I recently contemplated learning to play chess better (not to make an attempt at mastery, but to improve enough so I wasn’t so embarassed about how bad I was).
Most of my motivation for this was an odd signalling mechanism: People think of me as a smart person, and they think of smart people as people who are good at chess, and they are thus disappointed with me when it turns out I am not.
But in the process of learning, I realized something else: I dislike chess, as compared to say, Magic the Gathering, because chess is PURE strategy, whereas Magic or StarCraft have splashy images and/or luck that provides periodic dopamine rushes. Chess only is mentally rewarding for me at two moments: when I capture an enemy piece, or when I win. I’m not good enough to win against anyone who plays chess remotely seriously, so when I get frustrated, I just go capturing enemy pieces even though it’s a bad play, so I can at least feel good about knocking over an enemy bishop.
What I found most significant, though, was the realization that this fundamental not enjoying the process of thinking out chess strategies gave me some level of empathy for people who, in general, don’t like to think. (This is most non-nerds, as far as I can tell). Thinking about chess is physically stressful for me, whereas thinking about other kinds of abstract problems is fun and rewarding purely for its own sake.
My issue with chess is that the skills are non-transferable. As far as I can tell the main difference between good and bad players is memorisation of moves and strategies, which I don’t find very interesting and can’t be transferred to other more important areas of life. Whereas other games where tactics and reaction to situation is more important can have benefits in other areas.
I think the literature disagrees. E.g. good players are less prone to confirmation bias and I think that this is transferable. (Google Scholar would know better.) Introspectively I feel like playing chess makes me a better thinker. Chess is memorization of moves and strategies only in the sense that guitar is memorization of scales and chords. You need them to play well but they’re not sufficient.
But experimental evidence from studies of reasoning shows that people often find falsification difficult. We suggest that domain expertise may facilitate falsification. We consider new experimental data about chess experts’ hypothesis testing. The results show that chess masters were readily able to falsify their plans. They generated move sequences that falsified their plans more readily than novice players, who tended to confirm their plans. The finding that experts in a domain are more likely to falsify their hypotheses has important implications for the debate about human rationality.
I think that this is transferable
Well… The chess literature and general literature on learning rarely finds transfer. From the Nature coverage of that study:
Byrne and Cowley now hope to study developing chess players to find out how and when they develop falsification strategies. They also want to test chess masters in other activities that involve testing hypotheses—such as logic problems—to discover if their falsification skill is transferable. On this point Orr is more sceptical: “I’ve never felt that chess skills cross over like that, it’s a very specific skill.”
Can people consistently attempt to falsify, that is, search for refuting evidence, when testing the truth of hypotheses? Experimental evidence indicates that people tend to search for confirming evidence. We report two novel experiments that show that people can consistently falsify when it is the only helpful strategy. Experiment 1 showed that participants readily falsified somebody else’s hypothesis. Their task was to test a hypothesis belonging to an ‘imaginary participant’ and they knew it was a low quality hypothesis. Experiment 2 showed that participants were able to falsify a low quality hypothesis belonging to an imaginary participant more readily than their own low quality hypothesis. The results have important implications for theories of hypothesis testing and human rationality.
While interesting and very relevant to some things (like programmers’ practice of ‘rubber ducking’ - explaining their problem to an imaginary creature), it doesn’t directly address chess transfer.
What I found most significant, though, was the realization that this fundamental not enjoying the process of thinking out chess strategies gave me some level of empathy for people who, in general, don’t like to think.
LW has put a lot of thought into the problem of akrasia, but nothing I can think of on how to induce more pleasure from thinking.
What I found most significant, though, was the realization that this fundamental not enjoying the process of thinking out chess strategies gave me some level of empathy for people who, in general, don’t like to think.
Wow—I have a similar response to chess, but never drew that analogy. Thanks.
Learn to play Go, then even if your chess ability is lower, people won’t be able to judge your Go ability.
Go is roughly a game based on encircling the other’s army before his or her army encircles yours. A bit of thought about the meaning of the word ’encircle” should hint to how awesome that can be.
If your gaming heart has been more oriented towards WWII operational and strategic-level games, Go is the game for you. If chess incorporates the essence of WWI, Go is incorporates the essence of mobile warfare in WWII, if the part of the essence represented by Poker is removed.
Scott Boorman in The Protracted Game tried to model Mao with Go, and in particular, the anti-Japanese campaign in Manchuria. It was an interesting book. I’m not convinced that Go is a real analogy beyond beginner-level tactics, but he did convince me that Go modeled insurgencies much better than, say, Chess.
Chess: Battle of Chi Bi is exemplary. (I am not sure if that is at all informative to people who don’t already know a ridiculous amount about three kingdoms era China.) I don’t feel qualified to say anything about Go.
