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Become a Redditor and join one of thousands of communities. x 267 268 269 How Much Are Games Like Factorio And EVE Online Sapping Away The Intellectual Potential Of Humanity? (self.slatestarcodex) submitted 2 years ago by ComfortableSoup5 I often wonder if these specific types of games are redirecting a nontrivial amount of human intellectual output into a deadend. They're explicitly geared to lure in the kind of obsessive tinkerer types who've historically driven scientific and engineering progress. Only now, there's little to no payoff for the rest of humanity if they spend thousands of hours consumed by one of these games. What's Newton's modern equivalent doing right now? Probably perfecting a build order in Stellaris. * 294 comments * share * save * hide * report top 200 commentsshow all 294 sorted by: best topnewcontroversialoldrandomq&alive (beta) [ ] Want to add to the discussion? Post a comment! Create an account [-]WTFwhatthehell 153 points154 points155 points 2 years ago* (94 children) You assume that skilled people spring from nothing. Play is a way to learn and hone skills. You can read a textbook about how pointing your boosters roughly in the direction of the ship you're trying to intercept will let a spacecraft overtake it... but playing kerbal space program for a few weeks will let it make intuitive sense. https://xkcd.com/1356/ A capable quantity surveyor and construction site manager I'm friends with credits various management games with making various organisational tasks intuitive. You can read a textbook about protein folding and get a related postgrad degree related to protein folding... and still find you can't come close to beating some little kid with the top score for the day in https://fold.it/ who still has a bedtime. Theres a strong chance that one day that kid will be applying for a postgrad degree in something bio related and will be able to glance at a protein sequence and figure out more about it in seconds than their professors can see in hours Production line engineers don't play factorio as a substitute for working. They can't stop playing it becuase their brains love optimisation problems and playing a few thousand hours of factorio only makes those tendencies stronger. You could assume that video game botting is "redirecting" talent that could be increasing shareholder value somewhere... But browse r/programming and countless programmers cut their teeth on programming as kids building game bots. At age 4 I obsessively played some silly little kids math game. The naive response would be "he could have been doing extra schoolwork instead!" but in reality that play burned grooves deep into my brain that made math easy for the rest of my life. Top diplomats in eve are sometimes actual diplomats in real life. Where do you think people practice skills? * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]hiddenhare 39 points40 points41 points 2 years ago (63 children) One thing to add: I'm not thrilled with OP's framing that the "intellectual potential of humanity" is equivalent to "scientific and engineering progress" performed by "obsessive tinkerer types". I'm an "obsessive tinkerer type" who's dual-classed in both a medical field and a creative field, and performing my creative work at a high level requires much more conscious thought, planning, tinkering and optimisation than medicine ever did. My "intellectual potential" is unquestionably doing "humanity" more good via my current creative work, rather than trying to force myself to go into medical research. Even if you think about the problem in strict utilitarian terms, I'm doubtful that the productive output of scientists and engineers is unusually important. To me, the more likely bottleneck is that we won't have enough skilled politicans or advocates fighting on the side of the angels. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]WTFwhatthehell 18 points19 points20 points 2 years ago (62 children) Art has value. It has utility. A skilled performer or writer can bring joy to millions. A top tier performer can easily generate more utility than an average engineer. But I'd argue that top tier scientists and engineers can blow every artist out of the water. A musician will almost never generate as much human welfare through their music as the people who developed effective smallpox or malaria vaccines. A relatively tiny number of humans are responsible for a vastly disproportionate fraction of long term improvements to average human welfare. Outside of utility generated from their work average writers and performers and politicians seem as likely to pull a Jenny McCarthy as they are to help. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]LeifCarrotson 34 points35 points36 points 2 years ago (3 children) I'm an automation engineer - by no means top tier, but somewhere past the Valley of Despair on the Dunning-Kruger effect - whose machines have tested and built (and are currently building) hundreds of thousands of vehicle seats, airbags, batteries, medical devices, and so on. My contribution is largely that people in 2012 and newer Subarus, Toyota, and Ford vehicles in car accidents have been saved from what could have been a fatal crash by equipment built on machines that I developed. On a less scalable level, the individual production operators have collectively spent tens of thousands of hours working near high-power, high-temperature, high-speed equipment to make those parts, and thanks to safety circuits and devices I fought for and integrated I've never had a single report of harm from the machine. I think I have a pretty high-impact output as far as productive humans go. But I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I disagree with you on three major points: First, I disagree that my output as an engineer is any less significant than the output of non-engineers who share the planet with me. I could give a significant amount of the credit for the work I did in yesterday afternoon to the guy at the Wendy's who made me an unusually excellent fantastic spicy chicken sandwich. Thank you, anonymous fry cook! There's no point in my building mostly-automated machines if there are no human operators who may not design machines but fill in the gaps in the automation. Thank you, shift worker! And what's the point of driving home safely if I can't enjoy a game of Factorio to relax. If everyone was an engineer like me for their entire waking lives we'd be completely unproductive and the planet would be an awful place to live. Second, you have to look at not just now, but throughout time. My wife is a stay-at-home Mom, together we're raising a small boy. Maybe my greatest gift to the human race will not be any of those machines I built but my half share of providing it with the man who, in 2060, will accomplish something I can't even imagine today. Or maybe a product of one of those machines I built will save the life of someone else who will have that accomplishment, or who's raising the kid who will do that. Or maybe that fry cook just inspired a different creator. Maybe this post will inspire someone to do something. There's a huge butterfly effect of complexity and interdependence in human society, the physical things I've produced are just the tip of the iceberg. Third, it's not just the top-tier scientists and engineers at the cutting edge who deserve credit. I'm a tiny cog in the giant machine that is modern science and industry. Somewhere, many people, but we'll abbreviate that to 'someone', is turning sand into silicon, someone's turning silicon into chips, someone else is putting those chips into motor drives, someone else is putting those motor drives into robots, I'm putting those robots into conveyor lines, my customers are putting those conveyor lines into their factories, they're selling the components that come off those conveyor lines to manufacturers who put them in their cars, someone is driving those cars to dealerships, someone is making the website on which those cars get sold...Nils Bohlin gets a lot of credit for inventing the seatbelt, but he couldn't personally install one every 0.4 seconds like the industry is currently doing. All the arguments against the "Great Man" theory of history apply to the "Great Engineer" theory of productivity, but in a still more concrete sense - I use a huge variety of off-the-shelf industrial parts to accomplish all my work; what I do would be completely impossible without the labor of others. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]TracingWoodgrainsRarely original, occasionally accurate 12 points 13 points14 points 2 years ago (0 children) I noticed this comment because a friend of mine said: This is a great comment. Wrong, but great. Since I intuitively agree with his point, I want to expand on why I think it's wrong, while still appreciating the point at its core. You focus on your output as an engineer versus the output of others. Here, I agree with you in a vital way: everyone who is willing to put their labor out into the world for the benefit of others deserves genuine appreciation and credit. That includes you, working as an engineer building the machines that enable our infrastructure. It includes your wife, raising the child. It includes janitors and fry cooks and taxi drivers. The key, there, though, is active, outward-focused behavior. Raising a child, working a Wendy's, so forth--all of that requires you to actively do something that has a clear impact on others. Go to the other extreme--someone sitting on their couch, watching TV, all day every day. That's passive, it's inward-directed, and in terms of the butterfly effect you mention it just doesn't create much of a breeze. There's a (well-known) concept I appreciate, of creating one's own luck. Everyone gets lucky in some ways and unlucky in others, and a good chunk of success lies in maximizing your exposure to potential upside, putting yourself in situations where good things can happen. Whether you get any given job, for example, involves a lot of luck, but someone who doesn't apply is not going to get it. The same applies with outward-focused, active behavior and the positive effects you mention. Someone who puts more out there provides others more opportunity to benefit. Your appeal to see all activities as equal parts of a tapestry has an appeal, but there are important reasons not to do such. Being actively engaged in a positive, outward-focused direction is much, much more difficult than, say, passively enjoying a TV show, and does much more for others. Ultimately, being unable or unwilling to distinguish the value of different activities leads to a sort of nihilism--why strain to add difficult meaning for others, if simple and immediately satisfying self-centeredness is as credit-worthy? No, we cannot distinguish perfectly, and things like salary are a poor measure. But that should not stop us from distinguishing at all. Personally, I think the jobs fewest want to do should have high conscious status--sanitation plant workers, janitors, carers in facilities for the mentally disabled, so forth. Parenting, certainly. And yes, positions like yours where you provide a significant chunk of value for countless people day to day. The future is unknowable, but some things--having kids, particularly, as you mention, or creating works that can improve things for others long after you stop noticing them--are massively more likely than others to create lasting meaning. Returning to the specific example of video games: I play them, and I like them. Nothing's wrong with them. But there's not a whole lot right with them either, in the sense of allowing you to produce external meaning. That's not a problem, except that they are remarkably adept at conveying much the same feeling as effortful, outward-focused behavior. They provide an illusion of meaningful work, while providing everyone-who-isn't-you about the same value as you not existing at all. That doesn't mean they have no place, but it does mean they deserve less praise, and if people really are substituting one for the other, I think it's worth understanding the potential loss inherent in that. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]Zendayas_Stillsuit 3 points4 points5 points 2 years ago (1 child) This is one of my favorite comments I've ever read on Reddit. Great point after great point. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]LeifCarrotson 5 points6 points7 points 2 years ago (0 children) I'm glad it was enlightening for you; maybe my best contribution of intellectual output for today was writing this comment so that Zendaya's Stillsuit (awesome username, BTW) will someday remember it and be inspired to do something great. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]hiddenhare 15 points16 points17 points 2 years ago (11 children) Ranking people from best to worst sounds like a hard problem (!), but I do agree that a skilled artist probably has less utilitarian impact than an equally-skilled medical scientist. I was mostly just expressing frustration with the way that "valuable intellectual work" is so often, thoughtlessly, equated with "engineering and hard science". That being said, I think I disagree that the most skilled scientists and engineers should be placed towards the top of the Utilitarian Impact Totem Pole. My instinct is that the most skilled politicians, lawyers, mediators, managers, investors (etc.) would have drastically higher impact. I admit that's only speculation. (I notice nobody's making posts like, "should we be worried about brain drain from all of the potential politicians who are arguing about politics online for hours instead?". When phrased that way, it does sound a bit silly, doesn't it?) * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]WTFwhatthehell 11 points12 points13 points 2 years ago (10 children) I notice nobody's making posts like, "should we be worried about brain drain from all of the potential politicians who are arguing about politics online for hours instead?". When phrased that way, it does sound a bit silly, doesn't it? Impact, I might agree, positive impact... I'm gonna point back to my randomness thing. If twitter manages to keep some of the people I see arguing on twitter distracted and out of real politics I'd want to nominate twitter for some kind of prize.... Scientists sometimes have negative impacts but even some of the ones like Fritz Haber attached to terms like "father of chemical warfare" ... probably still had a massively net-positive impact on average human welfare because of the impact of the Haber-Bosch process on farming worldwide and the rest of humanity can choose to not use Zyklon gas on each other while still using the other work to feed the hungry. Science is in an unusual category that has an easier time having a huge positive impact because it fundamentally increases the capability and resources available to all of humanity and that impact then keeps happening forever. Even fairly minor scientists can have a disproportionate effect on the world just because the ground they claim stays claimed. A young woman I know who's doing her Phd figured out how a rare disorder was making people go blind by breaking a particular molecular pathway. It only affects a handful of families worldwide but after she figured it out and proved it, as a result a couple hundred people around the globe now won't go blind and won't gradually lose the ability to walk because of her Phd project. And that impact will just keep adding up. The most saintly or satanic politicians... their policies die the next time their opposition gain control of the government. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]hiddenhare 7 points8 points9 points 2 years ago (9 children) I don't think this trait is unique to scientists and engineers, though. If we're going to idolise Newton for his contributions, then we also need to do the same for Bach, or the US Founding Fathers. Inventions in the arts and soft sciences are still inventions. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]WTFwhatthehell 4 points5 points6 points 2 years ago (8 children) Sure, Bach will continue generating a modest trickle of utility long after every nation that existed at the time of his work has crumbled to dust. The American founding fathers have a fairly big impact, both positive and negative, but that will likely mostly come to an end when the state they helped found crumbles eventually like every other empire. The Haber-Bosch process will keep feeding people for as long as plants need nitrogen and humanity itself survives. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]PlacidPlatypus 9 points10 points11 points 2 years ago* (7 children) I wonder though if scientists might be more replaceable than artists. Without Haber someone else probably would have figured out nitrogen fixation within a few years. But if Bach had never existed I don't think anyone else would have written his music, and I don't even see much reason to believe that equivalent work would get created by someone else- the world would just be poorer. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]notasparrow 6 points7 points8 points 2 years ago (3 children) Bach might be more equivalent to an Einstein, but still I think I agree with your point. Science has the benefit of having "next things" to work on, where a lot of brilliant people focus on explaining known gaps in knowledge. Art is much more open ended, and while there is often a gestalt where great artists work on collective advancements (impressionism, etc), it lacks the kind of "known issues" that drive a lot of science. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply load more comments (3 replies) load more comments (3 replies) [-]gorkt 8 points9 points10 points 2 years ago (22 children) But what inspires many of those engineers and scientists to love humanity enough to strive to make life better for them. Art, stories, human creative potential. It's all connected, and us arbitrarily deciding that some human professions and skills have more societal value is the wrong way to think about it. It's all interconnected in a beautiful way. