Thread by @KrisAbdelmessih

I sometimes explain how I use boardgames as a tool to teach my kids. The unsaid assumption is that "transference" works.

Paraphrasing from Yale:

Transfer” is a cognitive practice whereby a learner’s mastery of skills in one context enables them to apply it in another.

🤔

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I see examples of this all the time. Consider @Alex_Danco letter this week (I'm a big fan of his writing btw).

He writes about using poker as practice for decision-making practice. In the past, he's written about bridge as the cooperative, strategic analog to SV culture.

Kasparov has tacitly taken advantage of the fact that transference is a thing, parlaying his chess acumen into authoritative political strategy writing.

SIG hires world-class poker, backgammon, Magic, and chess players. On the Amex I met world-class bridge & chess players.

SIG's training famously includes hundreds of hours of poker (ranked by Sharpe ratio), they host an annual firm-wide tourney, and won't shy from hiring unconventional misfits who are genius game players to learn options. (at least 20 years ago this was true)

Now strategic video game "transfer" is being advocating (Tobi Lutke, most famously on Invest Like the Best).

I'm inclined to believe in "transfer". CoVid blew up the boardgaming camp I supposed to do for a week for about 15 kids in my neighborhood. Transfer is assumed.

SIG has skin in the game when they spend time and money to train hires with games. And they are a brilliant company. Their offshoots believe this as well.

But this is an idea whose start and end is very fuzzy to me for a few reasons.

Thinking aloud. Transference is probably a thing.

But what are its mechanics?
What conditions of practice must be present to enable transfer?
What are the limits?
How do we decide how efficient these approaches are?

I've expressed my own bearishness on the use of video games, mostly because of what I think is opportunity cost.
moontowermeta.com/video-game-vet…

I tend to think the game skills are more symptomatic of an underlying aptitude towards computational thinking, abstraction, high attention span, memory, & being technical about rules/logic.

Tobi is really smart. I don't feel on solid ground to think he has causality backwards

But being good at some jobs can be correlated to being good at games because of genes not transfer.

I'm saying this despite wanting to believe in transfer. But the "this does not replicate" crowd is knocking.

https://twitter.com/StefanFSchubert/status/1308364235441942530

I wish I had saved the links to other psych studies I've seen shared on Twitter (maybe @DegenRolf ) which think "transfer" is bs.

At the end of the day, industry seems to believe in it. There are opportunists who will seek to sell you something on its assumed existence.

The fact prop traders believe it is a weighty data point, they have nothing to sell you. The CIA uses games to teach computational thinking.

inversegenius.com/gsl-blog/2018/…

I haven't done a lot of research so if anyone has a survey of what academia thinks.

The games industry has a vested interest in transfer.
But a lot of that could be game-based learning where you can use games as a fun way to teach concepts you might have taught in a less fun way. This isn't really about transfer so much as putting the dog's pill in peanut butter

There are lots of cool resources for using games to teach. There are podcasts, forums, and communities devoted to this. Luckily, I don't think the merit of it all needs transference to be true for it to be worthwhile. It can just be fun ways to learn. But transfer would be sweet.

I'll end with a link to the gaming section of my site (it's mostly about using games as enrichment for kids).

Any resources, thoughts are all appreciated (I'm collecting links on the topic of games in learning as well as "transference", for or against)

moontowermeta.com/category/gamin…