I saw a post here on LW recently advocating for “Steelman Ping-pong”. In the spirit of spending between 2 and 5 minutes (no more) each day writing, I played a 5-phase Steelman Ping-pong, with 1 minute per phase, on the topic of whether Chess should be played mainly with a fast or slow clock. Each paragraph tries to argue against the previous paragraph:
Chess is a measure of thinking ability, and while thinking things through thoroughly is important, being able to quickly react to situations and make good decisions is also important, and is a defining characteristic of how people make their way through the world
But advocating for a fast clock misses an important point: it is important, as much today as ever, to be able to sit down for a long time analyzing one situation, and to find the right approach to try to find the best solution to that one problem.
While it is important to be able to find deep and subtle solutions, it is also important to be able to find them quickly. By using a slow clock, you allow people to waste time, but an important skill is to not just find the best solution, but to be able to find it as quickly as possible
But there are perhaps some solutions that simply cannot be found quickly; instead they require much time to consider all the possibilities that eventually leads to the right answer. By reducing time, you aren’t incentivizing finding the right answer quickly, but to sloppily find an okay answer in a hurry
While in edge cases this may be true, I suspect this doesn’t characterize Chess- instead having a sharp eye for positions, and a good ability to cut through the game tree, is what allows a player to find the best moves- and the sharper a player is, the more quickly they can do this.
I saw a post here on LW recently advocating for “Steelman Ping-pong”. In the spirit of spending between 2 and 5 minutes (no more) each day writing, I played a 5-phase Steelman Ping-pong, with 1 minute per phase, on the topic of whether Chess should be played mainly with a fast or slow clock. Each paragraph tries to argue against the previous paragraph:
Chess is a measure of thinking ability, and while thinking things through thoroughly is important, being able to quickly react to situations and make good decisions is also important, and is a defining characteristic of how people make their way through the world
But advocating for a fast clock misses an important point: it is important, as much today as ever, to be able to sit down for a long time analyzing one situation, and to find the right approach to try to find the best solution to that one problem.
While it is important to be able to find deep and subtle solutions, it is also important to be able to find them quickly. By using a slow clock, you allow people to waste time, but an important skill is to not just find the best solution, but to be able to find it as quickly as possible
But there are perhaps some solutions that simply cannot be found quickly; instead they require much time to consider all the possibilities that eventually leads to the right answer. By reducing time, you aren’t incentivizing finding the right answer quickly, but to sloppily find an okay answer in a hurry
While in edge cases this may be true, I suspect this doesn’t characterize Chess- instead having a sharp eye for positions, and a good ability to cut through the game tree, is what allows a player to find the best moves- and the sharper a player is, the more quickly they can do this.
(The irony is not lost on me that the method through which this was written is basically the writing equivalent of blitz chess)