:grimace:

Have you read Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit?

A relevant passage:

It is clear that what makes Fourth of July oration humbug is not fundamentally that the speaker regards his statements as false. Rather, just as Black’s account suggests, the orator intends these statements to convey a certain impression of himself. He is not trying to deceive anyone concerning American history. What he cares about is what people think of him. He wants them to think of him as a patriot, as someone who has deep thoughts and feelings about the origins and the mission of our country, who appreciates the importance of religion, who is sensitive to the greatness of our history, whose pride in that history is combined with humility before God, and so on.

[Emphasis added.]

Be careful with that stuff (I assume it's weed). I had a horrible trip awhile back that led to depersonalization. Took me awhile to come back from it (and a stint on antidepressants).

BTW I think this is an interesting OP, and the only reason I haven't commented is that I haven't found anything interesting to say about it, that hasn't already been said.

The hedgehog and the fox? — Srap Tasmaner

I've had the opportunity to look into it more and it seems very insightful, although I haven't read enough of by the Russian authors discussed, to have a very deep understanding. The notion of a fox who thinks he should be a hedgehog certainly resonates.

I take as an indicator of comprehension, the ability to simplify and explain. In fact, the way you teach children to better comprehend (yes, it's a teachable trait) is to have them read a passage from a book, to have them summarize it, to ask them to relate it to the real world, and there are other techniques. But simplification demands examples, comparisons, and relation to experience.

For example, "Jack and Jill went up a hill to catch a pail of water. "

A complicator would say two people went to get water. That's not simplified. It's abstracted to summarize. We no longer are dealing with actual people, but concepts of people and we have no setting, but it's occurring anywhere.

To simplify, it must be a story because stories are what happens in real life.

So, if the child is doing poorly with comprehension, ask him how Jack and Jill are related (brother/sister, husband/wide, neighbors?), why are they getting water from beyond a hill (don't they have a sink?, where are they? What year is this happening), why do they say "fetch"? (is this somewhere far away?).

I'd argue a simplifier fills in these blanks. The person who can't provide these answers obviously did not experience this event and fully understand it. The complicator keeps it abstract without the ability to fully explain it, either because he's just poor at anticipating what his audience doesn't understand, or more commonly, he doesn't fully understand what he's talking about

I take as an indicator of comprehension, the ability to simplify and explain. — Hanover

Thanks for the substantive response.

I'm not surprised that you, as an attorney, see things that way. However an understanding of Broca's aphasia shows thing are not that simple. Another thing to consider is Srap's comment:

Chess provides a clear example, as usual: there's a saying among masters that the move you want to play is the right move, even if it seems impossible. This is intuition... — Srap Tasmaner

A chess master's intuition would seem by definition to be something that the CM can't put into words, and yet it is demonstrable that the CM's intuition must in some regard be comprehension, even if it not a comprehension that the CM can express linguistically.

In my case, I do much of my electronic design by mentally modelling designs in the form of 'pictures' in my head. It is often the case that I can see why designs will or won't work, but it would take a lot of effort to translate the dynamic model I am picturing in my mind into language. Ability to comprehend is separate issue from being able to express what is comprehended verbally. Fortunately electronic designs can be communicated in the form of schematic diagrams, that others with the right knowledge base can develop their own comprehension of.

To simplify, it must be a story because stories are what happens in real life. — Hanover

But that's simplistic. Vastly more happens in real life than has ever been put into a story. Can you really disagree?

The complicator keeps it abstract without the ability to fully explain it, either because he's just poor at anticipating what his audience doesn't understand, or more commonly, he doesn't fully understand what he's talking about

I think it is pretty natural for most people to interpret the thinking of others, in terms of the experience of thinking that they themselves have. However, most people don't have a very fine grained understanding of what their particular constellation of cognitive strengths and weaknesses are, and how that constellation of cognitive strengths and weaknesses shapes the way they go through life. So most people are inclined to jump to simplistic conclusions about the thinking of people whose constellation differs significantly from their own. It may be the case for you, that if you are unable to explain something you don't understand it. It might even be the case that such is true for most of the people you encounter, but it certainly isn't universally true.

