Improv theater—Practice in examining and altering your motivations. Sharper-than-usual distinction between terminal goals (humor, drama) and immediate goals (those of your character).
Game design—Similar benefits to chess. You’re in a situation of perfect information and clearly-defined rules, and yet you still bump very quickly against the limits of your own cognition. You’re forced to acknowledge and try to work around your limitations, because there are no excuses. Unlike in chess, there are no unsolvable problems; at worst, there are problems with no elegant solution.
Writing pages on the tvtropes wiki—Heavy overlap with the goals of lesswrong; there are even tvtropes pages for fallacies and biases. Learning to spot patterns in literature has the same challenge as learning to spot them in thought: the most omnipresent ones are also the least visible.
Anything to do with language—Translation, conlangs, writing in English with arbitrary restrictions...they all help the same way that Rationalist Taboo does.
Game design—Similar benefits to chess. You’re in a situation of perfect information and clearly-defined rules, and yet you still bump very quickly against the limits of your own cognition. You’re forced to acknowledge and try to work around your limitations, because there are no excuses. Unlike in chess, there are no unsolvable problems; at worst, there are problems with no elegant solution.
It also illustrates the gap between what rules directly allow/prohibit, and what they actually incentivize doing. It requires that bit of economic thinking—what incentive systems are your rules setting up? What feedback systems does this result in?
Edit: Actually, it requires careful clear thinking about human biases in quite a few other things too! In order to even do what I wrote above, you have to avoid obvious biases in playtesting, if you want to figure out what a good player will do. But then you also have to account for the fact that most players will probably not be seriously focused on winning, and you will have to consider what their biases will lead them to do instead, so you can make sure the game is fun for them as well.
Yes, and game design also provides some very good examples where people not thinking broadly enough can lead to serious problems. One good example of this is Dungeons and Dragons 3.0, where the play testing occurred with characters all playing as certain archetypes (the fighters hit, the wizards throw fireballs, the clerics healed in combat). As a result, no one noticed that minimal amounts of tactical sense could make the wizards and clerics massively outshine the other classes.
Improv theater—Practice in examining and altering your motivations. Sharper-than-usual distinction between terminal goals (humor, drama) and immediate goals (those of your character).
Game design—Similar benefits to chess. You’re in a situation of perfect information and clearly-defined rules, and yet you still bump very quickly against the limits of your own cognition. You’re forced to acknowledge and try to work around your limitations, because there are no excuses. Unlike in chess, there are no unsolvable problems; at worst, there are problems with no elegant solution.
Writing pages on the tvtropes wiki—Heavy overlap with the goals of lesswrong; there are even tvtropes pages for fallacies and biases. Learning to spot patterns in literature has the same challenge as learning to spot them in thought: the most omnipresent ones are also the least visible.
Anything to do with language—Translation, conlangs, writing in English with arbitrary restrictions...they all help the same way that Rationalist Taboo does.
It also illustrates the gap between what rules directly allow/prohibit, and what they actually incentivize doing. It requires that bit of economic thinking—what incentive systems are your rules setting up? What feedback systems does this result in?
Edit: Actually, it requires careful clear thinking about human biases in quite a few other things too! In order to even do what I wrote above, you have to avoid obvious biases in playtesting, if you want to figure out what a good player will do. But then you also have to account for the fact that most players will probably not be seriously focused on winning, and you will have to consider what their biases will lead them to do instead, so you can make sure the game is fun for them as well.
Yes, and game design also provides some very good examples where people not thinking broadly enough can lead to serious problems. One good example of this is Dungeons and Dragons 3.0, where the play testing occurred with characters all playing as certain archetypes (the fighters hit, the wizards throw fireballs, the clerics healed in combat). As a result, no one noticed that minimal amounts of tactical sense could make the wizards and clerics massively outshine the other classes.
And, of course, Fun Theory!