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Chess really baffles me Most of the more sophisticated people I know are completely disinterested in sports. Not that they dislike sports, it just never occup

Chess really baffles me Most of the more sophisticated people I know are completely disinterested in sports. Not that they dislike sports, it just never occupies their mind. Sports is a purposeless activity for kids Chess is different from sports in only one way: the loss of very intelligent capable people who could be helping to create the future. Chess is even more tragic than the olympics.

not_kurt_godel 2y ago
Intelligent people who create the future must choose that path for themselves. Chess isn't preventing people from making that choice. If chess didn't exist, most chess players would probably just be playing some other game instead of STEM careers or whatever your definition of creating the future is. Also plenty of very strong chess players do ultimately wind up pursuing other career paths. And then there's also the fact that a good number of the top chess players have shown themselves to be highly dysfunctional people who are unfit for the professional world such as Bobby Fischer and Vladimir Kramnik.
- paulsutter 2y ago
  The stereotype of the absent-minded professor is a great illustration of how norms view the world. What WE see as focus, norms see as .. not conforming? Focus is crucial. To be great at chess you need to focus on it. To be great at creating the future you need to focus on it. By definition you can’t focus on both If you aren’t sacrificing, you aren’t focusing. I’m not saying you need to sacrifice everything else. But definitely you need to choose very carefully. ps. Creating the future is easy to define. Look at OpenAI, Starship, Optimus, mass scale photovoltaic manufacturing in China. Someone had to make those happen and it took focus
  - 11101010001100 2y ago
    Nevermind all that we learned from teaching chess to a computer. Ya a total waste.
    - nileshtrivedi 2y ago
      We literally had a chemistry Nobel Prize winner crediting chess for making him curious about thinking and intelligence and ultimately to find DeepMind.
- sourcepluck 2y ago
  A tradition (of being highly dysfunctional at the top of chess) kicked off in great style, I would say, by the legendary Paul Morphy.
chongli 2y ago
I'll take smart people playing chess any day over those people choosing to go into the tech industry where they spend all their time building addictive products that drive ad impressions. I'd love it if they put their talents to work by going into medical research, chemistry / materials science, or even political science and try to take meaningful steps towards making the world a better place. That route seems to be a lot less popular these days and obviously compensation has a lot to do with it.
fooker 2y ago
Not everything has to have a purpose. That most of the society thinks so is a failure of our systems.
wbl 2y ago
"To play chess is the mark of a gentleman. To play chess well is the mark of a wasted life"
crdrost 2y ago
Honestly this sounds like a knock-on effect of the US's constant erosion of the glue of community. Church attendance down, sport attendance down, theater attendance with friends down, it's all the same. Social norms can change this -- the Netherlands has a very similar culture to the US, But one thing people asked me while I was doing my M.Sc. there was just, "what is your sport?" ... and I got asked it enough that I eventually got one, and then for a good period of time I managed to completely kick my obesity, until I moved back to the American Midwest. The introvert/extrovert axis also plays a role in what sort of "sport" is right for you, of course, and many of your sophisticated friends still hit the gym or jog etc. -- those are just sports for introverts in my view. Sport time is not, time that could have been better spent elsewhere. It's like how cleaning the sink isn't time that could have been better spent elsewhere -- if you don't have a clean sink, you'll pay the interest in terms of "ugh what's that smell [...] oh it was the standing water in this bowl" and "crap I don't have a clean glass, hm, I wonder if I can just buy compostable cups on Amazon so that I don't have that problem..." etc. So as an extrovert, I can go once a week to play soccer with friends in a small league, or, just hear me out, I can get lonely and then do what I do when I get lonely, which is pop on Physics Stack Exchange and answer physics questions so that I can feel Of Use. You pay the interest either way. Chess-time also is no great loss for the world. The top-level world chess community is something we have numbers for -- 17k titled players, 2k grandmasters, 4k international masters beneath that. They are pursuing something that exactly fits the nerdy way that their brain works -- memorize openings out to 20 moves deep, obsessively study and re-study their failed games to understand why the computer thinks they lost and how they might make better mistakes in the future, and for them it HAS to be competitive and they HAVE to have that immediate feedback of trying a new idea in the same narrow niche of ideas that they became a super-expert-in, against another top player who can punish their new mistakes. It's just not a set of transferable world-changing skills. It's like, my brother became single-mindedly obsessed with pool in High School. This persists even though he now runs a small company operating a strip mall. This was just his thing, he loves that there is no upper bound to how much control he can have over the cue and the balls, using the spins of each to control the layout, and precisely planning a course through a 9-ball break and setting himself up for a clean sweep through the game. There was no world in which some "world-changing create-the-future" lifestyle, would have felt as much of a glove fitting his hand to him, as this did. And it is no great loss for the world that he found the glove that fits his hand. It's not like the strip mall would have become an American retail empire rivaling Amazon, if only he had spent his nighttime hours working on the mall instead of on his life passion. For comparison, probably most of the people in the bottom 10% performance bracket at Google are being told and pressured "you need to do more, more, more, you're gonna get fired if you keep those low numbers up" and at 180k employees, that amounts to 18k people that, unlike top chess players, probably _could_ flourish and do better in some smaller scrappier company, but because America doesn't have a social safety net to speak of, they feel like "well I got the dream 6-figure job, I better hold onto that until my knuckles are white because if I got fired, Bay Area rent and cost-of-living could bankrupt me in 3 months." And that's literally just one megatech company, not even talking about the world of people Graeber argues are doing "bullshit jobs" etc. etc.
vunderba 2y ago
Yawn. This banal criticism has been leveled against chess and really the pursuit of any game since the dawn of recreational activities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Morphy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Morphy
screye 2y ago
Disagree, but I have a funny anecdote in your favor. My university's top Dota player was a 2.x GPA slacker who did nothing but play games all day. Guy was going to continue wasting-away by going to a mediocre foreign grad school, but he got his admit revoked because of stupid visa reasons. Life hits him in the face and for 1 year, he quits dota and studies. Goes in, bags 99.99 percentile score in exam with 300k applicants and ends up at my country's HBS. That's the power level dota was holding back. To be fair, a team of chess grand-masters tried to form a dota team once, and got destroyed. So maybe dota is harder. Speaking from personal experience, I haven't done anything in life that's as all consuming, rewarding or as destructive as dota. Don't do Dota kids. Try drugs.
- sourcepluck 2y ago
  > Guy was going to continue wasting-away by going to a mediocre foreign grad school Wow. Who knows what amazing stuff that guy could have done if he'd escaped to a new place, with new people, in an exciting new culture, rather than the very close-minded one you describe here!
- mcmoor 2y ago
  Funnily one of the two times world champion is a doctor who only plays competitively whenever there's world championship (And not the regional tournaments)
kllrnohj 2y ago
> Chess is different from sports in only one way: the loss of very intelligent capable people who could be helping to create the future. Being good at chess does not mean you're "very intelligent". Most of the top players are good at chess because they are very good at memorization & pattern recognition, those are the actual abilities of a high level chess player. Does that translate into other intellectual pursuits like theoretical physics or math? Not really. Grandmasters aren't going to be dumb by any stretch of the imagination, but they aren't super-intelligent geniuses, either.
monooso 2y ago
There's no reason to imagine that a talent for chess equates with a talent for "creating the future." It's also worth noting that very few people make a living from playing chess, so they're probably still available for your future plans.
smolder 2y ago
Okay, let's say we built the future to your satisfaction, and then what? We would probably play games. How much future do you need to build before it's okay to enjoy your time alive immersed in trivialities?

