If you just bragged on Facebook or Twitter that you or your spouse works 80 hours a week just to get by, this is for you. If you are not that person, read on anyway, and enjoy the show.
Jane McGonigial, a rather well known woman who works in the video game industry and who has started doing research on the effects of games on humans, has given a number of TED talk which I highly recommend watching. In one of these videos, she describes some research she was involved with. In this research, a number of nursing home residents were asked what their biggest regrets were. The two most common answers were, spending too much time working and spending too little time with family. Someone (who I have been unable to identify) once said something to the effect of, "Any fool can learn from his own mistakes; it takes a wise man to learn from the mistakes of others." If you are working 80 hours a week, you should be asking yourself, are you going to be the fool who learns from his own mistakes only after it is too late, or are you going to be the wise man (or woman) who learns from the mistakes of a majority of old people who wish they had spent their lives better?
I also want to point something else out: Even black slaves in the South, before the Civil War, did not typically work 80 hours a week. Slaves were expensive, and owners were fully aware that frequent 16 hour work days would cause injury, making the slaves unable to do their work. Now days, this is not a problem. Most employers do not pay any up front costs, so working people to death is quite profitable, so long as there is a line of replacements waiting outside. If you are working 80 hours a week just to get by, your employer considers you expendable. Does a wise person continue to work a job where the goal is extract as much work as possible before throwing an employee aside and bringing in a fresh one? Further, slaves in the South did not have to worry about where their food was going to come from, or how they were going to make rent next month. It sounds like your employer is great. You are working more than a slave, you get less compensation than a slave, and you do not even get to have the peace of job security. Your life sounds awesome.
So what about the people that are working 80 hours a week, but could get by on less? Can I ask, what is the point? I suppose if you like your job a whole lot, maybe you could justify neglecting family and other relationships to spend all of your time working. And maybe you do not really care about having time to put all of your hard earned money to good use. Oh, and maybe you just do not care about your health either. Actually, you are beginning to sound like someone with severe depression. You should probably get some help for that. In fact, people who spend all of their time working, even if they like their jobs, are at much higher risk for depression than others. Not only does this cause major relationship problems, depression causes reduced productivity. In other words, if you are working 80 hours a week, good luck continuing to be productive enough to keep your job.
There was a time, long ago, when working for someone else was humiliating. The single exception was apprenticeships, where someone was paying for you to work for someone else, in exchange for that person to teach you their craft, so you would never have to work for someone else again. Some jobs were not that bad, for instance, being a banker. Obviously not every banker could afford to open his own bank. The President of the United States (or any other elected government position) is another example. On the whole however, most hired jobs were menial labor or mindless brain work that only the desperate were willing to do. Many people bought land and started their own farms, to avoid the humiliation of working for someone else. These people often worked 60 to 80 hours a week, and those with large families sometimes worked more. They worked for themselves though, and they took pride in the fact that no one was their master. During hard times, these people sometimes had to humble themselves and accept welfare from others, but while they preferred not to, they considered it better than working for someone else. During better times, these people often paid it back by giving to others who were in need. They only ever worked for someone else when there was no other option. Working for someone else was rock bottom.
Now, however, I hear reports of people bragging on Facebook that they spend 80 hours a week working for someone else and barely even get compensated sufficiently to survive! How low has our society sunk that the slave looks down on the freeman? How bad has it gotten that social pressure encourages people to voluntarily become slaves, and people do it? Gone are the days when slaves must be guarded day and night to prevent their escape. Now, slaves will stay in bondage even when there is no legal ownership demanding that they stay. Is this really the American Dream?
It gets worse. The U.S. government has setup programs that make the situation even worse. I would like to believe that this is not intentional, but that might be naive. Our current welfare systems help encourage slavery very effectively. Contrary to popular belief, a majority of people on welfare work. In fact, things like the Earned Income Credit require work to get paid, and most welfare in the U.S. penalizes people who are either not working or who are not looking for work (which is far more work than actually working). So, the government tells us that we can only have sufficient welfare if we are already slaves or if we are trying to become slaves. Worse, if we try to escape slavery by finding a job where fewer hours are required for greater pay, our welfare gets cut off, reducing our net income to below what is sufficient for survival. Slavery may not be explicitly legally enforced, but even the government has designed welfare programs to prevent the escape from slavery. It gets even better than this though. All of that money for the welfare system comes mostly from the middle class. The primary benefit of welfare goes to businesses that do not pay enough for their employees to get by. You might try to claim that welfare is benefiting the employees and not the businesses. You would be wrong. If those employees did not get welfare, what would happen? Many of these people already work multiple jobs, or spend their free time looking for a better job. They do not have time to do even more work. Without welfare, they have three options: keep working for too little to get by and starve to death, quit their jobs and start looking for better work full time (and probably starve to death anyway), or quit their jobs, enjoy life and wait for the end to come (and definitely starve to death). I suppose they could try to get help from family, but the extra strain on their family members is likely to make the poverty spread. Ultimately what happens to the businesses is, they loose all of their employees to starvation, suicide, or just quitting, and the businesses fail. Alternatively, the businesses could raise wages to make up the difference. Now, notice that the business ultimately takes the brunt of the blow if welfare quits. The business fails, even if the ex-employees find a better job, unless the business starts paying higher wages. That welfare money is not helping the slaves so much as it is reducing the costs of the businesses. If businesses fail and demand for their services still exists, they will be replaced by new businesses that will pay sufficient wages, if welfare is removed. Otherwise those new businesses will fail almost immediately. Our current welfare system robs the middle class to make life easier for the slave masters, under the guise of robbing the rich to pay the poor.
