A better answer to this question in reddit is "Does reddit sap the intellectual potencial of humanity?". Imagine if all those people was doing something useful, or myself instead of writing this.

Imagine if people didn't need rest, downtime, brain shut down, or activities outside of work :o

I'm a bit snide here; I object to the "hustle" culture where people are guilted or self-flagellating for having downtime. I've seen too many of my excitable colleagues go too far there and end up with burnout, relationship problems, depression, etc.

Me, I've been chooching along nicely for the past decade and will need to do so for another three decades in all likelihood, and I'm enjoying my downtime (including playing Factorio) while doing so, instead of postponing it until the magical After.

In my personal experience, yes. Absolutely yes. In a way that chess, novels and geometry do not. I think there's a strong correlation (I'll even say causation) for me between spending less time on sites like reddit and sharing/cultivating my own intellectual potential in meaningful ways.

I think it all comes down to fulfillment.

Few of us particularly like how much time we spend on HN/Reddit or go “yeah really glad I’m spending my precious time in this way!” yet we do tend to feel fulfillment from activities like reading a novel or trying to write one or many of the activities we pretend are just the same as playing World or Warcraft and watching Netflix.

How many Steven Pruitts are out there who, instead of contributing in some way to human knowledge are just wasting away on Reddit?

And regardless of your personal opinion on the reliability of Wikipedia, I think we can all agree that the ability to quickly find a brief overview of any subject is insanely valuable to society.

On the other hand, I know if I weren't wasting time on HN right now, I wouldn't be doing anything productive.

> Imagine if all those people was doing something useful, or myself instead of writing this.

In my personal experience, reddit/HN has never been the reason I didn't do something useful. The reason was that I just didn't want to do it, and if HN didn't exist I'd just stare at the ceiling.

Do ceilings sap the intellectual potential of humanity?

Absolutely no.

At least those that already have a drive to know use reddit to sharpen their knowledge. As a research tool itself reddit is pretty invaluable.

Also, Reddit was absolutely great for me to sharpen my English debate skills. I was able to go from English being a poor third language to people refusing to believe it's not my first :)

Yup! It's fantastic place to write, organize ideas, and get responses from other people. And then respond to those responses. The chain structure of reddit conversations is very interesting, imo, and an invaluable tool.

I tend to use HN as a way to hone my writing skill. I'll play with length, wording, style, etc. The karma count gives me a bit of feedback on how well I've done, and comments back to me will further hone my writing.

So, for me at least, HN provides a fertile place to be productive, but mostly as a place to play around and sharpen my skill.

To be fair, special interest subreddits have given me a lot and are not a waste of time. Much like Hacker News! :-)

Imagining is more fun than almost anything else.

Touché. Well played, sir. :-)

Honestly, conclusory and flip answers like this strongly make me suspect that there is some truth to it. It's worth discussing beyond "Let people do whatever they want."

There is very little harm in considering this question open-mindedly, and yet the defensiveness is so reflexively strong -- even as a bunch of the people who play them will very frequently themselves step back and joke about how much time some of these suck out of their lives.

So yes, we actually SHOULD encourage people to reexamine their patterns and consider if some (not all, some) of these hours could be put to a different or better use.

You're so right. It's extremely strange how most replies here and on reddit take the "100% it's not a problem" stance. The real answer would require actually doing surveys of

1) the value, learning, and art generated by games 2) the cost, judged according to each individual player's own value system.

And then weighing the strength of each effect. Note that I am judging according to the individual's values, not my own. Example: the rate at which people say "I wish I could stop playing game X" or the rate they suffer regret after a play session, or a year after quitting playing. I personally am really glad I found factorio, but not very happy about my time playing diablo 2.

Surely there are hypothetical examples of games which could be created, or addictions conscious beings could be vulnerable to, which would force defenders of freedom to admit that it's at least conceivable that there are situations where "bad" things exist, which we'd be better off without. Not saying we are in that state now, or what we should do if it happened. Just pointing out that acting as if there are no costs at all isn't addressing the opponent's position, even though we know there are lots of people who claim otherwise.

