I hear you that teenagers spending hours computing hundreds of analytic derivatives or writing a bunch of essays is a pretty sad time waste… But if incentives shifted so instead that time got spent perfecting a starcraft build order against the AI a hundred times or grinding for years to pull off carpetless star in SM64, this might be one of the few ways to make that time spent even more pointless… (And for most people the latter is no more fun than the former)
The comparison isn’t to “education” or “study” in general, it’s to IQ tests. SM64 speedruns might not have that much intellectual merit, but they’re not really any worse than, say, studying Raven’s Progressive Matrices problems until every basic type is memorized. And you can do better than SM64 challenges; that’s not something I suggested here.
I hear you that teenagers spending hours computing hundreds of analytic derivatives or writing a bunch of essays is a pretty sad time waste… But if incentives shifted so instead that time got spent perfecting a starcraft build order against the AI a hundred times or grinding for years to pull off carpetless star in SM64, this might be one of the few ways to make that time spent even more pointless… (And for most people the latter is no more fun than the former)
The comparison isn’t to “education” or “study” in general, it’s to IQ tests. SM64 speedruns might not have that much intellectual merit, but they’re not really any worse than, say, studying Raven’s Progressive Matrices problems until every basic type is memorized. And you can do better than SM64 challenges; that’s not something I suggested here.