Just let people do whatever they want with their free time. Nerdy hobbies are treated uniquely unfairly in this respect.
Few of us particularly like how much time we spend on HN/Reddit or go “yeah really glad I’m spending my precious time in this way!” yet we do tend to feel fulfillment from activities like reading a novel or trying to write one or many of the activities we pretend are just the same as playing World or Warcraft and watching Netflix.
I'm a bit snide here; I object to the "hustle" culture where people are guilted or self-flagellating for having downtime. I've seen too many of my excitable colleagues go too far there and end up with burnout, relationship problems, depression, etc.
Me, I've been chooching along nicely for the past decade and will need to do so for another three decades in all likelihood, and I'm enjoying my downtime (including playing Factorio) while doing so, instead of postponing it until the magical After.
And regardless of your personal opinion on the reliability of Wikipedia, I think we can all agree that the ability to quickly find a brief overview of any subject is insanely valuable to society.
On the other hand, I know if I weren't wasting time on HN right now, I wouldn't be doing anything productive.
In my personal experience, reddit/HN has never been the reason I didn't do something useful. The reason was that I just didn't want to do it, and if HN didn't exist I'd just stare at the ceiling.
Do ceilings sap the intellectual potential of humanity?
At least those that already have a drive to know use reddit to sharpen their knowledge. As a research tool itself reddit is pretty invaluable.
So, for me at least, HN provides a fertile place to be productive, but mostly as a place to play around and sharpen my skill.
There is very little harm in considering this question open-mindedly, and yet the defensiveness is so reflexively strong -- even as a bunch of the people who play them will very frequently themselves step back and joke about how much time some of these suck out of their lives.
So yes, we actually SHOULD encourage people to reexamine their patterns and consider if some (not all, some) of these hours could be put to a different or better use.
1) the value, learning, and art generated by games 2) the cost, judged according to each individual player's own value system.
And then weighing the strength of each effect. Note that I am judging according to the individual's values, not my own. Example: the rate at which people say "I wish I could stop playing game X" or the rate they suffer regret after a play session, or a year after quitting playing. I personally am really glad I found factorio, but not very happy about my time playing diablo 2.
Surely there are hypothetical examples of games which could be created, or addictions conscious beings could be vulnerable to, which would force defenders of freedom to admit that it's at least conceivable that there are situations where "bad" things exist, which we'd be better off without. Not saying we are in that state now, or what we should do if it happened. Just pointing out that acting as if there are no costs at all isn't addressing the opponent's position, even though we know there are lots of people who claim otherwise.
If you want to educate people on alternatives, or offer treatment systems, or whatever, that's fine. But ultimately and finally you need to let people do what they want. Anything else is a consent violation.
There is no inherent incompatibility between "very strongly challenging peoples' ideas and practices" and "violating consent."
It's hard not to get defensive because this reddit post is basically flamebait:
>use of words like sapping and deadend
>"there's little to no payoff for the rest of humanity"
Like you said we can probably discuss this question without getting defensive but it's impossible thanks to the way it's worded.
A question worth asking is what a 'better use' is to that person and to what extent (and why) that differs from your idea of a 'better use'. For example, I personally don't think chess is much better than a game like Starcraft or Factorio. I don't think billiards is any better than chess. I don't think English literature is better than philosophy. I don't think science is as good as maths.
Not everyone wants to be an intellectual; many people (due to other factors in life) can barely find the time to care enough (with either depression or work sapping thir creative energies). "Reexamining patterns" is good. Saying that someone is a bad person (in a moral sense, as some have done) is not. It doesn't take into account individual situations. Philosophers have argued we 'should' reexamine all kinds of things, from our political conceptions to who we decide to date.
What's the most significant intellectual contribution of any athlete? I can't think of one without really stretching. It's not like tennis players are making great intellectual contributions and football players are the only athletes who are absent.
If you're talking about the opportunity cost of watching college football instead of doing something more productive, then maybe, but most (virtually all) of the extremely smart people I know do not spend much time watching sports.
[0]: I'm not saying they're dumb, they're just not geniuses
But just blindly dismissing that kind of reasoning is not wise in my opinion. Casinos eat money from victims and they are regulated. Computer games eat time from some victims and time is quite important asset as well.