Being autistic, it is definitely the case that I can be poor at anticipating what other people will and won't understand, at least until I've gotten to know the person somewhat.

I'd urge you to watch the movie Temple Grandin, as a means of developing a more informed perspective.

A chess master's intuition would seem by definition to be something that the CM can't put into words — wonderer1

There are lots of things where I think that's true, where it's even obviously true, but actually I don't think chess is one of them. Chess has no hidden information. (Why von Neumann said it's not a game but a form of calculation.)

I can write paragraphs about this but I doubt anyone wants to read that.

I can write paragraphs about this but I doubt anyone wants to read that. — Srap Tasmaner

I'd be very interested. Although I've never put much effort into becoming good at chess, and I'm not sure I would understand it very comprehensively.

In this case, words means variations. And yes, with the limited time available, a player might not be able to produce all the variations that justify a move. But if a move has a relatively definitive result, it has to be possible to show that with variations. (The exceptions might be something like "compensation" or something else that's unavoidably a little squishy.)

Back in the early days of AI, Herbert Simon did a lot of work on chess and concluded that intuition is in some sense a myth, that it is just experience, and chess masters have vastly more experience than amateurs, have a huge stock of positions and patterns committed to memory and can draw on those to evaluate positions, find variations and so on.

A claim about a chess position (mostly) has to cash out as specific variations with a well-understood result. It often can't in the heat of the moment, but eventually it must.

Here's a classic example that's slightly different. Story is that two strong players at an international tournament (this would have been maybe the 20s, I guess) were going over the ending of a game and unable to figure out who was better. Jose Raul Capablanca* walked up, watched for a moment, then removed most of the pieces from the board and arranged the remaining kings and a handful of pawns in a certain way. Both players saw immediately the meaning of the position (a draw, let's say, I don't remember) and both also saw clearly that Black (also don't remember) could force this position. They had been struggling through analysing the position move by move, but Capablanca saw the essence of it.

* When Capablanca played chess, someone said, it was like he was speaking his native language. A British champion said (paraphrased): I've won the British championship three times, have had the honor of playing many great players, including five world champions, but when I sat down across from Capablanca, even my first move seemed a little suspect.

Back in the early days of AI, Herbert Simon did a lot of work on chess and concluded that intuition is in some sense a myth, that it is just experience, and chess masters have vastly more experience than amateurs, have a huge stock of positions and patterns committed to memory and can draw on those to evaluate positions, find variations and so on. — Srap Tasmaner

Thank you very much for taking the time.

I think the question to ask is, what is "just experience"?

This is the less early days of AI. Today we have ChatGPT, with information processing which in part is based on studying how neurons process information. ChatGPT was trained via an enormous amount of experience.

I'd agree with you somewhat about intuition being a myth, in that what some people conceive of as intuition isn't very realistic, but I think "intuition" is a quite useful word, to label something which is important to understand about human cognition, and which people (to vaying degrees) recognize as an aspect of how their mind works. I'd say intuition just is outputs resulting from deep learning in neural networks, which were trained to do the information processing that they do, with experience as input.

You mention "positions and patterns committed to memory". Pattern recognition is something neural networks can be trained to be extremely good at. So good that if you have driven a long commute over and over, you eventually develop the ability to drive the route on 'autopilot' with your conscious mind free to consider something completely unrelated to the experience of driving.

Do you think it might be worth looking deeper than "just experience"?

Do you think it might be worth looking deeper than "just experience"? — wonderer1

I think everything you posted is right, and comports with what I understand of the two systems model; thus we can continue to use the word intuition just to mean something like very fast, largely unconscious, habitual thinking, problem solving, recognition, and so on.

Not sure what you had in mind with the question, but I can give a little more background that might clarify things. I think it's actually Simon and company who discover the phenomenon of chunking -- could be he got the idea elsewhere, I don't remember. Basically, a master looks at a position and breaks it up into little clusters of pieces, in some cases standard patterns with known properties (like a fianchettoed bishop, or a knight blockading an isolated pawn) and sometimes one-off peculiarities of the position. Chunking gives another layer of structure to the position that amateurs lack; for them it's just pieces and squares, and they'll tend to see too many possibilities in a position. Masters only see a few, the ones that make sense.

