Repairing a clock, or creating a weaving machine requires thought with an underlying simplicity (and definitiveness) to its logic - you have to take simple fact

Repairing a clock, or creating a weaving machine requires thought with an underlying simplicity (and definitiveness) to its logic - you have to take simple facts and relationships (without rich associations) that can piled on top of each other and yield precise calculations. Poetry is a great preparation for many things, but probably not clock design or repair. Math, logic, mechanics - what's so different about these tasks is that they're simple-to-complex. But because our minds are association-machines, they're all hard for us. Chess gets you closer to that sort of thinking than Go does (it's a more intuitive game.) However Chinese chess has a long history and isn't much different than Western chess, so chess hasn't been a Western advantage. And a language with an alphabet and tons of homonyms strips away many of the rich associations present, say, in the written Chinese language. I'm going to guess you haven't experienced and can't imagine the difference, or perhaps the notion that the Chinese way might be richer or superior in any respect. Compare many of the mind-bending "reasonings" of Medieval thinkers from a time when Latin was the medium of scholarship. So many of these, which were taken very seriously at the time, are just stupifying to moderns - because the arguments are so easily taken over by coincidental associations which to a modern person have no logical importance at all, of any kind. Latin borrowed, but never as freely as English did, and by Medieval times was a pared-down, rationalized version of Ancient Latin. No forest of homographs. Another pretty well-known hypothesis holds that english common law, which in contrast with so many other top-down legal traditions, necessitated the logical reconciliation of decision across many circumstances, etc, over hundreds of years, reinforced the mechanical bent of mind. I guess you'd find it plumb crazy too.