![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
strategic displays of social confidence...
Feb. 6th, 2002 02:33 amChess is not a game of strategy. It may seem that way, but that is because you, pitifully small-panned human that you are, cannot hold all the possibilities of the board's evolution in your mind at once.
Much like Tic Tac Toe, given 2 opponents whom are not suffering from a severe case of head-in-ass, one side should always win. However, given the complexity of chess, 'a severe case of head-in-ass' translates as 'a capacity for computational accuracy less than Deep Blue'.
As I'm sure you can understand, this is not something to be embarrassed about. In fact, for a significant number of voting people's who have made it to and beyong voting age it seems to be a source of perverse pride.
Let's talk Autism for a moment. Ignore Mercury Rising, it's a fanciful view of the condition, but seize upon the following: Autistic people have an enhanced capacity for computation. Usually this is at the expense of 1) socialization ability 2)sanity. This is the trade off of the human mind: you cannot improve the ability for retention and sorting dramatically without diminshing the key ability of a human being; generalization. The standard person endeavors to generalize and simplify their surroundings in their minds in order to interact intelligently, but efficiently, with it. Correspondingly, an autistic, often, cannot let go of the large number of individual and specific variations in their environment, so they get caught up trying to deal with everything individually, and start to come unglued without certain mental anchors to keep them steady. As always, there is variation and autism can range from a habit of writing really shitty music all the time to being a gibbering mess who can compute pi to 50,000 digits with mental math.
I mention this because the tendency for a broader, general, strategic approach to thought in the human race as opposed to autistic behavior (which, when not at its severest, can produce some truly amazing things) is that the majority of the world consists of unknowns. There is a science of statistics which many people can manipulate conciously or subconciously, as well as weird symbolic methods of thought (such as conservative strategy or aggressive strategy) which quickly upon implementation provide a vastly higher rate of success than only working with certainties. An encounter with Quantum physics will further deepen a respect for the strategic mode of thought, since at the basic level, the universe appears to run off pure statistics (which isn't to say there's no finite order, I'm not going to argue that one way or the other here).
Much like Tic Tac Toe, given 2 opponents whom are not suffering from a severe case of head-in-ass, one side should always win. However, given the complexity of chess, 'a severe case of head-in-ass' translates as 'a capacity for computational accuracy less than Deep Blue'.
As I'm sure you can understand, this is not something to be embarrassed about. In fact, for a significant number of voting people's who have made it to and beyong voting age it seems to be a source of perverse pride.
Let's talk Autism for a moment. Ignore Mercury Rising, it's a fanciful view of the condition, but seize upon the following: Autistic people have an enhanced capacity for computation. Usually this is at the expense of 1) socialization ability 2)sanity. This is the trade off of the human mind: you cannot improve the ability for retention and sorting dramatically without diminshing the key ability of a human being; generalization. The standard person endeavors to generalize and simplify their surroundings in their minds in order to interact intelligently, but efficiently, with it. Correspondingly, an autistic, often, cannot let go of the large number of individual and specific variations in their environment, so they get caught up trying to deal with everything individually, and start to come unglued without certain mental anchors to keep them steady. As always, there is variation and autism can range from a habit of writing really shitty music all the time to being a gibbering mess who can compute pi to 50,000 digits with mental math.
I mention this because the tendency for a broader, general, strategic approach to thought in the human race as opposed to autistic behavior (which, when not at its severest, can produce some truly amazing things) is that the majority of the world consists of unknowns. There is a science of statistics which many people can manipulate conciously or subconciously, as well as weird symbolic methods of thought (such as conservative strategy or aggressive strategy) which quickly upon implementation provide a vastly higher rate of success than only working with certainties. An encounter with Quantum physics will further deepen a respect for the strategic mode of thought, since at the basic level, the universe appears to run off pure statistics (which isn't to say there's no finite order, I'm not going to argue that one way or the other here).
