6 ms·
This reminds me of a quote from Raymond Chandler, describing a chess game: > ..seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting
by fenomas 5y ago
This reminds me of a quote from Raymond Chandler, describing a chess game:
> ..seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.
- drcode 5y agoHe must not have had much experience with quant desks at trading firms.
- brudgers 5y agoChandler did not. He died in 1959. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Chandler https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Chandler
- uyt 5y agoI thought "advertising agency" was referencing that the best minds of our generation are thinking about how to make people click ads at google/facebook. I guess it was always a thing even back then?
- petamask 5y agoPossible. But I think more likely is that it was a good frame of reference for him as he was an executive at an advertising agency for quite some time.
- fenomas 5y agoI don't think that's correct. Outside of writing, his career was spent in an oil company.
- tkgally 5y agoI think he meant that the best minds of his generation were devising advertising campaigns and writing advertising copy for laundry soap and canned vegetables. Advertising was more text-centric then, and talented writers like Chandler could make more money writing ads than books.
- fenomas 5y agoThe quote is from 1940.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago> elaborate a waste of human intelligence Hmm… any way we can turn chess into a proof of work algorithm? xD
- XCSme 5y agoYes, it proves humans work.
- pmastela 5y agoChess is to humans as Bitcoin is to computers (Chess : Humans :: Bitcoin : Computers). Except humans stick up for the wastefulness of both, and computers stay silent on the matter.
- Lordarminius 5y agoYou know little about either chess or bitcoin. The first enables self knowledge, molds character, and helps develop a mental model transferable to other pursuits; the second is the first iteration of computer money.
- reader_mode 5y ago>The first enables self knowledge, molds character, and helps develop a mental model transferable to other pursuits; That's what quickly got me out of chess, when it was me playing with my brother as a kid it was about thinking really hard and trying to explore as many options as I could - it was really about who can think faster and outsmarting eachother since we only knew the rules. When I decided to look into chess I found out it was about learning openings, recognising patterns, traps, etc. I didn't feel any smarter learning those, I just learned more about chess. You can draw up silly strategic methapores with any activity, but chess does seem to have that Sun Tzu status.
- nezirus 5y agoI kindly disagree. It may appear that chess is a memoization game, but when or if you want to become a master of the game , you'll notice that rote learning will not take you there. You do need to understand phases of the game, set up strategy, estimate your position, know when to attack or to defend, and have confidence in your technique. Mind you, that is only for the plain master title (FIDE or even a national master). Grandmasters are a whole new level in comparison, aliens.
- reader_mode 5y agoBut this wasn't my critique. Chess strategy is again chess specific, the things that translate are going to be superficial. You can draw parallels between many domains, like there are phases, strategy and coordination in many competitive online games, and I'd argue that the cooperative nature translates better to most real world than chess. Chess has this poetic image of playing around with kings, queens and pawns that lets artist paint grandiose metaphors about real world, but at the end of the day spending a bunch of time on chess is going to make you good at chess, doubt it will do much better than any other similar hobby for transferable skills.