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  1. Last 7 days
    1. So how do you decide which games to play? The story of gamification offers five broad rules.

      1) choose long-term goals - if you did the same thing today for the next 10 years, where would you be? 2) choose hard games - hone skills and build characters through long-term games 3) choose positive-sum games - games where every player is benefitted by playing 4) choose atelic games - games that you enjoy the process of, not the reward 5) - choose immeasurable rewards - freedom, meaning love

    2. There is, after all, a vacancy in heaven. When God is dead, and nations are atomized, and family seems burdensome, and machines can beat us at our jobs and even at art, and trust and truth are lost in a roiling sea of AI-generated clickbait — what is left but games?
    3. Companies that exploit our gameplaying compulsion will have an edge over those who don’t, so every company that wishes to compete must gamify in ever more addictive ways, even though in the long term this harms everyone. As such, gamification is not just a fad; it’s the fate of a digital capitalist society. Anything that can be turned into a game sooner or later will be. And the games won’t just be confined to our phones — “extended reality” eyewear like Meta Quest and Apple Vision, once they become normalized, will make playing even harder to avoid.
    4. On X, meanwhile, there is a self-propagating system known as “the culture war”. This game consists of trying to score points (likes and retweets) by attacking the enemy political tribe. Unlike in a regular war, the combatants can’t kill each other, only make each other angrier, so little is ever achieved, except that all players become stressed by constant bickering. And yet they persist in bickering, if only because their opponents do, in an endless state of mutually assured distraction.
    5. On Instagram, the main self-propagating system is a beauty pageant. Young women compete to be as pretty as possible, going to increasingly extreme lengths: makeup, filters, fillers, surgery. The result is that all women begin to feel ugly, online and off.
    6. To illustrate his point, Kaczynski describes a thought experiment involving a forested region occupied by several rival kingdoms. The kingdoms that clear the most land for agriculture can support a larger population, affording them a military advantage. Every kingdom must therefore clear as much forest as possible, or face being conquered by its rivals. The resulting deforestation eventually leads to ecological disaster and the collapse of all the kingdoms. Thus, a trait that is advantageous for every kingdom’s short-term survival leads in the long term to every kingdom’s demise.Kaczynski was describing a “social trap”, a term coined by a student of Skinner, John Platt, who’d theorized that an entire population behaving like pigeons in a Skinner box, each acting only for the next immediate reward, would eventually overexploit a resource, causing ruin for everyone. What Platt called “social traps”, Kaczynski called “self-propagating systems”, because he viewed them as negative-sum games that took on a life of their own, defeating every player to become the only winner. He believed such games not only drove industrialization but also replaced the sense of purpose and meaning that industrialization destroyed. They were thus inextricable from technological advancement, and, in a society like ours, impossible to stop.

      social trap/self-propagating systems - the more harm done, the more addicting it is. the more you're winning, the more you're losing

    7. Put simply, we try to measure what we value, but end up valuing what we measure.And what we measure is rarely what we mean to value. As Skinner showed, the goals of games — points, badges, trophies — are secondary reinforcers that only derive their worth due to their association with something we actually desire. But these associations are often illusory. A click is not the same thing as a food pellet. And points are not the same as progress.
    8. Kaczynski’s theories eerily prophesize the capture of society by gamification. While he overlooked the benefits of technology, he diligently noted its dangers, recognizing its role in depriving us of purpose and meaning. Today the evidence is everywhere: religion is dying out, Western nations are culturally confused, people are getting married less and having fewer children, and many jobs are threatened by automation, so the traditional pillars of life — God, nation, family, and work — are weakening, and people are losing their value systems. Amid such uncertainty, games, with their well-defined rules and goals, provide a semblance of order and purpose that may otherwise be lacking in people’s lives. Gamification is thus no accident, but an attempt to plug a widening hole in society.
      • god, nation, family and work - traditional pillars of life
      • it's exactly like cikszentmihalyi had said on flow state, that it's addicting and we'll go to far lengths just to experience it all over again
    9. These features turned social media into the world’s most addictive status game.
    10. Respect is so important to humans that it’s a key reason we evolved to play games. Will Storr, in his book The Status Game, charted the rise of game-playing in different cultures, and found that games have historically functioned to organize societies into hierarchies of competence, with score acting as a conditioned reinforcer of status. In other words, all games descend from status games. The association between score and status has grown so strong in our minds that, like pigeons pecking the button long after the food dispenser has stopped dispensing, we’ll chase scores long after everyone else has stopped watching.
    11. Most of the feedback loops in employment — from salary payments to annual performance appraisals — were torturously long. So Coonradt proposed shortening them by introducing daily targets, points systems, and leaderboards. These conditioned reinforcers would transform work from a series of monthly slogs into daily status games, in which employees competed to fulfil the company’s goals.
      • daily targets
      • point systems
      • leaderboards
    12. This led him to propose two kinds of reward: primary and conditioned reinforcers. A primary reinforcer is something we’re born to desire. A conditioned reinforcer is something we learn to desire, due to its association with a primary reinforcer. Skinner found that conditioned reinforcers were generally more effective in shaping behavior, because while our biological need for the primary reinforcer is easily satiable, our abstract desire for the conditioned reinforcer isn’t. The pigeons would stop seeking food once their bellies were full, but they’d take far longer to get tired of hearing the food dispenser click.
      • primary reinforcer - natural desire
      • conditioned reinforcer - we learned to desire on top of a primary reinforcer

      conditioned reinforcer are more effective (click > food)

