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gwern comments on SotW: Check Consequentialism - Less Wrong
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Really? I sure haven't noticed this. If anything from my own circle of acquaintances it looks like those who got better at life were the ones who stopped putting so much of their time and attention into card games.
Roughly, there's two populations - those who apply what they learned in magic (microeconomics, essentially) to life and those that don't. The latter tend to spend way to much time on card games. The former start saying things like "this event is pretty low EV for me, i think I better study/write that paper/work on that project/etc. instead."
In any case, as people get better at Magic, they get better at thinking about the consequences of their actions within the game. This seems like a natural stepping stone to thinking about consequences in all situations, though the trick is getting people to generalize it.
How would one distinguish between the scenario in which they begin to apply Magic-like thinking to their regular life and begin optimizing there, and the scenario in which ordinary diminishing marginal returns to playing Magic causes them to switch to the other activities?
If they're actually optimizing, you should be able to see the results, though measuring them is another problem in itself.