Now, do not get me wrong here. I am certainly not suggesting that it would be wise to eliminate government welfare to fix this problem. Notice above that the ultimate consequence for most welfare recipients is starvation and death. This is bad, both morally and economically. I have also discussed the inevitability of welfare as the primary form of income for a majority of the population, as the consequence of rapidly developing technology. Welfare is necessary for the survival of our society, and it is necessary for the support of our ever growing lower class. It needs to be fixed to be more friendly to escaping slavery, not eliminated.
Most Americans seem to have everything working against them. Slave masters have convinced us that slavery is more noble than freedom. This has been so effective that now the slaves brag on Facebook about their horrible work conditions and try to tell free men that they are stupid for recognizing it for what it is. Over the last century, mankind has managed to produce a huge amount of labor saving technology. We also managed to get the legal work week down to 40 hours. This was a long drawn out process that was finally codified into Federal law in 1937. Is has been like this for 76 years, during which time numerous devices have been invented and adopted which dramatically reduce labor. In fact, the computer has replaced inordinate numbers of people, just in the field of mathematical calculations. The need for labor is far lower than it has been ever in the known history of the world. It has been argued, and I agree, that a 20 hour work week should pay enough to support a small family. Given production costs for various goods and their retail prices, large business can easily afford to pay sufficient wages for this, if they quit paying their CEOs and upper managers hundreds or thousands of times what they currently pay their other employees. Instead we have laws and social expectations that keep what is approaching a majority of Americans in poverty.
If you want to complain that you are working 80 hours a week, or even that you and your spouse are working 80 hours a week put together, just to get by, you are telling me that you are stealing needed work from three other families. And one of those families is the person that you just accused of freeloading. Those three families that cannot find decent jobs and are forced to live on crummy government welfare because you are stealing their opportunity to work have far more reason to be angry with you than you have to be with them. At this point, government welfare is designed to make up the difference between what your employer pays and what wages would be fair. By taking four times the work you should just to avoid taking what you consider an unfair handout, you are robbing others of the opportunity to earn money by working and the opportunity to get enough welfare money to make up the difference. That is certainly nothing to brag about. Shame on you!
20 November 2013
18 November 2013
Video Games Rant
Last week in church, our lesson was on prioritizing time. Actually, the official subject was avoiding being worldly, without excluding yourself from the world. The two subjects that got the most attention were money and time, and time got the most, because money is always discussed, so it is nothing new. Anyhow, at one point the teacher proudly told how he had prioritized his time better, by playing less video games and doing more physical activities like running. I kept my mouth shut, because the subject of the lesson was not whether video games or physical activity is more valuable, but now it is time for me to rant on this subject.
I regularly hear people say things that devalue video games and exalt physical activity. The common "wisdom" of modern society tells us the video games are time wasters that have no value beyond entertainment. Combined with this, the fact that the occasional person gets addicted to video games, common wisdom says that video games are entirely bad. In addition, common wisdom tells us that violent video games make kids violent. Given these things, it must be obvious that violent video games are especially bad. There is one problem with the common wisdom though: So far, all scientific evidence contradicts these claims. It actually turns out that some of the minor benefits of video games were fairly well know over 20 years ago. In fact, in a public speech on Aug. 8, 1983, Ronald Regan said, "I recently learned something quite interesting about video games. Many young people have developed incredible hand, eye, and brain coordination in playing these games. The air force believes these kids will be our outstanding pilots should they fly our jets." It turns out that the long mocked benefit of increased coordination from playing video games is actually a very valuable asset in the military, among other professions (for instance, surgeons also need very good coordination). Now, I call this only a minor benefit, because real science has found a large number of other benefits that go far beyond the limited applications of highly developed coordination.
First, I recommend watching all of the TED videos by Jane McGonigal (here is one). In one of her videos, she talks about a study where people in rest homes were asked about their regrets and what they wished they had done. The first notable thing is that none of the regrets included playing games too much (video or otherwise). The things they wished they had done included things like spending time with family, working less, and other activities that games can help facilitate. Another one of her videos discusses how adding game-like elements to real life can help improve motivation and even health. She strongly recommends playing games (video games or other games) cooperatively with other people at least 20 hours a week. In the video linked to above, she says that typically 10,000 hours of doing some activity is considered sufficient to become an expert in that activity. She then points out that there are millions of people in the U.S. that have spent enough time playing various video games to be experts. She asks, what are they experts in? The answer is critical thinking and problem solving. McGonigal says that if we can harness the problem solving power of all of these experts, we might be able to fix most or all of the world's problems.
