Nature invented play long before it invented us
nautil.us
nautil.us
Elephants really are incredible creatures, which I had seen many times but never like this. All the seriousness in their imposing size disappeared quite literally in the water. It was amazing to see a group of animals in the wild do nothing but play. It reminded me that we humans sometimes just need to do the same as well, with no reason or productive purpose.
To learn the productive purpose, try sitting in the corner while everyone else plays.
After a while, you'll find yourself shunned from all kinds of activities, and even maybe bullied and considered an outcast. Do it long enough and it might affect your mental health and lead you down a path of depression or suicide...
Which leads to a possible purpose... It's detecting "bad" community members and expelling them. Nearly all animals that play also sometimes expel or kill some members of their own community.
In fact that is the norm in the wild, and even among primitive tribes today. Also among many non-primitive but simpler (than us) people in rural areas.
>It reminded me that we humans sometimes just need to do the same as well, with no reason or productive purpose.
Yes. See this linked comment and my reply to it:
To quote the abstract of the said book by Huizinga:
[...] He identifies five characteristics of play: it is free; it is not "ordinary" or "real" life; it is distinct from "ordinary" life both as to locality and duration; it creates order; it is connected with no material interest, and from it no profit can be gained.
With cross-cultural examples from the humanities, business, and politics, Huizinga examines play in all its diverse guises—as it relates to language, law, war, knowledge, poetry, myth, philosophy, art, and much more. As he writes, "Civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play like a baby detaching itself from the womb: it arises in and as play, and never leaves it."
Starting with Plato, Huizinga traces the contribution of "man the player" through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and early modern world. With an eye for our own times he writes: "In American politics [play] is even more evident. Long before the two-party system had reduced itself to two gigantic teams whose political differences were hardly discernible to an outsider, electioneering in America had developed into a kind of national sport." With its remarkable historical sweep, Homo Ludens defines play for generations to come.
According to this, video games are a form of play. I've always been told that playing video games is a waste of time, it would be interesting to see scientific evidence that it is actually good for you.
If, as the OP alleges, play is useful for preparing one for future challenges, then play can be counter-productive if an obsession with playing precludes one from ever encountering those challenges.
As the old saying goes, "moderation curbs all vices" (normally attributed to Leonardo da Vinci; but, of course, he was riffing on the ancient Greek virtue of "sôphrosune"—temperance).
That outlier aside, you raise a good point about language - I too learned my English mostly through videogames. Single-player, story-rich videogames, which hooked me enough to play them with a dictionary on hand. I learned most of my vocabulary trying to understand the games' lores and navigate dialogues.
For the child it is entertaining and also entrains static sedentary behaviour.
This will be useful for the future as we really have very little need of nature or vigorous movement - the longer the time we can remain still and mentally active, the more we will be able to contribute to society.
Even human play mimics skills needed for survival, we just need more complicated skills, like war strategy and creativity. Just think about sports, board games, and so on.
E.g. we work to make money to eat to have energy to have leisure time to play.
So what do you think about the idea expressed in the article, that play is fundamental to survival? You stated a thesis that seemingly argues the opposite. The article spends thousands of words to support its reasoning, now I’m curious to know yours.
Suppose play is necessary for survival. Abstractly, it would bring the reasoning full circle.
Do people eat to eat again? I guess you could say that. We survive to survive. We play to play.
People that don’t play or have leisure or relax do have worse health and psychological issues. So it would seem there is evolutionary pressure against lack of said play.
In the context of HN: ‘we post on HN to post on HN’ (i.e. leisure for leisure).
making money -> eating -> energy -> play
TFA: “play to survive”. The end purpose is whatever survival entails (probably reproduction, or more generally passing on one’s genes). Play is the means of getting there.
But there was a section in the article where it suggests that in nature, play is "expensive" - in that it costs precious energy (and some animals may actually put themselves in actual risk in the process).
So costing energy could be seen as what we view as labor. Working to be able to play, so to speak.
If it was not useful for survival, play (as defined in the article) could be thought of as the pinnacle of existence, useless on its own with everything else building up to it; but it is not that, it is argued to be merely a means.
With comment presenting the opposite viewpoint to TFA, either I was missing its point, or it reacted purely to the keyword “play” in the title and not the substance, or it was begging for someone to reply and ask for elaboration (which I did).
https://www.amazon.com/Finite-Infinite-Games-James-Carse/dp/...
A big example of this in my life was doing my MBA (I was a hardcore developer/dev manager at the time.) While many classmates had specific goals like leaving a career behind or breaking into investment banking, my thought was more like "I got the time, my employer will pay tuition, maybe this will be challenging and fun."
Fast forward a few years, I "naturally" ended up in product management. Not because it was my goal, but because the time in b-school taught me how to think about strategy, markets, communicate more clearly, and just be more sociable and have skills to confidently meet high-level clients and not embarrass myself. In other words, "playing at business school" happened to give me skills that enhanced my life in an unexpected (though in retrospect predictable) ways.
Smaller examples of this abound. During COVID lockdown I randomly bought a raspberry PI and some basic electronic components. Soon after I ended up buying motor controllers, a tank chassis, sensors (and a soldering iron..) Without intending to, I went from someone who's "never done anything with electronics" to someone who "has built an autonomous rover that navigates by sonar." Completely useless but - for example - it opens up future opportunities to confidently work on a hardware business/product should an opportunity arise.
