Jonah Lehrer's "The Cognitive Cost of Expertise"

Jonah Lehrer has written a fascinating post on "The Cognitive Cost of Expertise" (The Frontal Cortex, in Wired's Science Blogs, November 19, 2010) that uses Adrian de Groot's famous work with chess masters as a jumping off point to talk about the cognitive trade-offs of expert knowledge.  Lehrer seems to be making his career by writing about the science of choice and decision making, and I very much enjoyed his book How We Decide .  I have pointed readers previously to his essay "Don't: The Secret of Self-Control" and commented on a piece he wrote on Carlsen's "Chess Intuition."

Support "Chess Movie"

I.S. 318 at NY State Championships

Katie Dellamaggiore, an independent documentary filmmaker from Brooklyn, is raising money for her Chess Movie, about the award-winning I.S. 318 team.  Visit her "Kickstarter" page to learn more about the project and to pledge your support.  Though they have already met their minimum goal of raising $4,000, they definitely need a lot more than that to finish this important documentary, which I think could do for scholastic chess what Mad Hot Ballroom did for kids' ballroom dancing.  Here is Katie's appeal:

Over the last 2 years I have been producing and directing a documentary about scholastic chess with my company Rescued Media.  Chess Movie (working title) goes inside one of the best junior high chess program in the nation, Intermediate School 318 in Brooklyn, New York. Many students at 318 come from difficult circumstances and 60% are from low-income families, but being part of a winning chess team gives them a unique opportunity to experience success at a young age. Justus, Patrick, Alexis, Pobo & Rochelle are 5 of 50 team members that are learning on the chessboard the skills they need to face challenges of adolescence and their working class circumstances.

In April 2009 we embarked on our first trip with the team to Nashville, Tennessee, to the USCF Super Nationals. Once we witnessed how big the scholastic chess world was, we were hooked. Over the next year we embedded ourselves with the team-- at home, at school and away at tournaments -- and slowly, the kids' individual stories began to take shape.  Please view our five minute teaser for an idea of where the film is now headed. It’s our ultimate goal to secure a national television broadcast for Chess Movie and maybe even a small theatrical release. We also plan to build a strong community outreach campaign in the hopes the film will build support for scholastic chess programs in under served communities as we have witnessed firsthand the profound effect the I.S. 318 chess program has had on its students.

Right now we have a fundraising campaign underway at Kickstarter.com. Kickstarter is an online funding platform for artists to engage with their audiences and build support for their projects. Our Kickstarter campaign has been pretty successful so far, reaching our initial goal of $4,000 in just a few short weeks. But we still have 50 days to go and we need more than 4k to finish this film. When you log onto Kickstarter you will see that we are offering some really cool rewards and incentives for backers. For example a $10 donation gets you exclusive access to video updates and deleted scenes and a $55 donation secures you a "Special Thanks" credit in our film. We also offer chess-centric rewards like free memberships to WORLD CHESS LIVE and CHESS.COM but at the end of the day I hope you are most inspired to give because you love chess and are moved by the kids and their stories. We believe this film has the potential to breakdown false stereotypes about chess and present a new and fresh perspective to one of the world's oldest and most beloved games.

CHESS MOVIE (working title) from Rescued Media on Vimeo.

Jonah Lehrer on Chess and Expertise

Jonah Lehrer, who often writes on choice and decision making (from How We Decide to "Don't," mentioned here previously), has a great recent blog post on Carlsen and "Chess Intuition," in which he has some interesting things to say about what we mean by expertise:

Although we tend to think of experts as being weighted down by information, their intelligence dependent on a vast set of facts, experts are actually profoundly intuitive. When experts evaluate a situation, they don't systematically compare all the available options or consciously analyze the relevant information. Carlsen, for instance, doesn't compute the probabilities of winning if he moves his rook to the left rather than the right. Instead, experts naturally depend on the emotions generated by their experience. Their prediction errors - all those mistakes they made in the past - have been translated into useful knowledge, which allows them to tap into a set of accurate feelings they can't begin to explain. Neils Bohr said it best: an expert is "a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." From the perspective of the brain, Bohr was absolutely right.

And this is why we shouldn't be surprised that a chess prodigy raised on chess computer programs would be even more intuitive than traditional grandmasters. The software allows him to play more chess, which allows him to make more mistakes, which allows him to accumulate experience at a prodigious pace.

Who was it who said that you have to lose thousands of chess games before you become an expert? Hat tip: Chess Vibes

Chess-in-the-Schools President Profiled

Chess-in-the-Schools president Marley Kaplan is profiled in the Giving section of today's New York Times (see "Marley Kaplan Left the Banking World to Teach Chess to Schoolchildren" by Geraldine Fabrikant -- and be sure to check out the excellent "Chess for Change" photo gallery by Tom White). The article tells the story of how Kaplan left a lucrative banking career and turned the American Chess Foundation into Chess-in-the-Schools, "which now teaches 20,000 new children a year, with an annual budget of $3 million. Since 1986, it calculates, it has taught chess to 425,000 children on the theory that the game helps them develop basic analytical skills that lead to academic success." Hat tip: Jim West.