It could be a huge problem and the correct response is still and always an immediate "let people do what they want".

If you want to educate people on alternatives, or offer treatment systems, or whatever, that's fine. But ultimately and finally you need to let people do what they want. Anything else is a consent violation.

A technically correct one, but perhaps not a useful one.

There is no inherent incompatibility between "very strongly challenging peoples' ideas and practices" and "violating consent."

In general, people get extremely defensive when it comes to entertainment, shown in its mildest forms with arguments about which movie is better, which band has the AOTY, to how well these things intertwine with politics (like adding fire to fire), and its more extreme forms on the debate about whether video games cause violence or porn causes sexist attitudes. Part of this is likely the fact that it feels really good to play video games and watch porn (and I say this as someone who does both) - perhaps more than food. People just don't want to hear criticism, because it sets their mind into cognitive dissonance mode.

A question worth asking is what a 'better use' is to that person and to what extent (and why) that differs from your idea of a 'better use'. For example, I personally don't think chess is much better than a game like Starcraft or Factorio. I don't think billiards is any better than chess. I don't think English literature is better than philosophy. I don't think science is as good as maths.

Not everyone wants to be an intellectual; many people (due to other factors in life) can barely find the time to care enough (with either depression or work sapping thir creative energies). "Reexamining patterns" is good. Saying that someone is a bad person (in a moral sense, as some have done) is not. It doesn't take into account individual situations. Philosophers have argued we 'should' reexamine all kinds of things, from our political conceptions to who we decide to date.

>and yet the defensiveness is so reflexively strong

It's hard not to get defensive because this reddit post is basically flamebait:

>use of words like sapping and deadend

>"there's little to no payoff for the rest of humanity"

Like you said we can probably discuss this question without getting defensive but it's impossible thanks to the way it's worded.

Not at all. I'm aware that it has the potential to put people off, but sometimes you have to shake people up to get the discussion going. There is actually a huge difference between "forcing people to do something" and merely "asking a question, albeit in a tough way," and people don't really seem to get this difference around here.

A more interesting and controversial question might be: "Does American football in college, an extremely expensive sport which causes incremental permanent brain damage, sap the intellectual potential of humanity?"

Probably not. Most football players aren't that smart to begin with[0] and most important intellectual advances are made by a small minority of people.

What's the most significant intellectual contribution of any athlete? I can't think of one without really stretching. It's not like tennis players are making great intellectual contributions and football players are the only athletes who are absent.

If you're talking about the opportunity cost of watching college football instead of doing something more productive, then maybe, but most (virtually all) of the extremely smart people I know do not spend much time watching sports.

[0]: I'm not saying they're dumb, they're just not geniuses

The “intellectual potential of humanity” is such a misnomer. Does it mean not allowing people to do what they would want to do in order to achieve some societal goal? I could say a lot about people who work in advertising for example.

Some people are obsessed with computer games and will spend enormous amount of time which could be better spent otherwhere if not for that addiction. I'm talking from my own experience. I can't experiment by living in another world without computer games, may be I would destroy that time in the other fashion or may be I would write some useful code, who knows.

But just blindly dismissing that kind of reasoning is not wise in my opinion. Casinos eat money from victims and they are regulated. Computer games eat time from some victims and time is quite important asset as well.

Of course just like some people can reasonably spend some little money to get some enjoyment in casino, other people can reasonably spend some free time in computer games without compromising on more important activities. But not everyone have iron will and iron grip over himself.

> which could be better spent otherwhere

But realistically would it be better spent?

I banned myself from games to write my master thesis.

There was some mild improvement in pace of work, but I'm not sure if I should attribute it to not gaming or simply to approaching deadline.

On the other hand I watched all 10 seasons of "Friends" during that time. And I didn't even like "Friends" to begin with.

Better spent according to whom?

There is no authority higher for the appropriate use of one's time than oneself.

