think billiards is any better than chess. I don't think English literature is better than philosophy. I don't think science is as good as maths.
Not everyone wants to be an intellectual; many people (due to other factors in life) can barely find the time to care enough (with either depression or work sapping thir creative energies). "Reexamining patterns" is good. Saying that someone is a bad person (in a moral sense, as some have done) is not. It doesn't take into account individual situations. Philosophers have argued we 'should' reexamine all kinds of things, from our political conceptions to who we decide to date.
It's hard not to get defensive because this reddit post is basically flamebait:
>use of words like sapping and deadend
>"there's little to no payoff for the rest of humanity"
Like you said we can probably discuss this question without getting defensive but it's impossible thanks to the way it's worded.
What's the most significant intellectual contribution of any athlete? I can't think of one without really stretching. It's not like tennis players are making great intellectual contributions and football players are the only athletes who are absent.
If you're talking about the opportunity cost of watching college football instead of doing something more productive, then maybe, but most (virtually all) of the extremely smart people I know do not spend much time watching sports.
[0]: I'm not saying they're dumb, they're just not geniuses
But just blindly dismissing that kind of reasoning is not wise in my opinion. Casinos eat money from victims and they are regulated. Computer games eat time from some victims and time is quite important asset as well.
Of course just like some people can reasonably spend some little money to get some enjoyment in casino, other people can reasonably spend some free time in computer games without compromising on more important activities. But not everyone have iron will and iron grip over himself.
But realistically would it be better spent?
I banned myself from games to write my master thesis.
There was some mild improvement in pace of work, but I'm not sure if I should attribute it to not gaming or simply to approaching deadline.
On the other hand I watched all 10 seasons of "Friends" during that time. And I didn't even like "Friends" to begin with.
There is no authority higher for the appropriate use of one's time than oneself.
https://erikmcclure.com/blog/factorio-is-best-interview-we-h...
Reddit, however, I find draining. There's always a risk of getting sea lioned by a particularly toxic user. Conversation tends to be very one-sided also.
I mean I played around in ZZT and ended up a software engineer.
How many people do you know that don't work a job, are 25 and able bodied, and live at home with their parents to play chess?
How many people do you know that work a dead-end factory job, and come home and put all of their effort into chess over advancing their career?
I know of 0 for any of those for chess, but I can think of at least 100 people that this applies for video games.
Video games are great! I get it. But when it starts to be the purpose of life, it seems a very sad life.
Maybe majority of gamers would been the type who would waste themself in a pub or on some other meaningless thing otherwise? I don't think it's so easy to answer those aspects without hard numbers.
Then again, they are making money with their Twitch streams and walkthroughs simply by being Souls experts. So who am I to say they are wasting anything?
arguably, yes. it's a closed universe which at best provides entertainment for outsiders, unlike writing fiction which can inspire even revolutions, to say nothing of enriching minds and widening the emotional and intellectual horizons of individual readers. not sure if you were being serious about higher mathematics.
First off, everyone needs fun hobbies to distract them from their day to day. While many gravitate to hobbies similar to their career, it should never be a requirement. Its whatever recharges your batteries. However you achieve that, whether chess, reading, woodworking or nature walks, it doesn't matter. Again, as a fiction writer, the academic elitism of it really pisses me off. Not all entertainment needs to broaden your horizons. It first has to entertain and make you lose track of the miserable real world. Teaching you something is second on the list. Not first. Shoving the "it must enrich you or it's not art" is the most heinous elitist gatekeeping there is. This is the exact reason people dont like reading. Being told, "you're not reading the right books" turns people off, thus will never read said books.
Does D&D do the same? The amount of time spent on thinking about games, writing the story, etc is non-trivial.
The thing that all games share is that "losing" isn't gonna hurt your life. I'm not gonna lose my house because I blew up my factorio factory. I don't have to finish it. I don't have to play it every day.
Personally I hate games that make me build and design, I already overload on that at work, so for me a lot of my game time is more action-based games. Things I don't get to do during my work time. Does that mean I want to go learn how to shoot an arrow off a running horse? No. Does it mean I want to learn how to fly a helicopter? Nooooot that much. But I sure as hell enjoy flying a helicopter without the fear of death in a game.
what if it does ?
I would guess "dorky", "nerdy" are more mildly self-deprecating than pejorative nowadays. But this could change wildly from one area to another.
As a kid I said I played Secret of Mana on a weekend (SNES) and for the rest of that school year I was taunted and called "Secret Banana", haha. How far we've come. Or have we.
