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The entire brain training market seems to be based on a willful failure to understand Goodhart's Law. The basic pitch is "performance on these games correlates
by Bartweiss 10y ago
The entire brain training market seems to be based on a willful failure to understand Goodhart's Law.
The basic pitch is "performance on these games correlates with intelligence, so practice these games to become more intelligent". That's not how anything works! If you influence a metric directly, it stops being a good proxy for all the things it used to correlate with.
It's like fly-by-night companies improving retention by selling at a loss, or running up user count with expensive perks for each new client. Those numbers are important as a reflection of business health, not a cause of it.
- ConfuciusSay02 10y agoThanks to fMRI and other brain scanning technologies, we now know that when we learn, our brains physically change. This fact is the basis for the claims of the "brain training" industry. The reality is that our brains are constantly changing. I could memorize a thousand fart jokes and my brain would have changed. Does that make me more intelligent? I think the "brain training" apps are only really good for older or other people who are at risk of dementia, or other cognitive diseases, and even then I'm pretty sure the science is out on most of that.