Second, brain scientist Daphne Bavelier discusses actual scientific research in this TED video. Science manages to debunk a large number of myths about playing video games. One notable one is that playing a lot of video games damages eyesight. The research Bavelier is involved with has shown that action games actually improve eyesight, as well as perception. Gamers are more likely to notice small details than others. She also discusses the claim that playing games leads to ADD or ADHD. Again, this is false. Gamers tend to be better at fast decision making where high focus is required. They also tend to be better at keeping track of many things at the same time. These are both things that people with ADD or ADHD have difficulty with. Quantitative measures from Bavelier's research actually show that gamers are about twice as good at focusing compared to other people. She also discusses several other lab tests they did, all of which found that gamers have greater brain development than people who do not play games. After playing the games for several hours or several days, the above mentioned benefits were seen even in people who do not normally play games (and lasted up to 5 months).
Third, many studies have found that violent video games do not make children violent. In fact, some studies have found that violent video games can work as an outlet for aggression, making aggressive children less aggressive towards other people. The only case where video games and violence had a positive link were in people already predisposed to violence. Otherwise stated, people who might be affected by video games to become more violent are people who already have psychological problems tending towards violent behavior. These cases can be diagnosed before playing violent video games, and there are almost always warning signs long before any disastrous behavior occurs. In other words, violent video games do not make anyone violent. There is a very small amount of evidence that they may trigger violent behavior in people with diagnosable mental problems, earlier than would otherwise occur, but they will not cause violent behavior that would not have eventually happened anyway without video games.
There is far more evidence than this that games are good and healthy, and the only evidence that exists that they are bad only shows that they are bad when played obsessively. Real research shows that common wisdom claiming video games are bad is not just wrong, but it claims the opposite of the truth. Video games are actually very healthy for the brain.
I am not done ranting yet. There are some interesting implications of the above that I want to discuss. The first thing about the Sunday discussion that bothered me was the assumption that physical activity is superior to playing video games. Now, I am not saying that physical fitness is not important. It certainly is, but if a person is already reasonably fit, and that person has to choose between games and exercise, which is the better choice? The answer to this depends. In a society where people have to do a lot of physical labor to survive, further increasing physical prowess is extremely valuable, and physical activity would be the clear winner. We do not live in that society though. We live in a society where physical labor is done primarily by the lower class and is compensated fairly poorly. In our society, the high paying jobs are engineering jobs, which require highly developed problem solving skills. The ability to perceive small details is a huge asset in higher paying jobs. Even many higher business jobs require good problem solving skills. Further, getting those physical labor jobs is pretty difficult when the economy has trouble, because almost anyone can learn to do that work. During the recent recession, when construction jobs and nearly every other physical labor employment dropped considerably, jobs in problem solving (most especially engineering jobs including electrical engineering and computer science) were constantly available. For these problem solving industries it was business as usual: There was high demand for employees with a low supply. In short, so long as a person has enough physical activity to avoid health problems, the video games are more valuable in the long run. Going to the gym or hiking with friends is great, but it seems like a poor decision to sacrifice good brain exercise for physical activity that is little more than entertainment.
So, would I be proud of myself for spending less time playing video games and spending more doing physical activity? Certainly not. I currently spend around an hour a day walking to and from classes, every weekday. About 3 of those days, I run part of the way, to get my heart rate up and to maintain good lung function. I consider this physical activity an important part of my routine, because it is necessary to maintain good health. I am not an athlete, but this is sufficient exercise to maintain quite good health. My weekly total of time spent playing video games is probably several more hours than my weekly total of real exercise. As a Computer Science major, my problem solving skills are more important than physical activity, so long as I remain healthy. Since my exercise routine is sufficient for health, it would be rather irresponsible of me to spend less time playing video games so that I can spend more on physical activity. Spending less time on video games could easily result in a reduction of problem solving skills, which could make my work less valuable to an employer. I have a responsibility to provide for my family, and an important part of that is maintaining a high value to my employer, so my employment will be continued. The consequences of playing video games less, no matter how noble the alternative seems, could easily result in letting my family down.
I have said this before (somewhere; I forget exactly where): Playing video games is like working out for the brain. In physical workout, great strength can be gained, but it has no value if it is never used. Similarly, through video games, great mental strength can be gained, but likewise it has no value if it is never used. From this we should get two things: First, sitting in a basement playing video games constantly is truly a waste of time if the benefits are not used. Second, playing video games is like working out! Yes, that is exactly what I said. If you are a parent and you are worried about how much time your children spend playing video games, ask yourself how you would react if your children were spending that time working out at the gym instead. If your reaction to the gym is less negative, something is wrong. Are you hoping your child will become a garbage collector or a cheap construction worker (there are some highly skilled construction jobs that require less physical work and more mental work), or do you want your child to be well suited to be an engineer, a surgeon, or a lawyer (or a CEO or...)? Similarly, if you have a spouse or boyfriend/girlfriend who plays a lot of video games, consider the gym thing again. It is possible to spend too much time at the gym, and if someone in your life is spending that much time playing video games, then it is perfectly reasonable to be concerned. Otherwise is it completely hypocritical.
