I am curious what HN has to say about a thought I reluctantly admit that I occassionally have : "There is a huge number of people on this planet wasting their mental energy (computional power) on a board game where the same amount of energy can be expended into building new ways of curing cancer or whatever important problem. What's the difference between using calories to compute unnecessary peer to peer game calculations with no goal vs. using electricity to compute hashes in crypto mining."
I love chess and all kinds of board games :) but I can't help thinking about stuff like this.
I think you can extend that kind of thinking to its logical conclusion, i.e. "what is the value of leisure time?", and then you arrive at a question that's been debated by philosophers... well, as long as philosophy has existed.
I struggle with this question for myself, certainly. I know I could be working on some kind of revenue-generating side project, or volunteering my time on a political campaign I believe in, or working to feed the homeless, but instead I play video games. Is that.. okay? Is it "right" or "good"? I don't know that I have a perfect answer.
I know this much: without some amount of leisure time, I'd go crazy, nor would I be much use in any of my "productive" capabilities; so clearly, there's an amount of leisure time that is a net good for me. I think the question becomes: what is that amount?
Pretty soon you should come to the realization that the real question is "What is the value of work?", and the answer is that it enables your leisure time. If you work so much that you have no leisure time then you have defeated yourself, your life is empty.
> "What is the value of work?", and the answer is that it enables your leisure time.
I think that is false. Enabling your leisure is not the sole value of work.
The GP said:
>> I know I could be [...] volunteering my time on a political campaign I believe in, or working to feed the homeless
Those are work too. If you are a certain kind of person, you do those things and value them, and they don't enable your leisure time, indeed they reduce it.
I don't think it's for fun either. Another commenter said:
>>> the number one reason I spend my time there—by far—is because it was fun
It was fun for them, but I know people who do volunteer work to help others who don't find it fun, but do it because they think it is right or essential to do anyway.
I think most people do some kinds of work which is not for the sole purpose of enabling their leisure time, at some time in their lives.
For example every key worker (nurse etc) who feels underpaid but remains in the job because they feel it is a good thing to do. Every unpaid carer of their parents. Every volunteer who delivers food to others during pandemic even when they have become fed up of doing so.
I think the answer is way more straight forward then this... We play games because it’s fun. Having fun makes us happy. Being happy is a goal that is worthy in and of it self. A life which is optimized for happiness is a good life. If a game makes you happy, and it makes people around you happy, that game is worth playing for if only for that reason that it makes you happy.
Its funny that you mentioned “feed the homeless” as an example here. When I lived in San Francisco I spent every Tuesday going to my neighborhood anarchist space to cook for Food Not Bombs and later served it on 16th and Mission. Why did I do that? Sure helping people is a noble goal, spreading anarchist propaganda through direct action is productive for a cause I believe in. But the number one reason I spend my time there—by far—is because it was fun.
That is the whole idea of the sabbath. Humans are not supposed to be slaves to work. Work in the garden (or at the homeless shelter, etc.) six days and rest the seventh
My life got significantly better when I managed to switch from working 5 days and resting 2 (37.5 hours/week), to working 4 days and resting 3 (30 hours/week).
It's actually quite the opposite. Spending time to do something else than please yourself is questionable. What are you working for? To improve society and the world? First you'll improve things for a limited range of human beings only - not counting other humans and the animal world. Second, it's only a drop in the infinity of time. Third, it most always has counter-effects meaning you always do as bad as good.
Thus, you're better off playing games or reading. Being inactive and happy is by far the most rational thing to do.
I think the value of leisure time is a function of how much money you have, and how much free time you already have. If I don't have a lot of money, then it's worth my time to work overtime in a kitchen. If I have more money, I'm less likely to do so. Also people are more inclined to volunteer an hour here or there, but avoid a regular commitment.
I think you could approximate this function of the value of leisure time if you had enough time and money to go around polling people. My hunch is that there would be some variation around work ethic and virtue signaling, but that there would be a clear relationship between net worth, free time, and the value of free time.
This is the same argument against basic and theoretical research. Why spend your time studying obscure insects and animals when you could be doing something worth while? Why study pure math or chase strange theorems that often have no application to anything relevant what so ever?
Because these endeavors all lead to novel tools and learnings that are at times applicable in surprising ways to help solve "whatever important problem."
For example, number theory, on its face, seems completely useless, and since 1800 BCE, years were "wasted" by scholars toying with useless factoring problems...
