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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   5960 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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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.

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