It's obvious how chunking and the stock of known patterns go together, and Simon got an interesting experimental result out of it. Shown a position from a real game, for only a few seconds, masters could recreate it with high fidelity while amateurs made lots of mistakes; shown an irrational, illegal, arbitrary arrangement of pieces on the board, masters performed no better than amateurs at recreating it. Chunking and pattern knowledge are efficient.

(I can attest to this from personal experience. I remember going over a game I had just played and toward the end there had been a time scramble so I didn't have a score to go by and had to recreate the moves from memory. I remember getting stuck until my friend remembered that at some point one of the other guy's pieces ended up on a certain square -- I couldn't remember that move because it didn't make any sense!)

All of that research would have been early days of cognitive science. I think the basic gloss on "experience" was probably something like the "10,000 hours" rule of thumb, which might have come out around then. ("The Magic Number 7" had not been published so long ago at that time.) It just meant more games played, analyzed, studied. More training data.

All of that leaves untouched questions about basic aptitude, since most people have a ceiling for how good they can get at something no matter how long they work at it. And it doesn't address issues of creativity.

Since I mentioned Capablanca in my last post -- he was famous for his flawless (or so it seemed at the time -- frickin' Stockfish might disagree) endgame technique, and the endgame lends itself to a sort of elegance and clarity that seemed to suit Capablanca temperamentally. But I believe he acquired that famous technical mastery by carefully analyzing thousands and thousands of endgame positions. The man had a gift, no question, but he also put in the time. The thing is, to chessplayers this never took away from Capablanca's reputation; it was considered an extraordinary thing that he did this, that he was so devoted to the art of endgame play, and that he was capable of finding the truth of so many positions and discovering the best way to play them

I think everything you posted is right, and comports with what I understand of the two systems model; thus we can continue to use the word intuition just to mean something like very fast, largely unconscious, habitual thinking, problem solving, recognition, and so on. — Srap Tasmaner

I had a rough two system model in which I used "intuition" vs "logical/linguistic" instead of "fast thinking" vs "slow" thinking. So talking in terms of "intuition" comes a bit more naturally for me and I suspect might be more communicative to many than is "fast thinking". For example, here's something I wrote four years before TF&S was published.

Now my impression, as someone who's studied a bit about human mind/brain issues, is that it's highly reasonable to think that there are variations in brain organization that bias people towards one of these perspectives or the other. (Obviously there are social factors as well that play a huge role in which perspective one takes, and there are likely factors of brain organization that influence the degree to which a person adopts the view of those around them, or strikes out on their own in searching for the truth. It's all very complicated with regard to the nature/nurture question.)

Anyway, one way of looking at how people's minds work differently is, looking at whether they have a bias towards intuitive (pattern recognizing) cognitive processes, or logical thought. Now both aspects of human mental processing can be of great value, and both aspects can produce misleading results. And I'm inclined to think an ideal is to use both intuition and logic in a synergistic way, but anyway, that's somewhat tangential.

Sounds familiar I expect. I came at my view based on considering the properties of neural nets, and recognizing how suitable they were to doing the sort of information processing that we experience as intuition. As far as I know, Kahneman came to the view he presents in TF&S, on the basis of the sort of experimental results he lays out in the book. So finding Kahneman's view so consistent with mine was awesome.

Anyway, what I meant by looking deeper was looking into how what we experience as intuition can be understood as naturally arising from networks of neurons. I like to think other people can recognize the sort of things I've been recognizing for a long time, about the relevance of things at the level of neural nets where I see intentionality arising. Though I have to admit I do have a significant advantage due to my electrical engineering background and visuo-spatial abilities. There is an easy for you to say element to it. And part of me recognizes that few are going to have the kind of background knowledge and visuo-spatial aptitude to 'see' it as I do, and part of me doesn't want to admit that.

I'm sorry I haven't responded to more of your last two posts. You've said a lot that reinforces my view and warrants a response, but I need to call it a night. Once again thank you, and I hope to catch up in responding to you.

Being autistic, it is definitely the case that I can be poor at anticipating what other people will and won't understand, at least until I've gotten to know the person somewhat. — wonderer1

All you say may be true, that you fully comprehend without having an easy way of showing that to others by reducing your thoughts to conveyable language, but would not that still make you a complicator under your use of the term?