...until we got RSA cryptography in the 1970s.
If I had lived in the year 1900, I could have never imagined number theory having such immensely important applications, but in 2020, I sure as hell believe AlphaGo and these game solvers have relevance because it's already bearing fruit.
AlphaGo, for one, inspired many application papers. My favorite example though is of a neural net trained to solve CSPs through sudoko which was applied to the inverse protein folding problem! https://ostrokach.gitlab.io/project/proteinsolver/
I'm not sure an analogy between maths or AlphaGo and board games is reasonable, at least for the kind of board games OP was, I think, considering. OP was mentioning "mental energy", meaning they were thinking about playing the game.
Chess, Go, etc. are constrained environments. Playing these games makes you better at them. Maybe you'll find a new opening, a new sequence, etc., but I don't think you'll ever be able to apply it to another field.
Implementing AlphaGo is no longer playing the game, it's analyzing a computer science problem and finding a solution. Number theory was still about understanding some objects that seemed natural and given, rather than arbitrary ones with artificial constraints, like these games are.
The OP posted a chess like variant, so I used that as my baseline. Sure mental energy is wasted playing games, but a lot of modern mathematics has arisen from the study of games... Consider:
- Game Theory
- Was the "Seven Bridges of Königsberg" not a fun puzzle of sorts?
- Was probability and statistics not founded on trying to hack gambling?
- Did knot theory start out with advanced applications in mind or people deep dive into making knots for religious reasons?
- How are Fermat's last theorem, the Collatz Conjecture, Goldbachs conjecture, or the twin primes conjecture not unnatural, constrained environments?
I'd argue DeepBlue and AlphaGo and Watson /are/ playing the game, just in a far more sophisticated manner, and our collective learnings as humans provide the foundation for academic endeavors. If you remember, the first variant of AlphaGo studied games played by expert humans.
Also, playing, understanding, and thinking about these games has been a boon to the AI community for decades. McCarthy has an article on the subject called "Chess as the Drosophila of AI".
My point is that these things start off as games and puzzle divorced from a problem, as a pure pursuit of leisure or curiosity, and over time, perhaps millennia, these mental explorations bear fruit in the most surprising ways.
Game Theory, Seven Bridges of Königsberg, etc. were not raised by the game players, but mathematicians.
And the original question is not arguing against the "usefulness" of these games themselves either; it's about the practice/endeavor of merely playing these games.
>DeepBlue and AlphaGo and Watson /are/ playing the game
DeepBlue and AlphaGo are playing the games. But they don't "think" or, in the OP's words, "waste their mental energy", since they are not even human beings.
The designers of these AIs are not playing the games, though. That's what the question is about.
>Also, playing, understanding, and thinking about these games
To me, thinking about these games' mechanisms and/or how to optimizing them is totally different from the mental energy used in playing it.
Again, I'm not disagreeing or agreeing with this sentiment (actually I strongly disagree), just trying to explain what the OG questions is in my understanding.
This falls into the thinking “pure math is ok, since it will often become practical on a long enough time horizon”. Why not “pure math is ok because that’s what people want to do”?
Whether you can get funded for your explorations is a separate question, but no justification is needed for them.
My point is not that "pure math is ok" since it will eventually become practical. My point is that its not a vacuous waste of time as the OP suggests. Exploring a math problem for fun is not like sitting on your couch and twiddling your thumbs.
Yes, sitting on a couch arguably has value to someone as leisure, but its pretty clear that studying puzzles and exploring the possibilities of rigorous logical thought also happens to be valuable.
This is why we pay and award people to think about these problems rather than sit on couches.
> wasting their mental energy (computional power) on a board game where the same amount of energy can be expended into building new ways of curing cancer or whatever important problem
Frankly I'm much more worried about engineers wasting their mental energy on improving tracking of users to sell useless stuff that will end up in a landfill.
Hardcore optimization of one's life is the path to becoming soulless imho.
There is a more general idea here: why don't we efficiently allocate resources, when we know that we could?
Why is the fashion industry so big? Apparently it causes >10% of carbon emissions. 85% of used clothes end up in the dump.
Why is marketing so big? It has long since surpassed the point where it simply matches products with demand. The best marketing is designed to create demand. I view that as a market inefficiency.
The human emotional system has been tuned for local optimization and self benefit.
Because life is short and you should do what you're passionate about!