These kinds of games are the most uniquely intellectual outside of puzzle games, programming games, and even more difficult strategy games.
I have been helping one kid with a programming class and one thing I've noticed is that they often lack a certain approach to problem solving that I personally developed by playing video games. They also played video games but far fewer and definitely less of the harder problem solving ones. It is entirely possible I liked the games because I already had the talent and the games didn't build the talent, but until we get a definite study on the correlation and causation my bet is going to be on them sharpening the skill.
After a certain point it does begin to sap. This is the nature of all entertainment. A few good books can enlighten a mind but too many books can result in someone who reads but never does anything with the knowledge. Even one doing math for fun can end up spending all their time solving math puzzles that are created just to be math puzzles and which don't tie into any greater discoveries.
I think this is fine. First, the system is far too hard to control so I don't see any way to improve it that wouldn't wreck the system. Maybe minor suggestions to diversify entertainment a bit and to be sure to share your experiences with a like minded community, but these are small tweaks and not massive overhauls.
I also don't think we can predict when something will produce the best results. Even if 9 of every 10 kids who get heavily drawn into math problem solving end up just wasting time solving math problems that exist just for the sake of math problems, that last 1 might get into applying the problem solving to novel fields of math that expand the total knowledge of humanity. If one is too heavy handed in optimizing that they'll risk destroying the ability for that 1 who goes further. I doubt we can be sure that trade off is worth while.
Numberphile had a good take on 'recreational maths' with their video on the loops and strings in pi. Dr. Crawford has a good bit near the end (~12:30 mark) on how these techniques lead to bigger discoveries. The 'playing' around and the methods generated often lead to much deeper truths in math, and serve as very good practice for new mathematicians.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W20aT14t8Pw
What does that consist of?
The same applies to handling a programming problem. Larger problems can involve many smaller problems that are mostly unrelated, but students new to programming can be overwhelmed and mentally shut down because they can't solve the entire problem at once.
Once a student learns to break it down into much smaller problems, they can find the ones they know or can easily solve and separate it from the parts of the problem that requires googling around. If a teacher tells them to use a certain library, knowing how to break down the problem into smaller ones helps arrive at the problems that need the library and the ones that don't. Maybe you need to visualize the data, so knowing if it is possible generate and store the data while ignoring the entire visualization until you are ready, knowing how to handle visualizing sample data you create on the spot while ignoring how it should be created, and knowing how to merge these two partial solutions into a larger one can make a daunting problem much more manageable.
This is a skill you can learn many ways. Just doing sudoku puzzles can teach a methodology approach to problem solving of solving the bits you know and seeing how that opens up more options. Board games are another great tool that can teach similar approaches.
Even a game like Final Fantasy 12 where you can build basic programs your allies follow when fighting can help reinforce concepts like handling edge cases and the computer doing exactly what you specified. Do you keep wiping because you set heals to only happen <20% hp when the boss does 25% hp damage an attack?
How much extra money will the people at the top centrally controlling everything make if, for example, your plumber is a more intellectually well rounded individual? Possibly a negative amount of money. So the plumber plays modded minecraft.
Some of the reddit apologists claim telecommunications will free us all, but its mostly bringing us purity spirals, cancel culture, and identity politics. If political demographic membership is more important than programming skill, such that a skilled programmer cannot be hired, that person should grind survival rations at walmart and play factorio for recreation.
There's the optimistic view that maximizing intellectual potential means curing cancer and living on mars. But the people currently at the top make a lot of money off cancer, and won't make any money off mars, but we do know "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." so in that pessimistic sense I'm glad our propaganda driven prison is not as optimized as it could be. Unleashing autonomous walking AI robots to randomly kill people in the middle east to make oil cheaper would require amazing intellectual potential but is a negative outcome, and frankly it would make the people in charge a lot more money than positive stuff like curing cancer.
People are already educated beyond the economies means to employ them. Having them pretend to work while remaining unable to employ them sounds like too much of a free lunch. Who benefits, follow the money, it won't be us. We already have too much intelligence and education to apply to our current economy, making even more structural underemployment isn't going to help. If under the current system there's 20 postdocs living in poverty trying to apply for that one paying job to cure cancer, creating a "fairer" system where 2000 people intellectually capable of being postdocs all living in poverty applying to that one paying job to cure cancer isn't going to provide statistically better results for the cancer curing program although it will make 1980 people highly dis-satisfied with life. Is it worth making 1980 people suffer if the overall program isn't more successful? Even if the program is more successful, which I find unlikely, how much torture of how many people is acceptable in exchange?