A final example - also during COVID lockdown - our living room in-wall AC was barely blowing air and also getting wet. Repair people said that everything is working fine, that's just how it is given the airflow in the location of the unit (which didn't make sense because my wife remembered it working better a few years ago.) I decided I was going to figure it out - for fun. I didn't know anything about ACs and I figured there's a good chance that I'll fuck things up more, but the "worst" would be buying a new AC (about $2000) which might work better anyway despite what the repairmen said. So basically I had "room to play"
Several days later, after several trips to a parts distributor in Queens, after learning about and switching out capacitors, etc. I didn't fix the problem. I started to try to measure the current going across the blower fan motor (I learned enough to associate the ice/condensation with insufficient air flow) when I short-circuited something and the motor sparked, smoked, and died. FUCK.
Here's the scene of devastation (at about 3am) when I finally extricated the old burnt motor out of the unit: https://ibb.co/crYxs4R
One more bike trip over the bridge to pick up a new motor, then one more because the new motor had a different thickness shaft and I needed bushings, I replaced the motor and noticed right away stronger airflow. Long story short, the old motor was slowly failing (before I made it fail quickly by blowing it up.) So now, we have a perfectly working AC and it cost about $300 (vs living with it or paying $2000 for a new one) and most importantly, I had fun and accidentally learned the skills that will make me a much more confident home owner in the future.
There was a funny exchange I had with a colleague when I took a day off to work on the AC. He couldn't believe I took time from "the big important job" to do mechanical work, but he was missing the point - the reason I had "the big important job" is that I do shit like this and acquire random skills that help me move forward.
Enjoyed your story. Reminds me to keep working on things outside my comfort zone.
I do have to say that I have a tendency to chase shiny objects and it's important to keep that in check. EG if I ended up spending a year on the AC it wouldn't have been worth it - there's a line somewhere. IDEALLY, we strategically select the discomfort we want to experience as being the specific discomfort that will grow us in the way we need to, rather than just swinging at a lot of different things as I sometimes tend to.
And - I am really glad you enjoyed the tale and it reminded you about something you care about.
I think your anecdote also illustrates how people with the privilege to play can reinforce their advantages. When you don't have an employer willing to pay for you to play, it can be difficult to make the same kind of "natural" career changes, as one example.
I consider myself privileged. Similar story with parents except I was raised by my aunt and uncle who were penniless immigrants to the US. They had their own kids to worry about so I was low priority. Half my clothes came from flea market bins. No tutoring, extracurriculars, etc. I was jealous of kids who could 'afford' $1.25 school lunches.
I would even say that I was privileged at the time that I wasn't raised by abusive alcoholics and that at least my adoptive family valued education. And I never had to worry about starving.
This led to the virtuous cycle where I have a lot of free time today.
I live in Romania now and when people say I'm privileged I agree.
Privilege on the other hand reads like "something you have and I don't and therefore I can never catch up" - which in turn leads one to be passive and not believe that their actions can alter what kind of cycle they are in.
Maybe it's linguistic nuance that not everyone sees the same way (eg: you see it differently) but it seems to me that most discourse on "privilege" has to do with "how do we take it away from others / use it to justify our own relative lack of success" rather than "ok I get the concept, what opportunities to I have to build up such 'privilege' for myself and my family?"
But the educational process has to serve two needs. It serves as a place for people to develop intellectually, but also to make themselves employable if they want to be. Those two tracks may be completely mixed together in each class, but the students who are in it for "play" are definitely there. I was one of those students. I came from a middle class family, but I gave relatively little thought to my future career during college.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transference_focused_psychothe...
so help me out here, im insinuating that someone is bad at philosophizing by guessing they are not a philosopher, when they make a statement that has the hallmarks of a scientist, and none of the hueristic qualities of philosophy.
i know its impossible to tell now, however my original comment was the first response to the parent submission, the philosophy was the interrupt event.
A similar kind of way of speaking would be something like "I'm guessing you never went to college". This would be similar to calling someone an idiot. Or "you program like someone that's never taken a class in it".
These are difficult to take positively because nearly every connotation implies that they're somehow lacking something.
Rather than speaking about how someone is lacking, it's wiser to speak about how what they're doing is a positive.
"You didn't go to college, did you?" is negative; but, "Are you self-taught?" is a positive.
Self-taught implies a sort of stick-to-it-iveness and discipline, where as not going to college, again, implies a failing on that person.
Does this make sense?
And I mean come on, they said "machine learning is just bio-mimicry big whoop" and I responded "yeah, that's kinda the point"[0] because clearly they don't understand the bio-inspiration of ML and its history, which is a bit obtuse considering we call them "neural networks." And that's without even looking at things like dropout (inspired by sex), genetic programming (sex again), or exploration/exploitation strategies (which are directly related to play). Just let them ride their imaginary high horse. But I do have to give them props for the strangest insult I've gotten all year.
[0] It would be very naive to actually say that ML is bio-mimicry. It has a lot of bio-inspiration but does things vastly differently than what biology actually does. But one cannot ignore the inspiration despite the implementation being vastly different.
* English is their second or third language
* don't perceive statements the way others do for a variety of reasons
I'm treating it as though this situation is one or the other; but, yes, you're right, I've put enough energy into it.
Hope you're getting some free time over Christmas - if you've worked a lot; or get that break and a new job! - if you've been in trouble lately