Hi all,
Today, I’ll wrap up my review of Garry Kasparov’s Deep Thinking with some of my responses to a few of his thoughts that I did not cover in my prior posts.
Merely leaving its life’s work behind can disrupt a fragile mind.
This universally observed phenomenon seems to emphasize that the sensation of loss in the wake of losing or stepping away from work has more to do with the subtraction of work itself rather than the loss of the natural support structure that comes with work. It might not be the fragility of a mind that is relevant; perhaps the more important concern is how the loss of the people, places, and things inseparable from the work destabilize the mind to the point of fragility.
Humans tend to downplay work ethic as a talent and often go so far as to hold the two concepts entirely separate. But isn’t work ethic just as much a form of talent?
My high school basketball coach used to say “hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.” It was even briefly printed on the back of our program's t-shirt. The expression fed into our underdog mentality and I liked how the mantra motivated our team to work.
I take a different approach to the concept today. Like Kasparov, I think hard work is a form of talent. In fact, I would even consider whether hard work is the only talent, or at least its most indispensable component. What's the point of talent if you never work hard enough to make use of it?
It kind of works like literacy. The ability to read is a talent that takes many years of effort to learn and cultivate. And yet, many joyfully waste their literacy by simply remaining too lazy to benefit from their reading ability. What’s the point of literacy if you never bother to read?
If a very talented or able person does something others do not immediately understand, it often can be assumed that this action merely expresses the underlying talent or ability.
Let’s suppose you are competing with an opponent you consider superior. This person makes a move or a decision that you cannot figure out. Are you going to assume it was clever or an error? I think most tend for the former because the opponent's superiority makes it seem implausible that the opponent would commit an error.
The argument for assuming a smart person always makes smart decisions is a good one - a smart person makes smart decisions! However, you must believe in yourself, your knowledge, and your instincts ahead of another’s reputation, title, or authority. Otherwise, how do you expect to ever see the truth in any situation, especially when reality runs against your perceptions? How will you ever achieve independence in your thoughts, behaviors, or beliefs?
A bad plan is better than no plan for those who want to learn from their mistakes. Otherwise, at best a person will only become a good improviser.
The most difficult aspect of learning from a mistake is separating a poor decision from bad luck. Those who plan can use hindsight to assess the various outcomes that might have resulted from different choices while those without plans cannot reliably think back to their options and cannot evaluate their decision making process with any rigor.
Narrative fallacies make it difficult to analyze games. A ‘winner made good moves because it led to a win’ does not account for how good the move itself actually was.
Michael Lewis described in Moneyball how baseball teams assessed the value of batting by comparing the result of a hit ball with other hit balls from the history of the sport that traveled with similar velocity and trajectory. If a hit resulted in a double 90% of the time and an out 10% of the time, the batter was credited with 90% of a double (and 10% of an out). This method reduces the impact of single outcomes on an analysis and helps keep the focus on the process instead.
Recent technologies have created a lot of spare time for us that we do not have the sense of purpose needed to make the best use of.
Luckily for us, TV, social media, and this half-assed blog are there to fill the void!
In my dreams I wrote the greatest song I’ve ever written, can’t remember how it goes…
I think it’s important to keep in mind that although the dream of a machine-based intelligence is always presented as a complete positive or a definite negative, the reality is always much more complicated. A computer that was smart enough to build a tree house might be the dream but until we bring Dreamland into reality it probably isn’t a bad idea to know what to do with a hammer and nails.
The devil is always in the details, I suppose…
…what?
Fine…
That’s not from Deep Thinking, that’s from Courtney Barnett’s ‘History Eraser’. But it is a riff off, you know, and who better…
Never mind.
Thanks for reading.
