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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   5724 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023

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It’s well-known that children learn chess and languages faster than adults. I’m curious: if you take a kid and put him through an intensive chess program, what are the trade-off costs for other aspects of cognitive development?

For instance, you can do two hours of chess, or you can do two hours of social interaction where they will learn visual-facial cues and auditory-expressive cues and other valuable information. You can do two hours of Spanish, or you can do two hours of self-reflection on a long walk, where they will learn how to filter and organize their past memories and discern what they actually like and dislike.

Some of the traded-off benefits are significant but impossible to measure. Spending time “listening to your body” before and after activities, eg eating certain things or spending time with certain people, builds a valuable collection of associations between activities and wellbeing. Spending time socializing will teach a kid how to recognize cues of trust and distrust, who to imitate and who not to, and so on.

If anything, enjoying competitive chess requires an impressive attention span by modern kid standards. Until of course the kid discovers online bullet chess.

My feeling is that most kids' time is unstructured and not very valuable for learning. So if the choice is between an intensive chess program and the status quo, the chess program is a pareto improvement. If the choice is between an intensive chess program and an intensive Spanish program, then sure, there are trade offs. But most kids would otherwise be watching youtube videos or playing minecraft.

Are you implying that learning chess aids a child's cognitive development?

No, I’m saying that learning chess enhances certain parts of cognition, most of which are limited to chess. In other words, they learn chess and implicit secondary things in the process of learning chess.

The question being asked is about the significance of trading off “unmeasurable learning” in favor of chess-related learning. The broader question outside of this specifically would be, “what are the unmeasurable trade-odds when we raise a child to be prodigious in only obvious measurable skills”?

Right. Well, it would be impossible to quantify without a huge study.

But I suppose the simple, rough answer is to look at everything that chess makes strong use of, and then assume that everything else suffers somewhat from under-use. Chess teaches you pattern recognition more than anything, and visuospatial working memory for planning sequences, visualisation, and I suppose, keeping track of relative values of pieces.

Then there are the trade-offs outside the cognitive. A kid who does nothing but play chess in his free time becomes a chess nerd. I wouldn't want my child to do it. Chess is very much a winner-take-all field. Only the top 50 players or so in the world make good money from it, out of millions of serious players. As someone whose name I forget said: "Knowing how to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. Knowing how to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."

Hilariously, the quote is from Paul Morphy.

All game-playing does, to a certain degree for each type of gameplay loop and ruleset. Dominoes and Go Fish aid in cognitive development. When I started playing Bloxorz in my twenties, I could feel my brain stretching with each level I completed.

My understanding is that cognitive skill development is fairly specific, and that research into far transfer from games (or anything) to unrelated cognitive tasks has pretty much been a total bust.

Part of learning chess is learning your opponent’s reactions and how they honestly or deceptively relate to their perception of the board-state. Playing games with other people is a deeply social activity. Having someone walk you through classic games in person would be amazing for cognitive development in all areas.

It was really interesting hearing a master talk about specific games he'd played. It wasn't just "these pieces are better at this stage of the game" or whatever, there was a surprising amount of "I knew Jimmy liked to bulldoze people with aggressive plays, so I insert strategy.

It surprised the hell out of me. Not that psychology was important, but that I got to hear about it at an all-ages community chess class that I only attended to spend time with my nephew.

I was trying to figure out how I would teach my niece chess, and I realized I would start by having us play matches with only one specific piece at a time, such as all four knights or all sixteen pawns. We would build up to using the pieces in full games.

But chess today, being predominately online, makes it the least social sport/game. These benefits are secondary, and most of the learning taking place involves looking at pieces and patterns on the board. Reactions and mentorship are found in many activities and are not unique to chess, so we’re still left with the question of trade-offs.

Ah. As a Gen-X American, I still think in meatspace events. I assumed “an intensive chess program” for two hours a day wouldn’t be computerized.

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