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ChristianKl comments on The social value of high school extracurricular time - Less Wrong
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I'm not certain that sport and drama provide bad extracurricular time. Physical activity is a good to be healthy and also to be mentally productive. Drama provides stage time which might be useful for social abilities like giving speeches.
The things that really provided bad return on investment are watching TV and playing computer games. Getting someone from playing computer games to computer programming is a massive shift.
I made a move from playing Warcraft 3 to playing Go because at the time I had the idea that Go is sort of more productive. Today I don't play go anymore but replaced it with dancing Salsa with provides much better returns.
When it comes to sports moving from tracks and fields to a martial art provides more value. The martial arts teaches confidence that's useful in social interaction.
Not sure about TV, but there's evidence that at least some games can have significant positive cognitive effects - most of the research is on FPSes IIRC. Still, programming is probably better for one's career prospects.
'significant' as in 'our small underpowered experiments with bad controls had a particular test of a metric reach p<0.05' - or 'significant' as in 'passes a cost-benefit test'?
I strongly believe the former, strongly disbelieve the latter, and would even more strongly disbelieve a variant on the latter like '...cost-benefit test for college admission'.
(This sort of problem is a reason I have banned the pattern ' significan*' from my own writings with a lint script; if I mean the useless meaning, then I will write 'statistically-significant', and if I mean the useful meaning, then I will write 'large' or 'substantial' or 'important' or some more informative word like that.)
Given the very large variety of games and diversity of benefits, that position seems overly general.
There is also (as in diet studies) the "replacing what?" issue.
I don't think so. I have been deeply unimpressed by the potential practical benefits of the video-game psych literature. They share all the weaknesses of, say, the n-back studies, without even the hope of improving useful things like WM or fluid intelligence.
I am also fairly skeptical that video games substitute perfectly for, say, TV rather than reading or other more potentially useful forms of leisure, much less for periods of real effort. That would be awfully convenient, and doesn't tally with my own experience growing up where video games seemed to drain effort & productive time (even excluding extreme instances I've seen, like dropping out due to too much gaming).
I didn't read and don't really care about video-game psych studies. My impression is based on the observation that playing -- in general -- is a highly useful, probably indispensable, part of growing up. And it's not obvious to me that the mediation of a computer screen kills all the usefulness of play.
For an example, consider something like throwing a ten-year-old into an open gaming world (even if single-player, e.g. Skyrim). I have a pronounced impression that his intellectual facilities will get excellent exercise out of figuring how things work and what one can do with them. That's not something easily measurable and not something you'd ever find in a psych study -- but that doesn't mean the effect does not exit.
I don't know about perfection but many (non-obsessive) people game as relaxation, when they're tired and not in the mood for real effort. In many cases the computer game is replacing TV time. I have a strong opinion that playing computer games is better than watching TV (subject to the usual YMMV, of course).
I'm skeptical that typical fiction reading (ie easy popular stuff) is more beneficial than typical game-playing, except for the specific purpose of improving reading comprehension and speed (which are of course important things).
On a side note I'm also increasingly weary (and wary) of the notion that 8 hours of work isn't enough and that we need to be striving for "productivity" in our free time as well.
Fiction has direct use for college applications and elsewhere: allusions, writing your own, doing better in literature courses, signaling intelligence etc.
Video games, on the other hand, offer no such benefits and signal 'I'm a loser'.
Some fiction signals pretty much the same, though I can't think any better example of that in English than Dan Brown's novels.
It's true that reading is important to learning to write better. Signalling benefits on the other hand are very context-dependent, and I'm more interested in more inherent properties. At any rate, both activities are likely to have diminishing returns and some mix is probably ideal.
Also I'd say merely playing games at all, as opposed to being as hardcore WoW player or something, only has mild negative connotations at worst these days, especially among younger people. In terms of social status, I'd bet that a 16 year old who spent all their time playing CoD online would have higher status among their peers than one who spent all their time reading Twilight, all else being equal.
You seem to really have a grudge against games?
edit: And to clarify, it's probably true that on the margin a lot of kids spend too much time playing games compared to homework or other activities.
This is a college admissions article. If you're 'interested in more inherent properties', you're in the wrong place.
Do their peers work at Harvard?
I think people are desperately trying to justify their favorite recreation as beneficial, and this desperation starts with the citation of the brain-training literature and continues down the thread.
Well, I forgot what the OP was even about, this was more of a side-note. But I did play lots of videogames as a teen and still scored high enough to go to the (equal) best university in the country with a scholarship. (This is in Australia though and we don't have anything quite comparable to Harvard I guess.) And I suspect that making custom maps in Starcraft was a major reason why I took relatively naturally to programming when first exposed to it in university when even some of my otherwise-smarter peers struggled.
I'm pretty certain play I personally play more games than is optimal (for most purposes), but I'm also pretty sure that playing games can be beneficial and that if someone doesn't play any at all they might benefit from doing so.
I'd guess it also depends on their gender.
This. Especially if you're in your teens.
I meant relatively large, not statistically significant. However the studies I read also didn't look that great in terms of size/reliability*. I do think it's a worthy avenue for future research and it seems to me that in principle it's possible for games to be more effective for some kinds of cognitive abilities than classroom learning for example.
* A while back I looked up a bunch with the idea of writing up a post on the results, but gave up because I wasn't clearly convinced.
My understanding is that various games can provide benefits such as ability to find relevant things in clutter, and reaction time, and decreasing the loss of mental function in the elderly. Other games could provide other benefits. However, if you consider that computer games could easily eat up all your free time plus some of your sleep, socialization, and homework time, and that alternate activities also have non-obvious benefits, this seems merely like a feel-good excuse. It's probably not as bad as watching certain television shows though.
Yes, these are good points, and the framing of my post wasn't quite right - I didn't mean "these activities aren't good uses of time, but students plausibly wouldn't be willing to shift toward more socially valuable ones" but rather "regardless of what the social value of these activities is, students plausibly wouldn't be willing to shift them."
Thanks for the other comments.
The New Games movement was popular in the 1970s and early 1980s which sought to replace competitive sports with cooperative ones, and spectator sports with participatory ones. Stewart Brand created one of the first such games in the late 1960s, ironically called “Slaughter”, which involved two groups of people trying to push a large ball over the other side’s line in a sort of inverted tug-of-war, but with some on the winning side encouraged to switch to the losing side whenever it seemed like the ball was moving too far in one direction; this would supposedly teach cooperation over competition, and ensure a game in which there was heavy physical exertion but no winners or losers. The large ball was painted like the planet Earth. Brand’s motivation as described in the first New Games Book had a more obvious connection to the opposition to the Vietnam War, as a game like Slaughter would allow people to get in touch with their warlike impulses and get them out of their system while turning the tables on the nationalistic implications of conventional team sports by encouraging people to switch sides to make sure neither side could push the Earth over the edge. He also felt the peace movement was unhealthily out of touch with intense physical activity and needed some sports of their own.
I played a cooperative game in high school that I hadn't come across till then. It's much easier to recognise the game theoretic benefits in-game than readind Alice in Wonderland is hermeneutically interpreting lines like ''Everybody has won, and all must have prizes!" or picking up an economics textbook.