Comments on: Useful crap

By: Steven

Steven — Fri, 30 May 2008 00:29:06 +0000

But could one really predict a Jeffrey Archer novel word for word ? Like some bastard version of Pierre Menard (re)writing Don Quixote? I shudder to think. Thanks for the interesting info re lead and petrol: seems much more plausible than Johnson's view, and possibly even more than the banana hypothesis, though I remain very fond of it. (Whether the Flynn effect is measuring a real increase in something is another matter.) And yeah, Jetpac was awesome.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Fri, 30 May 2008 00:17:21 +0000

[You could make an equally plausible case that since banana consumption has risen massively in the west over the same period, it must be the nutritional benefits of bananas, so rich in potassium and other brain-enhancing minerals, that are responsible for a rise in general intelligence]

the latest argument from the Freakonomics crowd is that one of the big wins in IQ terms was the removal of lead-based additives from petrol - a couple of credible econometricians claim to find really quite huge benefits from this in everything from crime rates to SAT scores. Albeit that a lot of the actual statistical work appears to me to have a lot of the same problems as the Levitt & Donohue “More Abortions, Less Crime” paper (ie the whole dataset is dominated by a massive rise and fall in the 1980s, which it is not clear whether you should ‘correct for’ it or not), they certainly think they’re on to something.

I’d tentatively advance a defence of Empson vs Archer on informational grounds. If you consider Shannon’s information theory (setting aside worries about whether the entropy-paramter in information theory actually matches up well to the ordinary language meaning of “information”), then a signal is informative only in as much as it differs from what you had expected. In this way, an entire novel from Jeffrey Archer, while highly complicated, might be totally predictable, and thus contain less information than even a quite short poem.

(the whole thesis of this book, of course, was prefigured by my uncle, who in the 1980s watched me playing “Jetpac” on the ZX Spectrum via the Kempston joystick interface and opined that I was well on the way to learning the skills necessary to drive a JCB).

By: Steven

Steven — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:25:53 +0000

Hi Pauline,
Thanks for the news from cog psy. Given genre traditions, gaming skills are very often transferable to other games, but the evidence that they are transferable to non-gaming situations is thin, except in the interesting subcase of military games (the US Army apparently successfully trains urban infantry tactics with multiplayer gaming, etc.), or highly specific cases such as that skill in lightgun-shooting games translates pretty well into skill in shooting real guns — but that’s not so surprising since they are very similar actions. (By contrast, I doubt Wii Tennis would improve one’s tennis game IRL.)

I also once wrote a tongue-in-cheek column about how videogames had enhanced my life skills.

By: Pauline de Robert

Pauline de Robert — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:17:22 +0000

Hello Steven - I came across your link to this review on the Prospect blog and since I am in the middle of reading the “Everything Bad…” book right now, came for a look-see. There has been something bothering me about the book (very readable, somewhat tongue in cheek and therefore quite dangerous in its likeability) and I think you nail it. It is the lack of definition of “smart” and the implicit assumption that the skills are transferable from virtual to real world.
One of the major theories to come out of cognitive psychology in the past 3 decades is that people plan but engage in situated action, ie are opportunistic in a given context rather than stick to the rational plan; another slightly older theory is that humans tend to “satisfice” and pick the first good-enough-solution rather than look for the optimum solution, which in most cases is not worth the effort. In other words, people use heuristics most of the time rather than rational reasoning (and this induces various biases in decision making, but that’s another story). Applied to video games, you could very well argue that gamers’ problem solving behaviour is specific to the particular virtual world they are engaged in, that they plan given the objectives of the game and so on, and react depending on the “physics” of the game (ie context), and that none of this is transferable to the real world (a different context, where different motivations apply). Which would tend to somewhat knock Johnson’s idea that games make us smart…