Tag: chess

Teaching in Verbs rather than Nouns

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There are two ways to teach chess, a master explained.

The first, is to teach chess principles that may apply to life. And the second, is to teach life principles that definitely apply to chess. 

“Could you give me an example of one such principle? Because I love in biology teaching not names, not using nouns, but instead teaching verbs. Because ultimately, if you want to understand, for instance, how the nervous system works, or the immune system, you teach the verb actions of molecules.

And the names of the molecules are important if you decide to go into that field professionally. But otherwise, the principles and verbs are what’s most important. So what’s an example of a principle of chess or a mode of action on the board that you think transfers?”

Yet we teach with nouns and employ nouns because nouns have a lower cost, even though they may not be the right tool for the job.

–

From Huberman Lab: Josh Waitzkin: The Art of Learning & Living Life, Jan 27, 2025
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/josh-waitzkin-the-art-of-learning-living-life/id1545953110?i=1000685629066&r=5936
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Chess Forks

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In the 2023-2024 school year I was back in the classroom. It was a successful year. There were ups and downs, but the setbacks provided chances to grow and the successes led to further advances.

During the last eight days, after exams and projects, we played chess. It was a blast.

I’d last played this much chess in middle school. A friend brought a rolled up board to lunch and we would play over peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, apple slices, and potato chips. Among our lunch table I was about average. I’m still about average. My strategy is winning by accident.

For instance, I didn’t know about “chess forks”:

From ChatGPT: In chess, a fork is a move where a single piece attacks two or more of your opponent’s pieces at the same time. This puts your opponent in a difficult situation because they can usually only move one piece to safety, leaving the other piece (or pieces) vulnerable to capture. Knights are particularly known for creating forks, but any piece can perform a fork. It’s a clever tactic to gain an advantage by threatening multiple pieces simultaneously.

To prevent forking, a player needs to stay out of trouble, unlike Amina.

The best selling fantasy adventure story The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi is one fork after another. Amina, our buccaneer hero, faces one tradeoff after another. Unlike my chess skills, she wins not by accident but…., well no spoilers.

Does this happen in real life? Go to a meeting and deal with obstinate coworkers or skip the meeting and be left out? Have a difficult conversation with your loved ones or let the issues fester? Sell an investment for a loss or continue to psychologically carry the burden? Waste more time in a job or face the unexpected prospects of starting over?

One solution comes from Shane Parrish’s book, Clear Thinking, where warns against two-dimensional solution sets. This or that. Burgers or dogs. Good or bad. Day or night.

But, Parrish prods, get creative. Ask: what would it take for one of these options to be good? Can you empathize with the obstinate coworker? Can you have a hard talk with the goal of one step backwards two steps forward? Can you sell an investment as a tax-loss? Can you side-hustle while staying in the job?

Chess and fantasy adventure novels are too strict for this sort of Alchemy.

But life is flexible. It’s malleable. We should avoid getting forked. But if we do, maybe with a little work, there are 3D chess moves to make.

What is cheating in chess is winning in life.

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Roland Walker (BBC) talking with David Edmonds. The context is how Chess.com monitors cheating.

“We can’t overstress this enough, humans and computers play utterly differently. Humans play by planning and recognizing patterns. Computers play in unusual ways, it forgets everything that it knew in between every move. A computer doesn’t really have a plan.
“An engine will take back a previous move if it realizes that in the context of the following moves it wasn’t good. A human has a kind of sticky feeling about their plan.”

Chess engines make people better at chess and good players use them to practice, if not to play. It’s the Cowen idea of meta-rationality (more here). The idea of using the right resources.

Computers are good because they compute without bias (kinda) and avoid human mistakes like sunk cost. As Mohnish Pabrai pointed out, “when we spend a lot of time on something, we feel we should get something in return for that time, it’s a danger if you say, I’m going to research a company and decide if I want to invest or not. I think you’re better off researching a company with no such preconceived notion.”

This week my daughters (12, 10) and I watched both Sherlock (also BBC) and Enola Holmes (Netflix, we loved it). In both the episode and the movie, the characters had to be more objective to solve the crime.

However, it’s going full-Sherlock as much as moving in that direction. Like someone training to gain/lose weight, the goal isn’t to become extremely skinny/strong but to be more than the current state.

Meta-rationality then is under indexed, unless of course, it’s outlawed like chess.

h/t Cowen-kinda-queue, a podcast feed of Marginal Revolution mentions.

Multiply all potential WFH consequences by 1.2

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From Maria Konnikova’s The Biggest Bluff.

In the same way that mediums matter for content (why are there no good FinTwit YouTube channels?), mediums matter for work too. 

Much work is information exchange. The internet repairman comes to your, now home, office to install a better modem and upgrade the internet plan. The internist diagnosis that ‘thing’. The teacher teaches.

A group of researchers wondered how virtual chess might lead to different decisions. It is still chess; sixty-four squares, four rooks, two kings, but it is a different medium.

During the COVID-19 pandemic there was the Magnus Carlsen Invitational. The researcher wrote:

> “We use this event to compare the performance of the participating players to their performance in recent editions of the World Rapid Chess Championship as organized by the World Chess Federation in a traditional offline setting. Both tournaments are organized under comparable conditions, in particular giving players the same amount of thinking time during a game, and offer comparable prize funds.”

Researchers compared each of the 27,000 move across 441 games to the Stockfish 11 engine and found that while the number of mistakes was about the same, the quality of the mistakes was worse (16.8% to be exact).

One way digital work will be different than in-person work will be in how we interact with technology. For example, many writers print their words to proofread their work. They noticed differences in a different form.

Jason Blum and Rory Sutherland both work in creative fields and note the importance of a confidence boost–which is hard to do virtually. In his op-ed, Jerry Seinfeld wrote that New York City will bounce back, that broadband isn’t enough to do the same work. Why? “Energy, attitude, and personality cannot be ‘remoted’ even through the best fiber optic lines.” 

In the same way we might leave early if an upcoming drive is through a notoriously congested area, we should adapt our decisions, interactions, and intentions as we WFH.

Here’s the suggestion: When working virtually try to be 20% nicer, more supportive, and more cautious. There’s a psychological heft that’s lost in our virtual interactions.

Hey, you read the whole post, want more? I’ve got a new pay-what-you-want pdf. It’s a handful of ideas from Tyler Cowen about thinking like an economist. It’s here. It’s twenty-seven minutes ideas.