Now I am sure someone out there is wondering, "If video games are so beneficial, how did ancient humans get by without them?" That is not an entirely unreasonable question, and it conveniently has a very simple answer: They lived them! Ok, so that sounds both melodramatic and slightly absurd, but it is also true. The most beneficial video games are those that require remembering where things are (mapping), noticing small details (perception), and making important decisions very quickly (decision making and problem solving). Before we had all of this technology and knowledge, people had to hunt for food, they had to avoid or fight neighboring tribes, and they had to avoid predators. Getting lost (mapping) was very often deadly. If a person did not notice the stalking predator or warrior from a nearby tribe (perception) it would also result in a quick death. If a person reacted poorly to a situation with a scout from a nearby tribe (attacked a friendly or tried to talk to a hostile; this is decision making), it could result in quick death or unnecessary war. All of these things were literally developed as a consequence of the difficult conditions of real life. People that live in a society without these difficult conditions do not get these opportunities to develop problem solving skills that are far more important than we give credit for. Really, the only other reasonable (and cheap) place to get this training is video games that simulate similar conditions to those that ancient humans lived their entire lives in. Many modern video games manage this very effectively. The benefit with video games is that they do not require the grueling physical exertion (which can lead to poor choices as the body uses resources needed by the brain) and do not have the constant threat of death. In other words, in games we can make mistakes and learn from consequences, without having to experience them first hand.
The moral of this is that video games are good for us, if we take advantage of the benefits they give us. Even those who are traditionally against entertainment and for "going back to the land" should see the value in video games, as they train the human brain for problem solving in the way it was designed to learn. Video games are more or less the most natural form of learning, aside from living under the constant threat of death. I suspect part of the reason so many people are drawn to video games is that they use the brain in the most effective way possible. Learning to play a new video game is easy, but learning a new school subject of equal complexity is often quite hard. Games provide constant motivation to play. In school, the only real motivation is a light at the end of a very long tunnel. Games reward us for learning as much as we can. School rewards us for doing as little as possible that will get us through it. We can see this clearly by the fact that "piston" sometimes returns a Minecraft reference as the first result in a Google search (most of the time it is second to Wikipedia). Many other searches return World of Warcraft results before real world knowledge. Well designed video games can take advantage of this to teach useful real world applications of knowledge, but even games designed purely for entertainment can teach problem solving skills that cannot effectively be learned anywhere else.
Like Jane McGonigal, I recommend playing 20 hours of games a week (see her videos for the exact context). Further, I recommend that at least 5 hours of this be video games where keeping track of location, noticing small details, and making quick decisions are integral parts of the game play (these do not all have to come from the same game, but I think it would be more efficient use of time if they did). The most obvious genre for this is first person shooters (FPS, which I do not happen to enjoy much), but most real-time strategy games (RTS), role-playing games (RPG), and many games from other genres can satisfy these requirements (even Tetris is good for decision making). Currently I have been playing a lot of Minecraft, which has small amounts of quick decision making, a huge amount of mapping, some small details, and an extremely strong focus on general problem solving (and if you do not like killing the occasional zombie or spider, you can set it for "Peaceful" mode, at the expense of quick decision making).
It is not hard to see major benefits from playing video games, unless you think that somehow a few more hours of physical activity is more valuable than useful work skills that are essential to comfortable survival in the modern world. If you really want something to be proud of, quit wasting so much time on physical activity and spend a few more hours a week playing video games (or better, turn of the TV and spend the extra free time on video games; they are at least as entertaining and far more beneficial).
Lord Rybec
I regularly hear people say things that devalue video games and exalt physical activity. The common "wisdom" of modern society tells us the video games are time wasters that have no value beyond entertainment. Combined with this, the fact that the occasional person gets addicted to video games, common wisdom says that video games are entirely bad. In addition, common wisdom tells us that violent video games make kids violent. Given these things, it must be obvious that violent video games are especially bad. There is one problem with the common wisdom though: So far, all scientific evidence contradicts these claims. It actually turns out that some of the minor benefits of video games were fairly well know over 20 years ago. In fact, in a public speech on Aug. 8, 1983, Ronald Regan said, "I recently learned something quite interesting about video games. Many young people have developed incredible hand, eye, and brain coordination in playing these games. The air force believes these kids will be our outstanding pilots should they fly our jets." It turns out that the long mocked benefit of increased coordination from playing video games is actually a very valuable asset in the military, among other professions (for instance, surgeons also need very good coordination). Now, I call this only a minor benefit, because real science has found a large number of other benefits that go far beyond the limited applications of highly developed coordination.
First, I recommend watching all of the TED videos by Jane McGonigal (here is one). In one of her videos, she talks about a study where people in rest homes were asked about their regrets and what they wished they had done. The first notable thing is that none of the regrets included playing games too much (video or otherwise). The things they wished they had done included things like spending time with family, working less, and other activities that games can help facilitate. Another one of her videos discusses how adding game-like elements to real life can help improve motivation and even health. She strongly recommends playing games (video games or other games) cooperatively with other people at least 20 hours a week. In the video linked to above, she says that typically 10,000 hours of doing some activity is considered sufficient to become an expert in that activity. She then points out that there are millions of people in the U.S. that have spent enough time playing various video games to be experts. She asks, what are they experts in? The answer is critical thinking and problem solving. McGonigal says that if we can harness the problem solving power of all of these experts, we might be able to fix most or all of the world's problems.
