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BlueSun comments on Rationality Quotes April 2013 - Less Wrong
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Something a Chess Master told me as a child has stuck with me:
-- Robert Tanner
-- Jake the Dog (Adventure Time)
For reference purposes: video clip; episode transcript.
WTH... My latest Facebook status is “You got to lose to know how to win” (from “Dream On” by Aerosmith). o.O
Checkmate, atheists!
I don't get it...
Will is (non-seriously) pointing out that the synchronicity between army1987's Facebook status and Qiaochu's comment is too great to be explained by coincidence alone, and is thus strong evidence for the existence of God.
You've got to crash the car to know how to drive, got to drown to learn how to swim, you've got to believe to disbelieve. Got to !x to x.
But that would make it "checkmate, believers". All the other sentences say " you've got to <bad thing> to <good thing>".
X & !X can be anything, good or bad. You've just got to pick a value for X that fits in with your desires to get a particular outcome if you want to break it down in terms of good and bad. Got to live to die. The point is that the underlying structure of the argument remains the same whatever you pick.
If you're actually interested in propositional logic, then the suitably named Logic by Paul Tomassi is a very approachable intro to this sort of thing. Though I'm afraid I couldn't say what it goes for these days.
Which is of course a different question to "What should I do to get good at Chess?" which is all about deliberate practice with a small proportion of time devoted to playing actual games.
Right, I often play blitz games for an hour a day weeks on end and don't improve at all. Interestingly, looking at professional games, even if I don't bother to calculate many lines, seems to make me slightly better; so there are ways to improve without deliberate practice, but playing blitz doesn't happen to be one of them. Playing standard time controls does work decently well though, at least once you can recognize all the dozen or so main tactics.
Playing a lot isn't as good as deliberate practice, but it's better than having done neither.
This seems incontrovertible.