The people who try to figure out the exact rules of everything they do tend to be less effective than people who figure out a strategy that works and simply execute.
I agree with this idea in general, but I think it’s prudent sometimes to ask if one has the best strategy or just a good enough strategy.
Folks who rarely or never reflect on this often end up at a (relatively low) local maximum.
In this experiment, it would probably be reflected in the results if they had a larger sample and made a combo with the black dots block award more stars. Many adults probably would not discover this, while many/most kids probably would.
Lucky for you, this set is empty.
> ... tend to be less effective than...
At what? If you're an AI, then you might be overfitting on your training data.
Snide jabs aside. I usually find that "good enough, just execute" has its own failure modes, different than those of "keep digging, understand deeply". Better yet, there are no "failure modes" or "successes" at all unless you have a goal to evaluate against.
> At what?
Accumulating government issued currencies? I do have an impression that technical literacy rarely pays off. It is not like human history is full of trillionaire theoretical physicists and practical machinists.
I mean, not just in terms of making money, but inventing new technologies, saving lives or any tangible measure of success. At some point, you need to play the game.
Edit: Also all of Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon were started by people in their 20's. That is a pretty big coincidence, especially given that younger people have fewer connections and less money than older ones and therefore should in theory have a harder time starting a company.
There is catch - adding money into equation can trigger "avoid risk" behaviours.
If the game was 10x longer, adults would behave differently.
Large codebases can do many amazing things quickly, but they tend to have a lot of technical debt making other things very hard to do. Kids are small codebases, they lack all those abstractions for solving problems quickly but they also lack all the technical debt, allowing them to quickly change and adapt their thinking.
Why are adults better at playing games? Because good board games are designed to align with abstractions adults are likely to have and don't hit the parts with lots of technical debts. It is very easy to design games that goes against the abstractions adults have learned, but those games will be horrible to play so you wont see them.
Edit: Also board games aren't meant to be mastered, you just need people to learn the simple basics. If you add the requirement to master the board game, then we can look at chess and see that people who started learning as a kid becomes way stronger than people who started learning as adults. Adults can learn to play chess much quicker than children, but an adult wont master the game.
And I am not even talking about "mastered" game. Most kids are not playing chess. It is not just difference in experience of board games.
Small kids don't figure out completely new situation faster then adults. They just dont. The quickness of understanding comes in much much later.
Kids older then toddlers care great deal about winning. It is not true that they don't understand why they should care. If you play boardgames with kids, they understand concept of board games in general. Babies don't, toddlers don't, but it is also impossible to play with them.
Framing difference between kids and adults as just lack of experience and pre-existing knowledge is, imo, more of wishful thinking or theory then anything actually observable.
So to me it is obvious that at least some of the difference is that adults have a lot of knowledge to apply while kids don't. In scenarios where the adult lacks a lot of relevant knowledge the kid performs way better.
Small kids, surprisingly, completely sux at understanding computers too. Not software engineer level. They sux at basic user stuff. Small kids don't learn UI fast, it takes them a lot of time. Once they get it, they think how fast they were getting it. But in reality, they sucked for a long time.
Small kids don't navigate UI fast, unless someone in their life patiently shown them and made them feel that way.
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And also, adulthood starts somewhere between 18-21. Those people in fact learn computers, UI and anything new quite fast. You have to go to retirement age to get that "super difficult to learn" thing.