Second, brain scientist Daphne Bavelier discusses actual scientific research in this TED video. Science manages to debunk a large number of myths about playing video games. One notable one is that playing a lot of video games damages eyesight. The research Bavelier is involved with has shown that action games actually improve eyesight, as well as perception. Gamers are more likely to notice small details than others. She also discusses the claim that playing games leads to ADD or ADHD. Again, this is false. Gamers tend to be better at fast decision making where high focus is required. They also tend to be better at keeping track of many things at the same time. These are both things that people with ADD or ADHD have difficulty with. Quantitative measures from Bavelier's research actually show that gamers are about twice as good at focusing compared to other people. She also discusses several other lab tests they did, all of which found that gamers have greater brain development than people who do not play games. After playing the games for several hours or several days, the above mentioned benefits were seen even in people who do not normally play games (and lasted up to 5 months).
Third, many studies have found that violent video games do not make children violent. In fact, some studies have found that violent video games can work as an outlet for aggression, making aggressive children less aggressive towards other people. The only case where video games and violence had a positive link were in people already predisposed to violence. Otherwise stated, people who might be affected by video games to become more violent are people who already have psychological problems tending towards violent behavior. These cases can be diagnosed before playing violent video games, and there are almost always warning signs long before any disastrous behavior occurs. In other words, violent video games do not make anyone violent. There is a very small amount of evidence that they may trigger violent behavior in people with diagnosable mental problems, earlier than would otherwise occur, but they will not cause violent behavior that would not have eventually happened anyway without video games.
There is far more evidence than this that games are good and healthy, and the only evidence that exists that they are bad only shows that they are bad when played obsessively. Real research shows that common wisdom claiming video games are bad is not just wrong, but it claims the opposite of the truth. Video games are actually very healthy for the brain.
I am not done ranting yet. There are some interesting implications of the above that I want to discuss. The first thing about the Sunday discussion that bothered me was the assumption that physical activity is superior to playing video games. Now, I am not saying that physical fitness is not important. It certainly is, but if a person is already reasonably fit, and that person has to choose between games and exercise, which is the better choice? The answer to this depends. In a society where people have to do a lot of physical labor to survive, further increasing physical prowess is extremely valuable, and physical activity would be the clear winner. We do not live in that society though. We live in a society where physical labor is done primarily by the lower class and is compensated fairly poorly. In our society, the high paying jobs are engineering jobs, which require highly developed problem solving skills. The ability to perceive small details is a huge asset in higher paying jobs. Even many higher business jobs require good problem solving skills. Further, getting those physical labor jobs is pretty difficult when the economy has trouble, because almost anyone can learn to do that work. During the recent recession, when construction jobs and nearly every other physical labor employment dropped considerably, jobs in problem solving (most especially engineering jobs including electrical engineering and computer science) were constantly available. For these problem solving industries it was business as usual: There was high demand for employees with a low supply. In short, so long as a person has enough physical activity to avoid health problems, the video games are more valuable in the long run. Going to the gym or hiking with friends is great, but it seems like a poor decision to sacrifice good brain exercise for physical activity that is little more than entertainment.
So, would I be proud of myself for spending less time playing video games and spending more doing physical activity? Certainly not. I currently spend around an hour a day walking to and from classes, every weekday. About 3 of those days, I run part of the way, to get my heart rate up and to maintain good lung function. I consider this physical activity an important part of my routine, because it is necessary to maintain good health. I am not an athlete, but this is sufficient exercise to maintain quite good health. My weekly total of time spent playing video games is probably several more hours than my weekly total of real exercise. As a Computer Science major, my problem solving skills are more important than physical activity, so long as I remain healthy. Since my exercise routine is sufficient for health, it would be rather irresponsible of me to spend less time playing video games so that I can spend more on physical activity. Spending less time on video games could easily result in a reduction of problem solving skills, which could make my work less valuable to an employer. I have a responsibility to provide for my family, and an important part of that is maintaining a high value to my employer, so my employment will be continued. The consequences of playing video games less, no matter how noble the alternative seems, could easily result in letting my family down.
I have said this before (somewhere; I forget exactly where): Playing video games is like working out for the brain. In physical workout, great strength can be gained, but it has no value if it is never used. Similarly, through video games, great mental strength can be gained, but likewise it has no value if it is never used. From this we should get two things: First, sitting in a basement playing video games constantly is truly a waste of time if the benefits are not used. Second, playing video games is like working out! Yes, that is exactly what I said. If you are a parent and you are worried about how much time your children spend playing video games, ask yourself how you would react if your children were spending that time working out at the gym instead. If your reaction to the gym is less negative, something is wrong. Are you hoping your child will become a garbage collector or a cheap construction worker (there are some highly skilled construction jobs that require less physical work and more mental work), or do you want your child to be well suited to be an engineer, a surgeon, or a lawyer (or a CEO or...)? Similarly, if you have a spouse or boyfriend/girlfriend who plays a lot of video games, consider the gym thing again. It is possible to spend too much time at the gym, and if someone in your life is spending that much time playing video games, then it is perfectly reasonable to be concerned. Otherwise is it completely hypocritical.