We are in this spot where there is really very, very little work that needs to happen to keep society rolling along, and a glut of educated people wanting to do that work. More education, more up-skilling, and more self-improvement is not going to fix this.
Further, it seems obvious to me that hunting money is a fools game. If money made people happy, at some point, then why do billionaires push for tax cuts, and more power and wealth? As research is starting to show, wealth is an emotional hunger that you can never sate.
Half true. Knowledge workers yeah, but there's actually a shortage of skilled blue-collar workers.
That spirit of the game was the 'Dos Equi's guy' [0]. You had all these different skills (mining, woodcutting, farming, etc.) and the purpose of the game was to have the highest level in them all, while accumulating gold and items. As I started hating the changes that where going on within the game, I slowly started to feel a sense of waste as i spent time into the game. I started to think of how i could spend my time better and it turns out this vision for what time spent valuable is directly shaped from my experiences with runescape. If you replaced those 'Skills' in-game, with real life skills and tracked your progress, you could theoretically gamify life. Take for instance cooking. It is a skill in runescape that you can perform in real life. The goal of runescape is to gain more experience and you 'Unlock' the ability to 'Cook' a certain fish or item. In real life there is no barrier to entry or immediate feedback, but you can 'learn' these skills. Turns out they aren't as fun because you can't show off to your friends that you have level 40 flute playing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Interesting_Man_in_th...
I couldn't agree more, and I couldn't write it better myself.
Thank you
I do have some areas of hope.
> Some of the reddit apologists claim telecommunications will free us all, but its mostly bringing us purity spirals, cancel culture, and identity politics.
The current status quo is that technology is a system for building products that consumers consume. Social media is another consumer device, another ready-made provided thing.
We don't have a very good established front for pro-humanistic technologism. Even though these social platforms are about content creation, they're through the narrow windows of what the tools provide, engagement is even more un-liberal, more constrained. The environments are artificial, we have only a small provided window of them that we can participate in, and our participation is prescriptive, via the defined channels of the software.
But that is not an inherent vice of technology nor information technology. This reliance upon adoption adoption adoption adoption, on onboarding as many as possible, as the means of measuring success has suppressed the other forms of technology that are available for us to explore: holistic technologies. Technologies that embrace all of our potential, that always leave the door open to examination & modification. Yes, this is a Free Software rant!! To quote Programming is Hard[1][2],
> No other science is as accessible as computer science, and most of its proceeds happen out in the open - computer science thrives on the internet, and although there are corners that do actual gatekeeping, most of content is freely accessible and thrives on this accessibility.
Science & code are replicable & experimental, always, it's just a question of how accessible science & creativity are. Software faces so few material constraints, so few connectivity limitations- software is malleable, and vast, and forever willing to let us explore our potential, to develop ourselves & grow ourselves. To ongoingly experiment with will & creation, all from a phone and bluetooth keyboard. If and when we are given access to participate, to find our potential!
The current facts on the ground are not nearly so sunny. The iron hold of big platform feels a prison, and virtually is, except that we can escape at any moment. Free Software missed the jump to the internet entirely. Instead Open Source became the underpinnings for great vast monoliths, huge corporate properties to emerge, that dictate digital spaces we might use, but which give us none of the libre liberty that software might so deeply let us enrich ourselves with.
So yeah, I think you're over-doing it, but sure, I think IT is playing a really crap role right now, and I think being trapped on these content-farms has made the natives do some really weird shit. Humankind can deploy none of their amazing perceptual skills, has only abstract potential on these limited, controlled, finite systems, and we never get to see the greater game as it's played: we only have what glimpses the platforms give us. "purity spirals, cancel culture, and identity politics" are not what trouble me, I am way way way more progressive, but I think there are all manners of cultural loops that society becomes bound up in, and our inability to see the knots stems from the consumeristic nature of these systems, from there not being an honest, potential-respecting, augmentative free technological basis from which to perceive, operate, & advance from, in a distributed decentralized pro-human manner.
It's not clear to me where we need to go to start changing things. Free software, not necessarily copyleft, but software made by people for people not for developers, needs to become internet relevant. It missed the connectivity revolution entirely. Social Media/Web Protocols[3] like ActivityPub give me hope, but there still feels like a great missing, that we're still on a too application-ized view of the world, trying to provide experiences, not seed the ground to allow us each to find & discover our own experiences, our own activities: too mechanistic, not computational enough. Systems like Yahoo Pipes were built more upon will & volition & watching & experimentation with computing itself, and I think that sort of componentry is key to starting to unravel some of the built up anti-humanity IT has become shrouded in.
