From what I understand, the way that people get good at chess is by endlessly honing their ability to recognize a wide variety of visual patterns that happen to recur in the game (and especially at the higher levels, to some extent by just memorizing trees of opening moves), rather than by understanding deep principles or learning deep skills that generalize to other domains. As with anything complex that many smart people have spent a long time thinking about, it has a lot of interesting little details in its culture, and as with anything that takes sustained and concentrated effort and punishes mistakes, it probably teaches qualities like persistence and self-control, but on the whole I would definitely recommend against trying to become good at it if you’re not having a lot of fun.
Strongly agreed. This is largely why the next sentence in my quoted comment was “Becoming a grand master involves increasing your ability to do this in the domain of chess when you should be generalizing the skill to other applications.”
That’s true, but only of intensely competitive play. You can reliably beat beginners, amateurs, and even many devoted hobbyists by reading about three books worth of visual patterns and then honing your epistemic/instrumental rationality to a fever pitch.
There is a skill level beyond which you cannot win without sinking thousands of hours into memorizing trees of opening moves, but you can comfortably enjoy chess while learning new skills for thousands of hours before you ever reach that point, and even once you reach that point you can always play the occasional friendly game with someone who shares your distaste for otherwise pointless memorization.
That said, there are very few reasons to play any game repeatedly if you’re not having a lot of fun with it. If you’re going to bother to force yourself to do something, force yourself to learn a skill or read a textbook or earn money or help people, not to play a game. The whole comparative advantage of games is that they can teach us things without more than a trivial cost in terms of morale & willpower.
From what I understand, the way that people get good at chess is by endlessly honing their ability to recognize a wide variety of visual patterns that happen to recur in the game (and especially at the higher levels, to some extent by just memorizing trees of opening moves), rather than by understanding deep principles or learning deep skills that generalize to other domains. As with anything complex that many smart people have spent a long time thinking about, it has a lot of interesting little details in its culture, and as with anything that takes sustained and concentrated effort and punishes mistakes, it probably teaches qualities like persistence and self-control, but on the whole I would definitely recommend against trying to become good at it if you’re not having a lot of fun.
Strongly agreed. This is largely why the next sentence in my quoted comment was “Becoming a grand master involves increasing your ability to do this in the domain of chess when you should be generalizing the skill to other applications.”
From what I’ve read by Josh Waitzkin, you need the massive memory file of positions, but you also need a system of connecting them together.
That’s true, but only of intensely competitive play. You can reliably beat beginners, amateurs, and even many devoted hobbyists by reading about three books worth of visual patterns and then honing your epistemic/instrumental rationality to a fever pitch.
There is a skill level beyond which you cannot win without sinking thousands of hours into memorizing trees of opening moves, but you can comfortably enjoy chess while learning new skills for thousands of hours before you ever reach that point, and even once you reach that point you can always play the occasional friendly game with someone who shares your distaste for otherwise pointless memorization.
That said, there are very few reasons to play any game repeatedly if you’re not having a lot of fun with it. If you’re going to bother to force yourself to do something, force yourself to learn a skill or read a textbook or earn money or help people, not to play a game. The whole comparative advantage of games is that they can teach us things without more than a trivial cost in terms of morale & willpower.