Of course just like some people can reasonably spend some little money to get some enjoyment in casino, other people can reasonably spend some free time in computer games without compromising on more important activities. But not everyone have iron will and iron grip over himself.
But realistically would it be better spent?
I banned myself from games to write my master thesis.
There was some mild improvement in pace of work, but I'm not sure if I should attribute it to not gaming or simply to approaching deadline.
On the other hand I watched all 10 seasons of "Friends" during that time. And I didn't even like "Friends" to begin with.
There is no authority higher for the appropriate use of one's time than oneself.
Reddit, however, I find draining. There's always a risk of getting sea lioned by a particularly toxic user. Conversation tends to be very one-sided also.
I mean I played around in ZZT and ended up a software engineer.
https://erikmcclure.com/blog/factorio-is-best-interview-we-h...
How many people do you know that don't work a job, are 25 and able bodied, and live at home with their parents to play chess?
How many people do you know that work a dead-end factory job, and come home and put all of their effort into chess over advancing their career?
I know of 0 for any of those for chess, but I can think of at least 100 people that this applies for video games.
Video games are great! I get it. But when it starts to be the purpose of life, it seems a very sad life.
I don't live with my parents so I can post on hacker news.
Maybe majority of gamers would been the type who would waste themself in a pub or on some other meaningless thing otherwise? I don't think it's so easy to answer those aspects without hard numbers.
Are gamers just a holding pattern for society, because we have passed peak employment - and just need to keep a chunk of society busy doing "nothing" ?
Then again, they are making money with their Twitch streams and walkthroughs simply by being Souls experts. So who am I to say they are wasting anything?
arguably, yes. it's a closed universe which at best provides entertainment for outsiders, unlike writing fiction which can inspire even revolutions, to say nothing of enriching minds and widening the emotional and intellectual horizons of individual readers. not sure if you were being serious about higher mathematics.
More realistically, for the elite in charge of their communities.
Its a practical problem for employment. No company complains about smart people not making their coworkers lives better; its all about "stealing from the company" by doing projects at home on their own time using their own materials, that may or may not be the feudal property of their owner/employers depending on their state of residence's attitude toward modern slavery.
No, it doesn't. A conclusion that something is a drag on society is not necessarily (and frequently not) an argument for banning it. The implication only exists in a pure form if one assumes a "government knows best" sort of politics. Label it what you like, I'm not going to pick fights.
I am a bit worried about this line of reasoning, though -- basically saying it isn't a line of thought that can lead to good policy, so it probably shouldn't be investigated or argued.
frankly, I think we should not care so much about what people do with their leisure time, as long it isn't actively harming anyone (ie, not in a "what could have been" sense). if we want smart people to do more useful stuff, we should figure out how to pay them for it.
Also, I think we can represent the problem in a different way to make it more desirable to be solved. Instead of being entitled, we can represent it as incentivizing trade. So rephrase it into "Can society incentivize particularly smart people to trade brain cycles."
I think this one has an decently agreeable answer of yes. Having now answered it, we can then approach optimizing the market for our society which would include having more particularly smart people to trade with (especially since I suspect brain cycles are somewhat unique per person). And is allowing people to sharpen their minds using thought intensive play one method of achieving that goal? Sure, it may lead to those people being less willing to trade their brain cycles (because they now can use them on Factorio instead), but it also means that more people now have brain cycles to trade.
to be verbose: since smart people are a limited resource it is imho correct to note that an intellectually, emotionally, and life-focus demanding activity, such as chess, that has not (and can not) ever transfer knowledge gains in that closed system to other domains of concern to our species, is in fact, as a matter of simple math, sapping a precious resource.
(but i'm open to the suggestion that maybe chess is keeping society safe from otherwise unoccupied mad geniuses -- calling B.F. .. :)
First off, everyone needs fun hobbies to distract them from their day to day. While many gravitate to hobbies similar to their career, it should never be a requirement. Its whatever recharges your batteries. However you achieve that, whether chess, reading, woodworking or nature walks, it doesn't matter. Again, as a fiction writer, the academic elitism of it really pisses me off. Not all entertainment needs to broaden your horizons. It first has to entertain and make you lose track of the miserable real world. Teaching you something is second on the list. Not first. Shoving the "it must enrich you or it's not art" is the most heinous elitist gatekeeping there is. This is the exact reason people dont like reading. Being told, "you're not reading the right books" turns people off, thus will never read said books.
