Many college professors seek out "active learning" exercises they can use in class. Coming up with some good rationality games would be an excellent way for LW to expand its influence and promote rationality.
Hopefully we'll be able to learn something. Although, watching the next video suggests that the gamification video led to them getting 500+ emails about it. Here's hoping they actually see mine and are interested in donating their expertise to LW.
I thought this was why we had the Karma system (Points!), why we interlink articles to create a "wiki-walk" effect, and so on? I got the impression we were so good at being engaging that some people even had to put us on leechblock.
Also, maybe someone on SIAI could try making good on that email offer? A non-profit for increasing rationality is probably one of those things that were offered help for free.
All that stuff may help us read LW, but not as good at actually directly helping to train us to be more rational. Also, the issue of "how to create games that help teach rationality" is one that's been explicitly talked about here, so perhaps could directly benefit from people with expertise in the game industry side of things.
Anyways, I've already emailed them. (Though obviously I don't count as an official SIAI person in any way.) But yeah. I pointed them more at LW than SIAI as such, basically saying "hey, I'm not an educator or a doctor, but I'm a member of a community interested in increasing human rationality..."
Gamification is essentially the art of exploiting human cognitive biases so it is very meta to use gamification to teach rationality.
An important thing with games is that all the participants are supposed to share the understanding that they are participating voluntarily in a game with specific rules. As long as gamification sticks to this, it's already somewhat separable from the field cognitive bias exploitation in general, where all sorts of subterfuge is generally the rule.
Games are obviously compelling even with the players being aware that they are participating in a voluntary game. But does gamification work even when the mechanism the game is supposed to serve some ulterior goal and the cognitive biases that it works on are made clear to the player? Jane McGonigal has described running gamification on herself, and apparently being successful with it.
Well, arguably "advertising" is that art. Gamification is rather more specific, though in some cases it may involve exploiting biases.
But hey, twisted meta is always fun. :)
Watch this Extra Credits and take note especially of the end, where they're offering consultation to educators and doctors re making educational stuff and other useful stuff more like games. (Incidentally, the people that make Extra Credits all work in or have been around in the game industry)
I figured I'll email them and going to point them to LW, see if they're willing to give any insights re rationality training. Especially in light of the fact that the subject of games for teaching rationality has come here up before.
Hey, maybe we'll learn something about how to learn something about how to be Less Wrong.