I think it's more likely that all the above (and Factorio, Eve, etc.) in fact generate intellectual potential.

+1. It is absurd to simplify intellectual energy to a measurable quantity as if our brains are batteries hooked up to one giant electric motor. Brilliance is a mysterious thing, but we know it comes from unexpected places. An intellectual jungle of games, arts, and culture seems more fertile than the homogenous, sterile ivory tower.

"Factorio Is The Best Technical Interview We Have"

https://erikmcclure.com/blog/factorio-is-best-interview-we-h...

Definitely. A sillier example, I find Minecraft can be useful to get me back in the zone if I'm feeling unfocused. Building systems and overcoming design limitations does require thought. Having to concentrate on something that's easy to concentrate on helps get you in the right "mode" so to speak.

Reddit, however, I find draining. There's always a risk of getting sea lioned by a particularly toxic user. Conversation tends to be very one-sided also.

I'm sure there's some people whose analytical brain is being awakened by Factorio and who are looking into turning that into a career.

I mean I played around in ZZT and ended up a software engineer.

How many people do you know that play 40+ hours of chess a week?

How many people do you know that don't work a job, are 25 and able bodied, and live at home with their parents to play chess?

How many people do you know that work a dead-end factory job, and come home and put all of their effort into chess over advancing their career?

I know of 0 for any of those for chess, but I can think of at least 100 people that this applies for video games.

Video games are great! I get it. But when it starts to be the purpose of life, it seems a very sad life.

How many of those people do have intellectual potential that they waste in Factorio or Eve Online? How many of those people ended there because they played games? And how many started gaming because they were fed up with their lack of potential?

Maybe majority of gamers would been the type who would waste themself in a pub or on some other meaningless thing otherwise? I don't think it's so easy to answer those aspects without hard numbers.

Hard to know!

Are gamers just a holding pattern for society, because we have passed peak employment - and just need to keep a chunk of society busy doing "nothing" ?

Yeah, I'm blown away when I watch videos of people smashing Dark Souls 3 while almost never dying. Then I think of the 2000+ hours it must have taken to achieve that level of muscle memory and expertise.

Then again, they are making money with their Twitch streams and walkthroughs simply by being Souls experts. So who am I to say they are wasting anything?

I'm glad to see you're doing something more productive with your time.

Hey hobbies are great. Everyone needs hobbies.

I don't live with my parents so I can post on hacker news.

Of course. How convenient that you're the exception.

> Does Chess sap the intellectual potential of humanity?

arguably, yes. it's a closed universe which at best provides entertainment for outsiders, unlike writing fiction which can inspire even revolutions, to say nothing of enriching minds and widening the emotional and intellectual horizons of individual readers. not sure if you were being serious about higher mathematics.

Okay, that's some wonky high brow elitism. I'm trying to break into fiction writing as a career and even though I'd like to prop up writing's value in society, you're going too far.

First off, everyone needs fun hobbies to distract them from their day to day. While many gravitate to hobbies similar to their career, it should never be a requirement. Its whatever recharges your batteries. However you achieve that, whether chess, reading, woodworking or nature walks, it doesn't matter. Again, as a fiction writer, the academic elitism of it really pisses me off. Not all entertainment needs to broaden your horizons. It first has to entertain and make you lose track of the miserable real world. Teaching you something is second on the list. Not first. Shoving the "it must enrich you or it's not art" is the most heinous elitist gatekeeping there is. This is the exact reason people dont like reading. Being told, "you're not reading the right books" turns people off, thus will never read said books.

> Shoving the "it must enrich you or it's not art" is the most heinous elitist gatekeeping there is.

I'm not sure he said that it must enrich you or it isn't art. His point was whether or not the effort one puts into a particular thing saps or uses up intellectual intelligence of a person. Is the task a hamster wheel where no benefits are experienced by anyone other than the hamster or is the hamster wheel connected to a capacitor and providing electricity to the other hamsters. I don't see a reason to get into the elitist arguments. All of these activities fall somewhere on the spectrum of the amount of good provided to humanity. Closed loop activities that only recharge one's battery provide less benefit to humanity and can be said to sap or use up our intellectual intelligence. There is no elitism about this argument, it's just a 30k foot view of us hamsters and which ones use more or less intelligence that benefits the rest of the hamsters.

