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Will_Newsome comments on What Curiosity Looks Like - Less Wrong
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More or less accurate, though of course there's a ton of stuff that was left unsaid. "Study fields like these" is easy to say, "learn skills like these" is really difficult. There's no easy way to communicate skills, and sanity is a skill-set. You kinda just have to hope people have enough lucidity to make connections between fields and reliably see single step implications, and enough ambition to seek out and learn the skills from better thinkers than themselves. E.g. thanks to having brilliant friends I know a lot of cognitive tricks and verbal patterns that can't be learned from books or blog posts. Before I had these skills I wasn't a very good truth-seeker, and I'm sure a lot of people get stuck in that valley. Luckily a surplus of lucidity and reflectivity gets you a long way by itself.
Oh, and play a lot of chess. It's important.
I prefer poker, actually. Unlike chess, real life is not a perfect-knowledge game.
Playing chess is important because the form constant of the chessboard has a salubrious stimulating effect on the mind.
(I'm not serious.)
You have caused me to hallucinate the faint superimposition of a chess board over the center of my field of vision. I hope you're happy.
I would love to hear more about how playing chess helps whatever skills you think it helps.
I expect it helps with your dubstep moves.
Will is never going to live that down.
If someone does a study on it and turns out that he is right he'll be laughing at us something shocking!
If I understand correctly, good chess players use something like motor planning for playing chess.
In general improving my motor planning over abstractions seems like a good way of getting the part of my brain that actually works really well for planning to get better at planning, and doing things.
Yes, getting skilled is hard, but reading this site helped me immensely. Yet, my experience is that my peers don't believe me when I say that studying fields like philosophy and rationality help people think, and my (Catholic) English teacher doesn't even want to hear anything about these topics. Getting over social politics is pretty difficult for me.
Would you be willing to try to explain your ideas about why chess is important (for people like me who don't particularly like chess) and maybe talk about the "cognitive tricks and verbal patterns"?