Those games don’t really improve any sort of skill, though, and neither does anyone expect them to. To teach kids this, you need a game where you as a player pretty much never stop improving, so that having spent more hours on the game actually means you’ll beat anyone who has spent less.
There are schools that teach Go intensively from an early age, so that a 10-year-old student from one of those schools is already far better than a casual player like me will ever be, and it just keeps going up from there. People don’t seem to get tired of it.
Every time I contemplate that, I wish all the talent thus spent, could be spent instead on schools providing similarly intensive teaching in something useful like science and engineering. What could be accomplished if you taught a few thousand smart kids to be dan-grade scientists by age 10 and kept going from there? I think it would be worth finding out.
I agree with you. I also think that there are several reasons for that:
First that competitive games are (intellectual or physical sports) easier to select and train for, since the objective function is much clearer.
The other reason is more cultural: if you train your child for something more useful like science or mathematics, then people will say: “Poor kid, do you try to make a freak out of him? Why can’t he have a childhood like anyone else?” Traditionally, there is much less opposition against music, art or sport training. Perhaps they are viewed as “fun activities.”
Thirdly, it also seems that academic success is the function of more variables: communication skills, motivation, perspective, taste, wisdom, luck etc. So early training will result in much less head start than in a more constrained area like sports or music, where it is almost mandatory for success (age of 10 (even 6) are almost too late in some of those areas to begin seriously)
Yes, but what would it matter if 200 billion hours was spent refining wikipedia? There is only so much knowledge you can pump into it. I don’t think that’s a fair comparison.
So what else could we also accomplish? I didn’t read it as ‘wikipedia could be 2,000 times better’, but ‘we could have 2,000 wikipedia-grade resources’. (Which is probably also not true—we’d run out of low-hanging fruit. Still.)
Those games don’t really improve any sort of skill, though, and neither does anyone expect them to. To teach kids this, you need a game where you as a player pretty much never stop improving, so that having spent more hours on the game actually means you’ll beat anyone who has spent less.
Go might work.
There are schools that teach Go intensively from an early age, so that a 10-year-old student from one of those schools is already far better than a casual player like me will ever be, and it just keeps going up from there. People don’t seem to get tired of it.
Every time I contemplate that, I wish all the talent thus spent, could be spent instead on schools providing similarly intensive teaching in something useful like science and engineering. What could be accomplished if you taught a few thousand smart kids to be dan-grade scientists by age 10 and kept going from there? I think it would be worth finding out.
I agree with you. I also think that there are several reasons for that:
First that competitive games are (intellectual or physical sports) easier to select and train for, since the objective function is much clearer.
The other reason is more cultural: if you train your child for something more useful like science or mathematics, then people will say: “Poor kid, do you try to make a freak out of him? Why can’t he have a childhood like anyone else?” Traditionally, there is much less opposition against music, art or sport training. Perhaps they are viewed as “fun activities.”
Thirdly, it also seems that academic success is the function of more variables: communication skills, motivation, perspective, taste, wisdom, luck etc. So early training will result in much less head start than in a more constrained area like sports or music, where it is almost mandatory for success (age of 10 (even 6) are almost too late in some of those areas to begin seriously)
A somewhat related, impactful graph.
Of course, human effort and interest is far from perfectly fungible. But your broader point retains a lot of validity.
Yes, but what would it matter if 200 billion hours was spent refining wikipedia? There is only so much knowledge you can pump into it. I don’t think that’s a fair comparison.
So what else could we also accomplish? I didn’t read it as ‘wikipedia could be 2,000 times better’, but ‘we could have 2,000 wikipedia-grade resources’. (Which is probably also not true—we’d run out of low-hanging fruit. Still.)
Go is useful, I figure. As games go, it is one of the best. Perhaps computer games will one day surpass it—but, in many ways, that has happened yet.