Now I am sure someone out there is wondering, "If video games are so beneficial, how did ancient humans get by without them?" That is not an entirely unreasonable question, and it conveniently has a very simple answer: They lived them! Ok, so that sounds both melodramatic and slightly absurd, but it is also true. The most beneficial video games are those that require remembering where things are (mapping), noticing small details (perception), and making important decisions very quickly (decision making and problem solving). Before we had all of this technology and knowledge, people had to hunt for food, they had to avoid or fight neighboring tribes, and they had to avoid predators. Getting lost (mapping) was very often deadly. If a person did not notice the stalking predator or warrior from a nearby tribe (perception) it would also result in a quick death. If a person reacted poorly to a situation with a scout from a nearby tribe (attacked a friendly or tried to talk to a hostile; this is decision making), it could result in quick death or unnecessary war. All of these things were literally developed as a consequence of the difficult conditions of real life. People that live in a society without these difficult conditions do not get these opportunities to develop problem solving skills that are far more important than we give credit for. Really, the only other reasonable (and cheap) place to get this training is video games that simulate similar conditions to those that ancient humans lived their entire lives in. Many modern video games manage this very effectively. The benefit with video games is that they do not require the grueling physical exertion (which can lead to poor choices as the body uses resources needed by the brain) and do not have the constant threat of death. In other words, in games we can make mistakes and learn from consequences, without having to experience them first hand.
The moral of this is that video games are good for us, if we take advantage of the benefits they give us. Even those who are traditionally against entertainment and for "going back to the land" should see the value in video games, as they train the human brain for problem solving in the way it was designed to learn. Video games are more or less the most natural form of learning, aside from living under the constant threat of death. I suspect part of the reason so many people are drawn to video games is that they use the brain in the most effective way possible. Learning to play a new video game is easy, but learning a new school subject of equal complexity is often quite hard. Games provide constant motivation to play. In school, the only real motivation is a light at the end of a very long tunnel. Games reward us for learning as much as we can. School rewards us for doing as little as possible that will get us through it. We can see this clearly by the fact that "piston" sometimes returns a Minecraft reference as the first result in a Google search (most of the time it is second to Wikipedia). Many other searches return World of Warcraft results before real world knowledge. Well designed video games can take advantage of this to teach useful real world applications of knowledge, but even games designed purely for entertainment can teach problem solving skills that cannot effectively be learned anywhere else.
Like Jane McGonigal, I recommend playing 20 hours of games a week (see her videos for the exact context). Further, I recommend that at least 5 hours of this be video games where keeping track of location, noticing small details, and making quick decisions are integral parts of the game play (these do not all have to come from the same game, but I think it would be more efficient use of time if they did). The most obvious genre for this is first person shooters (FPS, which I do not happen to enjoy much), but most real-time strategy games (RTS), role-playing games (RPG), and many games from other genres can satisfy these requirements (even Tetris is good for decision making). Currently I have been playing a lot of Minecraft, which has small amounts of quick decision making, a huge amount of mapping, some small details, and an extremely strong focus on general problem solving (and if you do not like killing the occasional zombie or spider, you can set it for "Peaceful" mode, at the expense of quick decision making).
It is not hard to see major benefits from playing video games, unless you think that somehow a few more hours of physical activity is more valuable than useful work skills that are essential to comfortable survival in the modern world. If you really want something to be proud of, quit wasting so much time on physical activity and spend a few more hours a week playing video games (or better, turn of the TV and spend the extra free time on video games; they are at least as entertaining and far more beneficial).
Lord Rybec
01 November 2013
Does poverty make people stupid?
Today I read a fascinating article that should completely change how we think about poverty. Recent research has found strong evidence that poverty impairs cognitive function. Researchers cited in the article (found here) describe it as something of a limited resource that poverty consumes very quickly. Evidently the human brain has a limited capacity for difficult decision making. Once that capacity is used up, it takes time to recharge, and during that time, the ability to make wise decisions can be dramatically reduced. It happens that people in poverty have to make these difficult decisions (which bill should I pay, or how will I get to work without a car) a lot more than well off people. In reality, poverty does not make people stupid, but it does tax their decision making abilities to a point where they are reduced considerably.
Several years ago, I read about a study that found that black people have a slightly lower average IQ than white people (in the U.S.). Before going off, this study was not racist, and in fact the researchers went to great lengths to explain that the most likely cause was not racial. Their final conclusion was that intellectual blacks tend to have less children than those who are less intellectual. The result, according to the researchers, was that this process was a process of natural selection, selecting for lower IQ. This more recent study offers a much more likely explanation. In any kind of research, there is a thing called a confounding factor. Confounding factors are things which might taint the data, but which cannot be controlled. If they have a large impact, they can entirely invalidate the conclusions of a study. In studies of psychology (IQ falls into this category), confounding factors are often not all known. It turns out that the recent studies on poverty bring up a major confounding factor to the IQ study, which was not known when the IQ study was conducted. In the U.S., a larger percentage of the black population is in poverty than the white population. If the sample for the IQ study was selected with accurate diversity, this would have been reflected in the results. Since we now know that cognitive function can be diminished by poverty, there is a much better explanation for the results of the IQ study: Black people do not actually have a lower average IQ than white people. Because a larger percentage of the black population is in poverty, black people score lower on IQ tests than white people. The poverty study gives reasonable evidence that the lower scores are a result of the poverty, not of lower IQ. Ultimately, the IQ study is really worthless, because the confounding factor was not accounted for, thus the data is tainted. That said, the point of this is not to discuss how poverty affects IQ scores. This is just an example of how poverty can affect critical thinking.
