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Viliam_Bur comments on A Gamification Of Education: a modest proposal based on the Universal Decimal Classification and RPG skill trees - Less Wrong
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Comments (80)
Well thank goodness I'm on a holiday and can actually afford to read all that. Nevertheless, such a violent flipflop of opinions would make me dangerously closer to epistemic learned helplessness, i.e. giving up on learning new stuff because of not feeling confident that I can tell good arguments from bad ones when they come from experts after getting burned one time too many.
That is a dangerous state for a rationalist to be in. so would you please be a dear and have a look at that book to figure out how precisely it junk-scienced me and the rest of its readers? It would really help me out and I'd really be grateful for that.
Also, I have a vested interest in believing in the "only deliberate practice matters" thesis. I used to feel having a high IQ obliged me to get excellent results with little effort, and every time that didn't happen I felt disappointed in myself and that I didn't live up to some weird standard. Nowadays I only believe in working as hard as possible for as long as possible, and it serves me much better.
Imagine a world where 50% of your results are genetically determined and 50% of your results are hard work. What would be the best strategy for success in that world, assuming that you already have decent genes? It would be working hard. Not working 50% hard, but working 100% hard.
Seems like you found the right strategy for the wrong reasons. You can keep the strategy; you don't have to blindly reverse your decisions.
I dunno, at a certain point the marginal utility of one unit of hard work will be less than the marginal utility of one unit of leisure, and it's well possible that the point at which that happens depends on how genetically good you are.
You should work 100% hard on whatever you're working on when you're working on, but there might still be cases where you should think about the nature/nurture ratio to get the best outcome.
If outcomes are all about hard work, doggedly aiming for a rare high-reward position that requires a large amount of skill, like a quantitative analyst on Wall Street or a professional athlete, can be a good high risk / high reward strategy. But the more you know outcomes to be affected by genetic talent, the faster you'd want to recognize that some goals are beyond you and direct your 100% effort elsewhere if you find your genetic talent lacking, because then the people who also put in 100% effort but have more genetic talent than you will take all the positions no matter how much effort you put in.