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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35547 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Adults don’t use phonetics in the same way that Magnus Carlsen doesn’t calculate chess moves. Over hundreds of hours, effortful mental activity becomes intuitive. The question is how this intuition is best paved.

It's nice to be able to fall back on a rote system to check one's work. I'm sure Magnus Carlsen can calculate chess moves explicitly.

I might intuitively feel the correctness of some quick mental math, but I can show my work in my head by laying out the calculations to prove it to be doubly sure.

When paving that intuition with a more holistic approach, how does one explain why a thing is correct?

Sure. My point is that either method seems more akin to how we actually teach other skills (like driving) than to just throwing them in the deep end.

Adults don’t use phonetics in the same way that Magnus Carlsen doesn’t calculate chess moves.

It's truly remarkable how many chess patterns are internalized by world-class chess players. Here's a video of a chess grandmaster solving simple chess puzzles in real time, as he narrates. What's amazing to me is how quickly the professional recognizes the solutions - often before I have any sense at all for the position. For him, it's like playing "Where's Waldo" if every non-Waldo character were dressed in all black - the correct result seems to just pop-out without any conscious processing.

So, I agree with the overall thrust of this comment. But it's also absolutely the case that top chess players often perform deep calculations, even in rapid games.

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