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wnewman comments on Science: Do It Yourself - Less Wrong
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Wei_Dai writes "I wonder if I'm missing something important by not playing chess."
I am a somewhat decent chess player[*] and a reasonable Go player (3 dan, barely, at last rated tournament a few years ago). If you're inclined to thinking about cognition itself, and about questions like the value of heuristics and approximations that only work sometimes, such games are great sources of examples. In some cases, the strong players have already thinking along those lines for more than a century, though using a different vocabulary. E.g., Go concepts like aji and thickness seem strongly related to Less Wrong discussions of the relative value of conjunctive and disjunctive plans.
There might also be some rationalist value in learning at the gut level that we're not on the primordial savannah any more by putting a thousand or so hours or more into at least one discipline where you can be utterly unmistakably crushed by someone who scores a zero on the usual societal/hindbrain tags for seriousness (like a bored 9 year old Ukrainian who obliterates you in the first round of the tournament on the way to finishing the tournament undefeated with a rating provisionally revised to 5 dan:-).
That said, I think you will probably get much more bang for your rationalist-wins-the-world buck from studying other things. In particular, I'd nominate (1) math along the usual engineering-ish main sequence (calculus, linear algebra, Fourier analysis, probability, statistics) and (2) computer programming. History and microeconomics-writ-large are also strong candidates. So it's not particularly worth studying chess or go beyond the point where you just find it fun for its own sake.
[*] highwater mark approximately 60 seconds before I abandoned my experiment with playing chess somewhat seriously: forced threefold repetition against a 2050ish-rated player who happened to be tournament director of the local chess club minitournament, who had told me earlier that I could stop recording when my clock fell below 5 minutes, and who ruled upon my 3-fold repetition that it didn't count as a draw because the game was not being recorded
Empirically, we have more impressive instrumental rationalists, such as Peter Thiel, Tyler Cowen and Demis Hassabis coming from the much smaller field of chess than from the much larger field of math (where I think there's only James Simmons). There's also Watizkin, who seems very interesting. It seems to me that math emphasizes excess rigor and a number of other elements which constitute the instrumental rationality equivalent of anti-epistemology, and possibly also that the way in which it is taught emphasizes learning concepts prior to the questions that motivated their creation, which never happens in games. Fischer was probably more insane than any famous insane mathematician I can think of though, and Kasparov does claim the following http://www.new-tradition.org/view-garry-kasparov.php though given his Soviet education, e.g. education in a system which actually did teach a blatantly false version of history, this is more understandable.
At the elite PhD level, the mathematical community encourages a level of rigor, and the analytical philosophy community a level of pseudo-rigor that may even qualify as epistemic anti-epistemology for the typical student, (hence the anomalous number of theists in those fields relative to other high-IQ fields) but the people who are recognized as the best in those fields are probably matched only by the best physicists (as a group) in epistemic rationality. Certainly those fields reward epistemic rationality like no others.
Poker, MtG, Go, etc have good instrumental track records compared to math but bad ones compared to chess IMHO.
BTW, I feel instrumental rationality guilt at writing a blog comment that few people are likely to read. I'd love it if someone were to incorporate this and their thoughts about it into a top level post.
I don't have enough data to compare such gaming outcomes very well, but I'll pass on something that I thought was funny and perhaps containing enough truth to be thought-provoking (from Aaron Brown's The Poker Face of Wall Street): "National bridge champion and hedge fund manager Josh Parker explained the nuances of serious high school games players to me. The chess player did well in school, had no friends, got 800s on his SATs, and did well at a top college. The poker and backgammon set (one crowd in the 1970s) did badly in school, had tons of friends, aced their SATs, and were stars at good colleges. The bridge players flunked out of high school, had no friends, aced their SATs, and went on to drop out of top colleges. In the 1980s, we all ended up trading options together."
Also, FWIW, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are apparently in the bridge camp, though I dunno whether they played in high school.
Who do the chess and bridge players play bridge and chess with if they don't have friends?
I've never become friends with any of the dozens of people with whom I've played chess in person (see below for why the qualifier "in person" is relevant) excepting one high-school classmate. A chess player is pretty much forced to suppress any natural human cooperative instincts like reciprocal altruism, instincts that are probably very important in the establishment of friendships. Also, sharing small pleasures seems important in starting friendships, and in chess the pleasure of one party coincides with pain in the other party.
Also, since the early 1990s anyone logging on to the Free Internet Chess Server can with an expected wait of less than a minute be matched up with another chess player of whatever skill level (more precisely, Elo rating, which is calculated automatically by the server) one desires. There is no need to remember the identity of who one has previously played against (although doing so will tend to increase one's rating a little since individual players have styles that can be learned and exploited in the game).
Of course there could well be some exaggeration for dramatic effect there --- as David Friedman likes to say, one should be skeptical of any account which might survive on its literary or entertainment value alone. But it's not any sort of logical impossibility. In Dallas near UTD (which had a strong well-funded chess team which contributed some of the strong coffeehouse players) ca. 2002 I was able to play dozens of coffeehouse games against strangers and casual acquaintances. One can also play in tournaments and in open-to-all clubs. Perhaps one could even play grudge matches against people one dislikes. Also today one can play an enormous number of strangers online, and even in the 1970s people played postal chess.
I didn't mention bridge because I think of it as a game people take up later in life and transfer skills to, not as a game people learn as kids and transfer skills from. I could easily be wrong about this.
Other members of the chess and bridge clubs.