That’s a nice heuristic, but unfortunately, it’s easy to come up with cases where this heuristic is wrong. Say, people want to play a game, I’ll use chess for availability, not because it best exemplifies this problem. If you want to have a fun game of chess, ideally you’d hope you did have roughly equal matches. If 9 out of 10 players are pretty weak, just learning the rules, and want to play and have fun with it, you, the 10th player, a strong club player, being an outlier, cannot partake because you are too good(with chess, you could maybe try giving your queen to handicap yourself, or take time handicap, to make games more interesting, but generally I feel that sorta of tricks still make it less for fun for all parties)
While there might be obvious reasons to suspect bias being at play, unless you want to ban ever discussing topics that might involve bias, the best way around it, that I know of, is to actually focus on the topic. Just stating “woah, you probably are biased if you think thoughts like this” is something I did take into consideration. I was still curious to hear LW thoughts on this topic. The actual topic, not on whether LW thinks it’s a bias-inducing topic or not. If you want me to add some disclaimer for other people, I’m open to suggestions. I was going to include one myself, that was basically saying “Failing socially in a way described here would at best be very very weak evidence of you being socially gifted, intelligent, or whatever. Reasoning presented here is not peer-reviewed, and might as well contain errors”. I did not, because I didn’t want to add yet another shiny distraction from the actual point presented. I didn’t think it would be needed, either.
In general, the the very skilled player would have gotten that way by being smart AND smashing a ton of less skilled players. Trying to say: “I can’t go to chess club because I would just defeat everyone and it wouldn’t be fair” is ridiculous, and even more so when you’ve never actually won a tournament. You never hear the story “I was a social butterfly, the most popular person in school, but then I decided that was abusing my powers and now I’m alone. Yay!” On the other hand “I was alone and sad and nerdy, but then I practiced social skills and now I have a ton of friends and am the most popular person in school. Yay!” is, if not very common, a story that I’ve heard way more than once.
That’s a nice heuristic, but unfortunately, it’s easy to come up with cases where this heuristic is wrong. Say, people want to play a game, I’ll use chess for availability, not because it best exemplifies this problem. If you want to have a fun game of chess, ideally you’d hope you did have roughly equal matches. If 9 out of 10 players are pretty weak, just learning the rules, and want to play and have fun with it, you, the 10th player, a strong club player, being an outlier, cannot partake because you are too good(with chess, you could maybe try giving your queen to handicap yourself, or take time handicap, to make games more interesting, but generally I feel that sorta of tricks still make it less for fun for all parties)
While there might be obvious reasons to suspect bias being at play, unless you want to ban ever discussing topics that might involve bias, the best way around it, that I know of, is to actually focus on the topic. Just stating “woah, you probably are biased if you think thoughts like this” is something I did take into consideration. I was still curious to hear LW thoughts on this topic. The actual topic, not on whether LW thinks it’s a bias-inducing topic or not. If you want me to add some disclaimer for other people, I’m open to suggestions. I was going to include one myself, that was basically saying “Failing socially in a way described here would at best be very very weak evidence of you being socially gifted, intelligent, or whatever. Reasoning presented here is not peer-reviewed, and might as well contain errors”. I did not, because I didn’t want to add yet another shiny distraction from the actual point presented. I didn’t think it would be needed, either.
In general, the the very skilled player would have gotten that way by being smart AND smashing a ton of less skilled players. Trying to say: “I can’t go to chess club because I would just defeat everyone and it wouldn’t be fair” is ridiculous, and even more so when you’ve never actually won a tournament. You never hear the story “I was a social butterfly, the most popular person in school, but then I decided that was abusing my powers and now I’m alone. Yay!” On the other hand “I was alone and sad and nerdy, but then I practiced social skills and now I have a ton of friends and am the most popular person in school. Yay!” is, if not very common, a story that I’ve heard way more than once.
If your goal is to win at chess, then by all means dominate the noob chess league.
If your goal is to play challenging games, find a group of people at your level or somewhat better than you.
If your goal is to make friends, the chess is incidental.