I think you did provide important counters by pointing out the way those who are neuro-atypical process and communicate, but I imagined a complicator or simplifier to be someone who offers information to others for clarification purposes, but if you're imagining those terms to describe a person in terms of what goes on internally for their self-clarification, then that would be a difference in how I considered the terms you presented.

To the extent that one can internally be a simplifier and be unable to show it due to an atypical neurological process, that would draw a distinction in the way we might have been defining your vaguely defined terms. That is, I instinctively thought of a simplifier as that professor who could simplify concepts for me, not as someone who might have the thoughts clear in her head but unable to articulate it to me. But yes, I'll concede there are those who do understand but cannot articulate it well, but I'd call those complicators, not because they're confused, but because they leave me confused.

Maybe that makes me a complicator to you under my definition of the term.

All you say may be true, that you fully comprehend without having an easy way of showing that to others by reducing your thoughts to conveyable language, but would not that still make you a complicator under your use of the term? — Hanover

Oh absolutely. I can be an annoying as fuck complicator of things.

I'm not surprised, that my OP is easily misinterpreted. I wrote the OP wanting to see what would arise in people's thinking without painting too clear a picture. So I'm not too surprised that you were misinterpreting me, but still the following helps me recognize what I might clarify to convey the ideas I am interested in discussing.

I imagined a complicator or simplifier to be someone who offers information to others for clarification purposes, but if you're imagining those terms to describe a person in terms of what goes on internally for their self-clarification, then that would be a difference in how I considered the terms you presented. — Hanover

I think of simplisticator and complicator as different approaches to communicating ideas. Some people lean more towards one approach or the other. I see both simplisticators and complicators as seeking a result of increasing understanding of something in the other party to a communication, but using different strategies to reach that goal.

My (jaundiced) view of simplisticators is that they tend to present simplistic, but relatively easy to understand accounts of things that don't tend to challenge people's intuitions too much.

On the other hand my (clearly superior) complicator style is to present things to challenge people's intuitions, and get them thinking outside the box. For example, I might simply present some facts that I think someone else's simplistic view of things can't account for and leave it to the other person to develop a more complex understanding that can account for the fact. (I.e. I provide no story.)

I can understand why this sort of style might not seem too practical. It would be the wrong style to use in a courtroom. However, I find that in practice it does get results, in the right environment and given time. An aspect of how it works in practice on a forum like this, is that some people do pick up what I'm laying down relatively easily. (Srap and Janus are two examples.)

Furthermore, in my experience, people who get things I say, often expand on something I say in a word to the wise sort of way. An example of this is this post by Jabberwock in response to a one sentence post of mine:

And in that model nothing is synchronized enough to be called 'the present'. If you see a bird flying in the sky near the sun, the light that bounced off the bird hit it a fraction of a second ago, but the rays coming for the Sun left it eight minutes ago. That is, what you perceive as contemporary is not – the Sun might have suddenly ceased to exist four minutes ago, long before that bird even got near you. Your perception 'the bird flies when the sun shines' would be false in that case.

The same goes for all your senses, of course. If you step on something sharp, you feel it about 0.3 s after the fact. If you think that you have heard something at the exact same moment - you did not, as your auditory impulses are also delayed, but less than touch. And of course both stimuli occurred even earlier, before they were processed by your brain. What you perceive as 'the present' is a jumble of of various occurences that have already happened at different times. 'Reality itself' it is not. — Jabberwock

Jabberwock fleshed things out nicely. He has had some practice translating from wonderer to neurotypical. I get by with a little help from my friends. :smile:

I have read the thread with interest and it instantly reminded me of the famous Einstein's quote:

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

I thought it would fit perfectly here, but then I looked it up and... apparently he never said it nor wrote it. What he did write was this:

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience. — Albert Einstein

... but then simplisticators got him.

Which is almost identical to the original Ockham's, entities should not be multiplied without necessity. (And the simplified version: all else being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the best -- or something like that.)

There are interesting things to say about Ockham's as a rule of thumb, or as a principle.