Six days ago, I had brain surgery. I made it home a few days ago and I'm still mostly bed ridden. Despite this, I'm starting to work again because I love my job and I'll be bored out of my mind if I stop...
If I was at differently stage in my career, I would probably be playing Civ and shooting for a religious victory under Canada (the religion would be named "Tim Horton's" of course).
What is it like, recovering from brain surgery, in ways that may be different from recovering from other kinds of surgery? I imagine it could be quite challenging and unique?
>If I was at differently stage in my career, I would probably be playing Civ and shooting for a religious victory under Canada (the religion would be named "Tim Horton's" of course).
Is this to say that you enjoy your work that much at the present (more advanced?) stage?
I'm gonna go against concensus and say I agree. There are countless excuses for why it's a net neutral or even a positive for us to waste our most finite resource (time). But chances are, you're not going to be glad you played that one extra game, or watched more TV shows, when you're on your deathbed.
I don't accept that life is about happiness. Happiness is too vague of a term, used to describe multiple different things. Does it mean a measure of how much pleasure one is feeling in a given moment? Satisfaction with one's own life? How much entertainment someone manages to have?
We could reduce the argument that life is about simple pleasure to its logical conclusion, and ask why it wouldn't be optimal to use drugs and/or a neural device to induce a semiconscious, lasting state of maximal pleasure. I don't accept that most people would choose this life. And to anticipate that objection that it's because you have to look at a ultiliarian view of everyone's happiness, I don't think most people would choose to have everyone collectively in that state, either.
I assert that life is about meaning. That's why the above doesn't sound appealing (probably). What do you do that is truly meaningful, to yourself? That is what makes a life well lived and gives you satisfaction, and it's separate from how happy you feel.
And it could be chess games. It's up to us to look inside and figure it out for ourselves. I'm just tired of people expressing existential angst and it being met with "it makes you feel good so it's good".
> We could reduce the argument that life is about simple pleasure to its logical conclusion
If you really want to reduce, then you might as well go for the physics explanation: everything is deterministically following the laws of physics and any perception from your meat brain about what's desirable or noble or whatever are merely entropic microstates of a
large complex physical system. Therefore, there's no "choice", and whether one specific individual chose to play a game at one time and another chose to study cancer at another time are entirely inevitable outcomes given the exact arrangement of atoms at their respective times.
The idea that an individual conscience has control over any outcomes would have to somehow prove that it's possible for some metaphysical force to change chemical reactions enough to "flip a bit" in a neuron in some way that is capable of affecting a macroscopic human decision that would otherwise have taken a difference course, had one "let" chemistry run its deterministic course.
I've read of experiments where lab rats lost the will to live so to speak, when they had their pleasure chemical receptors short-circuited (meaning, given the choice after experiencing the "neural device", they chose to submit to it). This suggests that motivation is indeed merely governed by a series of chemical reactions, rather than being a supernatural actor in its own right. It just so happens that from a natural selection perspective, organisms that take outside stimulus into account in their pleasure mechanisms are more likely to reproduce. Acts like choosing to play games or choosing to study are, under that interpretation, merely variations of evolved neurological mechanisms attempting to generate dopamine through convoluted means.
> Frankl points to research indicating a strong relationship between “meaninglessness” and criminal behavior, addiction and depression. He argues that in the absence of meaning, people fill the resultant void with hedonistic pleasures, power, materialism, hatred, boredom, or neurotic obsessions and compulsions (Frankl 1992, p. 143).
Because you can't always reach "noble goals" by simply brute forcing your way through them. Looking at other topics, even the most mundane ones, could end up giving you new ways to conceptualize reality.
Another take on this is that there is no "noble goal" at all, whatever one individual finds interesting is their own choice and freedom and there's no reason to create a hierarchy of goals which would be completely arbitrary.
The logical extreme of "no hierarchy of goals" is to have no law. A law is able to penalize certain goals that are actively harmful. This encodes consensus of a hierarchy, and many people believe it is useful (depending on the particular law).
What you are suggesting is a nihilistic approach. Despite our collective inability to determine any "root goal" of the universe to aspire to, we collectively benefit from certain "local goals" - such as trash collection, trying to stop people from running around and killing others, having food (ideally good) available, etc.
A "noble goal" is a social construct. You might actually define it as a goal with positive impact on a society that some members would rather not or cannot do themselves.
I agree that people should not have their goals forced. However, the concept of a "noble goal" is useful in describing this evolutionarily emergent social phenomenon. And I am in favour of a societal incentive system that rewards positive impact to society.
