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Craig_Heldreth comments on LessWrong gaming community - Less Wrong
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Comments (44)
SAID principle is the one that garners the most acceptance in my circles. I go back and forth on this. I was encouraged to play chess and advised chess practice would increase my general thinking power. I invested a lot of work into this and I have no idea how much I got out of it, beyond getting better at playing chess.
It seems most prominent in exercise and fitness circles and my opinion is that it is not valid in that domain. My most valuable tennis coach told me jumping rope was the best training for tennis and I am 80% certain that in my case a lot of jumping rope made me a better tennis player. It is rather daunting to me to consider how to design a research study to determine if chess playing or go playing could be beneficial (in proportion to its cost) for young mathematicians or physicists or engineers.
It's especially daunting because it's so unlikely. One of the things that has impressed me researching my DNB FAQ is how rarely psychology tasks/games 'transfer' to anything we care about besides those tasks/games, and those are pretty precisely focused, carefully designed, and tested.
Agree. To me this raises a question of where and whence this idea got its mojo. When people told me to play chess to grow my brainpower, they gave me this message with a lot of conviction.
Doesn't seem that odd to me. Lots of correlation/causation there, and there's truth to it - smart people do well and learn faster, one makes genuine progress (in the game), one learns heuristics which one will try to apply elsewhere (of questionable value; Tetris effect), early on the mental exertion may be helpful and one can imagine that some kids don't care enough about 'regular' intellectual activities but will about chess, then you have the usual biases and Hawthorn effects.
In order to determine whether they were beneficial we'd first have to be more precise in what we mean by 'making you smarter' and then test that skill in tasks unrelated to the training that use the same faculty.
For example, if we hypothesise Chess benefits working memory we would do a series of unrelated working memory tests on a sample of individuals and look for correlations with their chess ability (for ease of testing, the same individuals as they progress across time would be best). Similarly, if we hypothesise Poker contribute to probability estimation ability we would test them on non-poker related statistics questions.