[Found in Maestro Victor ’s quotes:] What if games’ role in representation and identity lies not in offering familiar characters for us to embody, but in helping wrest us from the temptation of personal identification entirely? What if the real fight against monocultural bias and blinkeredness does not involve the accelerated indulgence of identification, but the abdication of our own selfish, individual desires in the interest of participating in systems larger than ourselves? What if the thing games most have to show us is the higher-order domains to which we might belong, including families, neighborhoods, cities, nations, social systems, and even formal structures and patterns? What if replacing militarized male brutes with everyone’s favorite alternative identity just results in Balkanization rather than inclusion? …

Amidst arguments on Twitter and Reddit about whose favorite games are more valid, while we worry about the perfect distribution of bodies in our sci-fi fantasy, the big machines of global systems hulk down the roads and the waterways, indifferent. It is an extravagance to worry only about representation of our individual selves while more obvious forces threaten them with oblivion—commercialism run amok; climate change; wealth inequality; extortionate healthcare; unfunded schools; decaying infrastructure; automation and servitude. And yet, we persist, whether out of moralism or foolishness or youth, lining up for our proverbial enslavement. We’ll sign away anything, it would seem, so long as we’re still able to “express ourselves” with the makeshift tools we are rationed by the billionaires savvy enough to play the game of systems rather than the game of identities. …

Only a fool would fail to realize that we are the Sims now meandering aimlessly in the streets of the power brokers’ real-world cities. Not people with feelings and identities at all, but just user interface elements that indicate the state of the system, recast in euphemisms like the Sharing Economy, such that its operators might adjust their strategy accordingly.

[Found in Maestro Victor ’s quotes:] People are much smarter when they can use their full intellect and when they can relate what they are learning to situations or phenomena which are real to them.

The natural reaction, when someone is having trouble understanding what you are explaining, is to break up the explanation into smaller pieces and explain the pieces one by one. This tends not to work, so you back up even further and fill in even more details.

But human minds do not work like computers: it is harder, not easier, to understand something broken down into all the precise little rules than to grasp it as a whole. It is very hard for a person to read a computer assembly language program and figure out what it is about…

Studying mathematics one rule at a time is like studying a language by first memorizing the vocabulary and the detailed linguistic rules, then building phrases and sentences, and only afterwards learning to read, write, and converse. Native speakers of a language are not aware of the linguistic rules: they assimilate the language by focusing on a higher level, and absorbing the rules and patterns subconsciously. The rules and patterns are much harder for people to learn explicitly than is the language itself.

[Found in Maestro Victor ’s quotes:] A problem for understanding intellectual development is that we have no adequate metaphors for it. You will perhaps recall Jonathan Miller’s claim that it became possible to understand the function of the heart and the circulation of the blood only after the invention of pumps to clear mines of water. Everyone since the beginning of our species has felt that regular thump in the chest and has seen blood spurt when arteries are cut. Thinking of the heart as a pump enabled us to understand its function.

But we have no similarly useful metaphor to help us understand intellectual or cultural or educational development. The nearest processes are biological… Piaget’s is perhaps the best known elaboration of a biology-based metaphor of development, and John Dewey elaborated a conception of education drawing on “growth”.

I have tried to adhere to a nonbiological and rather vague use of “development”. These kinds of understanding are only “somewhat” distinctive in that they are not wholly different forms of thought, mutually incomprehensible; they are not so much like different computer programs as like modules of a well-integrated program, focusing on different tasks but each able to comprehend the others. Well, that’s not a great metaphor either; tempting though computer metaphors are for mental operations, they always seem to confuse as much as they clarify.

[Found in Maestro Victor ’s quotes:] Dozens of psychological studies have consistently shown that giving expected extrinsic rewards for an activity (e.g. “If you do x, I will give you y amount of cash/points/…”) often reduces intrinsic motivation of people to do it. The first reason is that people feel controlled by the person giving the rewards, reducing their sense of autonomy… Secondly, giving a reward for an activity sends a strong social signal that you don’t consider the activity worth doing for its own sake.