Most of my goals are pretty neutral, and I guess I don't really put much effort into any particularly noble ones. Open source software, I guess. Though I can see that some goals really have a large beneficial impact to the experience of life, and can't help but appreciate people who engage in those goals.
Your question made me think of Richard Feynman. He had this approach where he had a dozen difficult problems in the back of his mind and every time he learned a new technique or perspective, he would re-evaluate each of them and see if the new technique could help get him closer to a solution. This made him sometimes come up with brilliant solutions that nobody else had thought of. So there can be enormous value in using insight from one domain in another domain. Point being, don't discount the value of using your brain in different ways - there's plenty of people hammering at problems from the obvious direction, and you're actually more likely to be able to contribute in a significant way if you're not a one-trick pony. Plus, by going with the grain of how your brain works, and what motivates you, rather than against it, you are able to be "productive" (actively thinking and learning) much longer and more effectively than by forcing yourself to work on something because you "should".
>There is a huge number of people on this planet wasting their mental energy (computional power) on a board game where the same amount of energy can be expended into building new ways of curing cancer or whatever important problem. What's the difference between using calories to compute unnecessary peer to peer game calculations with no goal vs. using electricity to compute hashes in crypto mining.
The problem is that without some eventual justification the whole value system becomes circular. You can't put all of your efforts into working to keep people alive so they can... put all of their efforts into working to keep people alive, etc. All value systems are ultimately circular or unjustified, but the latter is IMHO superior since it's more honest.
Human thought and attention isn't fungible. I can think about my job for a certain amount of time and then my productivity plummets, I can read for pleasure for a certain amount of time before I get antsy and my mind drifts, and so on. There's no "cure" for this because humans are intrinsically capable of stepping outside of the system and imagining what else we could be doing at a given moment; getting in the zone is a way to quiet this line of thinking, but humans have a specific amount of "zone" in them and that's it.
Having fun is an important part of the learning process, which ultimately lead to technological advances so I don't think it's a waste. Also, mining crypto could be a total waste of energy.
If you're able to find a way to use peoples desire for playing to solve hard problems like curing cancer, you'll deserve a nobel prize.
You'd be turning work into fun, and that into solving hard human problems. If you get there, maybe you'll notice that curing cancer wouldn't help humanity in the long run, so you'd turn to the cause of that. Could end up in a vicious circle. But as long as it is fun, go for it.
People aren't computers, but even without the computational analogies, what you're saying is still true. We spend a lot of our time and energy on unimportant problems while the world is full of real problems that could use our help.
I think what it comes down to is access. It's easier to buy a chess board and books about chess strategy than it is to buy the tools you would need to do cancer research. The chess community is open to anyone who wants to join; to join the cancer research community, you need years of school. There's an institution sitting in front of the problem saying "trust us, we're working on it" -- and if you want to work on it too, you have to do it as part of that institution. Most people aren't motivated enough to climb this institutional mountain. They'd rather stay at base camp and enjoy themselves.
(This is one nice thing about software, by the way. You don't need a degree or an expensive lab to play around, learn, and contribute.)
I think people tend to be bad at difficult tasks they are not specifically interested in, and we're all better served if people tend to be able to work on what they're interested in. I suspect that's going to end up better than if we somehow create a list of world problems ranked from the most to the least important and get the entire world to work from the top of the list down. (Never mind the difficulty of creating such a list.)
There are charities that focus on reducing human hunger. There are also charities that focus on reducing child hunger. Why should the latter exist, since it's a subset of the former? Isn't everyone working on the child hunger charities ignoring the problems of adult hunger? Of course not. There are just some people who, for whatever reason, are specifically interested and motivated in fighting child hunger, and I strongly suspect that overall outcomes are better when those people have the opportunity to focus their work on child hunger.
The premise of your question is the world model in which humans are given short lifespans to do something, replicate themselves and vanish from existence. I won't debate this hypothesis, but I want us to agree that this model isn't necessarily correct.
In the first world model, wasting energy and time is indeed suboptimal and humans indeed must focus on survival. In the second world model, curing the cancer is about as valuable as extending the lifetime of cars to thousands of years, while figuring out how the world works is the number one priority. I believe that humans intuitively lean towards the second model, and although they can't say it out loud, they do things that are optimal in that model. Thinking about chess won't extend anyone's lifetime, but it might reveal something important about the underlying principles of our world or of our thinking process and we secretly recognize that making that little discovery would be worth everything.