You looking up the Einstein and me quoting multiple versions of Ockham (almost included the Latin but I'd have to look it up), classic complicator moves.

Which is almost identical to the original Ockham's, entities should not be multiplied without necessity. (And the simplified version: all else being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the best -- or something like that.) — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, but here the emphasis is that we should be wary of oversimplification.

I haven't read enough of by the Russian authors discussed, to have a very deep understanding — wonderer1

Btw, me neither, I think, but it's been years since I looked at that essay. It's just part of the culture now. For instance, it's why 538's mascot is a fox ("Fivey Fox").

Right, right. Some of us tend to quote Ockham's with a little emphasis on the necessity. That was Quine's read, I'd say: anything your theory needs to quantify over you're committed to, whether you like it or not.

By the way, it's your model so I don't know what to do with this, but it might be worth bearing in mind that something that is invariably unarticulated might not be inarticulable, but simply not hooked up to the speech-producing system. There are phenomena like blindsight, where people have clearly acquired information about the world, but they don't know they have and cannot articulate it. And other studies that exploit left-right differences where people cannot report what they quite definitely simply because it does not reach their speech center. (Might have been severed corpus colossum patients, don't remember.)

No idea whether there's any room for such an idea in your thinking, but it is possible that the knowledge we have but can't quite put into words is not a different kind of knowledge but only knowledge that is not given access to speech.

Missing the forest for the trees is a real thing, but a forest without trees is a castle in the air, if you don't mind mixed metaphors. — Srap Tasmaner

Trying to catch up on responding...

I like it, but here in Indiana we call forests without trees corn fields. :razz:

Here's a more controversial example because it speaks to methodology. Timothy Williamson tells a story about explaining the Gettier problem to an economist colleague, who was really puzzled by all the fuss: "So there's a counterexample, so what? Models always have counterexamples." — Srap Tasmaner

I'd be interested in reading more about this controversy. I have the same reaction as Williamson's colleague. It is a bit baffling to me that people could go through life and still be surprised(?) by Gettier problems.

When Capablanca played chess, someone said, it was like he was speaking his native language. — Srap Tasmaner

Sounds really interesting. I'd love to read the account a time travelling Oliver Sacks might give. Any reading recommendations?

By the way, it's your model so I don't know what to do with this, but it might be worth bearing in mind that something that is invariably unarticulated might not be inarticulable, but simply not hooked up to the speech-producing system. — Srap Tasmaner

This discussion has gotten me thinking back over a set of related experiences I've had.

Around 15 years ago I had designed some logic, recognizing its efficiency compared to what my employer had done in the past. Sometime later my boss was asking about the functionality of that bit of logic, and checking to make sure I had done it in the approved historical way. I told him I hadn't done it the historical way, and he asked me to explain how I had done it. I didn't have a good way to explain it to him except by drawing a schematic. I'm guessing he realized fairly quickly that I wasn't going to be able to convey an understanding of the design as quickly as he could develop his own understanding from looking at the schematic. So he had me bring him the schematic. I gave a brief explanation of what various submodules do, and he looked at it for a minute or so, and said we should have gotten a patent on that.

I don't really know what it was he saw in the schematic but I suspect it is things that I wouldn't recognize until much later. My boss was one of those guys who went to university studying physics when he was 15 years old, and was the star of the math team even though he wasn't a mathematics student.

I think now, that he likely recognized a mathematical elegance to the design which, at least in some regards, I did not recognize at that time. There is a fairly simple mathematical equation which conveys the gist of the logical process occurring in the design, and I think that I had an intuitive recognition of the mathematical elegance 'driving' me to design the logic as I did. However, I didn't think in those terms when doing the design.

As best I can recall, when designing the logic I focused on a design which would efficiently use 'space' in an FPGA as well as DSP clock cycles, while doing the job the logic was intended to achieve with much greater accuracy than we had any practical use for. As I said, I think in retrospect, that intuitive subconscious recognition of the mathematical elegance played a role in what I designed. However, I don't think I can say that I consciously recognized the relevant mathematical equation. I would say it was more like I trusted the part of my mind that did recognize the elegance, even though that part of my mind wasn't able to 'speak into consciousness' except in a vague way motivating me to design what I did.