not_kurt_godel 2y ago

Intelligent people who create the future must choose that path for themselves. Chess isn't preventing people from making that choice. If chess didn't exist, most chess players would probably just be playing some other game instead of STEM careers or whatever your definition of creating the future is. Also plenty of very strong chess players do ultimately wind up pursuing other career paths. And then there's also the fact that a good number of the top chess players have shown themselves to be highly dysfunctional people who are unfit for the professional world such as Bobby Fischer and Vladimir Kramnik.

paulsutter 2y ago
The stereotype of the absent-minded professor is a great illustration of how norms view the world. What WE see as focus, norms see as .. not conforming? Focus is crucial. To be great at chess you need to focus on it. To be great at creating the future you need to focus on it. By definition you can’t focus on both If you aren’t sacrificing, you aren’t focusing. I’m not saying you need to sacrifice everything else. But definitely you need to choose very carefully. ps. Creating the future is easy to define. Look at OpenAI, Starship, Optimus, mass scale photovoltaic manufacturing in China. Someone had to make those happen and it took focus
- 11101010001100 2y ago
  Nevermind all that we learned from teaching chess to a computer. Ya a total waste.
  - nileshtrivedi 2y ago
    We literally had a chemistry Nobel Prize winner crediting chess for making him curious about thinking and intelligence and ultimately to find DeepMind.
sourcepluck 2y ago
A tradition (of being highly dysfunctional at the top of chess) kicked off in great style, I would say, by the legendary Paul Morphy.

chongli 2y ago

I'll take smart people playing chess any day over those people choosing to go into the tech industry where they spend all their time building addictive products that drive ad impressions. I'd love it if they put their talents to work by going into medical research, chemistry / materials science, or even political science and try to take meaningful steps towards making the world a better place. That route seems to be a lot less popular these days and obviously compensation has a lot to do with it.

fooker 2y ago

Not everything has to have a purpose. That most of the society thinks so is a failure of our systems.

