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Comment by otabdeveloper2 | Hacker News Reader

> something that learns your interests

It's not rocket science, a mole rat could figure out that kids want to play video games and eat candy all day long.

Figuring out and guiding the motivations of children is harder than rocket science.

Putting a rocket into space is just a lot of maths; we're not close to having anything like that in regards to human outcomes.

Textbooks aren’t just for children. (Adult education is woefully underoptimized.)

Adult interests are a no-brainer in the same way.

"Figuring out your interests" isn't the hard or useful part. The hard part is changing your default (usually harmful) interests into something useful and productive.

That involves lots of psychology and (yes) manipulation and coercion.

"useful and productive"

The cognitive nihilist in me shudders at the thought of a technocrat deciding what my own best interests are.

"Your best interests are the games I like to play, not the games you like to play."

Which is a fine position and all that. The objectionable part of it is the pretense of objectivity.

One of the most popular video games amongst kids is about tinkering, exploration and building cool stuff.

No child learned anything useful in Minecraft.

It's better than Candy Crush (no overt addicting psychological tricks) but ultimately the same kind of waste of time.

No child ever grew up and said "gee, how great it is that I spent 10000 hours in Minecraft instead of doing sports or learning a useful skill".

I grew up on video games myself; trust me, it sucks.

I grew up playing video games, and now I'm a graphics programmer. I learned to program because I wanted to make games. Trust me, it slaps.

Some years ago I worked at a technology-oriented summer camp where I personally taught several bright young children to program. Minecraft mods were an incredibly popular project and a big driver of interest for many of the kids. Many of my counselor colleagues got into programming themselves modding Warcraft III and other games of that era. The absolute conversion rate may be low because the playerbase is so huge, but I think something like Minecraft is definitely the first (or zero-th) step in the journey of a lot of kids these days who become interested in technology and will later develop into the next generation of programmers & technologists.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess youve removed most forms of gaming from you life?

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