Anyway, I really didn't start this thread to talk about me. I greatly appreciate the way you've gotten me to think about things in ways I haven't before.

Yeah I think that's not dissimilar to the chess examples I was giving. What remains unexpressed in the moment is still expressible, in this case as clearly as possible in mathematics. It may very well be that there are activities complex enough that no human is ever able to give an analytical account of their actions while so engaged -- just too many variables, too many feedback loops, and so on. And then you have something that's expressible in principle but never in practice. I think sports can be like this, flow state activities like surfing and rock climbing -- these pursuits effectively require lots of very quick calculations and estimates and updates and very fast adjustments of how to weight different factors, things humans can clearly do but which outstrip the speed at which we could consciously analyze or explain them.

But there's another category where people believe there is a kind of judgment that cannot be reduced to analysis even in principle. Maybe judgments about art, for example. I think the idea is that there isn't even conceivably a predefined set of variables to work with, no real way to make the sort of calculations you conceivably could, say, about the wave you're surfing or the pitch you're trying to hit.

Even if you're an excellent critic and can articulate some of what appeals to you (or doesn't) about a work of art, no one even considers the possibility that we're establishing truth here -- as you could, say, determine with certainty whether there was any path by which a fielder could have reached a batted ball. Not only is criticism not plausibly objective, it is not plausibly exhaustive. There is always something in a work of art still to be articulated, even if you go on and on.

An interesting case is unsolved problems in mathematics. Lots of mathematicians will have a strong intuition about the truth or falsehood of something like the continuum hypothesis, but that intuition itself may be a little strange. We're talking about math after all, so the truth of a statement is directly tied to its provability, but provability may not be on the table given the math currently available and something that we will still recognize as math will have to be invented to support proving or disproving what's hypothesized. That's just how math evolves, but then what could be the basis for a mathematician's intuition today? Not just the math he knows, because that's not enough, so the math that could be? Intuitions about what other kinds of math are possible? Long before Andrew Wiles proved it, most mathematicians believed Fermat's last theorem to be true, but it took some major and somewhat unexpected (as I understand it) results from other mathematicians, bringing together disparate fields of mathematics. (Double-checking at Wikipedia, they mention right off that most mathematicians believed it was not yet provable, kinda the position we're in now with the Collatz conjecture, which seems almost obviously true but it does not appear a proof is coming anytime soon.) So what was the basis for that common intuition that indeed the theorem was true?

It may very well be that there are activities complex enough that no human is ever able to give an analytical account of their actions while so engaged -- just too many variables, too many feedback loops, and so on. — Srap Tasmaner

Indeed. I'm inclined to think it is necessarily the case, that human minds can't fully grasp the physical activity occuring in human brains. Yes we can understand aspects of what occurs, in metaphorical terms of the sort I used in thinking about and discussing aspects of my logic design process, and communicating about it to my boss.

But there's another category where people believe there is a kind of judgment that cannot be reduced to analysis even in principle. — Srap Tasmaner

Very interesting food for thought, and let me say now that I found the entirety of your post very interesting to think about, despite leaving much of it unresponded to.

Regarding criticism, it seems to me a similar sort of situation to that of knowing knowing the phenomenal experience of another person. Supposing we are talking about criticism of literature. There are bound to be many idiosyncrasies to how the literature interacted with the brain of the critic. Of course, if the critic is any good she will have a lot to say that people will find insightful as well, but a degree of idiosyncracy is to be expected as well, from my perspective.

Finally, a question I had, that came from looking into Capablanca a bit... Wikipedia says, '...Bobby Fischer described him as possessing a "real light touch".'

I'd like to hear your perspective, as speculative as it may be, on what Bobby Fischer might have meant by that.

Finally, a question I had, that came from looking into Capablanca a bit... Wikipedia says, '...Bobby Fischer described him as possessing a "real light touch".'

I'd like to hear your perspective, as speculative as it may be, on what Bobby Fischer might have meant by that. — wonderer1

Yeah I get that. I think he was a great influence on Fischer, although I'd say Fischer's real progenitor is Alexander Alekhine. Lasker is important to him too, but I don't know Lasker's style as well. Fischer used a famous quote from Lasker as the epigraph to My 60 Memorable Games:

On the chessboard, lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in the checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite.