By subterfuge do you mean Huang Gai’s fire ships? I think of it more as a subtle pawn sacrifice which gets greedily accepted which allows for the invasion of Zhou Yu’s forces which starts a king hunt that forces Cao Cao to give up lots of material in the form of ships and would have resulted in his getting mated if he hadn’t a land to retreat to (and if he hadn’t gotten kinda lucky). I thought I remembered Pang Tong doing something interesting and symbolic somewhere in there (a counterattack on the opposite wing to draw away some of Cao Cao’s defending pieces) but I don’t remember if that was fictional or not.
I recently contemplated learning to play chess better (not to make an attempt at mastery, but to improve enough so I wasn’t so embarassed about how bad I was).
Most of my motivation for this was an odd signalling mechanism: People think of me as a smart person, and they think of smart people as people who are good at chess, and they are thus disappointed with me when it turns out I am not.
But in the process of learning, I realized something else: I dislike chess, as compared to say, Magic the Gathering, because chess is PURE strategy, whereas Magic or StarCraft have splashy images and/or luck that provides periodic dopamine rushes. Chess only is mentally rewarding for me at two moments: when I capture an enemy piece, or when I win. I’m not good enough to win against anyone who plays chess remotely seriously, so when I get frustrated, I just go capturing enemy pieces even though it’s a bad play, so I can at least feel good about knocking over an enemy bishop.
What I found most significant, though, was the realization that this fundamental not enjoying the process of thinking out chess strategies gave me some level of empathy for people who, in general, don’t like to think. (This is most non-nerds, as far as I can tell). Thinking about chess is physically stressful for me, whereas thinking about other kinds of abstract problems is fun and rewarding purely for its own sake.
My issue with chess is that the skills are non-transferable. As far as I can tell the main difference between good and bad players is memorisation of moves and strategies, which I don’t find very interesting and can’t be transferred to other more important areas of life. Whereas other games where tactics and reaction to situation is more important can have benefits in other areas.
I think the literature disagrees. E.g. good players are less prone to confirmation bias and I think that this is transferable. (Google Scholar would know better.) Introspectively I feel like playing chess makes me a better thinker. Chess is memorization of moves and strategies only in the sense that guitar is memorization of scales and chords. You need them to play well but they’re not sufficient.
True; see 2004 “Chess Masters’ Hypothesis Testing” Cowley & Bryne:
Well… The chess literature and general literature on learning rarely finds transfer. From the Nature coverage of that study:
Checking Google Scholar, I see only one apparent followup, the 2005 paper by the same authors, “When falsification is the only path to truth”:
While interesting and very relevant to some things (like programmers’ practice of ‘rubber ducking’ - explaining their problem to an imaginary creature), it doesn’t directly address chess transfer.
LW has put a lot of thought into the problem of akrasia, but nothing I can think of on how to induce more pleasure from thinking.
I think rationality helps to avoid making mistakes, and avoiding feeling unnecessarily bad, but not too much to the positive side of things.
I agree—pleasure in thinking might not be part of the study of rationality, but it could very much be part of raising sanity waterline.
Wow—I have a similar response to chess, but never drew that analogy. Thanks.
Learn to play Go, then even if your chess ability is lower, people won’t be able to judge your Go ability.
Go is roughly a game based on encircling the other’s army before his or her army encircles yours. A bit of thought about the meaning of the word ’encircle” should hint to how awesome that can be.
If your gaming heart has been more oriented towards WWII operational and strategic-level games, Go is the game for you. If chess incorporates the essence of WWI, Go is incorporates the essence of mobile warfare in WWII, if the part of the essence represented by Poker is removed.
Go=an abstraction of mobile warfare—Poker
Chess is battle, Go is war. I don’t see how it’s very much about mobility rather than scale.
What real scale and era, if any, is even roughly modeled?
Scott Boorman in The Protracted Game tried to model Mao with Go, and in particular, the anti-Japanese campaign in Manchuria. It was an interesting book. I’m not convinced that Go is a real analogy beyond beginner-level tactics, but he did convince me that Go modeled insurgencies much better than, say, Chess.
Chess: Battle of Chi Bi is exemplary. (I am not sure if that is at all informative to people who don’t already know a ridiculous amount about three kingdoms era China.) I don’t feel qualified to say anything about Go.
Why did you choose that battle? Subterfuge was prominent in it.
Chess may resemble some other pitched battles from before the twentieth century, but it doesn’t resemble modern war at all.
By subterfuge do you mean Huang Gai’s fire ships? I think of it more as a subtle pawn sacrifice which gets greedily accepted which allows for the invasion of Zhou Yu’s forces which starts a king hunt that forces Cao Cao to give up lots of material in the form of ships and would have resulted in his getting mated if he hadn’t a land to retreat to (and if he hadn’t gotten kinda lucky). I thought I remembered Pang Tong doing something interesting and symbolic somewhere in there (a counterattack on the opposite wing to draw away some of Cao Cao’s defending pieces) but I don’t remember if that was fictional or not.