I’ve been spending the afternoon alternating between writing a syllabus for a decision theory course and websurfing. So naturally I’ve been drawn to web sites about decision theory and game theory. And I was struck by this question “David Shoemaker”:http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2004/06/teaching_or_exp.html raises – are games played in the classroom covered by rules on human experimentation?

As David notes, some of the games that are most useful for teaching purposes require that we mislead the students, or at least that we don’t get their permission before starting the game. And we, as professors, do learn something from how they respond. Fortunately we’re careful as philosophers to avoid things like experimental design, so we don’t get much _useful_ information from the game, but it can look a little like an unlicenced human experiment.

I hope not because the game David describes looks fun to me. Except I don’t think he should back down from having it count for grades. It’s only 10% after all – I think having 10% of the grade ride on how well you can do at a simple game is perfectly reasonable. It’s just a kind of in-class test I think. Maybe given how simple the game is it should only be 5%, but I don’t think it’s wrong to have it count.