What is with this closed loop fascination? 100% of your time has to be devoted to benefiting humanity? I'm all for ranking certain careers and their value to society, but if someone who is apart of Doctors Without Borders likes to drink shitty Pats Blue Ribbon and watch a Kardashian show at the end of a long day... so? Whatever they have to do to ready for the next day with enthusiasm, who the fuck cares? Why does their relaxing, time off endeavor have to benefit someone else?

Get off your Silicon Valley, always got to hustle hamster wheel. Go watch a sunset.

> 100% of your time has to be devoted to benefiting humanity?

I don't see him saying that, or even implying it. Rather, he seems to be indicating that is a valid vector by which the activity can be rated. It is not the only thing it can be rated on, nor is it even necessarily _worth_ rating it on that. But it is a thing that can be discussed.

Where at all did I say you need to devote 100% of your time to humanity? Where at all did I say a person is better or worse than another based on how productive their intellectual interests are? Not sure my response deserves that much hostility. The original article is purely about whether or not eve online and similar pursuits burn intellect without any positive impact on society. I am on the nihilistic end of the tech spectrum. I made no argument that working on apps in their free time makes one better than one that spends their free time writing novels. The reality is that intellectual activities can have some meaningful benefit to humanity and some activities benefit humanity more than others. That is what the article is attempting to tease out and measure.

Chess knowledge doesn't really transfer to anything else but chess as far as I know.

Fiction can have the potential to broaden knowledge if only by making writers doing some research.

the question reduces to something like "is society entitled to the brain cycles of particularly smart people?". if so, then one can criticize just about anything smart people spend time thinking about that doesn't create material returns for their communities.

It is deeper than that because even if we were to assume society was entitled to them, we still wouldn't know how best to optimize them. To what extent does play involving complex problems contribute to those brain cycles being worth as much as they are.

Also, I think we can represent the problem in a different way to make it more desirable to be solved. Instead of being entitled, we can represent it as incentivizing trade. So rephrase it into "Can society incentivize particularly smart people to trade brain cycles."

I think this one has an decently agreeable answer of yes. Having now answered it, we can then approach optimizing the market for our society which would include having more particularly smart people to trade with (especially since I suspect brain cycles are somewhat unique per person). And is allowing people to sharpen their minds using thought intensive play one method of achieving that goal? Sure, it may lead to those people being less willing to trade their brain cycles (because they now can use them on Factorio instead), but it also means that more people now have brain cycles to trade.

> the question reduces to something like "is society entitled to the brain cycles of particularly smart people?".

No, it doesn't. A conclusion that something is a drag on society is not necessarily (and frequently not) an argument for banning it. The implication only exists in a pure form if one assumes a "government knows best" sort of politics. Label it what you like, I'm not going to pick fights.

I am a bit worried about this line of reasoning, though -- basically saying it isn't a line of thought that can lead to good policy, so it probably shouldn't be investigated or argued.

I don't believe anyone is seriously talking about banning factorio, but I do have a hard time trusting that an affirmative answer to these questions isn't accompanied by some level of value judgement. how could I not? we are literally contemplating all the great things that could have been accomplished if nerds didn't spend so much time playing certain video games. you never hear about all the furniture that could have been moved for the elderly if people didn't spend so much time at that damned gym.

frankly, I think we should not care so much about what people do with their leisure time, as long it isn't actively harming anyone (ie, not in a "what could have been" sense). if we want smart people to do more useful stuff, we should figure out how to pay them for it.

> I do have a hard time trusting that an affirmative answer to these questions isn't accompanied by some level of value judgement

Sure, I'll grant "value judgement", and I don't have much of a problem with it. I think people saying X is a waste of time are often right and often misguided, and it's a useful kind of conversation in general.