I'm not sure he said that it must enrich you or it isn't art. His point was whether or not the effort one puts into a particular thing saps or uses up intellectual intelligence of a person. Is the task a hamster wheel where no benefits are experienced by anyone other than the hamster or is the hamster wheel connected to a capacitor and providing electricity to the other hamsters. I don't see a reason to get into the elitist arguments. All of these activities fall somewhere on the spectrum of the amount of good provided to humanity. Closed loop activities that only recharge one's battery provide less benefit to humanity and can be said to sap or use up our intellectual intelligence. There is no elitism about this argument, it's just a 30k foot view of us hamsters and which ones use more or less intelligence that benefits the rest of the hamsters.
Get off your Silicon Valley, always got to hustle hamster wheel. Go watch a sunset.
I don't see him saying that, or even implying it. Rather, he seems to be indicating that is a valid vector by which the activity can be rated. It is not the only thing it can be rated on, nor is it even necessarily _worth_ rating it on that. But it is a thing that can be discussed.
Fiction can have the potential to broaden knowledge if only by making writers doing some research.
Does D&D do the same? The amount of time spent on thinking about games, writing the story, etc is non-trivial.
The thing that all games share is that "losing" isn't gonna hurt your life. I'm not gonna lose my house because I blew up my factorio factory. I don't have to finish it. I don't have to play it every day.
Personally I hate games that make me build and design, I already overload on that at work, so for me a lot of my game time is more action-based games. Things I don't get to do during my work time. Does that mean I want to go learn how to shoot an arrow off a running horse? No. Does it mean I want to learn how to fly a helicopter? Nooooot that much. But I sure as hell enjoy flying a helicopter without the fear of death in a game.
what if it does ?
I would guess "dorky", "nerdy" are more mildly self-deprecating than pejorative nowadays. But this could change wildly from one area to another.
Non nerds and non dorks have hobbies, always had. Having hobbies is quite normal and used to be normal. And frankly, playing computer games was popular among popular young boys for whole generations now.
"Dorky", "nerdy" never really described average gamer. It described small groups of people who had social issues regardless what they did - including sport.
Also, there's Football Manager, which takes the 'playing football' game out of the game.
But I do find something attractive about games that keep someone's brain active. Never played factorio though my colleagues wax lyrical about it ad nauseum.
Think I've completed that circle by suggesting to a friend working on accounting SaaS that he look at FM as UX inspiration...
As a kid I said I played Secret of Mana on a weekend (SNES) and for the rest of that school year I was taunted and called "Secret Banana", haha. How far we've come. Or have we.
These kinds of games are the most uniquely intellectual outside of puzzle games, programming games, and even more difficult strategy games.
We exist. We generally are not motivated to provide proof that we exist, especially because many requests for proof are expected in the form of "SEND NUDES". That was not implied in your comment, but your experience likely consists of this exchange and mine reflects a universe of incredulity and harassment.
If you gain insight from reading this, great. But that's not why I'm replying. Somewhere reading this thread is a girl in high school or a woman in college who's into grand strategy, or programming, or something else that's "uniquely intellectual". She's heard messages all her life that girls and women aren't the kinds of people who do this stuff. I know this because I've been that girl - going back decades to where I would read "I'm pretty sure there are no 12 year old girls using Linux", at age 12, from my dual boot Fedora/Debian machine.
Sis, you matter, even if you're just starting to get into this. If we only look at gaming, I've had thousands of hours across Factorio, Paradox games, Zachtronics games, and study sims (not to mention - gasp - mass market tactics games), but you can't get to hour #1000 without hour #1. Whether you choose to keep a low profile in nerd spaces or you choose to be a Girl Gamer (TM) lightning rod, I'm glad you're here, and I hope you pay more attention to comments like mine than the one above mine.