Some Life Lessons from Chess

The Scottish chess Grand Master, Jonathan Rowson, hovered around the Top 100 chess rankings, at his peak. So yes, you’re not likely to have heard of him. But he does have many interesting points on what chess can teach us about life in his book, The Moves that Matter. He knocks off the obvious one first:

“The connection between chess and life is usually assumed to be almost exclusively about the application of strategic thinking.”

After all, we hear a remark like this in so many contexts, don’t we?

“Sporting commentators often announce disconcertingly that the tennis or cricket match you thought you were watching is now ‘a chess game’.”

 

Another obvious thing in chess is that you need to concentrate. Very hard:

“The experience of how concentration ebbs and flows, how we replenish intellectual bandwidth so that we can keep examining the same set of things while also accommodating new things without the whole wave of thought collapsing on itself. To concentrate, we need that kind of resilience.”

As if that wasn’t hard enough, you have to consider a move, then your opponent’s move… and you realize how it easy it is to get lost (or tired). It doesn’t stop at 2nd order thinking, the best chess players go many orders deeper:

“There are times when what matters is knowing what others know, and further, knowing what others know about what other others know. This experience of holding multiple perspectives in mind and then thinking productively without dropping anything is (very hard but useful to be able to do).”

That resilience, to not drown even when there are a dozen alternatives, is something that would serve us well in life. And it’s also a reminder that whoever said that man is a rational animal didn’t know squat about human nature!

“Rational is one of the many things we can do, not something we are.”

 

He quotes these lines by David Bohm, the physicist, on the topic of information:

“(We tend to believe that) ‘you’ are inside there, deciding what to do with the information. But I want to say that you don’t decided what to do with the information. The information takes over. It runs you.”

That’s so true. In chess, you should consider multiple aspects (kingside, queenside, the center, short term v/s long term), and then decide the right move, without falling in love with only one aspect. Rowson says we need to do that same multi-aspect analysis for the decisions we make in life, and not let one axis (physics, biology, chemistry, economics, psychology, politics, sociology, philosophy, theology) dominate our thought process.

 

That’s quite a lot of food for thought… and all that’s just from the first quarter of the book.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more