I am very grateful that I did not get encouraged to put various labels on my behaviors when I was younger. I believe it would have made my situation vastly worse.
It’s the opposite for me. I was curious and couldn’t find answers. Or rather, the answers that people helpfully provided to me with high confidence all turned out to be wrong. After a few decades I have mostly found the answers I was looking for. If I could send them back to myself using a time machine, I would.
As I see it, the problem is communicating things incorrectly. Yep, a wrong information can be worse than no information at all. Specifically with autism, we used to have “Asperger syndrome” which meant kinda autism but nothing too serious. Of course throwing aspies and autists in the same bag did not improve clarity.
Jacobin runs a remarkably good critique of central planning.
I suspect that a large part of attraction of socialism is that young people imagine themselves to be the future planners. Or at least someone who has the same preferences as they do.
I get the thinking here from master game designers, that if too many people like your game then you are catering to expectations too much and you need to be bolder. The key is to use this as an opportunity to do something cool, it shows you have points you can spend.
I will worry about that when I get there (to the situation where I make a game and too many people happen to like it), which is realistically never. But yeah, I also see it more as spending points rather than further improving the game.
Like, there are many great games. Your game, if it’s merely great, will only be one out of many. But if you do something weird, you can become a legend for some group of people who resonate with that. It is better to make a game that is legendary to some and 90% good for the rest, than a game that is merely 100% good for everyone.
Edutainment products, or ‘gamifying’ learning, is usually the worst of both worlds. You get very little entertainment, and very little learning.
I think the problem is that most people don’t have a way to evaluate the quality of such games. So they go by “seems impressive at first sight, let’s buy/recommend it”. Which of course incentivizes the authors to make games that seem impressive at first sight, nothing more. The thing we care about, hypothetically, is how much will children actually learn, and such information is nowhere to be found. (If you happen to be a good teacher, you can make an educated guess after seeing the game… but the point is that most of the market is not like that.)
That does not mean that good educational games are impossible. But yeah, you need to make the math itself fun, not just make a game which instead of ads is interrupted by math problems. I think Sumaze gets the fundamentals right, unfortunately the quality of code could be much improved. Also, the learning curve could be less steep, with more levels, IMHO.
It’s the opposite for me. I was curious and couldn’t find answers. Or rather, the answers that people helpfully provided to me with high confidence all turned out to be wrong. After a few decades I have mostly found the answers I was looking for. If I could send them back to myself using a time machine, I would.
What answers were these? I’ve never felt the fascination with labels, and observing how others use them it seems that they mostly function as Mysterious Answers, where people ask “Why am I like this?”, and for psychological reasons they find “You have like-this-itis” to be a much more satisfying answer than “You’re just like this”.
Labels are pointers to somewhere. In the degenerate case, they just point to their own description. “Why can’t I get anything done?” “Because you are lazy.” “What does ‘lazy’ mean?” “It means the person who can’t get anything done.” Those are the mysterious answers.
(The problem with mysterious answers is that people mistake a classification label with causal explanation. There is nothing wrong with “x ∈ S” per se; the problem is the “x ∈ S because x ∈ S” circular reasoning.)
Useful labels point to some useful knowledge. “Why can’t I get anything done?” “Because you have ADHD.” “How is that useful to know?” “You may want to try Adderall or Ritalin.”
Could we just skip the label and go directly to the advice? “Why can’t I get anything done?” “Try Ritalin.” Nope, that’s exactly how you get a generation of kids medicated with something that most of them don’t need. ADHD is more than just a synonym for “can’t get anything done”; it is a(n assumed) specific mechanism that causes the symptom. Sometimes the same symptom can be used by many different mechanisms, and you need differential diagnostics to figure out whether the specific label applies. Not all people who “can’t get anything done” have the version of “can’t get anything done” that benefits from trying Ritalin. The label ADHD refers only to those who do. (Even this is simplifying things.) Therefore, knowing that you have ADHD is more useful than merely knowing that you can’t get anything done.
If you are weird in some way, people will give you a label anyway. It just probably won’t be a useful one. It could be a mysterious one, such as “lazy”. Or it could be a misapplied one, such as “ADHD” when your problem is actually something completely different, so you will try dozen ADHD medications and only get some mild placebo effect.
“You’re just like this” is not enough. I want to become stronger. But I won’t achieve that by banging my head against the wall, which is the standard “just try harder” advice. If a pill can make me stronger, I want to know that. If noise canceling headphones can make me stronger, I want to know that, too. I have no objection against using “crutches”. If there is a way through the maze, I want to know it.
But experimenting with possible solutions is costly. If you try random pills just to see if any of them works, it will take a lot of time (you should probably only do one at a time? and wait for a month to see whether it works?), may have bad side effects, and could be illegal (or jumping through the hoops will take even more time). If your workplace does not allow headphones, you need to change your job before trying them. Etc.
Having a good model of yourself helps you make better predictions about what will or won’t work for you.
.
