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Gunnar_Zarncke comments on Games for Rationalists - Less Wrong
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I know. I self-committed to posting the article in Main yesterday but it out-grew a manageable size. I have extracted unneccessary and somewhat unresolved sidetracks esp. those on biases. I will post those parts later when they are ready.
Wait, why is this down-voted?
It is downvoted because
And then it is not downvoted that bad. It got 8 up and two down.
I agree with it being moved to Discussions. I should have taken more time with this one. Or else built up to it with more general posts about rational games.
What I think I did right was:
You seemed to have integrated a lot of links into the post. On the other hand as far as I see you didn't link to empirically validated claims.
Look at a statement like "Classical games with dice or shuffled cards surely build some intuition for probability theory which is present in most games in so far as some most games need some controlled random variables".
As a reader I don't really know what to do with the statements. On the one hand sounds reasonable. But it doesn't tell me anything that I didn't know beforehand.
On the other hand I don't really know whether there are significant effect sizes for the effect you are talking about.
I do have quite a few references about games and teaching concepts - but all of these address games in parenting, computer games, motor skills and literacy/numeracy. None of these are applicable here.
At best these would apply:
Quote from the study: “Providing children from low-income backgrounds with an hour of experience playing board games with consecutively numbered, linearly arranged, equal-size squares improved their knowledge of numerical magnitudes to the point where it was indistinguishable from that of children from uppermiddle-income backgrounds who did not play the games. Playing otherwise identical non-numerical board games did not have this effect.”
This supports the claim that games with clear concepts can quickly convey these concepts (albeit possibly only very simple concepts).
Deals with “the importance of home experiences in children’s acquisition of mathematics”. This supports the claim that concepts present in games significantly improve acquisition of complex concepts (albeit again simple ones).
I wanted to draw the connection between the fact that probabilty theory is neccessary to explain those games theoretically (the "controlled random variable" part) and the ability to actually infer this in a game (the "intuition" part), But rereading it I agree that it comes across as either trivial or meaningless.