The player is presented with a small scenario (a paragraph, possibly illustrated), and has a text field in which he can enter the name of a concept that applies—the name of a cognitive bias, or a logical fallacy, or a useful concept from economics or psychology or statistics, or a LW catchphrase. The text field has auto-complete (you don’t need to enter the whole darn phrase), adn the player is scored by the time he took (if you guess wrong, the box blinks red for a couple seconds and you can guess again).
Example:
Scenario: “Bob is blaming his dad for letting the dog play outside and get hit by a car”—answer: “Hindsight bias”
A bunch of small scenarios could be made by getting a list of biases and other lesswrongy concepts, and a bunch of categories of real-life situations (family, work, school, health …) and trying to come up with an illustration of the concept in each category—heck, even generating that list would be a valuable exercise.
This game wouldn’t teach people how to use any skill, but it might help create a mental association between real-life situations and some applicable concepts, which would be a step towards making that kind of thinking automatic in everyday life.
Guessing the teacher’s password
The player is presented with a small scenario (a paragraph, possibly illustrated), and has a text field in which he can enter the name of a concept that applies—the name of a cognitive bias, or a logical fallacy, or a useful concept from economics or psychology or statistics, or a LW catchphrase. The text field has auto-complete (you don’t need to enter the whole darn phrase), adn the player is scored by the time he took (if you guess wrong, the box blinks red for a couple seconds and you can guess again).
Example:
A bunch of small scenarios could be made by getting a list of biases and other lesswrongy concepts, and a bunch of categories of real-life situations (family, work, school, health …) and trying to come up with an illustration of the concept in each category—heck, even generating that list would be a valuable exercise.
This game wouldn’t teach people how to use any skill, but it might help create a mental association between real-life situations and some applicable concepts, which would be a step towards making that kind of thinking automatic in everyday life.