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]WTFwhatthehell 4 points5 points6 points 2 years ago* (21 children) But what inspires many of those engineers and scientists to love humanity enough to strive to make life better for them. This goes back to the tendency towards randomness. For every kid who's inspired towards a career in science, how many were put off by a million ScienceIsBad stories by lazy authors. Sure, the world is interconnected, in an alternate timeline Jonas Salk dies from infections after his sewer line backs up due to poor maintenance and his home is flooded with sewage. In an alternate timeline Von Neumann dies in a car crash because some local wannabe artist incorporates some local traffic lights into an art project. But if you replaced Jonas Salk or Von Neumann with some randomer, there likely wouldn't be this wiki article to their name. Lots of people do an important job, but some people are a lot more replaceable than others. From one of a Pratchett book: He was called the Candle Knave because that was how the post had been described in the university records when it was created, almost two thousand years before. Keeping the candlesticks, sconces and, not least, the candelabra of the university filled was a never-ending job. It was, in fact, the most important job in the place, in the mind of the Candle Knave. Oh, Smeems would admit under pressure that there were men in pointy hats around, but they came and went and mostly just got in the way. Unseen University was not rich in windows, and without the Candle Knave it would be in darkness within a day. That the wizards would simply step outside and from the teeming crowds hire another man capable of climbing ladders with pockets full of candles had never featured in his thoughts. He was irreplaceable, just like every other Candle Knave before him. I love the work of Terry Pratchett but I'm willing to bet that even he as one of the worlds most successful and influential humanist authors would rank his positive impact on humanity below the people who came up with anaesthetics and antibiotics such that dental abscesses aren't often fatal any more. You can't make people happy by law. If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago "Would you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the world's music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, travelling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you don't have to die of dental abcesses and you don't have to do what the squire tells you" they'd think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say 'yes'. -- Terry Pratchett * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]MannheimNightly 9 points10 points11 points 2 years ago (3 children) "in an alternate timeline Von Neumann dies in a car crash because some local wannabe artist incorporates some local traffic lights in an art project" Gee, I wonder what the rate is of people getting killed by murals. I never realized how bad art was! This does not strike me as a serious point. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-][deleted] 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (0 children) Sorry for the off topic, but it's kind of funny that he picked a car crash in particular, considering Von Neumann actually caused a few himself with his habit of reading books while driving. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]WTFwhatthehell 0 points1 point2 points 2 years ago (1 child) How many people die from sewage flooding their homes in the US? The point was to lead on to the sentence "But if you replaced Jonas Salk or Von Neumann with..." while acknowledging that everyone is affected by others, positive and negative. Not to imply there's an epidemic of sewage drownings or art related traffic accidents. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]MannheimNightly 4 points5 points6 points 2 years ago (0 children) So your point seems to be John von Neumann contributed much more to humanity than the average artist? I fail to see how that gives us any insight, since he also contributed much more to humanity than the average mathematician as well. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply load more comments (17 replies) [-]iiioiia 3 points4 points5 points 2 years ago (11 children) But I'd argue that top tier scientists and engineers can blow every artist out of the water. Maybe the vast majority of the time, but always? Take climate change for example: science gave humanity certain technologies and tools, but the general consensus now seems to be that our overuse of them has become rather problematic (an "existential threat" according to many) - can Science alone undo what it has [DEL:done:DEL] enabled (can it significantly decrease the usage of these harmful technologies), or might we perhaps need skills from other domains to get things sorted out? * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]Sinity 0 points1 point2 points 2 years ago* (10 children) but the general consensus now seems to be that our overuse of them has become rather problematic It is because people ignore what it bought us. If you told average commenter of such things that they can reverse that environmental impact - but it plunges ~everyone into abject poverty - well, hopefully they wouldn't. Maybe they would because of a misconception that climate change is an apocalypse-level catastrophe which can't be stopped at all once some threshold CO2 PPM is reached. Which is not true - there are options like climate engineering, which are currently suppressed in public debate, because of nudgerism (it'd be bad if people knew about these options, it is better they think the only solution is decreasing emissions so they panic as strongly as possible about it and focus on decreasing the emissions only) and being paranoid about humans purposefully "meddling with nature" (it seems awfully similar to opposition to GMO (but not increasing mutation rate due to radiation) or mRNA vaccines (human designed code bad, 'natural' infection feels safer)). Unintentional environmental impact is, in comparison, much, much, much less concerning to people per equivalent amount of impact. Climate change is not an exception - it's just that the impact is so huge it can't be ignored now. But even then, purposeful changes are barely on the edges of Overton Window. Possibly it'll eventually change. People are also to a large extent willfully blind about economic inevitability of going past fossil fuels due to rapidly falling prices of things like photovoltaics and batteries - on both sides it is being treated mostly as an political problem instead, and there is common assumption that solving the climate change problem requires "degrowth". can Science alone undo what it has done enabled (can it significantly decrease the usage of these harmful technologies), or might we perhaps need skills from other domains to get things sorted out? Nothing else can, unless we want humanity to go back into being a curious species of animals, living like rest of them, not progressing, and eventually being wiped out by a random asteroid or something. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]iiioiia 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago* (9 children) Nothing else can... I'm thinking more from the perspective of...with current science and technology, is it physically possible on Planet Earth for 7 billion people to live in an environmentally sustainable manner? (If you conceptualize Earth as a video game, could an expert player Make It Work?) I think George Hotz thinks about it the right way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxKMiVqqBgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SpptYg_0Rs * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]Sinity 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (7 children) with current science and technology, I think... probably? Eventually we'll likely run out of some rare materials we can't recycle (at least perfectly). It's a weird question through. Why current science and technology? Unless you meant "current science, technology and infrastructure being stagnant" Energy mix staying constant. Then no, probably not. But we already have photovoltaics cheaper to use than fossil fuels. All that needs to happen is upgrading the global infrastructure. And energy storage might be an issue if we're really staying at the current level. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply load more comments (7 replies) [-]chimeric-oncoprotein -1 points0 points1 point 2 years ago (0 children) Of course it is. Worst case, we eat single-cell protein. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]wiggin44 3 points4 points5 points 2 years ago (1 child) This randomness argument makes pretty strong judgements about who is more likely to help vs hurt. I don't know where you're finding the data to put forward a 50-50 split as the most likely answer (seems suspiciously like "my tribe helps, other tribe hurts") It would help to explicitly say something like: I'm assuming 30% of politicians are helpful, 40% are harmful, and 30% don't really matter. Engineers presumably have some distribution like this too (it's disengenuine to pretend that bad engineers don't exist or produce harm) but maybe it skews differently. Either way, randomness is all relative. I find it hard to swallow that "helps as much as it hurts" is the most likely scenario in all those cases. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]WTFwhatthehell 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago* (0 children) I'm assuming 30% of politicians are helpful, 40% are harmful, and 30% don't really matter. I'd probably drop a much higher fraction in the "don't matter" or "mostly don't matter" or "mostly close to neutral" pile for politicians, artists, engineers and even most scientists. Science and inventions have the quality that in 10, 100, 500, 1000 years time the cure for a disease or the knowledge of how to smelt iron continues to be a cure for that disease or a way to make tools and society has gained it forever provided some politician doesn't run an unusually successful knowledge-eradication campaign and society can continue to apply it (or not) forever subject to whatever morality society has at that future time. There's almost no equivalent of permanent gains for politicians apart from discovering completely uninhabited land. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]FlyingBishop 4 points5 points6 points 2 years ago (8 children) Top tier scientists come from the ranks of middling scientists. You need to give thousands (millions is better) of middling scientists excellent training and resources and a few of them will become top-tier. As the OP said, the real problem is an absence of people working on the "side of the angels." How many people who could have been brilliant scientists had their intelligence stunted for life because of what happened to the water in Flint, MI? People basically need good food, health, love, education, and exercise in childhood and the more people we can get that to the more brilliant scientists we will have in 50 years. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]WTFwhatthehell 5 points6 points7 points 2 years ago* (7 children) How many people who could have been brilliant scientists had their intelligence stunted for life because of what happened to the water in Flint, MI? For that specific event? Probably not very many. The population is around 95K, they tested 40K people for blood lead levels. Likely mostly the most at-risk fraction of the population. 326 children had blood lead levels of ~ 5 mg/dL A 5 mg/dL increase in blood lead, a person lost about 1.5 IQ points. So you'd expect that 326 to be dropped by about 1/10th of a standard deviation. So if you set "genuis" at 140, without any lead you'd expect about 1 or 2 of them to fall in that band. With the lead you'd still expect about 1 or 2 of them to fall in that band with a few percent chance that one of them will fall to 139 instead. Hundreds of kids losing around 1.5 IQ points is no joke but most kids from there who would have made capable scientists would still make capable scientists. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]FlyingBishop 4 points5 points6 points 2 years ago (4 children) The water isn't the only thing wrong in Flint, MI. The kids are also generally poor and have worse access to everything. If you did a concrete study of Flint, MI I would bet you could find 30 ways to raise the kids' IQ by 1.5 IQ points. Of course each of those things probably requires a 10-year investment of $300/year/child. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]WTFwhatthehell 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (3 children) 30 ways to raise the kids' IQ by 1.5 IQ points. Unless 50% of the kids are currently so impaired that they're non-verbal that seems unlikely. But sure, there's probably a few measures that could help at least a little. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]FlyingBishop 3 points4 points5 points 2 years ago (2 children) Parental income has a positive correlation with IQ. The more money parents get, the more they invest in tutors, etc. Also the more money parents have the more free time parents have to directly tutor, etc. Maybe the cost is more like $1000/year for 10 years. Some things are just prerequisites for high IQ (good access to nutritious food.) Some things directly improve IQ (one-on-one instructional time.) I really think most people don't appreciate how much you can improve a child's intelligence with a proper application of resources. Of course nothing is guaranteed. Maybe it's more like you do this for 100 kids and 10 of them will actually use what you give them. But this is how you grow geniuses and there are no shortcuts, you have to start with many and make sure they are well cared for to get the one. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]WTFwhatthehell 4 points5 points6 points 2 years ago* (1 child) Parental income has a positive correlation with IQ. The more money parents get, the more they invest in tutors, etc. IQ is pretty highly correlated to income but kids adopted into high income families miss out on much of the boost because it's also highly heritable and people tend to mate assortatively for both income and IQ. just throwing money at kids will help a little but once they're not suffering from malnutrition or parasites or significant neglect... the gains seem to tail off. When looking at kids who were adopted and comparing biologically related family members to adoptive, biologically related family tended to resemble each other intellectually more than they do adoptive family members. So either rich adoptive parents are systematically withholding a lot of resources or just throwing money at cognition has limited effect. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]FlyingBishop 3 points4 points5 points 2 years ago (0 children) Adopted kids miss in utero stuff as well as infant/early childhood stuff. It's well-documented that the mother's environment during pregnancy has huge developmental effects. Some extreme cases we can detect (fetal alcohol syndrome, etc.) but there's a ton of stuff (both proven and unproven) that happens in the womb which we have no way to test the effect of. In any case, we're not looking for IQ, we're looking for novel ways of thinking which IQ isn't even really a rough proxy. once they're not suffering from malnutrition or parasites or significant neglect Again, we're talking about Flint, MI, a city where the median income is $17,000. malnutrition, parasites, and significant neglect are hard to avoid in the US with that income. I think you're thinking I'm saying you can turn average intelligence into genius intelligence. I'm not. I'm saying the kids are barely functional when they become adults and we can turn most of them into average intelligences (and maybe one of them will be a genius, but we don't know which one.) Multiply this by every similarly poor town in the US you've got a lot of potential being wasted. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]GerryQX1 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (1 child) And Newton probably had a brain full of mercury and who knows what else. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]WTFwhatthehell 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (0 children) in later years, definitely. I'm not sure what the lead levels would have been like in 1642 england.... * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]DiminishedGravitas 8 points9 points10 points 2 years ago (8 children) What an excellent answer. I think the power of games will be harnessed much further in the future: work will become more like play. I think the difference between the two, and why we generally prefer play to work, ties in nicely with the predictive processing theory. For example, a game like Factorio has the same substance and logic as actually working on an assembly line, except without all the noise -- it's all signal! You can still make errors, but the logic is always easily discernable. My brain loves games, because there's so little uncertainty -- I know that the problems are solvable with my default behaviour, and it is unlikely that there are completely unexpected threats lurking. I think that much of the efficiency of modern civilization comes from gamification. Eg. To have a good life, you may simply play the education game and then the corporate game, both with mostly explicit and formal rules on how to win. Figuring out what you should do on your own is very inefficient if you can simply trust the system instead. Modern planning and management software already resembles some strategy game UIs. Self-improvement apps are almost indistinguishable from mobile games. What I've heard of the Chinese social status system sounds both terrifying and exciting. I think we'll eventually get so good at abstracting and game design, that eventually a job will be indistinguishable from a game: AI could present complex real tasks with superficial polish while retaining the same underlying logic, so you might not even know whether you're solving real problems or just playing. Most of us might someday be employed as CAPTCHA-clickers, except to us it'll seem like the best game there is. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]WTFwhatthehell 13 points14 points15 points 2 years ago (7 children) I think some stuff can't be hidden behind a veil. Factorio is pure production line optimisation. The fun without the pain. You never need to worry about one broken roller on belt 100,056 occasionally randomly kicking a product to the left of the line. You never need to worry about subtly defective product. You never need to worry about one belt being 3% faster than it should be or a robotic arm who's sensors drift out of alignment over a month. In the real world that kind of stuff eats time to figure out. The games strip away that kind of stuff, mostly and tend to leave the satisfying central problems. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]DiminishedGravitas 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (6 children) I think it could be veiled, if there's sufficient digitalization and bandwidth! Dynamic specialization and compartmentalization could gamify complex tasks. I imagine you could separate the unexpected events into distinct workflows: one person could solve broken rollers, and another looks at belt timings, while sensor drift is yet another game. For whomever is playing the production line optimization game, recruiting others for these tasks is simply clicking the repair -button on the relevant object; they can concentrate on identifying the bottlenecks. A sophisticated AI could un-confuse processes into tasks that are of optimal complexity for humans, perhaps even individually, according to their aptitude and preferences. While this does have a slightly dystopian ring to it, I'm not sure people would mind if it is fun as well as efficient. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]WTFwhatthehell 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (4 children) problem is, if you have such an extreme degree of surveillance and automation that you can pull this off... a lot of the work can probably be fully automated. I could make a little game to do some of the information processing tasks I do at work where someone uses a mobile app to drag and drop data from one step to the next.... but it takes less work to fully automate it and set it as an hourly cron job. The engineers are typically needed in the space that can't be fully automated or where information gathering needs to be done by someone and making a game of it would often require more work than fully automating it. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply load more comments (4 replies) load more comments (1 reply) [-]sistine_shrapnel 4 points5 points6 points 2 years ago (1 child) various management games Would you mind sharing what these are? I'm looking for great mgmt games. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]WTFwhatthehell 5 points6 points7 points 2 years ago (0 children) Not really my thing, I just know he likes the sort of games where you have to juggle contracts, cope with changes in market prices and time for raw materials to arrive etc. I'll ask him what he recommends next time we hang out. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]Erophysia 4 points5 points6 points 2 years ago (1 child) The people in charge should have played Plague Inc. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]WTFwhatthehell 3 points4 points5 points 2 years ago (0 children) You know the moment that madagascar closes it's ports that something serious is going to happen to the rest of the world * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]H2HQ 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (12 children) I'd like add a contrary point of view to the sea of people disagreeing with OP. Training, whether game-playing or formal training, is of course, not a directly productive activity. It's a cost. As someone who does accounting for our business, it's literally a direct cost-item on the Income Statement for the company. All the costs on the financial books, provide value and are needed. That doesn't mean they aren't costs. So the real question here is "Can training be productive beyond the reward of providing experience to the trainee.". ...and as you might imagine, the answer is "it depends". Sometimes we "train" someone on accounting, by having them do historical reconciliations. That is a low-priority work, but has some material value. My sister's law firm has new lawyers "practice" their skills on pro-bono cases while getting advice from senior lawyers. There are lots of ways to train or play games that are productive. When my kids and I needed to clean the car - we made a game out of it with the hose. Less productive than directly doing the work, but not total throw away like purely spraying each other with the hose. So the question becomes: Can games like Factorio and EVE be formatted in a way to provide some sort of real-world value. Currently, I don't see a way to do that. So it seems it will remain a purely "training/ play" activity with no direct real-world benefit. The question somewhat implicitly under-represents the degree to which society does this as a whole. I would argue that vast swaths of society, organizations, and activities, have no net benefit to humanity. Maybe even the majority. So picking on these games is silly. Is intellectual potential lost? Yes, definitely. The discipline and focus to work towards a life goal consistently each and every day is extremely rare. We each probably waste 99% of our intellectual potential each day. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]WTFwhatthehell 6 points7 points8 points 2 years ago* (1 child) I like the example of foldit. It was created as a research project because humans tended to be better at folding proteins than the best automated systems at the time. Data from players going through the process of solving challenges were used to build better real tools. (which I believe they fed back into the game) They also have regular challenges to help with real-world tasks https://fold.it/portal/node/2011438 : 04/02/2021 Influenza HA Binder Design: Round 5 Design a protein to bind to influenza virus! This puzzle is set up just like Puzzle 1968. Although there is no competition this time for the players who submit the most solutions, you are still encouraged to restart the puzzle once you reach 10,000 points. The more designs we have to test, the better our chances at finding a successful binder for influenza HA! I tried this almost 10 years ago when I was a student. When I mentioned a kid with a bedtime... that was my own experience in the games chatroom seeing one of the top ranked players who was kicking my ass at the challenges signing off because his mom was calling him. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]H2HQ 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (0 children) Hence the big buzzword in marketing and management a couple years ago "Gamification". * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]iiioiia 4 points5 points6 points 2 years ago (8 children) So the question becomes: Can games like Factorio and EVE be formatted in a way to provide some sort of real-world value. Currently, I don't see a way to do that. So it seems it will remain a purely "training/play" activity with no direct real-world benefit. I would argue that things like StackOverflow, /r/AskScience, /r/ AskHistorians, /r/WallStreetbets would be valid examples in that they are both a source of entertainment, but also provide value. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply load more comments (8 replies) [-]AnotherWarGamer -1 points0 points1 point 2 years ago (0 children) I would argue that a highschool student who plays factorio will almost definitely become smarter because of it. It's not like they will spend that time any better. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply load more comments (4 replies) [-]PMMeUrHopesNDreams 137 points138 points139 points 2 years ago* (40 children) I don't think pure intellectual output is the limiting factor in human progress right now. Most of the problems are political and organizational. The intellectual demands of figuring out, say, where and how to build high-speed rail, are just not that hard and there are plenty of people smart enough and interested enough to do it. The political challenge of actually coordinating the thousands of people and the money to make it a reality is what's holding it back. Or look at the situation with the vaccine. It took two days to develop the vaccine for Covid-19. Maybe there's a super-genius playing Factorio who could have done it in 1 day, but that doesn't change anything about the other 13 months of regulatory hurdles and logistics in delivering, and the politics of people who don't even want to take it because they think Bill Gates is going to control them with microchips. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]elgrecoski 37 points38 points39 points 2 years ago (1 child) Intellectual silos are close to dead thanks to the modern telecommutcations. If a serious problem presents itself you can immediately have the top SMEs in the world express their opinions on along with the unknown weirdos in the public for unconventional wisdom. Just throwing 'brainpower' at a problem doesn't get you results and you can't sequence the genome of politics to come up with a foolproof answer of how to actually implement an idea, though I'm sure Nate Silver would salivate at the idea. Organization and implemention is an art not a science. Having the right idea has always been the easy part and it's never been cheaper or easier to do so. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply load more comments (1 reply) [-]MarketsAreCool 10 points11 points12 points 2 years ago (1 child) Most of the problems are political and organizational. My gut says overall you're right, but I want to point out that playing EVE Online at a high level is solving political and organizational problems. It's like having a second job running a company for free. But you're right, there is a lot of zero sum political positioning happening in policymaking, so it's not just a question of whether we are having enough logistics and organizational work complete in order to accomplish things. And final point: it's possible also that some of these videogames are contributing to the pool of resources rather than just taking away from it. Everyone does need time off from work and these games might help some with that. But moreover, they could conceivably improve the skills of some users to improve their real-life output. I doubt it's super common, but it's plausible. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]Robert_Barlow 5 points6 points7 points 2 years ago (0 children) I've learned most of what I know about logistics from games like Factorio. I'm sure if I was enough of a social butterfly to play EVE, I would have learned a lot about management and teamwork from videogames too. As it stands, I'm about equally knowledgeable in both, and only one of those things is coming from my college degree. I think this also leads into the point that smart people aren't always universally competent, and sometimes a person might want to apply their intellect to an unconventional problem that lies outside their field. Video games which are like "second jobs" are a good way to do this, because they are low stakes and designed to put up as few of those political and organizational barriers as possible. Excellent learning tools. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]iiioiia 15 points16 points17 points 2 years ago* (16 children) I don't think pure intellectual output is the limiting factor in human progress right now. Most of the problems are political and organizational. ...and the politics of people who don't even want to take it because they think Bill Gates is going to control them with microchips. I wonder if there might be some way to ~gamify political problem solving. After all: a) It is human minds that are working on it as is, perhaps more minds (and more diversity) would be even better (if done right) b) The people being organized might have some more insight into how they would like to be organized than those who have been currently tasked with the job c) Some initiatives that seemingly ~everyone wants for some reason just can't get done, maybe if the public had more hands on involvement in the process we could improve upon the situation. Take climate change for example: rather than having billions of repetitive mini-arguments with an average lifetime of 24 hours spread out across numerous sites and threads, how about we have one massive argument that lasts for months, going through a process of constant decomposition and refinement, finding precisely where the true disagreements and lack of knowledge lie, how many people fall on each side of disagreements, what sort of compromises participants might be willing to make, etc? Could this plausibly produce better results than politicians have achieved so far? * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-][deleted] 2 years ago (7 children) [deleted] [-]iiioiia 0 points1 point2 points 2 years ago (6 children) I kind of think of it the other way around: the free market is one instance of the type of thing I have in mind (collective problem solving / value production), but what other unrealized permutations might be out there? It is true that the world "is" gamified, but to what degree is it gamified compared to all that is possible (a value which is unknown)? * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]nichealblooth 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (1 child) Prediction markets definitely fit into this category too. They're relatively unrealized, and can be used in small companies and big political systems alike. At the small scale, it can be used to cut through optimistic bullshit to simple questions like "When will this project be complete?" What's especially cool about prediction markets is, even if they don't get formally integrated into political systems, if they're popular enough, there should be pressure against making decisions that contradict the market. Can you imagine the media roasting a politician for voting in favor of regulation X when there are markets predicting bad things will happen if regulation X passes? This may have been useful for lockdowns. Markets may have been able estimate the health/economic impacts of certain lockdown policies. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]iiioiia 0 points1 point2 points 2 years ago (0 children) What's especially cool about prediction markets is, even if they don't get formally integrated into political systems, if they're popular enough, there should be pressure against making decisions that contradict the market. Can you imagine the media roasting a politician for voting in favor of regulation X when there are markets predicting bad things will happen if regulation X passes? Great point....even if such systems have no formal political power, if they are good enough they can command power. It would be nice to see crowd-powered prediction markets (and other such ideas) become much more common, there's a lot of compute power wasted on traditional social media activities that could plausibly be put to better use. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]Sinity 0 points1 point2 points 2 years ago (3 children) The world doesn't seem to be gamified nearly enough. In a gamified world there would be sleek websites with effortless entry which throw all kinds of challenges at people. Like various edu apps, courses etc. People would solve them and the site would continually evaluate their skills. At first it would throw at them various educational problems, teaching them. They'd earn some tokens doing them. Symbolic amounts. Tokens would hold actual value. Maybe these symbolic amounts would be subsidized by the government. Eventually, fluidly they'd start to get problems submitted by people who want them solved. And they'd gain not-symbolic amount of tokens. That'd eventually morph into solving problems which can't be made that atomic. That's... sort of like above/under the API concept, admittedly. And economy based on contracted people, not employees. I think it could work out, through. Or at least the 'edu' part. Something like this really, really should replace current paradigm of magic towers. There is ridiculous amount of potential to make the system nearly free in comparison, while actually good education. So much could be done. Spaced repetition, system making people understand stuff by explaining it further and further until inferential distance reaches zero. Things like it were possible for decades. Yet, nothing. But there's even more. Games. VR games. Immersion into history, physics sandboxes, whatnot. I really hoped things would start going in the right direction with 2020's enforced remote education. Instead nobody actually tried anything. And people believe that non-medieval-means education inherently sucks. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply load more comments (3 replies) [-]DiminishedGravitas 4 points5 points6 points 2 years ago (3 children) I think that once AI develops sufficiently, the organizational difficulties become much less relevant. Politics is a solution to problem solving in a scenario where bandwidth is very limited: there would hardly be anything to argue about if everyone knew everything. War might be a good example of how AI is already streamlining decision making. An air defense radar presents the human with very simple problems: here's something that's probably a threat, kill/no kill? The data is too complex to decipher manually, so you trust the computer, because you don't want to get killed yourself. Sometimes you shoot down an airliner, but not very often. If we could model complex issues like climate change in a way that makes intuitive sense for everyone, eg. a SimClimate 3000 game, it would be easier to understand. If there was also a scoring system with instant feedback that worked on real data, where you see things your Green score take a hit when you purchase plane tickets, it would be easier to change your behaviour. Now if political decisions would also be fed into the system, when an anti-climate bill was passed you would see your personal Green score drop because it affects you too. It would be easier to settle an argument over how many Green points do we sacrifice for what amount of Gold points, for example, when you have a feel for what it actually means. The big question is about who gets to make the model, but I think that could be solved by prediction markets. I guess I'm ultimately describing capitalism where all externalities are priced in by the magic of massive processing power, like some of the other commenters. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]iiioiia 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (2 children) I think that once AI develops sufficiently, the organizational difficulties become much less relevant. Or more relevant. Or six of one, a half dozen of the other, depending on the scenario (the internet for example, has been both beneficial and harmful). If we could model complex issues like climate change in a way that makes intuitive sense for everyone, eg. a SimClimate 3000 game, it would be easier to understand. If there was also a scoring system with instant feedback that worked on real data, where you see things your Green score take a hit when you purchase plane tickets, it would be easier to change your behaviour. Or not just climate, but the whole world. The climate "deniers" everyone frets over, is a lack of understanding of The Science the only motivating variable behind their behavior, or might there be some other human psychology "quirks" in play? The big question is about who gets to make the model, but I think that could be solved by prediction markets. I like this idea...a battle of models so to speak? I guess I'm ultimately describing capitalism where all externalities are priced in by the magic of massive processing power, like some of the other commenters. If that was actually true, but I don't think there's any way for all externalities to be priced in - climate change hasn't even been on our radar for much of the past, and still doesn't seem to be priced accordingly. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]DiminishedGravitas 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (1 child) It's easy to act like climate change isn't real when there's no perceivable causality to your personal actions. I think simply having a Green score that reflects your choices in real time makes climate change much more tangible and hard to deny, even if it isn't tied into eg. taxation and has little real consequences. Capitalism certainly isn't there yet, but maybe it could be: if we could accurately model all the complex things like climate change in real time, the externalities of all actions would become apparent, and efficient markets would eventually price them in. If we had a credible method for estimating the effects of climate inaction today on the stock market in a few decades' time, the math would force us to take drastic action. Corporations today certainly spare no expense lobbying for legislation that could thwart existential threats, they just need such threats to be made obvious to them. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply load more comments (1 reply) [-]Sinity 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (3 children) Take climate change for example: rather than having billions of repetitive mini-arguments with an average lifetime of 24 hours spread out across numerous sites and threads, how about we have one massive argument that lasts for months, going through a process of constant decomposition and refinement, finding precisely where the true disagreements and lack of knowledge lie, how many people fall on each side of disagreements, what sort of compromises participants might be willing to make, etc? Could this plausibly produce better results than politicians have achieved so far? I thought about that. There are some existing projects which attempt to do just that. But it doesn't really help. People who spend time arguing the same things over and over and over already know how such an argument-tree looks like (including myself, knowing how it is doesn't help avoid it unfortunately). Would existence of a nice explicit argument-tree make people stop repeating the same arguments? Even if, it doesn't lead to a conclusion. Take abortion debate: the main disagreement is really on the legitimacy of faith, whether it is a valid epistemology. And that can't really be solved by argument. Of course, there are plenty of progressively weaker branches based of "even if" concession to pro-life side on personhood-without-brain. Arguments like bodily autonomy and so on. Every one of them reaches Hume's guillotine eventually and terminates. And on the other side of the tree (no personhood without brain) there are progressively weaker branches too of course; things like significance of finding unique DNA, 'potential personhood' and so on. I mean. It would be very nice if such resource existed. Probably should be inclusionist - if people are constrained from adding thinner and thinner twigs like metaphors, anecdotes and what not, it'd certainly wither away and people would argue exactly as they do now. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]iiioiia 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (2 children) I thought about that. There are some existing projects which attempt to do just that. But it doesn't really help. People who spend time arguing the same things over and over and over already know how such an argument-tree looks like (including myself, knowing how it is doesn't help avoid it unfortunately). Would existence of a nice explicit argument-tree make people stop repeating the same arguments? Even if, it doesn't lead to a conclusion. Might it be more accurate to say: it hasn't helped so far, it hasn't lead to a conclusion so far? If you think about it, our reality is filled with manufactured products and services that require quite (sometimes extremely) precise control over inputs, timing, coordination, etc - should it be a surprise that society (essentially, coordinated human perception/behavior/interaction) which is infinitely more complex, may behave similarly? Look at the George Floyd incident...far larger injustices than this happen on a regular basis, but something about the ingredients of this one lit much of the entire world on fire. Of course, it's not hard at all for our heuristics to produce a just-so explanation for this anomaly...but is the underlying causality actually all that simple? What really went on there, and can it be understood? Or maybe we're thinking about it wrong...maybe sometimes there is no conclusion, and there can't be, and realizing this is the solution (and so this is (or is a missing component of) what needs to be taught). There are some existing projects which attempt to do just that. Can you offer some links or give project names? The only kind of thing I can think of is https://www.pairagraph.com/ which is certainly a step in the right direction, but it's very simplistic. Take abortion debate: the main disagreement is really on the legitimacy of faith, whether it is a valid epistemology. And that can't really be solved by argument. I think the abortion debate is an excellent example to work with to study real world human belief formation and logic (or lack of) execution. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/C8nEXTcjZb9oauTCW/ where-recursive-justification-hits-bottom looks like a really, really good essay, I am going to read it in depth. Somewhere in this area is where The Problem lies, so says my semi-reasoned intuition (I have been thinking about this problem for many years). I mean. It would be very nice if such resource existed. Probably should be inclusionist - if people are constrained from adding thinner and thinner twigs like metaphors, anecdotes and what not, it'd certainly wither away and people would argue exactly as they do now. I think you could even support that...infinite pedantry - but you'd have to manage it properly. I think conceptualizing a model of how to do this is not so hard, but rendering high dimensionality as a user interface is where it gets tricky (or at least, I haven't come up with it). * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]Sinity 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (1 child) Can you offer some links or give project names? I found it (link is directly to a claim; pro-{life/choice} in this instance, in the upper left corner of a page is a colorful (red/ green) circle; upon clicking a nice 'argument topology' shows up. Clicking on arguments/counterarguments opens up list of responses to them and so on. There are also comments to an argument/ counterargument. Functionality & interface seems pretty great. One could see how declared-ideological-opponents voted on the claim, or supporters, or everyone. It seems it even has a decent amount of contributions. Trees reach depths I didn't even see anywhere people arguing about. 0) Claim, "Pregnant people should have a right to the abortion" -> 1) Objection to 0, "Abortion might be used for eugenics" -> 2) Objection to 1, "Using abortions for genetic selection can be prevented without outlawing abortion" -> 3) Agreement with 2, "The underlying propensity for genetic selection could be culturally eradicated instead" -> 4) Agreement with 3, "The stigma around disabilities could be eroded across society, and thus the propensity for using abortion for genetic selection could be reduced". Yeah, it went from pro-life/pro-choice to like-deaf-culture-but-for-people-with-Down-syndrome. Impressive. Of course there is another Objection to 1: "It cannot be simply assumed without justification that genetic selection is wrong". Curiously it is rated lower than 2.. There's also an impressive thing about UBI with >2.8K such nodes in a tree. ...maybe such a tool would be useful integrated within liquid democracy framework, actually. Voting on individual nodes is nice. Commenting on them. Hm. but rendering high dimensionality as a user interface is where it gets tricky (or at least, I haven't come up with it). I'm really amazed at how well the interface of this site I linked seems executed. I'm thinking lots about Personal Information Management, which is similarly hard problem to design a nice interface to, and so far I have nothing useful apart from some examples of possibly good inspirations and features this, Roam, Project Xanadu which scares me (vaporware older than the Web) but there is something of worth there, Gwern's Resorter and this idea... Whenever I think of writing something along these lines I'm inevitably broadening scope and abstracting away until I'm left with Google's mission ""organize the world's information and make it (...) useful." -> except for 'personal information' instead. Or a programming language. Eh. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]iiioiia 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (0 children) I found it (link is directly to a claim; pro-{life/choice} in this instance, in the upper left corner of a page is a colorful (red/green) circle; upon clicking a nice 'argument topology' shows up. Clicking on arguments/counterarguments opens up list of responses to them and so on. There are also comments to an argument/counterargument. Ah ok, I have seen that one before (I have a list somewhere written down) but haven't looked at it in ages, I think I will look more closely at it, thanks for the reminder. Functionality & interface seems pretty great. It is impressive...but it also shows how difficult rendering a UI is for this level of complexity. But a very nice job, like really really nice. ...maybe such a tool would be useful integrated within liquid democracy framework, actually. You've been pondering the same problem as me? (From your links, it looks like maybe even more than me?) Voting on individual nodes is nice. Commenting on them. Hm. The problems are obvious with that - my thinking of how to handle that (and all the other 'quality of discussion'-class problems) is strict policies, and a sitewide culture of enforcing those policies with an iron fist. There would surely be a 'earning phase to this, and many people wouldn't accept it (or couldn't practice it), but I don't see that as a problem. Quality >>> Quantity when it comes to this sort of a site. Whenever I think of writing something along these lines I'm inevitably broadening scope and abstracting away until I'm left with Google's mission ""organize the world's information and make it (...) useful." -> except for 'personal information' instead. Or a programming language. Eh. Big time...the list of "nice to have's" is endless. So I think of this from the perspective of, considering The Nature of The Problem (a long, complex discussion itself) what gives the best bang for the buck? Does all the information have to be organized, or only "enough" (which depends on the The Problem discussion). I am "very confident" that something like this is necessary (a prerequisite component, of a larger initiative) though. This on its own is fantastic, but I doubt that it is enough. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]slappymcnutface 11 points12 points13 points 2 years ago (5 children) And that's the reason why I looked to social sciences instead of the traditional STEM stuff early on. Surely there's room for STEM to grow, but the real challenge of our day is social, not mechanical. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]eric2332 10 points11 points12 points 2 years ago (3 children) But how much are social sciences actually helping us grow socially? * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]iiioiia 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (2 children) Maybe the hard sciences folks should point their brains at the soft sciences for a decade or so, share their thinking techniques, see if they would approach these same problems in a different way. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply load more comments (2 replies) load more comments (1 reply) [-]Ratslayer1 3 points4 points5 points 2 years ago (3 children) I agree with most things you said, but heavily disagree with the last example - it took 2 days to find a candidate vaccine that was completely untested, and ~11 months for it to undergo extensive tests as well as scaling up the production & planning the logistics (eg freezing chains). These tests aren't there because someone in an office thought it'd be fun to have more rules around these things, but because vaccines are given to large numbers of healthy people (this one especially) and so the ethical bar is much higher than for e.g. experimental drugs. Also @OP, this question seems to have the underlying world view that humans have 24 hours in a day, and if they didn't spend it playing factorio they would spend it working, which I would heavily doubt - no one can work 16 hours a day for sustained periods of time. But the question how much additional time these games suck up through addiction/by being better than other games on the market is quite interesting (and probably impossible to quantify). * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply load more comments (3 replies) [-][deleted] 7 points8 points9 points 2 years ago (0 children) Most of the problems are political and organizational In addition, games like Factorio can be said to sharpen young minds, making them more likely to make discoveries. In addition, it's not an either/or prospect, as gamers can still be good scientists and engineers as well. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]LeifCarrotson 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (3 children) Most of the problems are political and organizational, but the most effective solutions are technical. Consider global warming, for example. Lots of legislation and identity or conscience based campaigns have been spent trying to get people to reduce their energy use and generate less carbon, huge amounts of controversial tax subsidies and political capital have been spent trying to regulate vehicle emissions and clean up power plants. But technology improvements in solar and wind makes them cheaper sources of energy today than coal, so that's barely a fight anymore - instead of pushing against economics to get a token solar installation you're begging profit-motivated companies to keep on some natural gas generation for standby capacity. Instead of being laughed at in your dorky, dinky, inconvenient Prius, people are signing up months in advance to get a Tesla because it's simply a better car than the internal-combustion industry can produce. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply load more comments (3 replies) [-]hippydipster 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (0 children) This is a good point and I feel it in my day job. There are so many barriers to Just. Getting. Work. Done. that I often just do the minimum, and then spend my intellectual capital, so to speak, on my hobbies, where I don't have the silly, artificial, arbitrary obstacles. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply load more comments (3 replies) [-]dorox1 46 points47 points48 points 2 years ago (15 children) Your reference to Newton is ironic, given that Newton spent many years of his life dedicated to studying the occult, numerology, alchemy, and biblical prophesies about the end of the world. I learned this in a university class, so I don't have a direct source, but Wikipedia has a well-sourced article on the topic. I would guess that people who are predisposed to enjoying these kinds of puzzle/tinkering-type games probably do that kind of thing for a job too. It's true that this is mostly an "intellectual dead-end", but I'm not sure that I agree with the idea that these games are "redirecting" intellectual output. I believe these kinds of games stimulate additional output that simply wouldn't exist if the games weren't being played. Games like these encourage people to exercise creative intelligence when they would otherwise be doing other downtime activities. They replace downtime, not productivity. Mentally-stimulating video games don't leech off of intellectual output any more than physically-demanding sports leech off of manual labor. It's true that if we could harness that intellectual output for good then we would see some benefit, but we're not losing anything by not harnessing that use. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]GerryQX1 13 points14 points15 points 2 years ago (0 children) Great point about Newton, almost turns the thesis on its head. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]Atersed 9 points10 points11 points 2 years ago (1 child) Your reference to Newton is ironic, given that Newton spent many years of his life dedicated to studying the occult, numerology, alchemy, and biblical prophesies about the end of the world. These weren't games to Newton. These were all potential lines of enquiry that could have resulted in further knowledge about the world. It's not like he thought "I'll do some useful physics, but also waste my time on alchemy." It wasn't clear which route would actually lead to something valuable. We could have been living a in world where the Christian god is real and truth really is hidden in the bible. In 2021 we know that's not true, but I think it was a reasonable belief in the 17th century. It's not like the ability to turn lead into gold is a priori more absurd that learning that white light is actually not white but a combination of colours. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]dorox1 3 points4 points5 points 2 years ago (0 children) That's all very true, and is an excellent point. My main reason for bringing it up was really that "total intellectual output" is not generally a limiting factor for the amount of useful or productive knowledge a person produces. People can dedicate huge amounts of output to useless things (intentionally or unintentionally) without impacting the portion of their output that is useful. But thinking about it more, I think you're right that Newton is a bad example of this. Given that he was trying to be productive that whole time (as you said), he probably would have dedicated that time to furthering math or physics if he was not spending it on promising but ultimately fruitless pursuits. Thankfully for the rest of my argument, I think that just cuts the ties between Newton and video games, rather than making him a counterexample. He purposefully spent huge amounts of his time being productive. Were he to live today, he probably wouldn't spend any time on games like Factorio. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]iiioiia 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (8 children) but we're not losing anything by not harnessing that use Short of having a parallel universe machine, how might one know such things? * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]dorox1 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (7 children) I'm basing that on my first opinion. If these games are replacing downtime rather than productive time, and people don't produce useful things during downtime, then it follows that we aren't missing out on useful things as a result of these games. I can't prove it because I can't prove my first opinion. It's my best guess based on my own first- and second-hand experience with downtime activities. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]iiioiia 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (6 children) Right....but might there be the potentiality for a scenario whereby when people are not engaged in productive time (say, their 9 to 5 job), rather than enjoying downtime with a video game, could there be something else they enjoy that also produces greater tangible benefit to society? * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply load more comments (6 replies) [-]Batrachus 5 points6 points7 points 2 years ago (1 child) I don't think research in dead end areas is useless either as we can't predict what will bear fruit * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply load more comments (1 reply) [-]hold_my_fish 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (0 children) This is an important point and should be higher up in the comments. Sort of surprised me to see so many comments and this is the only one mentioning it. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]Nicklaus_OBrien 224 points225 points226 points 2 years ago (50 children) Consider the brain drain of brilliant minds optimizing the checkout flow at Amazon, and Uber. All the quants squeezing another basis point on a weekly forex strategy. Attractive salary and status of various industry has sapped away more young, brilliant mind hours away from fundamental research in STEM than any video game. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]tehbored 77 points78 points79 points 2 years ago (8 children) Exactly. Entertainment is not replacing very much productivity except in the case of bona fide video game addiction, which is pretty rare. On the other hand, inefficient allocation of labor due to perverse incentive structures a la Moloch wastes a massive amount of productivity. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-][deleted] 24 points25 points26 points 2 years ago (7 children) Why is optimizing checkout flow an inefficient allocation of labor? * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]tehbored 54 points55 points56 points 2 years ago (5 children) That's not an amazing example, but I know what parent was going for. Optimizing social media engagement would have been a better one. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]aeternus-eternis 11 points12 points13 points 2 years ago (4 children) That engagement optimization work basically commoditized big data tools and machine learning frameworks. In an effort to attract top engineers, there was significant pressure on big tech to open source the coolest big data libraries. So it's not all bad, some of the code/ideas/tools used to optimize social media probably helped significantly with advancements like AlphaFold and GPT-3. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]tehbored 44 points45 points46 points 2 years ago (3 children) It also got kids and old people addicted to digital crack at the cost of their mental health. Not worth it imo. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [+]aeternus-eternis comment score below threshold-6 points-5 points-4 points 2 years ago (2 children) Was it really the algos though or just human nature? Crotchety old people and middle school cliques were around before social media. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]tehbored 37 points38 points39 points 2 years ago (0 children) The algos amplified the worst elements of those dynamics. Facebook's algorithms seem to be actively trying to radicalize people. I get constant recommendations for far left groups even though I'm pretty centrist, despite repeatedly clicking "hide all" on them. It's obvious that the algorithms have figured out that anger and extremism drives engagement. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-][deleted] 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (0 children) It's a valid question to ask, even if one disagrees with the implied answer. I'm disappointed that this got downvoted on r/SSC of all places * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]Neat_Listen 18 points19 points20 points 2 years ago (0 children) "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." (Jeff Hammerbacher) https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/04/ quote-ad-generation/349689/ * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]HarryPotter5777 29 points30 points31 points 2 years ago (21 children) I don't think those are necessarily as worthless as they're framed to be, though? Optimizing advertising strategy or something, sure, that's pretty zero-sum, but to the extent that things like "increasing ease of customer engagement with global commerce" or "making financial markets slightly more efficient" pay lots of money, it's at least partly by virtue of the actual endeavor having enormous amounts of value, and even minor adjustments to those things being quite useful, even if they cash out in a billion tiny changes rather than any one visible effect. Like, if you follow the causal chains backwards from "paycheck in the programmer's bank account", it does stem at least in part from the fact that people value having efficient markets and smooth checkouts and such, and in aggregate place a lot of value on even 0.01% improvements to that infrastructure. (Which isn't to say that the EV of promising research directions isn't much higher, but I do think "quant squeezing out another basis point" is probably better for the world than a randomly-selected job, if you had to choose.) * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO 18 points19 points20 points 2 years ago (12 children) Exactly. Making consumer goods 1 cent cheaper for a billion people has an enormous net value. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]SingInDefeat 14 points15 points16 points 2 years ago (5 children) The question isn't why quants and Amazon devs are being paid so much. It's why scientists are paid so little. And the answer is simple. The value that scientists provide is hard to measure, while measuring the value quants and amazon devs provide is much easier and quicker. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]ratufa54 5 points6 points7 points 2 years ago (0 children) The median academic scientist produces no or trivially useful research. And so definitely is not being under compensated. There are also a number of fields outside the hard physical sciences where I think the research enterprise actually has net negative effects on society. Top academic scientists contribute far more to society than they receive in monetary compensation. But, relative to private sector workers, they have a very nice lifestyle. A tenured academic at a top research institution has near total job security, the ability to be completely self directed, and often very generous fringe benefits (housing, education, pension). In addition to lucrative consulting work in many fields. If you have the choice between being professor at Princeton and a partner at Goldman or an MD at DE Shaw there's a good case to be made that Princeton is a better deal. It's also worth noting that top academics are not usually well suited to operating in the private sector and it's actually very unusual for PHDs to pursue careers in the private sector in most fields. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO 9 points10 points11 points 2 years ago (3 children) That's a hard problem to solve. I think many scientists are paid an appropriate amount. The best of them that are really geniuses doing groundbreaking work may be getting underpaid tho. but it's hard to determine appropriate pay for geniuses when their funding comes from stuff like grants. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]SingInDefeat 18 points19 points20 points 2 years ago (2 children) I think scientists on average are being ludicrously underpaid. That is, the value they provide society is many magnitudes greater than what they take. But the fruits of their work often take decades to be fully realized, and the ones paying the scientists are not the ones who benefit, so the market doesn't really work in this situation. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-][deleted] 2 years ago (1 child) [deleted] [-]SingInDefeat 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (0 children) Hence my (italicized!) 'on average' * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]Smallpaul -5 points-4 points-3 points 2 years ago (5 children) That's what engineers do. Not people gambling on the global craps table. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]DM_ME_YOUR_HUSBANDO 6 points7 points8 points 2 years ago (4 children) The global craps table is useful. It moves money to be invested into companies that will be most productive with that money. If Gamestop is dying and is likely to earn crap in future years, they should not get more investment money, because they won't do much useful with it. If Gamestop is being revitalized and is likely to earn big $ in future years, they should get investment money so they can renovate even more. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply load more comments (4 replies) [-]Smallpaul 0 points1 point2 points 2 years ago (7 children) The thing is that so much of this work is zero sum. One quant is shorting the stock. The other is long. The value provided to the world when one wins and the other loses is not anywhere near what if would have been if they had applied their attention to something non-zero creative. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]HarryPotter5777 6 points7 points8 points 2 years ago (6 children) But being a quant makes you positive money - if it were all zero-sum trades between people, then the expected return of working in quantitative trading would be zero. (And if you're a person making these trades, you don't want to trade with someone else "on your level", so to speak - on the outside view, you expect to lose half the time! So you should expect that most such people try to avoid these kinds of scenarios.) However, there is a question of how much of these trading profits come from taking your cut of a fixed-size pie (i.e. your money is just money that other traders would have counterfactually gotten instead), versus from genuinely improving the markets via offering greater liquidity / more accurate pricing / etc. There's also a factor where you make money by shrinking the pie available to finance as a whole, as with e.g. offering tighter spreads to customers in a given market. I don't have a great sense of what the actual split is between these sorts of factors (probably it varies a lot by the kind of quantitative trading done), but I think on the whole it's net good by a fair margin. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]Smallpaul 3 points4 points5 points 2 years ago (4 children) Does your calculation include the unrest generated by massive income disparity, the bloat in physician salaries caused by them trying to compete with finance people, the k-marts and toys-r-uses destroyed by financiers? * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]HarryPotter5777 8 points9 points10 points 2 years ago (2 children) No, of course not. The questions of "do marginal new people working in finance make capitalism slightly more efficient" and "is slightly more efficient capitalism a good thing" are distinct, and I was only addressing the former in my comment since that seemed to be the thing you were concerned about. But to address those three things: the unrest generated by massive income disparity Yeah, massive income/wealth disparities (especially in the US) are shitty on a number of levels, especially when the bottom of that distribution isn't enough to ensure basic material needs. I'm in favor of policy proposals that improve this situation, but I don't think that "prevent value-generating occupations from being incentivized by commensurate salaries" is one such. the bloat in physician salaries caused by them trying to compete with finance people I hadn't heard of this as a source of cost disease in medicine before! My intuitive impression is that the people aiming for medicine vs finance don't tend to overlap much beyond generic correlations with intelligence and college education, but I'd be interested in any sources you have on this. the k-marts and toys-r-uses destroyed by financiers Not sure I follow you here - I think of this kind of thing as due to Amazon, not quantitative finance people. Can you elaborate on the mechanism you're referring to? * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]Smallpaul 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (1 child) The questions of "do marginal new people working in finance make capitalism slightly more efficient" and "is slightly more efficient capitalism a good thing" It is mostly consensus that these people called the financial crash of 2008 with layers upon layers of complexity that nobody could understand. So I'm still extremely dubious about even the first point. It's amazing how quickly people have forgotten how INEFFICIENT and just-plain-stupid these people can be.. I'm in favor of policy proposals that improve this situation, but I don't think that "prevent value-generating occupations from being incentivized by commensurate salaries" is one such. Commensurate is a key word, I think. It is far easier to become a billionaire by trading stocks than by inventing a new anti-biotic. I wouldn't care as much about these people if their salary was commensurate to the value that they MAY provide (according to some analyses). the bloat in physician salaries caused by them trying to compete with finance people I hadn't heard of this as a source of cost disease in medicine before! My intuitive impression is that the people aiming for medicine vs finance don't tend to overlap much beyond generic correlations with intelligence and college education, but I'd be interested in any sources you have on this. Okay, I'll retract that one. I've heard it mostly anecdotally and in quotes like this (from Planet Money): "There are strong arguments that doctors aren't overpaid. They are highly skilled professionals who save lives and have the brains and work ethic to make lots of money in other sectors, like law or finance." But on the other hand, most sources agree that there are more people who want to become doctor than who can actually become doctors (given the medical school and residency bottlenecks) so that's probably the bigger contributor. Not sure I follow you here - I think of this kind of thing as due to Amazon, not quantitative finance people. Can you elaborate on the mechanism you're referring to? https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1c33fqdnhf21s/ Eddie-Lampert-Shattered-Sears-Sullied-His-Reputation-and-Lost-Billions-of-Dollars-Or-Did-He https://www.barrons.com/articles/ private-equity-firms-provide-20-million-in-assistance-for-former-toys-r-us-employees-1542737621 https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/1/6/21024740/ private-equity-taylor-swift-toys-r-us-elizabeth-warren "The controversy surrounding private equity is that whatever happens to the company acquired, private equity makes money anyway. Firms generally have a 2-20 fee structure, which means they get a 2 percent management fee from their investors and then a 20 percent performance fee on the money they make from their deals. Basically, if an investment goes well, they get 20 percent of that. But regardless of what happens, they get 2 percent of the money they're managing altogether, which is a lot. According to data from consultancy firm McKinsey, the global private equity industry's asset value has grown to nearly $6 trillion" * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply load more comments (1 reply) [-]Veqq 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (0 children) the bloat in physician salaries The vast majority of residencies are government funded through medicare. Private hospitals etc. almost never offer them. In order to practice medicine in the US, you need to have done a residency. Medical schools in the US and abroad educate a lot of people - but not all of them can get residencies. American medical associations lobby against increasing the number of residents. This makes increasing the number of medical school positions moot. This causes a shortage of doctors, driving their salaries up. https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/practices/ more-medical-students-than-ever-but-more-residency-slots-needed-to-solve-physician https://www.ucop.edu/federal-governmental-relations/_files/ fact-sheets/fgr-health-factsheet-gme-f1.pdf But for the first time since 1997, the government added more slots: https://www.sgu.edu/news-and-events/ new-residency-slots-approved-by-congress-what-it-means-for-medical-students / --------------------------------------------------------------------- Of course, physicians salaries only make up a small portion of overall bloat in the medical system. You'll have to look into the explosion of administrative positions paying 6 figures, the billing infrastructure with specific agents to fight with different insurance companies, stupid laws which e.g. state that only fax machines are "secure"... N.b. The affordable care act put a 5% profit limit on a large segment of the industry, but they simply swell up incomes and the like for insiders. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply load more comments (1 reply) [-]deltalessthanzero 17 points18 points19 points 2 years ago (0 children) See also the alt text on this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2101/ "I [suspect] that we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity. I suspect that the immense power of the computer is being harnessed to this 'paper economy', not to do the same transactions more economically but to balloon the quantity and variety of financial exchanges." --James Tobin, July 1984 * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]ratufa54 24 points25 points26 points 2 years ago* (12 children) I'm not sure I regard myself as a brilliant mind, but I've worked on variations of the problems above. And I think your analysis is too simplistic: 1. People under-appreciate the significance of making things marginally better at a very very large scale. Making a soda can use 1% less metal has a huge aggregate benefit to humanity. 2. I thought very seriously about pursuing a PHD in a quantitively intense subject. Two people who I worked with closely quit to do just that. What turned me off is not the money, though compensation is a factor, but the nature of academia. Most of academia does not reward groundbreaking research (or makes it very risky to pursue). Unless you think you have a shot of being a physicist on the level of Ed Witten you can often have more of an impact in the private sector. 3. Ultimately the competitors in zero sum games end up destroying each other. For example, HFT is no where near as profitable as it once was. Lots of firms have shut down or merged. Perversely, one of the best ways to reduce the resources allocated to zero sum games is to join them and help accelerate their demise. 4. You can't bring a knife to a gun fight. The optimal level of zero-sumness is something I struggle with a lot. But if you don't play the game (or work for an organization that does) others will. I'm not saying this is carte-blanche to do whatever you want. But helping the relatively less bad team win a zero sum game is often the only way to improve the equilibria. 5. The marginal effects are generally pretty small. If you take a job at a hedge fund, that means someone else won't get it. And so might stay in academia. Generally the person you displace isn't much less competent than you are. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]ChickenOfDoom 5 points6 points7 points 2 years ago (2 children) Making a soda can use 1% less metal has a huge aggregate benefit to humanity. If the result is that soda becomes more affordable and people consume more of it, the opposite is probably true because of the health impacts. I'd be at least as worried about intellectual potential being directed towards actively harmful facets of the economy as useless ones, especially because these are disproportionately represented in software careers. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]MarketsAreCool 9 points10 points11 points 2 years ago (1 child) You want to be careful to not be swallowed up by hard to answer consequentialist calculations IMO. Lots of things come in aluminum cans, and it's one of the easier materials to recycle so perhaps has fewer carbon emissions. Diet sodas are also pretty popular which don't have the same health impacts. Moreover, aluminum is one of the most common metals used in manufacturing. Looking at my desk right now, I see a water bottle, laptop, monitor, headset, phone, lamp all with aluminum components within reach of my hands. Cutting their material used for soda cans also means everything is subtly cheaper as well, so how do we factor that in? * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]ChickenOfDoom 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (0 children) I'll admit it would be very difficult to appropriately quantify it all, and when I say it's probably an overall bad thing, that is a biased guess on my part. But that's also the problem with what I'm disagreeing with. It isn't reasonable to just assume that a particular case of increased economic efficiency will be a net benefit to humanity. Are people's lives really made better, and not worse, with more and greater variety of aluminum products? How much of that change would actually filter into the rest of the metals market? Would it actually outweigh the suffering of an increase in dental problems and obesity? Maybe there's a fair case for that. But I don't see so much of a case for the sort of efficiency improvements that ultimately come from better manipulating human behavior, like increasing engagement with and use of social media and online marketplaces. There is much reason to think these make the world a worse place, not better, and they employ a significant proportion of smart people. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]ophiuroid 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (8 children) Your point 5 seems to be that "taking a job at a hedge fund" is only a small negative from a utilitarian perspective. While most on the subreddit are consequentialist, I want to explicitly point out that [I believe] it is wrong from a deontological perspective and so so very wrong from a virtue ethics perspective. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]ratufa54 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (0 children) I am a consequentialist, but that is a good point. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply load more comments (7 replies) [-]mylons 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (0 children) the best minds of our generation are optimizing ads * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]muchbravado 4 points5 points6 points 2 years ago (0 children) And that's productive compared to the brain waste of fine tuning pricing methods for securitized debt offerings and volatility arbitrage strategies and the like. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]elcheapo 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (0 children) Look at all the thoughtful responses in this thread, OP could argue the same for Reddit, yet he/she is here asking this question and "sapping" all this collective effort. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]deja-roo 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (0 children) Consider the brain drain of brilliant minds optimizing the checkout flow at Amazon, and Uber. Those things do contribute though. They save time and cost for billions of people continually. That's a continuous payoff. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]_SwanRonson__ 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (0 children) The best example is high frequency trading, which is a large draw for talent but is considered by many to be rent-seeking (on very small time scales they essentially arbitrage between randomness) * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]NCPokey 61 points62 points63 points 2 years ago (6 children) It's purely anecdotal, but it seems like there are weekly posts on the Kerbal Space Program subreddit from young aspiring engineers and physicists crediting the game with inspiring them down that path. I'm not sure why you're picking on gaming when the same argument could be made for just about any hobby that people spent time on. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]llIlIlIlIIlIlIlIlIlI 52 points53 points54 points 2 years ago (1 child) Also anecdotal, but ~100hrs of Factorio felt like it rewired my brain. Once you learn the how-to spot bottlenecks in a system, how to design for robustness vs speed, or how legacy systems impact future development it seems into the rest of your work. I work in software, though not as a developer, and it gave me a lot of appreciation for the tradeoffs that we have to make during development. For some, video games can give you a small hit of enjoyment from refining a system or solving problems. Eventually, you want to tackle problems in the real world, but have developed a bit of a knack for spotting areas for improvement. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-][deleted] 11 points12 points13 points 2 years ago (0 children) Yes here's a personal example of taking it to the real world. I randomly started playing a baseball game (super mega baseball 2) due to it being a free game on Xbox. After playing it for awhile I had a real desire to try baseball out. This sparked a passion in the sport which has given me countless hours of exercise and enjoyment * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]haas_n 12 points13 points14 points 2 years ago (2 children) Also anecdotal, but I credit numerous "programming-style" video games for setting me down the path of programming, as a kid. Of the many things one can criticize about video games, I don't think "sapping intellectual potential" is at all a concern I'd have. If anything, I think the main issue is that video games help cut off potential engineers from the rest of society, causing depression and (in extreme cases) suicide. That's the real intellectual damage here. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]eric2332 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (0 children) I know programmers who found their passion as teenagers by programming games for fun on simple computers or even graphing calculators... * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply load more comments (1 reply) [-]IngFavalli 9 points10 points11 points 2 years ago (0 children) I am finishing aerospatial engineering in college and that game got me in * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]PipFoweraker 80 points81 points82 points 2 years ago (10 children) The base rate of the waste of intellectual potential of humanity has always been extremely high. What makes us think that computer games have significantly changed that rate? If anything, they're more mentally engaging than passive entertainment like movies, so our grey matter is probably being kept in finer condition by playing complex games. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]MoronToTheKore 43 points44 points45 points 2 years ago (1 child) If you're going to stare at a screen, you can do worse than play video games. Especially ones that demand some amount of planning and forethought. Especially ones that may well wind up with you doing some math. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]retsibsi 11 points12 points13 points 2 years ago (7 children) I don't really have a position on the main question, but I think the OP is a bit more specific than you give it credit for. It's about a genre of games targeted directly at the kind of mind that could be capable of making progress in science and tech -- and potentially scratching the itch that might otherwise motivate deep thought and tinkering with real-world systems and concepts. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]PipFoweraker 4 points5 points6 points 2 years ago (4 children) I get that, but my point is that games are more engaging than passive activity like watching TV, so I feel like the OP question is kind of an isolated demand for intellectual rigor - 'if only the geniuses of our society weren't playing Factorio / listening to hip-hop / watching those Talking Pictures / reading newspapers / carving runes in animal bones etc etc then we'd be all living on the Moon by now' kind of argument. My overall position is the opportunity cost to society from having smart people be satisfied in their gaming is less than the opportunity cost of almost everything else. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]retsibsi 9 points10 points11 points 2 years ago (3 children) I sort of know what you mean but it still seems like we're talking across each other slightly. Maybe it just comes down to disagreement over what is being displaced. To me there's at least some plausibility to the claim that these games aren't simply filling time like other entertainment, but are actually (and uniquely) satisfying the specific drives that lead a certain type of smart person to do certain types of useful work. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]PipFoweraker 4 points5 points6 points 2 years ago (2 children) I see your point about displacement - and it's interesting to think about. I've thought for 5 minutes on it and still can't figure out a way we could conceivably measure the impact, and outside of weird quantum-involving time warpy situations I really can't see an experimental mechanism to get better data on it. This may well remain a ponderable but unsolvable question for a while longer :-) Edit - I would still say the requirement for evidence lies mostly with whoever's making the claim - seeing as there is a long history of people complaining about our 'best minds' being 'wasted' on the X of the day, and still, we've collectively made a lot of progress over the last few centuries. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]retsibsi 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (1 child) Yes, that seems fair to me! I think we could tell similarly-plausible stories where (in one case) the games displace more productive intellectual effort, and (in the other case) the games feed curiosity and help more people to discover/develop a passion and aptitude for that kind of thinking, which some go on to deploy in productive ways. (Plus a third story where the games are just entertainment, displacing other kinds of entertainment without any interesting flow-on effects.) Presumably both happen to some non-zero degree, and I think you're right that the ratio between them, and therefore the net impact, would be really hard to measure. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply load more comments (1 reply) [-]Epledryyk 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (0 children) targeted directly at the kind of mind that could be capable of making progress personally - maybe this is just my own mediocrity being projected - but I would question this part of OP's logic too. there's a venn diagram here of personality types, for sure, but as a long-time factorio player I guess it feels like we're giving it a bit too much credit for being some sort of intellectual game. I like making spreadsheets as much as the next nerd (even for games like stardew valley) but ultimately I'm not sure the time I spent in those games could have been used to save the world. I don't feel like I was withholding some sort of aspie talent from the wheels of progress. again, maybe this anecdote is more indicative of my own middling abilities more than some global average, but maybe also it means that nerds can like nerd games and not be substantially holding back humankind. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]Huellio 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (0 children) The opposite side of OP's coin would be to ask how many of those people didn't realize it was an itch they needed scratched? Kids who weren't or aren't challenged in school and end up finding a passion for programming after teaching themselves redstone, having a new understanding for orbital mechanics after spending time in kerbal space program, deciding on declaring an engineering major after refining lane balancers for various applications in Factorio, or realizing they have a knack for leadership and deciding to apply for management after herding cats in their MMO of choice. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]cstmorr 21 points22 points23 points 2 years ago (11 children) I think about this idea occasionally while gaming, usually as an extension of that famous Stephen Gould quote: I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. The difference, on the surface, would seem to be that those farmers and sweatshop workers had no choice, whereas those of us addicted to video games certainly do have a choice to do something better (using our gaming rigs for research and work instead of entertainment). The concept of choice and freedom is tricky, though. Is a genius who was brought up in a dysfunctional family and poor schooling, who plays games as a form of escape, someone you'd say has a choice to not game? I can't answer that or even begin to -- it's really complex and there are a million different variations on person and opportunity. I'm no genius, but I can certainly attest that I've lost a great many more productive hours to games than I had to, for strict reasons of relaxation or mental health. I can't even fully diagnose my own lost time; would I have accomplished more if I'd been properly educated, taught how to form good habits and stick to them, had the money to get counseling or diagnosis for potential issues like ADHD? I don't know; I can't even trust my own answer, because my ego is influencing that answer. What I will say is that the other comments here seem to dismiss the idea out of hand far too easily, and dodge it entirely by pointing out completely separate issues and potential wastes of time. The fact that people work in banking instead of theoretical research, or wasted time in the past, or have always enjoyed entertainment, is not particularly useful to studying this activity, which is new in many ways. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]cjt09 4 points5 points6 points 2 years ago (1 child) I kinda feel like part of this is that neither Factorio nor EVE Online are especially addictive. And even then, they model (and encourage the player to understand) complex dynamics which can be difficult to teach otherwise, so there's a clear value-proposition here. I suspect there are a lot more net-intellectual-hours wasted on slot machines and skinner boxes dressed up as video games. I think I'd look there first. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply load more comments (1 reply) [+]fuck_your_diploma comment score below threshold-12 points-11 points-10 points 2 years ago (8 children) Why would an Einstein dude work in a sweatshop? People can't even comprehend what being intelligent actually is and wanna conjecture about it. Nurture vs nature is real but intelligence as nature is quite distinct, people call it talent to make others feel better but some are natural apex predators at it, they kill it, these folks values could vary a lot but none would die in a farm unless they want it to. Agency and ambition are the motivators for environmental shifts toward better social economic status, nerds and those working on a sweatshop would sure have these if they were Einsteins * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]retsibsi 11 points12 points13 points 2 years ago (1 child) As others have pointed out, you seem to be massively underestimating how stifling an unfavourable environment can be. Even setting aside extremes like war and slavery and child abuse -- and ignoring the effects of things like disease or lead poisoning -- what if his family is simply very poor, and young Einstein spends all of what would have been his leisure/education time helping his family to earn its subsistence-level income? Einstein didn't magically intuit the solutions to hard physics problems. He first got a lengthy and extremely solid grounding in the subject (and its dependencies, like advanced mathematics and basic literacy; and other subjects that were arguably useful to him, like philosophy), via books and teachers. Beyond his formal education he benefited from conversations and correspondence with a network of other smart educated people. Even supposing the books alone would have been enough, books require money -- sometimes directly; always indirectly in the sense that one needs leisure time in which to study them -- and also the knowledge that they exist and are worth reading, as well as a route by which to access them. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]fuck_your_diploma -3 points-2 points-1 points 2 years ago (0 children) you seem to be massively underestimating I'm not. I even said nurture/nature. You people couldn't recon an intelligent person even if they were right there in front of you. Humans go above setbacks, intelligent people overcome setbacks. Books? Literacy? Teachers? All these things are inside a freaking smartphone today, an "Einstein" would know how to use this. You guys seem to think intelligence from the nurture perspective of the 80s. I'm talking about nature intelligence (the Einstein kind) in 2021, formal education is a BORE for these folks because they flight through it. You guys are talking about smart, educated people, I'm talking about intelligent people. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]cstmorr 19 points20 points21 points 2 years ago (4 children) Yeah, people should totally just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and nobody with talent has ever gotten stuck in a sweatshop job they started at the age of 10. ... err, do you know what a sweatshop is? * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply load more comments (4 replies) [-]jeff303 4 points5 points6 points 2 years ago (0 children) And if there was civil war or mass genocide happening around them? Or if they were born into slavery? Or abused by drug addicted parents? * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]666k_Sona 28 points29 points30 points 2 years ago* (0 children) I'm going to have to agree with a lot of the comments already. Firstly, I would imagine that computer games like Stellaris (a personal favourite of mine), Factorio, etc. are more likely to keep the curiosity that drives said people alive - and may be their only outlet in a world where many people have to take jobs that don't relate to their field of study or passion just to make ends meet. Secondly, I don't think there's any incompatibility between enjoying tinkering in a game, and doing the same in reality. I would be more surprised if the two weren't related than if they were. Relatedly, many people who enjoy such endeavours in a virtual world probably don't have the drive and/or aptitude (e.g. being too risk-averse) to try to create a new invention in reality. And while I doubt you could ever quantify it, I would argue that a world in which people have these creative outlets - even if they aren't able to channel it into something real - is better than one in which they don't. Thirdly, as has already been said, large corporations taking some of our brightest and best into their own pet projects with high salaries and massive benefits has almost certainly done more harm in this area than games ever could. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]StabbyPants 7 points8 points9 points 2 years ago (0 children) maybe a little bit, but let's be clear: we are here for our own purposes, not just as workers to the cause * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-][deleted] 8 points9 points10 points 2 years ago (0 children) I often wonder the opposite. 4x games, Factorio, KSP and similar I consider the Capsela of right now * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]IdiocyInActionI only know that I know nothing 27 points28 points29 points 2 years ago (1 child) I think in practice, not that much. I don't get the impression that the limiting variable of scientific progress is a lack of people currently. Also, maybe playing intellectually engaging games can also help - maybe you figure out a new way of optimally allocating resources while playing Factorio or you start learning new topics to optimize your play. Also, taken to it's logical conclusion, your argument implies that tinkerers should ideally do nothing but tinker - which, I think, would be counterproductive, actually. Most intellectual pursuits benefit from a little downtime once in a while. Maybe playing Factorio helps you unwind. Though I will say that I stopped playing Factorio for more or less this exact reason - I thought that I might as well start a little side project instead of making my factory more efficient. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]hey_look_its_shiny 6 points7 points8 points 2 years ago (0 children) Many of the largest paradigm shifts I've experienced in life came while playing video games. The real-time, quantified feedback that games provide was crucial in examining and correcting flawed ways of thinking about resources, time, optimization, and competition, in a way that may have taken decades longer to come to in a different context. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]-main 15 points16 points17 points 2 years ago* (0 children) I played a lot of EVE. Not a huge, life consuming amount, but I was putting in 3-6 hour sessions 3-5 times a week, for a year or two. I chose to quit because of basically what this post is about. I noticed that it was taking the exact same mental resources -- planning, budgeting, scheduling, coordination, risk assessment, logistics, and other executive function -- that I could use elsewhere in my life. Other games weren't consuming my ability to get my life in order. (And in particular, I had an extremely nice interaction with Planetside 2, in terms of what it did for me and how it fit into my life.) But I quit EVE after I was doing a bit better. First I got to a more stable place in life where I wasn't so dependant on escapism to function, then I quit EVE as part of an ongoing effort to improve my circumstances. And I think those skills grew because I was using them, and I was using them because it was fun and low stakes. If I forgot to purchase enough tech-2 microwarpdrives to fit out the frigates I was planning to go lose in lowsec, well, who cares? That's a goal I set for myself. I don't have to do it. I can go do another run to a trade hub, or pay marked up prices at a regional hub, or take other ships out instead, or rework my fit, or get it couriered, or strip another frigate so I can go out this session anyway, or just do something less combat focused tonight. There's no one else to blame and no real consequences for failure, except that I can't quite do spaceship pew pew as planned. It was a good environment to learn in. They only lure in people who don't care or don't mind that nothing in them is really connected to the rest of life. People who want something real, who want to have an impact, who don't want to just have their life go to escapist fantasies -- those people can and will quit to go do something real. So I wouldn't be too worried. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]jus10beare 6 points7 points8 points 2 years ago (0 children) Factorio improves your problem solving abilities. I've put around 100 hours in. I learned more about planning and approaching problems from Factorio then from any other leisure activity I can think of. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]Biaterbiaterbiater 6 points7 points8 points 2 years ago (0 children) Same with chess tho * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]zachol 10 points11 points12 points 2 years ago (0 children) The reason I enjoy Factorio and EVE is that they are tractable problems that can be solved by carefully looking at numbers and making spreadsheets, and then adjusting to deal with difficulties. The solutions are pretty clear, you can look up all the numbers, you can understand how things are going to pan out. If anything, these games are sucking up people who would otherwise be accountants or middle level managers. When Newton was massively reframing how to deal with, say, orbital mechanics, the kinds of people who would now play these games were still around, arranging insurance for merchant shipping or serving as a town bookkeeper to help during tax time or something. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]practical_romantic 4 points5 points6 points 2 years ago* (1 child) This is a good question. Big bang theory is a show i hate personally since it gets both research nerds and pop culture geeks (i was a geek for a long time before becoming a nerd lol) wrong but a thing that i noticed in that show was that the smart people in that show spent the majority of their time doing things that are distractive. Earlier people did not have the same tools of entertainment. Compare the past 30 years with the previous 300 or 400 years and it is easy to say that we have had a large explosion in terms of the sheer number and quality of immersive tools of entertainment. Video games, Movies, Social Media, sports (to an extent. I remember spending my days in cram schools thinking about MMA cards and how many fights i got right), and so on are things that produce quick dopamine rushes and have a wide variety. From slow burn video games based on thinking hard like XCOM or Starcraft to ones that are shallow like candy crush, people do not have the same incentives to do hard things in life. Math takes hours before you solve a problem and years to get to the point where you actually go into research and do stuff that is actually unknown. These distractions provided me with comfort and it got to a point where they permanently changed the way my mind worked for the worse. I could sit longer and churn out answers as a 12 year old than as a 20 year old. Karl Marx said something about religion and how it acts like an opium for the masses and this is pretty true for modern society. Also Newton became the immortal that he is after entering university. Had he entered a university today where the distractions are infinitely more appealing and so readily available, it would be hard to say that he would have done the same work he did. He did quite a bit of work in an actual pandemic and it was perhaps easier since he actually had nothing else to do. Now i for one will never question his greatness but my point here is that modernity with it's comforts and distractions has probably already wrecked a lot of people because of these distractions. Why sit still and think about graph theory u/practical_romantic when you can mindlessly surf the internet, why solve problems that cause you pain and make you happy once you solve them when you can just use your phone and not feel any pain at all. We all make such Faustian bargains where we prefer short term pleasure over long term pleasure. You quite obviously do not find math or programming or physics or philosophy boring once you get accustomed to it but most people would just quit before they even begin or not take it to the extreme. These are my views as someone with severe ADHD. I understand that great researchers still exist but i am quite sure that many spend their being on leisurely activities and i cannot fault them for it since i am still like that (trying my hardest to change). Also i do not think that scientific stagnation is purely because of having solved the easy questions already and this comment is an elaboration of my hypothesis that modernity with it's hedonistic outlets is somewhat responsible. I frankly am done with such activities and suggest that people who read my comment (and are interested in research) go out and perform research if they can as nothing beats the satisfaction of solving problems for me. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply load more comments (1 reply) [-]IngFavalli 4 points5 points6 points 2 years ago (0 children) Almost all scientific and engineering progress started out due to war efforts, maybe we should have more wars to maximize cientific output * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]deltalessthanzero 4 points5 points6 points 2 years ago (0 children) I was quite invested in Factorio for a while. I've now got a full time job as a software engineer, and no longer feel any desire to play the game. I suspect that this is because the same positive emotions I get from Factorio are better generated by the productive work I do instead. Just my 2 cents, and I wouldn't be surprised if other people felt differently (although 2 of my friends are software engineers as well and report the same feelings). * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]ratufa54 3 points4 points5 points 2 years ago (0 children) I'm not sure I 100% agree. But, I know people who failed out of college because of excessive video games. And there must have been countless cases of wasted talent below the threshold for what would be considered pathological. It's a real problem. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]Gentleman-Tech 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (0 children) I know a Venture Capitalist who hates all video games with a passion, because he's lost so much money investing in companies where the devs spent time gaming instead of writing code. He considers these two things equivalent - they draw from the same pool of focused creativity. I'm not sure he's wrong. I'm a dev, and a gamer, and I worry I'm spending my creative focus on Factorio. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]Schnevets 3 points4 points5 points 2 years ago* (0 children) Newton's modern equivalent is playing Stellaris after a drab, sterile workday where his colleagues complain about him not being a "team player" and his manager can't understand why he spent 3 hours focused on DFCT00102331 when STRY00101556 and STRY00101561 are overdue. Gaming is culture, and culture can lead to big ideas. Meanwhile, intellectual work has metastasized into collective thinking. That corporate mentality may be better for stability and incremental improvements, but is not conducive to cultivating "Big Thinkers". * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]ezoe 4 points5 points6 points 2 years ago (0 children) By your logic, we should also abolish LEGO, bread board, clay, or any tools that allows to make art. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]gurenkagurenda 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (0 children) I don't think the bottleneck for most obsessive tinkerer types is hours in the day, but tolerance for frustration and boredom, and more broadly, the exhaustible resources of executive function. Games like those are designed to expend those resources sustainably, and they attract players for whom that design is successful. I know that for my own part, I go through cycles where I my executive function resources match onto different tasks. Sometimes it will be a particular type of game or puzzle, sometimes music, sometimes coding, writing, etc, and I've learned that I'm happiest (and have the most creative output overall) if I nudge myself only toward what my current state fits with, and refuse to feel guilty that I'm not "making the most" of my intellectual resources. Otherwise, I just burn myself out, and I'll just spend all of my time zoning out to reddit and youtube. People can certainly get into addictive spirals with any leisure activity, but I think it's a mistake to assume that the hours spent on optimization-themed games are fungible with hours spent on more productive pursuits. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]NeverSawAvatar 16 points17 points18 points 2 years ago (3 children) That's like saying 'i wonder how much weaker we are as a species because of weightlifting?' * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]kingdomoffends 7 points8 points9 points 2 years ago (2 children) More like "how many less feats of natural strength have we created because of bodybuilding"; i can't think of anything notable, but the base question at least implies the target behavior was sapped of resources by the activity. I don't think playing games uses the same resources tinkering does, but I can see how the worry could come up. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]NeverSawAvatar 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (1 child) I think playing games strengthens and focuses parts of the brain that we can use for more complex tasks. I played a lot of jrpgs as a kid, and imho it taught me many the optimization techniques I rely on as an engineer today. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]kingdomoffends 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (0 children) Exactly - it might be development we already would have attained, but the variety offered by entertainment gaming offers cognitive growth even when designers and players aren't optimizing for it. That said, I do think jrpgs and mmo's do entail some amount of drain, that could someday be measured in labor outcomes. For each economics specialist who found their passion in game economies, there are ten players who learned the same lessons but didn't value the real-world application. We call them refuseniks, delinquents, neets,and more, and they push our carts or cook our food. There will be a day when we can face this inefficiency as a problem, but I think we aren't there yet and I don't know when we will be. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]wrexinite 11 points12 points13 points 2 years ago (8 children) A lot of the low hanging fruit on the tree of knowledge has already been picked. You're not going to see a ton of breakthroughs from people tinkering around with devices, testing chemical interactions, etc. as you would back in the day. I doubt these games are sapping much human potential at all. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]NeverSawAvatar 9 points10 points11 points 2 years ago (4 children) Gotta completely disagree with you here, in an intellectually demanding field and you find that it's never about low-hanging fruit, it's that we all grow taller. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]SnapcasterWizard 5 points6 points7 points 2 years ago (3 children) Nice platitude, but what does it actually mean? * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]MohKohn 6 points7 points8 points 2 years ago (0 children) The vast majority of discoveries are easy to understand but nearly impossible to discover, but each new discovery adds a bunch of new possibilities to build off of it or combine with previously known results, either in the same field or others. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]NeverSawAvatar 4 points5 points6 points 2 years ago (0 children) As we get used to thinking in new ways, even more ways of thinking open themselves to us and become easier to comprehend. Modern computers would be just this side of inconceivable to someone from the 30s, especially the semiconductor side, but I design them like 7nm is old news and I can assume I can scale below 5uv without having to worry about it. If you knew the magic in semiconductors, and we take it so completely for granted, even as we're finding ways to scale beyond the 'low-hanging fruit' as parent called it (low-hanging fruit actually meant lazy moron programmers in the past). We grow as we immerse ourselves, that's why contentment is so dangerous. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]percyhiggenbottom 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (0 children) Seems to be saying science is not a zero-sum game * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]Possible-Summer-8508 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (1 child) I'd be interested in reading some of the stuff that led you to this conclusion. I've had similar thoughts myself but never taken the time to probe it. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]SubstantialRange 5 points6 points7 points 2 years ago (0 children) Not sure if I agree with OP's assertion, but it's notable that most modern papers announcing major scientific breakthroughts usually have a dozen+ names attached from several institutions. It seems to apply for everything from biology, to astrophysics, to machine learning. Lone-wolf breakthroughs seem very much a rarity these days. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-]iiioiia 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (0 children) In the purely materialistic world perhaps, but we've got all sorts of unsolved problems in politics, economics, social issues, etc. * permalink * embed * save * parent * report * reply [-][deleted] 2 years ago (2 children) [deleted] load more comments (2 replies) [-]skybrian2 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (0 children) While I think you're right that it's very likely that many, many people could be putting their time to better uses, it's one thing to say that and quite another to figure out specifically what they could be doing instead. It's sort of like saying that more money could be donated to charities without saying anything about which charities are best. As advocacy, it's pretty weak sauce compared to the case made by GiveWell. Also, matching people with projects is considerably harder than figuring out where to send money, because people are all different. Do you have some specific project that you believe needs help? If so, perhaps you could make the case for why it's important to find the right people to volunteer to work on it. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-][deleted] 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (0 children) I think the bigger problem here is the stock market that lures away physics PhDs to make stock algorithms * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]callmesalticidae 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (0 children) I used to wonder about this with regard to fiction writing, but it turns out that Tolkien would spend his time playing solitaire rather than work on the Silmarillion, so I think we writerly types will find ways to procrastinate no matter what. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]bbqturtle 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (0 children) One thing I don't see mentioned is makers movements. Specifically, the marble machine X project. Marble Machine was a viral youtube music video using the marble machine. Since that went as a hit, the creator has been working with ~4000 think tank patrons to help design the next one. He presents an engineering challenge to the group, and they all bounce ideas around and find a solution. it's incredible to be working on a side project. It's so fun. It's addictive. Then you see the results quickly in the prototype machine. If you like learning engineering, participating and feeling your brain stretch in practical application is amazing. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]sktrdie 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (1 child) I understand the point of the post but what is "intellectual potential" really? Even if we're discussing helping humanity as a whole, what does "helping" mean? Maybe we want to make society better, say by helping everyone involved to live the best lives they could possibly live, but this is also a quite vague and subjective concept. What I'm trying to say is that a fulfilling life is something that changes per individual. Perhaps a less-scientific and more art-driven society is preferable and would result in a much more enjoyable life for specific individuals. Others might prefer the complete opposite. For instance I want to go to the stars and conquer different worlds because I feel that a life worth living means exploring the unknown. But I also understand that using our resources to reach for the stars might also exploit some other parts of society in a negative way. So who's to say that playing a video game that fulfils your needs is less valuable than doing anything else? Life is beautiful because it's diverse. Let the billions of variables coalesce and generate an existence that fulfils the needs of the people that live it. Sure you can push the needle in a specific direction (like scientific research) but the variables are so many and the individuals so diverse that it's hard to contemplate a formula that would work at scale for everyone. Instead of concentrating on the intellectual potential I would argue that "diversity" is a much more important variable. Life thrives in diverse conditions - we see this in how important biodiversity is for ecosystems (like plants). I think the same concept also applies for intellect. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply load more comments (1 reply) [-]ha1zum 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (0 children) My most intellectual friends are also the most hardcore ones when it comes to gaming and they are doing great in their career. If they use their time and energy that they spend on games for meaningful work, I think they will get burnt out instead of contributing 2x amount of value. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]DysonSphere75 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (0 children) Sounds like you might feel that you would accomplish more without playing video games. I personally find video games offer me stimulation that I cannot otherwise experience or find at my current stage of life. Not to mention, when I go from playing one game to another: Let's say I go from ArmA to Tarkov to Counter-Strike. I find that my tactical and time-critical decision making is heightened. Needless to say, I would much rather not have live cartridges fired at me. Even the ability to pick up and fully learn new games while retaining knowledge of prior ones has been a great assistance in my Computer Science degree. As around 60% of the degree is looking up and retaining or referring to libraries and APIs that are googled or otherwise similarly retrieved. The ability to look at code you didn't write, and understand most of what it's doing (or understand what it is not doing that it should) is paramount to debugging in a team environment. So I would say games good TV bad Unless of course you have no social interaction for a year and feel unhinged and un-grounded from humanity, then maybe TV is a good idea for recalling what society (is) like/likes. To more adequately ponder your question, imagine the case of a young child who plays minecraft and builds wonderous monuments. Then realizes it's all on a grid, then decides to figure out how to programmatically design in Minecraft, then realizes principles, ratios, and design elements of architecture before they can even shit on their own. If they go into Architecture, I would imagine they are better suited to be Architecture's Newton equivalent. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]ProphetOfTime 3 points4 points5 points 2 years ago (0 children) Do sand mandalas also sap the intellectual potential of humanity? * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-][deleted] 2 points3 points4 points 2 years ago (0 children) the demographic you are asking this question to are probably really into games. not surprisingly the overwhelming response to your question are "nah, it's fine." remind me of this oldie but goodie: https://i.imgur.com/Iw1qK5U.jpg * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]Aeroncastle 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (0 children) If you are talking about time, the productive time a human has is not the whole day, you should not count free time at home as something that anyone owns to society. And if you are talking about inteligence, the more you use it the more you have it * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]Lotusw0w 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (0 children) Based on this logic, can I just say "why would people play chess when instead they can just do engineering?" * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]_skndlous 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (0 children) Playing EVE Online taught me quite a few skills applicable to real life, both hard and soft. I'm not sure playing is a waste of time, militaries have been playing wargames for ages with good results... * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]GFrings 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (0 children) I think the premise that these players would otherwise be spending their time on something more productive is problematic. Nobody can work all the time, it drains you psychologically and physically. Video games help people unwind in the same way that watching tv, engaging in social encounters, or a myriad of other things that dont move the needle of human progress do. There is nothing wrong with that, everyone needs a break in the form of a no-pressure escape from their responsibilities. In the long run, these breaks help you achieve higher productivity. At least while playing (most) video games, your brain is still active (relative to other forms of unwinding) and you are reaping a benefit that could assist you when it's time to get back to work. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]jack-bloggs 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago* (0 children) Does LEGO drain intellectual capacity away from architecture? I think it's a case of abstraction and meta-learning. Civil Engineering students practice building bridges etc in idealised toy environments. But they rarely push the boundaries and create anything unanticipated. While these games won't teach 'real' physics or economics, they do teach, or encourage, how to create, discover, and push the boundaries of a constrained enviroment. In many ways, that meta-skill is far more valuable. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]mbravorus 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (0 children) Your approach presupposes that intellectual achievement is a zero-sum game, which it isn't. Humans *need* ways to channel their energies in diverse ways. Not only to disconnect, or find [social] interactions that they don't find in their other activities, but also to branch out and energize and train and expand their capabilities in new ways; perhaps even find ones they didn't know they have. There's endless variety of hobbies, from matchbox collecting to Gundam model building and other extremely otaku things ; many of those, even when they look trivial from the outside, require immense amounts of time and knowledge and effort. Video games are not different from any of those. And yes, casinos and card and dice games have existed for way longer, and have similar addictive properties if left unchecked. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]remind_me_later 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (0 children) In a semi-formal attempt to dismantle the argument: Let the statement be generalised to "How much is X sapping away the intellectual potential of humanity?". Which itself can be generalised and binarised to "Does X reduce the intellectual potential of humanity?", where X is any form of media that requires cognitive load to be entertaining. Given the existing media before video games (chess, sudoku, shogi, go, etc.) have not been shown to do such a thing, and given that such video games require about the same cognitive load, it can be concluded that the answer to that statement is 'no'. Translating the binary answer back in order to answer the original question, such games have little to no effect in terms of "sapping away the intellectual potential of humanity". * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]the_custom_concern 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago* (0 children) Okay, a bit of a selfish tangent. Recognition of this exact opportunity cost was a major driver in realizing my video game hobby had turned into an unhealthy compulsive behavior. I was juggling my PhD research with an MMORPG. The MMO became a way to escape the responsibilities of my dissertation and I couldn't play without experiencing massive cognitive dissonance realizing how much time I was wasting in a "closed system". Of course not everyone experiences this. For some it is wholly positive and they can take their skills and apply it productively in the world. But for me, what once was fun became shameful, and there's really no healthy way out of that. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]BaronVSS 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (0 children) I would say that an otherwise intelligent person who ends up pissing away their potential on video games has that as a symptom of their fate, not a cause. Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like without computers, and I think I would have just gravitated to the next solitary hobby that was available to me. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]GlabrousKinfaddle 4 points5 points6 points 2 years ago (0 children) I would guess that the decline of thinking about religion, also unproductive, does a lot to even it out. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]Charlie___ 1 point2 points3 points 2 years ago (0 children) I think one facet is that spots for researchers and inventors in a field grows sublinearly with population size (because people have to form a network, and adding a person imposes costs on the networking systems), and the number of available fields has grown, but mostly in smaller niches, such that education has outpaced opportunity. This means that if hardcore gamers became hardcore researchers, it wouldn't really expand the workforce, it would just give it better choices to select from. Which is still a thing! But maybe less of a thing than at any previous time in history. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]PolymorphicWetware 0 points1 point2 points 2 years ago (0 children) I don't have too much to add (that other people haven't already said) beyond pointing out there's a relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1414/ ( Writing Skills). * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]EndTimesRadio 0 points1 point2 points 2 years ago (0 children) Accelerationist's counterargument: Is the current state of society worth propping up, or can we let it collapse faster? * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]tehbeard 0 points1 point2 points 2 years ago (0 children) $entertainment_of_current_generation is destroying/killing/slowing $thing, cries $previous_generation. More news at 11. A trite remark for sure, but others have put my wider thoughts down much more succinctly. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]SlowMovingTarget 0 points1 point2 points 2 years ago (0 children) People should not write, it dulls the mind and reduces the human capacity for carrying on the oral tradition. How are people to engage in proper reasoning through debate if they spend their time reading and writing? Plato made this argument thousands of years ago. We've heard it in every generation. Radio! Comic books! TV! Now computer games. Maybe there just aren't any Newtons bopping around, this pandemic. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply [-]TheAceOfHearts -1 points0 points1 point 2 years ago (0 children) A lot less than Minecraft. * permalink * embed * save * report * reply load more comments (9 replies) * about * blog * about * advertising * careers * help * site rules * Reddit help center * reddiquette * mod guidelines * contact us * apps & tools * Reddit for iPhone * Reddit for Android * mobile website * <3 * reddit premium Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy. (c) 2023 reddit inc. All rights reserved. REDDIT and the ALIEN Logo are registered trademarks of reddit inc. [pixel] p Rendered by PID 17 on reddit-service-r2-loggedout-69f7c8b6c9-csvn8 at 2023-09-26 23:02:23.806603+00:00 running 16d0dcd country code: US.