The comment I replied to said this was about whether people are entitled to waste time, though, which is a stronger argument that I object to.

> that doesn't create material returns for their communities.

More realistically, for the elite in charge of their communities.

Its a practical problem for employment. No company complains about smart people not making their coworkers lives better; its all about "stealing from the company" by doing projects at home on their own time using their own materials, that may or may not be the feudal property of their owner/employers depending on their state of residence's attitude toward modern slavery.

does it? we're simply considering input -> output. society does not own your brain, do with it whatever pleases you. how you feel about your responsibility, if any, to your species is entirely your business, not mine. that's basically belief system (secular or spiritual) territory. do i have rights in respect to society? does society have rights in respect to me? these are interesting questions, but not what i had intended.

to be verbose: since smart people are a limited resource it is imho correct to note that an intellectually, emotionally, and life-focus demanding activity, such as chess, that has not (and can not) ever transfer knowledge gains in that closed system to other domains of concern to our species, is in fact, as a matter of simple math, sapping a precious resource.

(but i'm open to the suggestion that maybe chess is keeping society safe from otherwise unoccupied mad geniuses -- calling B.F. .. :)

I think A LOT of people i play with end up having jobs that don't engage their creativity at all. The end up playing games and building gorgeous bases and interesting complex setups.

Does D&D do the same? The amount of time spent on thinking about games, writing the story, etc is non-trivial.

The thing that all games share is that "losing" isn't gonna hurt your life. I'm not gonna lose my house because I blew up my factorio factory. I don't have to finish it. I don't have to play it every day.

Personally I hate games that make me build and design, I already overload on that at work, so for me a lot of my game time is more action-based games. Things I don't get to do during my work time. Does that mean I want to go learn how to shoot an arrow off a running horse? No. Does it mean I want to learn how to fly a helicopter? Nooooot that much. But I sure as hell enjoy flying a helicopter without the fear of death in a game.

Doesn’t this depend on scope? If you have 50,000 kids spending 5hrs on chess a day it’s one thing, if you had 5,000,000 it’s another thing.

Is there any grind-catch in chess, like in addictive videogames? And why novel writting, but not reading? Both are seen as intellectual, but reading I'd say has far higher chance to end in brainless consuming, wasting intellectual potential.

there could be an argument here though. it’s not so obvious. Chess might be because all the chess players only contribute to advancing chess. novel writing is obviously different, it means sharing knowledge so it contributes to whole humanity.

I know very little about chess, but to me it feels that any such activity is kind of relative to how exactly you're engaging with the activity, and what skills you already possess.

Arguably, if it benefits you via learning new things/skills, it also benefits the humanity because later you'll apply these skills at something else. So for example we can 'classify' the returns from engaging with chess depending on your current skills:

- playing a (single) game of chess

  - high if you never played chess or games like that before. A lot of it is a very transferable skill that applies to other games, and more importantly, real world reasoning
  - medium if you don't know chess but familiar with similar games (e.g. checkers/go) -- you might advance your skill
  - low if you're a good chess player -- you just maintain your chess skill? also of course it could still be beneficial if playing it makes you relaxed and happy, nothing wrong with this -- just in that sense it's not objectively better than idk, watching a tv show

- writing a brute force algorithm to play chess

  - high if you're new to algorithms
  - low if you're an experienced with algorithms (basically just yet another interview problem)

- writing an AI to play chess

  - high for most programmers
  - not so useful if you're a member of AlphaZero team?

Now replace chess with Minecraft or Starcraft or anything else, and all these statements probably still stand. Most humans would benefit from writing a novel.. but if you're already a good writer, it would probably have low benefit. Not sure what would be the algebraic geometry equivalent though :)

Well, by being bad at chess I was motivated to code up a chess engine for the first time. Does that mean being bad at chess is good for my intellectual potential? I learned a lot about chess programming...

Factorio, Eve Online, Chess, (or whatever you enjoy doing) *IS* the intellectual potential of humanity.

