With the general inaccessibility of college in the US (with AGI, they’re basically pay to play), would Chess or Go be a good qualifier for job mental acuity?
Both can be monitored on the spot and certified by third-party associations.
I’m a 3 dan Go player and active in the scene. This idea is horrible. The players are nice and tend to be smart but that is absolutely no proper criterion for educational admission.
Just because you surround yourself with the uneducated doesn’t mean everyone is. I’m in law school and some of the people here are truly brilliant, and yes they read. We all do, for hours, every single day. AI is there, I’m sure some use it. But the professors know about it as well and have pivoted. Lockdown browsers and handwritten exams are more common, and there are less take home exams than there were a few years ago.
this whole “I never went to college, so it must be useless” trope is annoying. Education is important, and “does it get you a job?” Should not be the benchmark for an education. Frankly we as a society would be way better off if we had a more educated populace. We need people who are critical thinkers, because critical thinking promotes intellectual independence. If you don’t have the skills to challenge authority with clarity, logic, and reasoning, you will be at the mercy of people who WILL tell you what to think. Studying subjects like History or Sociology teaches you how people think and why they might act differently, and allows you to approach problems from a broader understanding of the human condition.
Also a Chess or Go tournament will show recruiters how good an applicant is as Chess or Go. It won’t tell them anything else.
You’ve misread the situation, mate. I am very much pro college. I’ve been.
I also know of several studies showing that laymen are better problem solvers than the college educated, because they aren’t confined within the academic box.
A chess or Go ranking shows dedication – often years of it.
Hmmm, then I guess my confusion is as follows:
College, like being good at Chess or Go, also shows dedication for years. But one is dedicated to learning applicable skills in certain academic fields, while the other is showing dedication in Chess or Go. AI can be used in both academia and gaming, so the real test would still come down to the interview process. I guess I don’t agree that dedication is the sole thing that is measured in an interview, or that being good at Chess or Go is a better metric of dedication than a college diploma. I think that adding a Chess or Go ranking on your resume could be a good ice breaker, and a good chance to show your dedication outside of academia, but I fail to see how it shows you are more dedicated to studying. And again while games are great for mental health, they don’t teach you anything other than the game itself (maybe some tangential soft skills in cost benefit analysis or risk assessment or something). But even then, those skills wouldn’t show up in a one off chess tournament at an interview. Further, a structured learning of those same skills culminating in a test of those skills with comparable metrics to others who have tested those skills, would give a better idea of how the applicant has mastered those skills, a la, a diploma.
I would disagree, and say there’s a reason tech companies prefer hiring self-educated programmers over college-educated ones.
https://cybernews.com/editorial/experiment-tech-companies-eager-hire-self-taught-pros/
https://www.workforce.com/news/companies-eagerly-tapping-self-taught-tech-talent
When you judge a fish by it’s ability to climb a tree…
That’s what college does. My stepdad had a third grade education and could do math better than most bankers.
I disagree that college does that, but different experiences I suppose. If you want to improve college, how does admitting people based on a game improve things?
I’m not admitting people to college based on a game. I’m saying, as far as general education goes, such games demonstrate a pattern of dedication. And would be a perfect comparable skill for those who cannot afford college.
Then they would still fare poorly against those who both excel at chess and have gone to college.
I don’t think that’s how skills work.
No, you are not better off being less educated.
But are college kids getting an education?
Yes, spending thousands of hours reading books does make you better educated than someone who didn’t.
Read my other comments.
They aren’t reading. They’re skimming and paying others to read.
People do the readings. Also, even if they didn’t, they’re still sitting in lectures and learning substantially more than people who don’t. Saying you learn the same amount as someone who put in years of work, when you have done nothing to learn, is just cope. The fact is, you don’t develop the skills without putting in the time.
And what do you think people who learn these games are doing?
The purpose of college isn’t to measure your intelligence, it’s to teach you new things.
No it isn’t. I was doing about 10 college kids’ homework, right out of high school. $40 an assignment. Now, they have ChatGPT. And the professors are using ChatGPT to review papers. It’s literally a pay to play system in the US.
Learning strategy demonstrates an ability to learn, not from instruction, but experience.
If a system has become so degraded that there’s only one remaining semi-useful function left, it doesn’t follow that we should replace the system with one that only does that thing—the functions the system is failing to perform are the ones in need of replacement.
And yet that has not happened in decades.