In all, it's really down to Ursala Franklin's Prescriptive vs Holistic technologies[4]. The first, prescriptive, categorizes all technology which is definitive, which has well defined mechanisms that enact processes. These are used to control & process. For example, the control & process of gathering to a central place & then syndicating out posts people make to each other: that's a prescriptive technology. Holistic technologies are those in which the human has total control over means & materials to shape & create an outcome. In short, holistic technologies are technologies built with Free Software ethos, if not necessarily their hard copyleft politics. When humankind can share & exchange & experiment with the world about it, & learn, & form knowing exploring peers, humanity goes places: we explore our potentials, we find new things to get up to. Technology ought be a hotbed for this, for exploring our potentials, & it has gaps but it is already very far along de-pyramidizing the material/monetary order that pervades & so powerfully persists in our world, but this idea of free/pro-human software needs new initiatives & envigorated direction to maintain relevance amid our rising communicative capitalism.
[1] https://dorinlazar.ro/2021-02-programming-is-hard/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26711862
[3] https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...
I spent a lot of time in Minecraft and Factorio, managing my virtual house/factory to perfection, while completely forgetting that I could (and in some sense, would love to) learn skills to maintain my apartment (and my parent's house).
I often wonder why is that, and I doubt that it is because somebody (or the capitalist system itself) would actively prevent me from engaging in the hobbies that are more grounded to the real world.
Lot of it has to do with the perception of freedom, and some of the perception comes from the fact you're not serious about something, and you don't have to deal with other people.
So I suspect some (if not most) people are more productive in games precisely because they do not take them too seriously. Maybe in a different economic system, if we take the stress out (and have something like basic income), we could somewhat resolve that problem, but perhaps some component of it would still stay.
Also, when you write "achieving their potential", I always remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r, who showed that we might be educating our children very much under their potential. However, his method is extremely time consuming - you would have to be a really dedicated parent to go for it (although understandably economic system might prevent it here as well). Most parents, I believe, do not have the patience for this, so they do not believe it.
And many successful computer games (like Minecraft or Factorio) are really environments that are optimized for learning via immersion. So it is somewhat understandable that in the absence of direction for the real world, kids do gravitate towards such environments.
I've thought about this and have since I was a kid who enjoyed Harvest Moon while not enjoying growing plants in the garden, something my parents didn't hesitate to call attention to.
Speaking for myself (but expecting at least some of this to generalize to others) I think there are quite a few factors.
* The immediate turn around between work and result. If I want to grow strawberries, I have to wait months from start to finish. In Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley I get results in under an hour.
* The ratio between input and output. Strawberries can take many hours of labor over those months, and while I do get strawberries (or money if I sell them) in exchange for it, the overall enjoyment per hour spent is much lower than with virtual strawberries.
* The clarity and simplicity of the rules of 'the game'. If I grow real life strawberries, there are many things that can destroy them that I have little knowledge about or that I can stop. Industrial farmers might be able to control for most of these, but as a kid with a family garden I'm at the mercy of these factors. In a game the rules are much simpler and the risks much easier to understand and account for. A game with too many risks for the reward ends up being an unfun game and I can pick a better one, but we are stuck with a single instance of reality.
* Ability to avoid what I don't like. Expanding upon the freedom that games offers, I can avoid content I don't like. For example, I don't like spiders. In real life gardening, I can't avoid them. In a game, I can either avoid them or settle for a compromise involving virtual spiders that are simplified to the point they don't activate my phobia. This can even expand to avoiding laws of man (building things virtually that would never pass legal building code) and even laws of nature (building things that would collapse in reality).
I don't think economic system plays a major role in these factors. Sure, it is related in a few areas, but even if were to pick the most optimal legal and economic systems I think the end result would still not be as good as a game because of the systems beyond our control which can't be changed.
As intros to complex concepts, I think these kinds of games have long term intellectual value. As long as you understand you only have a cartoon understanding that creates a decent jumping off point to learning the real thing.