    13. Skinner’s goal was to make his pigeons peck the button as many times as possible. From his experiments, he made three discoveries. First, the pigeons pecked most when doing so yielded immediate, rather than delayed, rewards. Second, the pigeons pecked most when it rewarded them randomly, rather than every time. Skinner’s third discovery occurred when he noticed the pigeons continued to peck the button long after the food dispenser was empty, provided they could hear it click. He realized the pigeons had become conditioned to associate the click with the food, and now valued the click as a reward in itself.

      1) immediate response/feedback 2) reward randomly instead of consistent 3) the click has become a reward too, not just the food

  2. Jan 2023
    1. the transmission of information from teacher to learner is essentially the transmission of the response appropriate to a certain stimulus.

      We create stimuli specifically to generate a particular response. Knowing something is the demonstration of the response, nothing to do with metacognitive processes.

    2. Radical behaviorists such as Skinner also made the ontological claim that facts about mental states are reducible to facts about behavioral dispositions.

      The mind is nothing more than a decision machine and we can understand it if we understand cause/effect relationships.

    3. they focused on objectively observable, quantifiable events and behavior. They argued that since it is not possible to observe objectively or to quantify what occurs in the mind, scientific theories should take into account only observable indicators such as stimulus-response sequences.

      Adding empirical evidence to conclusions drawn about human psychology. Cause/effect relationships.

    4. Their methodology was primarily introspective, relying heavily on first-person reports of sensations and the constituents of immediate experiences.

      Self-reporting leads to bias in results?

  3. Sep 2021
  4. Mar 2021
    1. But, innovative, technologically advanced learning environments still benefit from a solid foundation in adult learning theory, instrumental theories like John B. Watson's Behaviorism, Lev Vygotsky's Social Development Theory, Jack Mezirow's Critical Reflection and John M. Dirkx's Nurturing Soul in Adult Learning. These theories should serve as the foundation for an enriched online learning experience.

      This resource gives a description of foundations in adult learning theory, discusses behaviorism, social development theory, and critical reflection. Knowledge in these theories can help set a foundation for an enriched online learning experience. Rating: 7/10

  5. Oct 2020
    1. Adapting adult learning theory to support innovative, advanced, online learning - WVMD Model

      This article details how to build an innovative online learning environment using methods based on influential adult learning theories. These theories include Social Development Theory, Behaviorism, Critical Reflection and Nurturing the Soul. 10/10, many theories throughly discussed.

    1. Adult learning theories: Implications for learning and teaching

      Article provides an in depth discussion of learning theories as applied to adult learners. Diagrams are particularly helpful. Clear discussion of Knowles, i.e., how adult and child learning differs. Rating 8/10

  6. Jan 2020
    1. . Thorndike and others approachedadult learning from a behavioral psychological perspective. That is, people weretested under timed conditions on various learning and memory tasks.

      Behaviorist approach

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  7. Nov 2019
    1. the younger educators are more inclined to use technology to enhance learning. It can be very time consuming and because of this many enthusiastic educators fall by the way and refuse to preserve with the task of using technology in the classroom.

      This author of this article discusses the topic of how some teachers are comfortable with their form of teaching with no technology in their curriculum or their classroom. The author expresses that technology promotes changes in behavior and grasping teaching skills. The use of technology in the classroom is a good tool for the students. Rating: 4/5

  8. Mar 2019
    1. Behaviorism

      Learning-Theories.com published a very handy few pages that describe various learning theories. This is a quick, straightforward, simple way to access information on the different theories. This article, Behaviorism, explains that the theory assumes learners learn by responding to external stimuli in their environment. Learning under behaviorism is characterized by a change in the learner's behavior. I use this in my horse training as I use both positive reinforcement (clicker training) and negative reinforcement (pressure-release) to structure my horse's behaviors. Behaviorism can be translated to human work, too. I've used TAG teaching (clicker training for humans) to teach people to get on and off horses with ease and also to trim horses' hooves. I also use it to clicker train my cats! 6/10

    1. Overview of Learning Theories

      The Berkeley Graduate Division published an interesting and straightforward table of learning theories. The table compares behaviorism, cognitive constructivism, and social constructivism in four ways: the view of knowledge, view of learning, view of motivation, and implications for teaching. This is an easy-to-read, quick resource for those who would like a side-by-side comparison of common theories. 9/10

  9. Oct 2018
    1. Dr. Freed and 200 other psychologists petitioned the American Psychological Association in August to formally condemn the work psychologists are doing with persuasive design for tech platforms that are designed for children.
  10. Feb 2014
  11. theaccidentalmissionary.wordpress.com theaccidentalmissionary.wordpress.com
    1. God is not a behavioral psychologist.

      This hits the core of everything wrong with popular narratives of relating with God. If religion has as a purpose the fostering of community through morality it fails to achieve where it retreats to rewards and punishment as a means of control.