I think in addition to this, people's engagement in hobbies often allows them the mental plasticity to return to difficult problems with a solution. Improving on something that doesn't necessarily benefit society directly, but which one finds personally fulfilling, tends to make people more energised when it comes to those society-building concerns (whether as activism, community engagement, or scientific advancement as previously mentioned.)
Why bother having fun?
Why bother reading?
Why bother doing anything but maximizing your human potential?
Because it is exhausting. We eat fruit not just for the nutrition and dietary fiber. It is also delicious and inspires joy.
Imagine a hot summer day. You are lying under the shade of a peach tree, because it is too hot to be out in the sun. A perfectly ripe, almost too ripe, peach drops off the tree. You pick it up and take a bite. The flesh tastes better than any candy. The juice drips down your chin.
Apart from the obvious points like burnout, the point of living is really to live - not to work. We work to live sure, but in a perfect world we’d all be able to do what we want such as Place chess right?
> the same amount of energy can be expended into building new ways of curing cancer or whatever important problem
That's the catch. We don't know what problems are important. We think we do, and sometimes we're right, but we've gone down dead ends too. And sometimes something that feels like a dead end turns out to be pivotal.
I'd bet there's many scientists and researchers out there who had their eureka moment while their brain was disengaged during leisure time. Disconnecting and play are essential parts of discovering the important things.
You ever hear the saying "Ted Kaczynski never played Monopoly." (it might have been a different board game - I forget the saying TBH. I heard it in passing at a bar one night when I was saying how I should be working instead of hanging out) I think it has to do with the fact that we all need to decompress sometimes. If all you do is something important 100% of the time, your going to end up being a crazy person. People need a valve release.
Chess as a purely mental challenge is not that interesting to me, and playing against a computer is not something I like at all.
But playing against a human opponent is one of the few games that interest me. I like that it is so old and has so long traditions, that means something in addition. So my conclusion is, it is as much a social activity as a mental one.
Remember that the Jacquard loom was invented so people could have frilly damask fabrics, and that's where punch card programming came from. You can't conceive of what advances might come from the study of something seemingly frivolous. Progress and innovation aren't necessarily cranks that you can just focus on grinding harder.
The mental effort required to run the human analog to alpha-beta pruning is extremely rewarding for other tasks. Mental working memory is significantly stressed (and therefor, more capable). I wouldn't be surprised if studies on GM chess players show that their brains stay far more strong as they age than average individuals.
How else can you learn to think? You need the ability to fail, repeatedly, in a short amount of time.
Then you need people who actually dedicate serious resources to the game, to bring it to its limit and to be able to teach students the relevant parts.
I prefer the reverse question: "What's the purpose of these 'productive' activities" - usually to increase the amount of time I have to read articles about bizarrely huge japanese chess games I guess :)
Evolution and markets are efficient. The purpose of your genes to copy themselves (“Selfish Gene”). As long as it happens, evolution doesn’t care what host is doing in leisure time.
Leisure time etc. is very important to creativity and productivity as well. There's a lot of studies that I'm too lazy to link to, but you can find them pretty easily.
You think it’s a waste to some the time and energy on board games, but it’s not a waste on curing cancer. It’s a bias, why is it more value able to do the latter?
- why play a game when you could work for society?
- why work for society when you could create replicateable value for society's future?
- why do that when you could change society?
- why do that when you could save lives today?
- why do that when you could save humanity from extinction?
- why do that, any of that...at all?
At the end of the day, the only remotely satisfactory reason for doing anything is to pursue individual fulfillment (even if that be in pursuit of a collective goal).
Additionally, progress in any valuable-to-society pursuit does not happen singularly within the confines of an academic or professional field. Human brains work in mysterious ways, and giving them a wider space of things to bounce off of and different systems to analyze only strengthens it, not take away from it.
I would be willing to bet the time (if/when) we find a cure to cancer will be concurrent with the most board-game-shaped-activities being participated in by humanity, not the least.
TL;DR: human brain utility is non-zero-sum, unlike computers.
I think it goes both ways. If Hitler or <your favorite historical bad guy> had spent their time playing chess instead of <bad things>, we would've been better off collectively. Also, who says I'm smart enough to contribute to cancer research?
I love chess and all kinds of board games :) but I can't help thinking about stuff like this.