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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2385 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 18, 2025

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What do we think about chess? My 5 year old daughter has become enamored with it lately, wants to play multiple times a day, doing some puzzles, all that good stuff. She's definitely improving fast - she impresses adults she plays who know how to play but aren't good haha - I'd benchmark at her at like a Class G player (ELO in the 600-700 range). I'm probably around an 1100 ELO, maybe a bit higher when I'm really focused.

Basically, trying to decide how much to encourage improvement in this vs other skills she enjoys (soccer, reading, etc) given Chess is a bit of a dead end? But if she enjoys it then it is a fun hobby and I like playing her...thinking we might try out a local scholastic club and see what we think.

Strongly in favor. In particular, if you become good at it it's a good chip to impress people with. I've also found it a good way to dump my need for cognition when needed.

The biggest benefit of her being into chess that I can see is that she'll find it easier to find a very intelligent husband if she sticks with it into womanhood. Given the sex ratio of the game, she'll have her pick of the litter.

Reading is nice, but antisocial. Soccer is social and involves exercise, so that's good.

The others are right, chess at its highest level doesn't feed into anything but itself. If your daughter had that rare acumen and you wanted to support her and she made WGM, chess would be her work and her life. I think you might wonder if this would be so bad. WFM Anna Cramling is the daughter of WGM Pia Cramling and GM Juan Manuel Bellón López. There's this video of her watching as her mother plays an amateur at a chess bar in Paris, and it's idyllic. Titled chess players also generally come from moneyed families; there are worse people to fall into crowd with.

But there are examples of highly successful non-career chess players who were good at it, namely Stanley Kubrick and Peter Thiel. I'm not attributing, obviously it's that the traits that made Kubrick a superb filmmaker as an adult, saw him interested and successful in chess as an adolescent, same with Thiel. Maybe chess is the nascent flame of something much brighter in her future, why not encourage it?

If you want to brush up yourself, IM Jeremy Silman wrote the best general book: How to Reassess Your Chess

Edit: linked the wrong vid, updated the link, the old vid is below

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_xFS2X-sHlQ

I am a serious chess nerd, and to be honest, I enjoy it purely as an end in itself. I don't think it's making me smarter or better at anything - I just really like chess, and so I play it and study it because it's fun. It brings me great happiness to have something like that.

I wonder if this is sort of a luxury of the middle-aged: I do not need to be getting better at "real" skills to give myself a shot in life, because I'm married, mid-career and so on. It certainly would be more valuable to do something else with her time from that perspective. But it's not as useless as some other things. Like others have said, it's socially acceptable and even cool to some people; and it is certainly possible to meet folks and make friends (admittedly odd ones) through it.

Chess is a fun hobby, and definitely a healthier way to spend time than staring at a screen, but it's not really useful in any way. As the siblings note, it is one of those tournament professions where only a tiny handful of people can ever hope to make a living, so unless you want to go full Polgar and make an all out attempt at raising a champion, that's out. Transfer of learning doesn't exist, so all those quotes about how chess teaches foresight and vigilance are full of shit; learning chess teaches you to play chess, period. And we are not in an age or place where it is a common pastime, so it is not particularly useful as a social skill, either.

I would say it depends on what it's funging against. If chess time or money comes out of the soccer budget, which keeps the body healthy, or the reading budget, which is useful in general, it's probably not worth it. If, on the other hand, time at the chess club would otherwise be spent on Instagram and YouTube, by all means go ahead.

Transfer of learning doesn't exist, so all those quotes about how chess teaches foresight and vigilance are full of shit; learning chess teaches you to play chess, period. And we are not in an age or place where it is a common pastime, so it is not particularly useful as a social skill, either.

I would not be categorical about it, I think there are a lot of lessons that a child would learn from chess. Mostly character lessons, not intellectual lessons, and not because it's chess specifically, but because it's a competitive game. It would teach a child humility; even if the kid is good, she will meet people who can effortlessly curbstomp her at it, so she will have to learn to deal with that. She will also learn that if she studies and practices hard, she can improve at something; a valuable insight that eludes a surprising amount of adults.