I heard some writer on the radio once claiming that the great chess champions were all sadists, and Fischer is kinda the poster child for that. He didn't just beat his opponents, he humiliated them. I think somewhere he talks about this sense of the struggle, which he learned from Lasker but turned up to 11, the point of chess being to destroy your opponent's psyche. Fischer punished you for being wrong. He was Caissa's avenging angel.

Capablanca didn't so much punish you, as correct you, point out to you your mistake. The level of chess was admittedly a bit lower back then, so maybe it's true that when Capablanca revealed your mistake to you, the answer seemed quite simple because it was.

But I think it's more about Capablanca's clarity of vision about the game. He didn't go in for speculative play -- and neither did Fischer or Alekhine really. In fact, the only player who had Fischer's number was Mikhail Tal. Fischer, someone said, maybe it was Tal in his book, didn't like irrational positions, and Tal specialized in irrational positions. I think he's the only player who had a plus score against Fischer in international competition.

But now Capablanca, who like Fischer strove for clarity and directness, eschewing speculative play was also rarely taken in by it. Chess as he played it was clear and simple. He was oddly famous for little combinations that would simplify and clarify the position leaving him with a winning advantage, which you knew he could convert, given his level of technique. But he didn't push. His play was not particularly aggressive, as Fischer and Alekhine were -- and just about all modern players are in this mold. Fischer liked to play "sharp", force the game to a decisive point. Put up or shut up. But not Capablanca. His play was elegant, to the point in a way that seemed effortless.

So there's a particular sort of Augustan beauty about Capablanca's play. It's hard not to be a little awed by him, even if Tal or David Bronstein -- another great romantic swashbuckling player -- are more exciting, more appealing as characters. But Alekhine in particular ushered in a more uncompromising approach that Fischer picked up and almost everyone since plays more like that.

I probably haven't quite answered your question, about the "light touch." Maybe I have. I find it fascinating that chess despite being fundamentally a sport, and in so many ways unlike any number of media we would consider art, is very much like art in providing tremendous scope for having a personal style, a full expression of the personality, and the opportunity to create something beautiful, for there is certainly beauty in chess.

One of my favorite moments in writing about chess comes in David Bronstein's Zurich 53, his book about the great tournament to select a challenger to face then world champion Mikhail Botvinnik. There's one game, maybe Averbakh-Kotov but I don't remember for certain, where a truly extraordinary queen sacrifice is played. Bronstein brings play up to that point, gives a diagram of the position, and then begins "Creativity in chess ..." or something, anyway, he launches into a two-page essay about creativity and beauty before showing you the next move, indeed one of the most beautiful moves ever played.

I probably haven't quite answered your question, about the "light touch." Maybe I have. — Srap Tasmaner

I think you've conveyed a lot of what I was interested in. My question arose from wondering whether this game of human chess on an internet forum exemplifies a light touch. I'm not sure how to count the number of moves to mate, and I suspect you will agree it was a much longer game than it should have been, and I don't expect you to read any further than you find it interesting.

Hmmm. Chess is closer to mathematics, and the beauty in it is similar. One of Capablanca's little combinations is like a neat proof -- here is both the evidence that you can't play that move and an explanation for why you can't, and you should now understand where you went wrong. There's not much room for argument with a proof -- not as regards the result, though there are aesthetic considerations and other things.

I'm not sure the same sort of thing is really available to philosophy, or to other sorts of debate, because the outcome is never so clear. I'm trying to think who might be the philosophical equivalent of Capablanca and no one comes to mind really.

And we're still on topic, because the problem is achieving that clarity and simplicity that's so characteristic of Capablanca. Hard to do that with philosophy. I think you might find something similar in wisdom traditions and in religion. Confucius has a clarity and a directness that is reminiscent of great chess players, and when he reminds his students of something fundamental they generally accept that he has said everything that needed to be said. Other religious teachers can achieve something similar. But in our tradition? I don't know. People who express themselves with the certainty of a Capablanca in this context tend to be a little scary. We have reasons for our nuances and complications.