Years of physics, and yet I had no intuitive understanding of what was going on till I'd sunk about 40 hours into KSP - sure, I couldn't plan a real solar transfer trajectory, but I certainly have a much deeper appreciation for why things are the way they are, why rockets have launch windows and the like. There's a difference between sort of seeing an explanation written down, and realizing why you're time accelerating on the launch pad to get the Mun into the right position...
The difference between knowing something and having a intuition is so LARGE it can not be overstated. That is also one of the reasons why I love 3b1b [1]. It just clicks for me on some of his videos.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw
Dead Comment
For some cultural reason we don't teach kids how, for example, in the long run, income statements interact with balance statements until at least their 20s and even then we limit the knowledge to a small elite, although I was an expert on reading financial reports by age 10 due to playing RRT. Certainly the math and logical concepts are not difficult for kids to learn.
Why do we intentionally limit "the masses" ability to understand how businesses are financed? Because knowledge is power... Ability to read financial reports is not much knowledge and not much power but its greedily guarded...
Someone in online forum (reddit iirc) said that even if they teach it, not many will follow. So I guess that demand isn't that high to begin with.
However if game or interactive actions can somehow teach it, it will reach many more people than lessons.
Not anymore, alas (though I seem to recall there was still a process of players explaining to him how certain game mechanics impacted the economy, like the fixed insurance prices for ships making an artificial price floor for the minerals used to make them, as well as producing inflation because of the currency appearing out of thin air during this process).
There is more to life than a feverish march of scientific progress. There's value in wasted time, boredom, and frivolity.
Furthermore, I'm certain that current/historic systemic oppression of large swathes of humanity contributes more to "wasted intellectual potential of humanity". And in those cases, it is actually detrimental to the person, whereas a game is usually provides benefit to a person in happiness, relaxation, or challenge.
There are time that I decided I don't want to work more in th evening and spend my time intentionally just watching youtube instead. That wasn't procrastination.
A game like factorio, I would like to ideally spend maybe 3-4 hours per week. But if I spent like 10,000 hours cumulatively, that might be too much for me. If I spent way too much time on video games, that start to become procrastination.
I bring this up because I think a person's ability (intellectual or otherwise) is usually nurtured by a passion. People with a passion put extra effort into developing the skills required to fulfill that passion. People with no passion simply don't invest the same level of effort and so are sometimes perceived as "dumb" in comparison.
One of the ways in which my wife tries to help her students is by helping them find something to be passionate about. She talks to parents/guardians to help discover their passions and often references the Occupational Outlook Handbook to help the students and their guardians figure out what they can do with that passion economically and what to invest the most in academically.
I think a person's "intellectual potential" is linked to their passion for a particular academic subject. I also think that intelligence is not a finite resource, but passion is.
So when analyzing the opportunity cost of games like Factorio or Eve Online, I think you must consider their effect on a person's passion. If I stopped playing games like Factorio altogether and forced myself to invest all that time into improving my software development skills, I'm confident I would quickly "burn out" - or exhaust my passion for the subject. Rather than "sapping my intellectual potential", I think relaxing with games such as Factorio from time to time allows me to replenish my passion which fuels my intellectual potential. Everything should be enjoyed in moderation of course, but I certainly don't think the existence of games like those is a net negative for humanity.
I think that we shouldn't judge others' hobbies on some intellectual basis and that people need some downtime and rest. It's fine to play chess, or improvise on a musical instrument or go clubbing without thinking whether it benefits the humanity.
Also I don't think it has to be restricted to 'obsessive tinkerer' games. You can make something cool in the 'real world' or learn more without being an engineer. Arguably tinkerer games or even chess are not any better in this respect than, say, call of duty, or some casual platformer.
If I was asking the same question, I'd ask "how can we make 'real word' activities as entertaining and rewarding as games".
To elaborate: I program a lot in my free time, I love building stuff, it's very rewarding when you reach milestones and do progress. On the other hand very often it's kinda meh. You know what you need to do, but then you spend massive amounts of time actually achieving it. You can easily spend hours and days debugging some crap, which results in a one-liner fix. This is not fun at all, it completely sucks!
Compare this to a dopamine train while playing Minecraft or SimCity or Civilisation where you're doing steady progress all the time. I can completely understand people who prefer video games to building things. But at least I know that I'm doing something that has never been done before, it will be useful for me later and other people so it wasn't all for nothing. In comparison, after playing video games all I feel is regret is that I'll never get this time back.
I'd imagine it's similar with many other 'real world' things. It's hard to push the boundaries of what you know or capable of, so brains resist it.. in comparison playing a video game is usually fun and easy since you know the drill.