wbl 2y ago

"To play chess is the mark of a gentleman. To play chess well is the mark of a wasted life"

crdrost 2y ago

Honestly this sounds like a knock-on effect of the US's constant erosion of the glue of community. Church attendance down, sport attendance down, theater attendance with friends down, it's all the same. Social norms can change this -- the Netherlands has a very similar culture to the US, But one thing people asked me while I was doing my M.Sc. there was just, "what is your sport?" ... and I got asked it enough that I eventually got one, and then for a good period of time I managed to completely kick my obesity, until I moved back to the American Midwest. The introvert/extrovert axis also plays a role in what sort of "sport" is right for you, of course, and many of your sophisticated friends still hit the gym or jog etc. -- those are just sports for introverts in my view. Sport time is not, time that could have been better spent elsewhere. It's like how cleaning the sink isn't time that could have been better spent elsewhere -- if you don't have a clean sink, you'll pay the interest in terms of "ugh what's that smell [...] oh it was the standing water in this bowl" and "crap I don't have a clean glass, hm, I wonder if I can just buy compostable cups on Amazon so that I don't have that problem..." etc. So as an extrovert, I can go once a week to play soccer with friends in a small league, or, just hear me out, I can get lonely and then do what I do when I get lonely, which is pop on Physics Stack Exchange and answer physics questions so that I can feel Of Use. You pay the interest either way. Chess-time also is no great loss for the world. The top-level world chess community is something we have numbers for -- 17k titled players, 2k grandmasters, 4k international masters beneath that. They are pursuing something that exactly fits the nerdy way that their brain works -- memorize openings out to 20 moves deep, obsessively study and re-study their failed games to understand why the computer thinks they lost and how they might make better mistakes in the future, and for them it HAS to be competitive and they HAVE to have that immediate feedback of trying a new idea in the same narrow niche of ideas that they became a super-expert-in, against another top player who can punish their new mistakes. It's just not a set of transferable world-changing skills. It's like, my brother became single-mindedly obsessed with pool in High School. This persists even though he now runs a small company operating a strip mall. This was just his thing, he loves that there is no upper bound to how much control he can have over the cue and the balls, using the spins of each to control the layout, and precisely planning a course through a 9-ball break and setting himself up for a clean sweep through the game. There was no world in which some "world-changing create-the-future" lifestyle, would have felt as much of a glove fitting his hand to him, as this did. And it is no great loss for the world that he found the glove that fits his hand. It's not like the strip mall would have become an American retail empire rivaling Amazon, if only he had spent his nighttime hours working on the mall instead of on his life passion. For comparison, probably most of the people in the bottom 10% performance bracket at Google are being told and pressured "you need to do more, more, more, you're gonna get fired if you keep those low numbers up" and at 180k employees, that amounts to 18k people that, unlike top chess players, probably _could_ flourish and do better in some smaller scrappier company, but because America doesn't have a social safety net to speak of, they feel like "well I got the dream 6-figure job, I better hold onto that until my knuckles are white because if I got fired, Bay Area rent and cost-of-living could bankrupt me in 3 months." And that's literally just one megatech company, not even talking about the world of people Graeber argues are doing "bullshit jobs" etc. etc.

vunderba 2y ago

Yawn. This banal criticism has been leveled against chess and really the pursuit of any game since the dawn of recreational activities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Morphy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Morphy

screye 2y ago

Disagree, but I have a funny anecdote in your favor. My university's top Dota player was a 2.x GPA slacker who did nothing but play games all day. Guy was going to continue wasting-away by going to a mediocre foreign grad school, but he got his admit revoked because of stupid visa reasons. Life hits him in the face and for 1 year, he quits dota and studies. Goes in, bags 99.99 percentile score in exam with 300k applicants and ends up at my country's HBS. That's the power level dota was holding back. To be fair, a team of chess grand-masters tried to form a dota team once, and got destroyed. So maybe dota is harder. Speaking from personal experience, I haven't done anything in life that's as all consuming, rewarding or as destructive as dota. Don't do Dota kids. Try drugs.

sourcepluck 2y ago
> Guy was going to continue wasting-away by going to a mediocre foreign grad school Wow. Who knows what amazing stuff that guy could have done if he'd escaped to a new place, with new people, in an exciting new culture, rather than the very close-minded one you describe here!
mcmoor 2y ago
Funnily one of the two times world champion is a doctor who only plays competitively whenever there's world championship (And not the regional tournaments)

kllrnohj 2y ago

> Chess is different from sports in only one way: the loss of very intelligent capable people who could be helping to create the future. Being good at chess does not mean you're "very intelligent". Most of the top players are good at chess because they are very good at memorization & pattern recognition, those are the actual abilities of a high level chess player. Does that translate into other intellectual pursuits like theoretical physics or math? Not really. Grandmasters aren't going to be dumb by any stretch of the imagination, but they aren't super-intelligent geniuses, either.

monooso 2y ago

There's no reason to imagine that a talent for chess equates with a talent for "creating the future." It's also worth noting that very few people make a living from playing chess, so they're probably still available for your future plans.

smolder 2y ago

Okay, let's say we built the future to your satisfaction, and then what? We would probably play games. How much future do you need to build before it's okay to enjoy your time alive immersed in trivialities?