I’ve seen this argument in particular for games like chess and go. The question is how transferable this stuff is. The conventional wisdom seems to be that mastery in something like chess is mostly just learning to pattern-match situations and responses in context of chess games, and doesn’t translate to more general aptitude. Though I think the non-transferability studies were about general intelligence, which is very tricky to raise. Studying the rationality skills, which are learnable, of expert go, chess or poker players might be interesting.
I wonder if the abstractness of the game matters here. Picking up analogous patterns to game situations outside the game could work, and more situations might match if the game is very abstract and bare-bones in its model, like go. The default state is probably still compartmentalization, people skilled in the game don’t make an effort to unify what they learn in one domain with non-game domains.
I’ve seen this argument in particular for games like chess and go. The question is how transferable this stuff is. The conventional wisdom seems to be that mastery in something like chess is mostly just learning to pattern-match situations and responses in context of chess games, and doesn’t translate to more general aptitude. Though I think the non-transferability studies were about general intelligence, which is very tricky to raise. Studying the rationality skills, which are learnable, of expert go, chess or poker players might be interesting.
I wonder if the abstractness of the game matters here. Picking up analogous patterns to game situations outside the game could work, and more situations might match if the game is very abstract and bare-bones in its model, like go. The default state is probably still compartmentalization, people skilled in the game don’t make an effort to unify what they learn in one domain with non-game domains.