Nabeel S. Qureshi

This will not always be the case. Large companies will be built that make it easier for anyone to make videos, or video games, or podcasts, and so on, unleashing a ton more latent creativity. This will make the idea of video games for education seem less and less insane over time, as better games get built to help students understand important thin... See more

This trend has a long way to go, though. Making video games is colossally hard and expensive; you need to be a crazy genius indie game developer with ultra-high risk tolerance, or else a mega-corporation like Unity or Steam or Valve, to do it. Video games haven’t yet had their “creator revolution”.

Another insight is that making things easier has nonlinear effects. Making something 10x easier can cause 1000x more of that thing to happen. Hence the explosion of online creativity you see on YouTube, with chess, Minecraft, math videos, Khan Academy, Twitchstreams, Soundcloud, etc; you remove a small bit of friction and get a large result.

"Here’s the formula if you want to build a billion-dollar internet company," he said. "Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time...Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps."

"We often think of the internet enables you to do new things," Williams said. "But people just want to do the same things they’ve always done."

It is currently too hard to make video games. Making it easier to create video games will massively increase the supply of good video games and cause a gradual revolution in education.

Where games mostly fall short is that they’re not that transferable to the real world. The skills you learn are highly specific to that game. This will change: if you have games that are (a) fun and (b) accurate for some aspects of reality, such as KSP or Factorio, you do get learning that is real and transferable. The challenge is in making games ... See more

So it makes sense that video games would be the primary educational environment of the future: they are the best way we have of (a) creating simulations of reality (b) with fast feedback loops (c) accessible at low cost.

Learning is just the act of engaging with an external thing and performing many conjecture/criticism loops, forming conclusions, and building on them to form a body of knowledge.