Chess and Self-Control

Chess Squared from Schools First on Vimeo.
I have been thinking about the effect of chess on self-control, especially as educators like myself have become more interested in self-control as a predictor of school success. In "Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control" (New York Times Magazine, September 25 2009), Paul Tough writes about the new interest that programs for young people have in self-regulation:

The ability of young children to control their emotional and cognitive impulses, it turns out, is a remarkably strong indicator of both short-term and long-term success, academic and otherwise. In some studies, self-regulation skills have been shown to predict academic achievement more reliably than I.Q. tests. The problem is that just as we’re coming to understand the importance of self-regulation skills, those skills appear to be in short supply among young American children. In one recent national survey, 46 percent of kindergarten teachers said that at least half the kids in their classes had problems following directions. In another study, Head Start teachers reported that more than a quarter of their students exhibited serious self-control-related negative behaviors, like kicking or threatening other students, at least once a week. Walter Gilliam, a professor at Yale’s child-study center, estimates that each year, across the country, more than 5,000 children are expelled from pre-K programs because teachers feel unable to control them.

There is a popular belief that executive-function skills are fixed early on, a function of genes and parenting, and that other than medication, there’s not much that teachers and professionals can do to affect children’s impulsive behavior. In fact, though, there is growing evidence that the opposite is true, that executive-function skills are relatively malleable — quite possibly more malleable than I.Q., which is notoriously hard to increase over a sustained period. In laboratory studies, research psychologists have found that with executive function, practice helps; when children or adults repeatedly perform basic exercises in cognitive self-regulation, they get better at it. But when researchers try to take those experiments out of the lab and into the classroom, their success rate is much lower.

Tough goes on to describe a program being developed in some pre-schools that immerses kids in serious make-believe play activities to keep their attention focused and motivate engagement. It's an interesting idea, but you have to wonder if just getting kids to play games like chess could be as effective and readily available as a curricular addition.

Part of the recent interest in self-control stems from the rediscovery of Walter Mischel's famous "Marshmallow Test" (which is both documented and re-enacted on YouTube), discussed by Jonah Lehrer in his excellent article "Don't: The Secret to Self-Control" (The New Yorker, May 18, 2009). In this classic experiment, Mischel and his associates presented a series of individual pre-schoolers with a single marshmallow on a plate. Researchers then said they were going to leave the room briefly in order to get an entire plateful of marshmallows, which the children could have if they could avoid eating the first marshmallow until the researchers returned. As you might predict, most kids ate the marshmallow as soon as they were left alone, and quite a few ate it before the researcher even left the room. But what Mischel found is that some were able to distract themselves from eating it and succeed in delaying gratification. Later, and almost by accident, he discovered that the kids who could delay gratification were much more successful in school, and still later (as Lehrer documents) more successful in life. After all, if you can delay gratification (or learn to delay it), then you can accomplish a lot of things. Many studies have followed Mischel's and demonstrated just that.

Oh, The Temptation from Steve V on Vimeo.

The critical question with all issues of chess and self-control is whether or not self-control can be taught. And if it can be taught, can chess teach it? After all, you have to ask whether chess teaches self-control or whether kids with good self-control are able to succeed at chess and therefore stay involved with a chess curriculum. I certainly believe that chess teaches self-control, but it would be nice to have proof. It would also be useful to have ideas on the specific type of chess activities or chess instruction that will encourage self-control most of all. After all, my own experience of teaching chess to young kids is that it often resembles barely controlled chaos. But if you are going to have a chess program to encourage self-control, then maybe you need to emphasize certain aspects of the game and have policies that require self-control in the classroom.

In my initial research, I see promising signs. At the very least, many seem to agree that chess can teach self-control even if they are not pointing to conclusive proof of the matter. The New Jersey Legislature passed a law in the 1990s that allowed chess to be taught as part of the second grade curriculum because, in part, "When youngsters play chess they must call upon higher-order thinking skills, analyze actions and consequences, and visualize future possibilities" (quoted in "The Role of Chess in Modern Education" by Marcel Milat) -- which are skills important to self-control. After all, if you can think ahead, you are likely to wait for the plateful of marshmallows rather than eating the one in front of you.

