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ChristianKl comments on Games for Rationalists - Less Wrong
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Don't look at the number of concepts that are taught but how well the concepts are taught.
This might be about the same bias that came up when you said that a lot of hours of playing pokemon are about trademarks. The world just doesn't work that way. Multiple things happen at the same time.
For most practical issues the intuition is much more valuable than having a mental concept.
Calling for repeatability in a game means basically that you don't want that players that are in the game use their specific knowledge that they gathered outside of the game to teach that knowledge to other players.
I don't think that's a worthwhile goal. Especially when it comes to social games. I don't think that the benefit of enabling better use of the scientific method is worth that trade off.
That is correct in general and for most games. But my main point was exactly that you also should teach the concepts - at least if you want to advance rationality. So here and for this goal it is more valuable.
The tradeoff with what? With supporting socializing? Again that is not the focus of this post.
Take the problem of doctors interpreting medical results. Who's more rational:
1) A doctor who doesn't know what the context of Bayes rule means but who has an intuition that allows him to be right about the probabilities of a treatment working with a given patient.
2) A doctor who can tell you what Bayes rule is and write down the numbers but who doesn't have the right intuition to be right about the probability when it comes to estamating which treatment works for a patient.
In the sense in which rationality is defined here, rationality is about picking winning strategies. Doctor 1) wins. He's the rational guy.
If I play Werewolf and someone else engages into bodylanguage that makes me conclude he's a Werewolf, I have to explain to my fellow players why that bodylanguage indicates that he's lying.
This means that I bring information about reading bodylanguage into the Werewolf game that I learned outside of it. As a result you lose repeatability.
Playing the game with different players has a different effect.
Ah. OK. Now I see your point clearly. You mean the 'high level' rationality in focus on LW. I agree that that is indeed not trained explicitly by the games I have in mind.
But then the question is: Are there games that address that kind of hight level rationality? Or does any game or rather a suitably high number of games or the extreme immersion in the game qualify?
It seems that my reference to rationality in the LW sense taken literally makes your argument justified.
Would you agree that the following goal would better match the game objectives I have described?:
"Games that train specific concepts helpful in understanding and reasoning about cognition, complex human behavior and strategies to aquired even more compelx concepts."
I'd take it that you'd prefer a Doctor who can do 1) and 2) to one that does only 1). And that is what I have in mind.