> Does Chess sap the intellectual potential of humanity? Does novel writing sap the intellectual potential of humanity? Does algebraic geometry sap the intellectual potential of humanity?

what if it does ?

In what way is gaming nerdy ... seriously.

All hobbies are "dorky" in a way (maybe except sports-related hobbies like hiking), they're considered especially so if one is obsessive about this hobby. Non-art hobbies, in my experience, are more likely to be classified "nerdy" as opposed to "dorky". I should note that, at least in the US for people in mid 20s, in the last few years (maybe thanks to Covid) "dorky" or "nerdy" sort of stopped being pejorative. Even in dating apps, it's normal for people to write stuff like "the dorkies things about me is... thinking about programming/gaming/drawing all the time" etc.

I would guess "dorky", "nerdy" are more mildly self-deprecating than pejorative nowadays. But this could change wildly from one area to another.

Sports are / can be massively nerdy tbh, some of them crunch more numbers and statistics than the average Eve Online spreadsheet warrior. And the bigger fans cosplay to the sports conventions.

Also, there's Football Manager, which takes the 'playing football' game out of the game.

Yeah, that football manager is still catergorised as a game is hilarious. I think I may have even developed a appreciation of the finer aspects of the modern games use of data analysis.

But I do find something attractive about games that keep someone's brain active. Never played factorio though my colleagues wax lyrical about it ad nauseum.

Football Manager once got described as being a game whose gameplay seems to have been inspired by accounting software.

Think I've completed that circle by suggesting to a friend working on accounting SaaS that he look at FM as UX inspiration...

Sports players and fantasy sports players live in different universes. Almost zero overlap.

Gaming is the most common hobby there is for males. And that includes men who do a lot of sport. They regularly happen to be gaming a lot. School drop outs game a lot.

Non nerds and non dorks have hobbies, always had. Having hobbies is quite normal and used to be normal. And frankly, playing computer games was popular among popular young boys for whole generations now.

"Dorky", "nerdy" never really described average gamer. It described small groups of people who had social issues regardless what they did - including sport.

I think some of us older folks have a hard time shaking the notion that gaming is nerdy. When I was a kid, you didn't tell people you played video games. Today it's a streamed e-sport in which people make huge sums of money. The transition was, I think, surprisingly fast and very unexpected back then.

As a kid I said I played Secret of Mana on a weekend (SNES) and for the rest of that school year I was taunted and called "Secret Banana", haha. How far we've come. Or have we.

Certain types of games, like factorio and eve online, are firmly nerd games. We make jokes in grand strategy game circles about how few not "traditional nerds" play these games. I still have not seen proof of a SINGLE woman who plays grand strategy games.

These kinds of games are the most uniquely intellectual outside of puzzle games, programming games, and even more difficult strategy games.

> I still have not seen proof of a SINGLE woman who plays grand strategy games.

We exist. We generally are not motivated to provide proof that we exist, especially because many requests for proof are expected in the form of "SEND NUDES". That was not implied in your comment, but your experience likely consists of this exchange and mine reflects a universe of incredulity and harassment.

If you gain insight from reading this, great. But that's not why I'm replying. Somewhere reading this thread is a girl in high school or a woman in college who's into grand strategy, or programming, or something else that's "uniquely intellectual". She's heard messages all her life that girls and women aren't the kinds of people who do this stuff. I know this because I've been that girl - going back decades to where I would read "I'm pretty sure there are no 12 year old girls using Linux", at age 12, from my dual boot Fedora/Debian machine.

Sis, you matter, even if you're just starting to get into this. If we only look at gaming, I've had thousands of hours across Factorio, Paradox games, Zachtronics games, and study sims (not to mention - gasp - mass market tactics games), but you can't get to hour #1000 without hour #1. Whether you choose to keep a low profile in nerd spaces or you choose to be a Girl Gamer (TM) lightning rod, I'm glad you're here, and I hope you pay more attention to comments like mine than the one above mine.

This particular game is very nerdy.