There's a few pitfalls too though, it's important that she understands that just because she can beat some people at chess, especially adults, it does not make her better, superior or even really more intelligent than them. And vice-versa. But I can easily imagine a kid losing respect for adult autority because she thinks she's more intelligent than them.

Yeah this is what I've emphasized - you will improve at this if you work at it, but doing so will result in a lot of losing along the way. We went to a chess club event recently and I prefaced it with "everyone here is going to be much better than you, but you will learn some things". She had a very good attitude, and I thought played some very solid moves that even I hadn't seen. She said she wanted to go again, so I think for now I keep nurturing it. Hopefully can find some people more her level for her to play soon.

Similarly I suspect it's good for a kid to have something that they are better than adults at, for giving a sense of "being adult like".

They can play in competition at an adult level without being condescended in skill. And in theory learn how to gracefully win as well.

Chess has limited transfer effects. It won't "develop the brain" very much except for getting better at chess/recognizing its patterns. I do like one thing about it though: It teaches the value of looking more than one step ahead when evaluating anything.

There's no career option in it, unless you're a very rare talent. Pretty much a dead end, as you say.

Chess players are usually kinda weird/nerdy. It takes a somewhat special person to spend hours every day on plugging away at it. Chicken or egg problem. Not sure how good the socializing aspect would be, I suspect not that good. I usually try to chat when I play online chess with mediocre results. But as deluxev2 says, it is pretty much respectable. Moreso than playing MMOs every day or something. Chess is "cleaner".

I guess I would encourage soccer just as much as chess? Decent hobby to spend a limited amount of time on though.

Paul Morphy said: "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."

One of the weirdest things I noticed is that the best chess player in the family (he was in top 20 nation wide(small country tho) in his prime, I think) is so scatter-brained that car maintenance and dealing with paperwork was something his wife did.

He has legendary skills at messing up anything computer related.

That sounds like someone who went savant-like in for one thing at the expense of many other things he should have learned.

Makes me wonder if some types of activities that require focus have transfer effects while others don't. Meditation has improved my focus on anything and everything. Perhaps practicing chess does not.

His day job was mostly medical research and teaching. Wasn't unsuccessful at it, quite well regarded. Became a full professor eventually. (it's a bigger deal/more rare in eastern Europe than in US) Personally I think he wasn't (when younger) as scatter-brained as he pretended to be and used it as an excuse.

I find meditation really cool and its promises really interesting, and then every time I look further into it I’m reminded that the end goal is, essentially, voluntary ego death.

You talk about meditation a lot, so please forgive me for asking directly: does it not creep you out that this practice is supposed to end in you realising that you don’t really exist? Am I mistaken about the end result? Not the rhetoric, but the actual purpose of realising that theee isn’t a real you.

It's not "ego death". That's a bullshit term used by people who don't understand anything about awakening.

I've attained anatta (not-self) insight and I didn't lose anything I would have wanted to keep. You lose a delusion. You see that the "self" was just a peculiar form of content in your consciousness, consisting of a combination of physical sensations, feelings, images, and a very strong and convincing belief/concept. You see it as being a mirage and a process, a verb, rather than a noun. I'm still a human being with a body, mind, consciousness, feelings, perceptions. I just don't get fooled by combinations of phenomena in those aspects of human experience making up a "self". I still have an ego, I know who I am and the difference between me and other persons. It's kind of like, after having played an MMO with an avatar every day of your life thus far, you see it for an avatar, rather than a real physical thing that could somehow ever have inherent existence.

So when you realise that you don't exist, that's just about dropping a false belief and seeing the truth: that feeling of being a self was never born except as a mirage-like construct of the mind, and cannot die because it never truly existed. That's a relief. You still take care of your body and mind. Chop wood, carry water.

As far as hobbies go, I think chess is pretty well respected. Socially being known to be good at chess won't typecast her as the wrong type of person. Practically unlikely to go anywhere big as you note (but the same is true of soccer, reading, etc). It might be a good place for practicing how to learn e.g. how to find good sources of information, when to rely on mental shortcuts, how to intentionally memorize things.

The chances of going pro are about the same as your odds of making a living in the NFL, about 0. But if she has fun playing then sure why not.

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