One problem the article points out is that the diminished decision making skills leads to a problem. People who are in poverty have a diminished capacity to escape poverty because the poverty reduces their decision making skills. In other words, poverty is a self perpetuating trap. It gets worse though. Our welfare system, which is supposedly designed to help people get out of poverty, adds even more decisions. To get on food stamps, you have to do a bunch of complex paperwork, which further consumes cognitive capacity. If you don't get to your appointment exactly on time, you have to reschedule, even if the government workers have time free, and you were late because of an emergency. Many government run employment centers have similar policies. One of the results is that people in poverty tend to have poor time management skills, which makes them more likely to be late to an appointment, which adds more difficult decision making, which further reduces their time management skills... This keeps going. It results in poor diet decisions, poor time management, poor relationship decisions, and all sorts of other poor decisions that help maintain the downward spiral. There is another problem though, which is not mentioned in the article.
The U.S. economy is having a lot of problems (if you were not aware). Ironically, most of the problems are related to poor decision making. Now, one thing I have to note. The U.S. government has set the official, legal poverty level at something around $20,000 a year for a family of 3 or 4 (I forget the exact number, so don't be too surprised if you find they are a bit different). External organizations, who do real research on cost of living and such estimate that it is closer to $40,000 a year, with a lot of fluctuations depending on where in the U.S. you live. This means that the entire lower middle class and a good portion of the middle class are technically in poverty. This lower and center middle class is the same demographic that went into the excessive debt that helped facilitate the recent economic crash. Poverty is bad for the economy.
Now that I have mentioned that much of the middle class is in the poverty category that is affected by the decision making problem, I want to look at some of the bigger implications. Our education system is pretty poor, but maybe part of the problem is the poverty of many of the students (even without that, our education system is terrible; this might be yet another contributing factor though). Also, most grunt laborers and lower management are technically in or near poverty. To get straight to the point, maybe the problem with Americans being less than ideally educated and acting pretty stupid a lot of the time is that most Americans fit into some level of poverty that is affecting their decision making skills. Consider the typical store manager. He (yes, more males are store managers than females, which makes the typical store manager male) is probably making $40,000 a year or less. If he has more than one child (and a wife), he is probably in the upper levels or poverty (depending on local cost of living). Now, in addition to having to make difficult money decisions for his family, he also has to make more difficult decisions daily for his job. No wonder a lot of store managers frequently make poor decisions. Even without the poverty, it is likely that the average CEO is way out of his league in difficult decision making, not because he has some problem, but because humans have limited capacity for making difficult decisions. Unfortunately, in many ways, this is just a problem we have to live with. Even the richest guy in the world is subject to the limitation, and further, with all of the responsibilities that typically come with being rich (or rather, that are an inherent part of being rich, because the process of getting and maintaining riches typically requires a lot of hard decisions), he probably is more subject to it than middle upper class people who are not in management positions.
Anyhow, the point is that redistributing wealth to minimize poverty is very likely to result in a far more robust economy, better relationships, better society, and a smarter America. Getting people out of poverty is no longer just a nice humanitarian thing that we should do because it is the right thing to do. It is a means of raising the standard of living of even the most rich people in the U.S. Imagine if we could take all of the people currently in poverty and have them becoming intellectuals working to advance science and improve technology. Imagine if we could get all of the lower class workers and lower management to a point where they consistently make decisions that are better for their employers and themselves. Imagine if we could get most of the middle class to use more wisdom in making decisions about debt. Businesses would run more efficiently, fewer costly divorces would happen, fewer violent crimes would happen, technology and science would advance more quickly, and the U.S. economy would reestablish itself as the leader of the world economy. So maybe the results would not be quite that dramatic, but even if we managed to make small improvements, the end result would be worth it. There are plenty of other reasons to seriously consider aggressive redistribution of wealth, including the fact that, barring unforeseen disasters that set back our technology dramatically, it will eventually become necessary to maintain any kind of economy in the U.S. The sooner we take action, the sooner we can benefit from an average increase in cognitive capacity in the U.S. Video games are already slowly raising the average IQ in the U.S. (it is true), eliminating poverty promises to give this process a major boost.