The Chess-Squared Program in Australia (see video above) is clearly having a positive impact on students, and there is some suggestion that this is because of the ways that chess impacts self-control and engagement. Math teacher Steve Carroll has written some excellent posts about this at his blog, where he points to the work of Fernando Moreno, whose book, Teaching Life Skills through Chess: a Guide for Educators and Counselors, suggests that self-regulation, concentration and foresight are among the skills that chess imparts:

It is widely claimed chess is a game that engenders and encourages positive cognitive and attitudinal traits, also known as the affective domain, in those who embrace it. The attitudinal traits it encourages are; impulse control, improved concentration, resilience, managing feelings and deferment of gratification.

The skills in the cognitive domain it develops, amongst others, are; self talk, problem solving, forward thinking, anticipating consequences, meta-cognition and reflectivity...

It has been suggested students aren’t encouraged to think ahead at school. When students play chess they are encouraged to set clearly defined goals for themselves and choose strategic methods to achieve the desired outcomes. They then evaluate and compare results with their objectives, and evaluate the outcomes in terms of the strategies they adopted.

Chess is a game of prediction, calculation and pattern recognition. Predicting consequences and pattern recognition are key elements of mathematics and chess. In chess games players have to visualize and predict consequences. This is an area schools seldom teach students how to improve in.

Other programs (such as Chess for Success or a program in Kansas City) make similar claims, and these all make intuitive sense. I'd just like some hard evidence.

I hope to explore this topic further and welcome input. I am interested because I have begun working on a program at Rutgers where I have developed courses in writing, math and chess for the young people, and I think self-control should be an important part of the curriculum. I have started research and will likely put together a bibliography in these pages. There appears to be a lot of good material coming out, especially from Alexey Root, whose books I have begun reading. Reader suggestions for further reading are most welcome.

Idaho's Scholastic Chess Initiative

"Idaho Turns to Chess as Education Strategy" by Dylan Loeb McClain (widely reprinted) reports that the "First Move" curriculum developed by America's Foundation for Chess will be adopted statewide for second and third graders.

Not only will this be good for education in Idaho, but it should significantly boost the average chess rating in the state by the end of the decade. According to the Idaho Chess Association website (one of the better state websites, by the way), a 1761-rated player won the 2008 Idaho Closed State Championship (more proof that "location, location, location" is the key to winning a state title).

Chess Amateurism

"Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose."
-- Marshall McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message"

I recently discovered an excellent essay by Federico Garcia that has gotten me thinking about the history of chess amateurism and its implications for today. In his paper “Steinitz and the Inception of Modern Chess” (2003/2005), Garcia argues that the break between romantic and modern chess should be understood as marking the difference between amateur and professional play. He begins with a very interesting question: why is it that the Romantics so rarely defended (accepting every offered sacrifice, for instance), most evidently in games like the Evergreen or the Immortal? To this Garcia responds:

To find an answer we must turn back to the social conditions that influenced chess at the time—in fact, the answer is closely related to what has been said about professionalism. The ethics of the amateurism, that ethics which finds so offensive any material, ‘mundane,’ interest, is also the ethics of ‘what matters is competing, not winning.’ A passive defence, or a passive attack for that matter, would be seen as cowardice. If you are attacked, anything other than a counterattack is an offense to chess and to your opponent. It is a matter of fair play not to escape your opponent’s bright combination with fastidious stubbornness (should the occasion arise, look for an even brighter combination!) In Romantic times, “you either won gloriously, or you succumbed to a counterattack and lost gloriously.” At stake, amateur decorum required, was honor—fairly independent from victory or defeat. Now, what is decidedly not independent from the victory or defeat is the accorded prize for the winner. The establishment of chess as a profession, one of whose consequences is an upheaval in priorities (for, no matter what, money, when needed, will always be a higher priority than honor), is probably the major factor at play for the appearance of defensive play and technique. Again, the fact that Steinitz was the first to assume his professionalism helps explain why it should be he the first to develop the defence. For even if Zukertort and the rest were professionals (in the sense that they earned a living through chess), they were—tied to the received scale of values—still ashamed of it, and they would not pursue the ignoble business of not fighting with knightly disinterest.

To look back at chess history through the lens of amateurism vs. professionalism is very compelling. Was it his amateurism that made Paul Morphy indulge in a sometimes unsound and tactical mode of play that causes some to devalue many of his games today? Was Mikhail Botvinnik's completely scientific approach to the game simply a natural expression of Soviet-era professionalism, and practically an extension of his work as an engineer? Was Frank Marshall's well-deserved reputation as a tactical swindler due to his occupying a liminal position, having absorbed the romantic ideals of the past but needing to make a living as a professional?

I am less interested in the answers to these historical questions than I am in thinking about the meaning of amateurism today, especially since I think we are entering a new era of chess amateurism, not just among players (since it seems very few U.S. players live as full time chess professionals) but most importantly among those who are promoting, writing about, and generally contributing to the game. This new form of chess amateurism, encouraged by the transformations of the internet, can only have a positive long-term effect on chess. After all, the word "amateur" (Latin root amat = "to love") is related to "amoré," and an amateur is one who participates for the love of it.