Now I am thinking about all those rationalists in Bay Area who believe that meditation will help them solve their problems. Wouldn’t it be nice if they had a way to predict whether this will work for them, or whether a decade later they will regret all the time wasted on something that in hindsight was obviously unrelated to the actual source of their problems? But wouldn’t a correct answer involve some kind of label?
If a pill can make me stronger, I want to know that.
Ritalin makes everyone stronger. Its effects on average people are well-tested by academics and college students. I believe your use of labels has led you astray.
It’s the opposite for me. I was curious and couldn’t find answers. Or rather, the answers that people helpfully provided to me with high confidence all turned out to be wrong. After a few decades I have mostly found the answers I was looking for. If I could send them back to myself using a time machine, I would.
As I see it, the problem is communicating things incorrectly. Yep, a wrong information can be worse than no information at all. Specifically with autism, we used to have “Asperger syndrome” which meant kinda autism but nothing too serious. Of course throwing aspies and autists in the same bag did not improve clarity.
I suspect that a large part of attraction of socialism is that young people imagine themselves to be the future planners. Or at least someone who has the same preferences as they do.
I will worry about that when I get there (to the situation where I make a game and too many people happen to like it), which is realistically never. But yeah, I also see it more as spending points rather than further improving the game.
Like, there are many great games. Your game, if it’s merely great, will only be one out of many. But if you do something weird, you can become a legend for some group of people who resonate with that. It is better to make a game that is legendary to some and 90% good for the rest, than a game that is merely 100% good for everyone.
I think the problem is that most people don’t have a way to evaluate the quality of such games. So they go by “seems impressive at first sight, let’s buy/recommend it”. Which of course incentivizes the authors to make games that seem impressive at first sight, nothing more. The thing we care about, hypothetically, is how much will children actually learn, and such information is nowhere to be found. (If you happen to be a good teacher, you can make an educated guess after seeing the game… but the point is that most of the market is not like that.)
That does not mean that good educational games are impossible. But yeah, you need to make the math itself fun, not just make a game which instead of ads is interrupted by math problems. I think Sumaze gets the fundamentals right, unfortunately the quality of code could be much improved. Also, the learning curve could be less steep, with more levels, IMHO.
What answers were these? I’ve never felt the fascination with labels, and observing how others use them it seems that they mostly function as Mysterious Answers, where people ask “Why am I like this?”, and for psychological reasons they find “You have like-this-itis” to be a much more satisfying answer than “You’re just like this”.
Labels are pointers to somewhere. In the degenerate case, they just point to their own description. “Why can’t I get anything done?” “Because you are lazy.” “What does ‘lazy’ mean?” “It means the person who can’t get anything done.” Those are the mysterious answers.
(The problem with mysterious answers is that people mistake a classification label with causal explanation. There is nothing wrong with “x ∈ S” per se; the problem is the “x ∈ S because x ∈ S” circular reasoning.)
Useful labels point to some useful knowledge. “Why can’t I get anything done?” “Because you have ADHD.” “How is that useful to know?” “You may want to try Adderall or Ritalin.”
Could we just skip the label and go directly to the advice? “Why can’t I get anything done?” “Try Ritalin.” Nope, that’s exactly how you get a generation of kids medicated with something that most of them don’t need. ADHD is more than just a synonym for “can’t get anything done”; it is a(n assumed) specific mechanism that causes the symptom. Sometimes the same symptom can be used by many different mechanisms, and you need differential diagnostics to figure out whether the specific label applies. Not all people who “can’t get anything done” have the version of “can’t get anything done” that benefits from trying Ritalin. The label ADHD refers only to those who do. (Even this is simplifying things.) Therefore, knowing that you have ADHD is more useful than merely knowing that you can’t get anything done.
If you are weird in some way, people will give you a label anyway. It just probably won’t be a useful one. It could be a mysterious one, such as “lazy”. Or it could be a misapplied one, such as “ADHD” when your problem is actually something completely different, so you will try dozen ADHD medications and only get some mild placebo effect.
“You’re just like this” is not enough. I want to become stronger. But I won’t achieve that by banging my head against the wall, which is the standard “just try harder” advice. If a pill can make me stronger, I want to know that. If noise canceling headphones can make me stronger, I want to know that, too. I have no objection against using “crutches”. If there is a way through the maze, I want to know it.
But experimenting with possible solutions is costly. If you try random pills just to see if any of them works, it will take a lot of time (you should probably only do one at a time? and wait for a month to see whether it works?), may have bad side effects, and could be illegal (or jumping through the hoops will take even more time). If your workplace does not allow headphones, you need to change your job before trying them. Etc.
Having a good model of yourself helps you make better predictions about what will or won’t work for you.
.
Now I am thinking about all those rationalists in Bay Area who believe that meditation will help them solve their problems. Wouldn’t it be nice if they had a way to predict whether this will work for them, or whether a decade later they will regret all the time wasted on something that in hindsight was obviously unrelated to the actual source of their problems? But wouldn’t a correct answer involve some kind of label?
Ritalin makes everyone stronger. Its effects on average people are well-tested by academics and college students. I believe your use of labels has led you astray.
With diminishing returns and some bad side effects, right?
If not, can you please recommend me the research that you find most convincing?