I’ve played Figgie a fair bit and don’t think it’s a good tool for teaching epistemics outside of a Jane Street trading internship.
To actually learn with it, you first need a number of motivated playing partners. They need to be quite skilled for their actions to be informative, and the game sucks before they reach this point. In my experience people don’t reach this skill level within their first couple hours of play. It also requires N custom-made decks for N rounds of play, or for everyone to install a specific app. So it’s really only practical for a trading firm internship program.
I have what I would call unusually good epistemics, and I mostly got there by obsessively reading the financial news (Bloomberg, Reuters) and making concrete predictions about how various stories would develop, and seeing where I went wrong. I’d ask myself questions like “how, concretely, did this article come into being?” I did this for about 9 months, and by the end I was rarely surprised by news items, could spot the signs of failure modes like circular reporting (super common), and had working mental models of many important institutions.
The other valuable thing I did was putting probabilities on everyday occurrences (65% confident I get home within 15 mins, etc.). I recorded these, and reflected on what went wrong when I deviated too far from perfect calibration.
I feel like we’re the blind men with the elephant more often than we’d like to admit. A lot of the time when two people make conflicting claims about society, really they’re both right about their substrate of society and the world is just twice as big as either thought.
Another shocker for most people: 20 million people in the US live in trailer parks. People with similar life circumstances tend to accumulate in similar places, only see those places, and thus vastly underestimate the diversity of life experience. (This is also true of everything in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KpMNqA5BiCRozCwM3/social-dark-matter)