I am not sure I can say what effects it has had on the type of game played by the top players. In fact, I'm not even sure that's so important any more. This is the new age of the amateur, and the professionals are not necessarily setting the audience's agenda. For instance, very few try to keep up on "main line" theory anymore -- how could they? The amateur game is getting more interesting for amateurs (certainly more worth looking at and commenting on), and amateur participation in the game more important to its continued evolution.

Chess in the schools (though it certainly provides some professional opportunities for coaches) is one institutional mechanism that feeds the growing tide of amateurism by creating more educated chessplayers. Ann Hulbert develops this point in her essay "Chess Goes to School: How, and why, the game caught on among young Americans" (Slate, May 2, 2007), arguing that "chess has held onto a certain purity, along with its penury" and that's a good thing:

In an era when sports in the United States are a big business, as well as a fraught element of college admissions, chess offers kids in our overprogrammed youth culture a rare exposure to the real meaning and value of amateurism—the mastery of something for its own sake. Chess isn't going to earn anybody much of a living, but it can teach kids about learning....

Chess is not only entering grade school, it is now becoming important at the college level as well, as described by recent articles: "Rah! Rah! Block That Rook!" in The American (regarding the recruiting practices at UTD and UMBC) and Dylan Loeb McClain's "Good Opening Can Be a Scholarship" (focused on academic chess scholarships at Texas Tech). Even Judith [Susan] Polgar, always on the cutting edge, has an academic appointment. And while you can argue that chess scholarships, like athletic scholarships, are a form of "pay for play," I think that having chess in the schools has only reinforced its amateur status. But schools are only one institution.

Chess is increasingly being sustained by amateur involvement on the internet, where Web 2.0 and user paticipation has made it possible for amateurs to play extensively, produce knowledge (chess blogs have proliferated beyond measure, and amateurs even produce quality videos), join online discussion forums, and generally help to sustain chess culture. Some suggest that "the cult of the amateur," by producing lots of free content, is making it more difficult for the professionals to sustain themselves. But personally I think the rise of amateurism simply means that the professionals will have to raise the bar for what they do if they want to distinguish themselves from the rest.

In the short term, more voices online will mean more noise. But in the long term, more voices mean more varied and original ideas. As Sir William Haley argued in an essay on "Amateurism" (American Scholar 1976), in defense of amateur writers:

Mankind has benefited immeasurably from the cross-fertilization of ideas. It is from amateurs, and these include specialists straying out of their own domain, that cross-fertilization comes. Cross-fertilization is a desirable end.

As John Watson has argued, cross-fertilization is certainly a desirable end in chess theory. And while amateurs may not always unearth forgotten chess analysis or ideas, they will always enrich our cultural understanding of the game. You no longer have to be a professional chessplayer, after all, to write about chess, and amateur players have contributed a great deal
to cross-fertilizing and reframing our understanding chess in history and politics. Witness the work of Daniel Johnson, Paul Hoffman, and David Shenk, to name just a few amateur players who have nonetheless made very important contributions.

It's a mistake to think that the decline of professional chess in the U.S. suggests that the game itself is in decline. Nothing could be further from the truth. Perhaps the possibility of a lucrative professional U.S. chess circuit built from the top down basically "jumped the shark" in 2005 with the $500,000 HB Global Chess Challenge. There may be more top-down developments (such as the US Chess League's promise to pay top players) that make life a little easier for some professionals. But America's titled players make more from poker these days than they do from chess and that "Tournament for the Rest of Us," the US Amateur Team, will always be much bigger than all of them and more important to the longterm health of chess...and of professionals. It seems to me that to focus on professional players of the game in the U.S. is a mistake until we have built up the amateur base significantly. The places to focus our attention, then, are the amateur institutions: amateur tournaments, the schools, the web, and literature. If you focus on the amateur institutions, you will be very hopeful about the future....

School Corruption Hurts D.C. Chess Program

In "A Most Wicked Chess Game: The D.C. Schools" (also here), Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher describes how $70,000 raised for a chess program to help struggling kids at the Moten Elementary school in Southeast Washington was stolen by an embezzling business manager. This is a very troubling case of school corruption, which Fisher uses to indict the whole system. Related coverage here:

• Freed by Chess, Cornered by D.C. Priorities (2003)
• Moten Educational Center School Chess Team Travels to Nashville (2003)
• School Uses Chess to Help Students (2003)
• Student Money Vanishes, But Few Are Punished (2007)
• Ex-Worker Charged with Stealing Donations to Student Club (2007)
• Ex-School Official Charged with Stealing Chess Club Funds (2007)