Any new education method will show increases in student test scores if people believe it results in increases in student test scores, because only interested parents will sign up for that method.

For example, Freakonomics tells the story of high school students in Chicago who participated in a lottery for the chance to switch schools. The students who were reassigned to new schools were more likely to graduate; but the students who applied for the lottery but lost did just as well. The explanation given is that the students (or parents) who care about education will attempt to switch to a better school, but the "better" school won't confer an advantage.

Cullen, Jacob, and Levitt. "The Impact of School Choice on Student Outcomes: An Analysis of the Chicago Public Schools". J. Public Econ. 200?.

Cullen, Jacob, and Levitt. "The Effect of School Choice on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Randomized Lotteries". National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, 2003.

http://breadandpuppet.org/

I guess the east-coast version.

Heinlein also had a thing for redheads....

The idea is this:

Not only that people can learn as much about a game from losing it as they can from winning it, but that they need to loose in order to learn how to win. The flip-flop acts as a helper in the process of trial and error.

The feedback caused by the wiring of two NOR gates of the flip-flop allow this because the switches are controlled by the true and false sets exclusively; one switch is always associated with the true statements and the other with false.

When we start to learn, all possibilities are indeterminate, they can be either true or false; F == A+A+A is just as valid as F != A+H+C.

The flip-flop becomes sort of an ex post facto method of examining the data of the experience depending on win or loss. With a loss there can be mild sorting of possibilities, but the real sorting comes with comparing wins and losses.

Let me know if how I am representing this idea is to brief, it is still in its infancy, and as I have said elsewhere in my posts, I haven’t read everything.

I still don't understand what the idea is.

The real question is what do we do when a game situation presents us with a flip-flop such as explained in Charles Petzold's book code? (This is a basic computing concept).

I don't understand the question. By flip-flop, do you mean an electronic circuit with 2 stable states? What did you have in mind, in the game world?

• Go and chess provide clear demonstrations of opportunity cost, the first-mover advantage (esp. go), and the importance of not wasting time on trivial moves.

• Go provides proof of, and some understanding of, the power of human intuition. My dad can make moves that I don't think he knows the reasons for, that turn out to have amazing consequences 10 moves later when I discover eg. that a group of stones of mine is dead because, even though I have more liberties in that group than he has in his attacking group, he can use his liberties while I can't use mine due to side-effects of those moves. But one is not inclined to view this as mystical intuition; it's patterns in the stones that his unconscious learned to recognize without his conscious mind knowing why.

• Small advantages escalate. In chess, at the start of the game I might focus on trying to force my opponent to take a move back, or to trade a piece I haven't moved for a piece he has moved. Once that's done, I take advantage of my increased deployment to try to make an otherwise-even trade that disrupts his pawn structure. Once that's done, I try to take the isolated pawn. Once I'm a pawn ahead (I know then that I'll probably win) I force trades to make that advantage larger. I don't know if this works in real life.

In the game described by the OP, Nature must invent a law, which must be expressed in a language. So, in the game, there must be a description language.

As to whether (real life) Nature can be said to have a description language: I assess the validity of this concept in terms of its success or failure in explaining phenomena. I wouldn't be 'pretty sure' of any hypothesis unless it were tested.

A good resource would be the previous attempts at such a work, Aesop's Fables (Platitudinal), I Ching (Esoteric), and Judeo-Christi-Islamic Texts (Dogmatic). If we are to attempt a similar work for the ideas of reason then what can we learn from them to tell the aspects of how to provide a bible, or even a psalm, of reason?

Do you know that these would be good resources? You haven't established this; it might help if you gave one or two examples of how these works of fiction that you listed could help us out.

"The WIKIRESONIA" :)

You'd need to specifically have brevity and low inferential distance as goals, if you made such a wiki. The LW wiki tends to give a brief description of something and then link to some long posts on the subject; in contrast, Wikipedia tends to have really long articles. Getting all those "many interpretations" you recommend takes quite a bit of space. Check out how long the Wikipedia article on confirmation bias is, and ask yourself if a hypothetical Average Person could take anything useful from skimming it.

I second the OP's recommendation of Zendo. It could've been named "Induction: The Game", it's a great medium for practicing (and teaching!) some basic science and rationality skills, and it's also a heck of a lot of fun. Plus, you can use the neat little Zendo pyramids (also called Icehouse pieces) for various other games.

For that, I think we'd need a stack with a line-termination character. In effect, we'd be removing two characters for one, which I suppose would be an improvement.