Several years ago, I read about a study that found that black people have a slightly lower average IQ than white people (in the U.S.). Before going off, this study was not racist, and in fact the researchers went to great lengths to explain that the most likely cause was not racial. Their final conclusion was that intellectual blacks tend to have less children than those who are less intellectual. The result, according to the researchers, was that this process was a process of natural selection, selecting for lower IQ. This more recent study offers a much more likely explanation. In any kind of research, there is a thing called a confounding factor. Confounding factors are things which might taint the data, but which cannot be controlled. If they have a large impact, they can entirely invalidate the conclusions of a study. In studies of psychology (IQ falls into this category), confounding factors are often not all known. It turns out that the recent studies on poverty bring up a major confounding factor to the IQ study, which was not known when the IQ study was conducted. In the U.S., a larger percentage of the black population is in poverty than the white population. If the sample for the IQ study was selected with accurate diversity, this would have been reflected in the results. Since we now know that cognitive function can be diminished by poverty, there is a much better explanation for the results of the IQ study: Black people do not actually have a lower average IQ than white people. Because a larger percentage of the black population is in poverty, black people score lower on IQ tests than white people. The poverty study gives reasonable evidence that the lower scores are a result of the poverty, not of lower IQ. Ultimately, the IQ study is really worthless, because the confounding factor was not accounted for, thus the data is tainted. That said, the point of this is not to discuss how poverty affects IQ scores. This is just an example of how poverty can affect critical thinking.
One problem the article points out is that the diminished decision making skills leads to a problem. People who are in poverty have a diminished capacity to escape poverty because the poverty reduces their decision making skills. In other words, poverty is a self perpetuating trap. It gets worse though. Our welfare system, which is supposedly designed to help people get out of poverty, adds even more decisions. To get on food stamps, you have to do a bunch of complex paperwork, which further consumes cognitive capacity. If you don't get to your appointment exactly on time, you have to reschedule, even if the government workers have time free, and you were late because of an emergency. Many government run employment centers have similar policies. One of the results is that people in poverty tend to have poor time management skills, which makes them more likely to be late to an appointment, which adds more difficult decision making, which further reduces their time management skills... This keeps going. It results in poor diet decisions, poor time management, poor relationship decisions, and all sorts of other poor decisions that help maintain the downward spiral. There is another problem though, which is not mentioned in the article.
The U.S. economy is having a lot of problems (if you were not aware). Ironically, most of the problems are related to poor decision making. Now, one thing I have to note. The U.S. government has set the official, legal poverty level at something around $20,000 a year for a family of 3 or 4 (I forget the exact number, so don't be too surprised if you find they are a bit different). External organizations, who do real research on cost of living and such estimate that it is closer to $40,000 a year, with a lot of fluctuations depending on where in the U.S. you live. This means that the entire lower middle class and a good portion of the middle class are technically in poverty. This lower and center middle class is the same demographic that went into the excessive debt that helped facilitate the recent economic crash. Poverty is bad for the economy.
Now that I have mentioned that much of the middle class is in the poverty category that is affected by the decision making problem, I want to look at some of the bigger implications. Our education system is pretty poor, but maybe part of the problem is the poverty of many of the students (even without that, our education system is terrible; this might be yet another contributing factor though). Also, most grunt laborers and lower management are technically in or near poverty. To get straight to the point, maybe the problem with Americans being less than ideally educated and acting pretty stupid a lot of the time is that most Americans fit into some level of poverty that is affecting their decision making skills. Consider the typical store manager. He (yes, more males are store managers than females, which makes the typical store manager male) is probably making $40,000 a year or less. If he has more than one child (and a wife), he is probably in the upper levels or poverty (depending on local cost of living). Now, in addition to having to make difficult money decisions for his family, he also has to make more difficult decisions daily for his job. No wonder a lot of store managers frequently make poor decisions. Even without the poverty, it is likely that the average CEO is way out of his league in difficult decision making, not because he has some problem, but because humans have limited capacity for making difficult decisions. Unfortunately, in many ways, this is just a problem we have to live with. Even the richest guy in the world is subject to the limitation, and further, with all of the responsibilities that typically come with being rich (or rather, that are an inherent part of being rich, because the process of getting and maintaining riches typically requires a lot of hard decisions), he probably is more subject to it than middle upper class people who are not in management positions.
Anyhow, the point is that redistributing wealth to minimize poverty is very likely to result in a far more robust economy, better relationships, better society, and a smarter America. Getting people out of poverty is no longer just a nice humanitarian thing that we should do because it is the right thing to do. It is a means of raising the standard of living of even the most rich people in the U.S. Imagine if we could take all of the people currently in poverty and have them becoming intellectuals working to advance science and improve technology. Imagine if we could get all of the lower class workers and lower management to a point where they consistently make decisions that are better for their employers and themselves. Imagine if we could get most of the middle class to use more wisdom in making decisions about debt. Businesses would run more efficiently, fewer costly divorces would happen, fewer violent crimes would happen, technology and science would advance more quickly, and the U.S. economy would reestablish itself as the leader of the world economy. So maybe the results would not be quite that dramatic, but even if we managed to make small improvements, the end result would be worth it. There are plenty of other reasons to seriously consider aggressive redistribution of wealth, including the fact that, barring unforeseen disasters that set back our technology dramatically, it will eventually become necessary to maintain any kind of economy in the U.S. The sooner we take action, the sooner we can benefit from an average increase in cognitive capacity in the U.S. Video games are already slowly raising the average IQ in the U.S. (it is true), eliminating poverty promises to give this process a major boost.
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