Chess Experts Getting It Wrong

Binary: I tend to agree with Five and ... Einstein.

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
--Albert Einstein

Actually that may not be true of physics, pace Einstein, but chess in comparison is not nearly so complicated.

Chess experts who resort to such a dodge are either lazy, arrogant, incompetent or dishonest.

That's my bias. I don't expect students to be ready to receive wisdom, but I do expect teachers to be ready to give it. In my life that's not what I have seen as standard operating procedure.

I myself have found those who consider themselves to be experts always seem to be unemployed

Explaining it so that people feel like they understand it is one thing, and may be a good metric for how well the person doing the talking understands what they're talking about.

Teaching something so that the other person learns is quite another thing.

Binary: Yes, it's so sad when the unwashed fail to cop on to what their betters offer.

It's all their fault.

ipcress12, even truer in physics, you can lose the students if they do not understand the fundamentals, however each step (as in chess) can be demonstrated and explained once they grasp these. However if you go too deep, as in theoretical physics or postional analisys, before they grasp, now very advanced fundamentals, you will lose them very quickly even if a comparativly simple explanation is offered.

RKiDZ, lol, very true of self-proclaimed experts, not so much true experts in their chosen field.

What I mean is, I might explain the general ideas of something so that anyone can get a feel for it. I've done this before and I enjoy it a lot actually.

But I'm not really teaching them so that they can do it themselves.

I saw some Michio Kaku video on youtube where he's explaining some kind of foam of the universe with lots of dimensions and it's all making me feel like it's totally understandable... but how much do I really know about quantum physics? Zero. lol :)

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Relating this back to the FoS and Huey exchange, they weren't really disagreeing, and I can agree with them both, but I like the point Huey brings up.

The qualifier, pace, as in my usage, "pace Einstein," means:

Used to politely acknowledge someone with whom the speaker or writer disagrees.

It strikes me as possible that a teacher could lose students legitimately when giving an explanation of physics.

Though perhaps not. Einstein said so.

But I really don't believe that there is much about chess a decent teacher couldn't explain, at least in a general way, to someone who had played more than ten games of chess.

The professor who used class time to solve Fermat's last theorem had to first purposefully make his lectures so dense that all the students dropped out. It worked, so he had more free time and could work on it under the radar (so someone wouldn't catch on to his ideas and try to publish the solution first).

Binary: Like I said...

Chess experts who resort to such a dodge are either lazy, arrogant, incompetent or dishonest.

Most coaches are probably very good at chess, and pretty bad at teaching.

I think Einstein's comment was more about a 20 minute conversation with a layman.

A good teacher will require their student to work and think for themselves... actually didn't you say as much in a fairly recent comment in a different topic? Your best teachers left you alone.

The learning process happens in the student's head. Good explanations are encouraging and open the door, but after these preliminary sorts of things, it's largely up to the student IMO.

There are 10 kinds of experts in the world.  Ones who understand binary and ones who don't.

So chess experts are sometimes wrong. How can we apply this knowledge to our advantage? One thing that springs to mind is keeping an open mind and being willing to look at things from new perspectives.

I'm often surprised by how dogmatic chess players can be. It's strange to see openings or styles of play ridiculed as "refuted" or "unplayable." Tarrasch hated the hypermodern style. I just read in Marshalls "My 50 Years of Chess," when someone played basically a modern main line KID, that "such an opening is weak, passive and almost begs for an attack." Etc.

You don't see much of this in the Go community. People still have a lot of respect for the ancients, and sometimes still play old openings. No one says, "Oh, that? Komoku is refuted, you know?" Maybe the Asian way of thinking is more flexible, less dogmatic.

When I think of chess openings, styles of play, or eras, I remember that these things are artificial mental constructs, and a lot of what we think of as "progress" in chess is really just changing fashion.

Michio Kaku is the best. 

Re: the discussion above about only understanding what you can verbalize.

I think this is true when we're talking about concretes, but what about abstractions and intuitions? People clearly understand concepts like honor, beauty, or justice, but no one can really verbalize them. (I was a philosophy major and boy did we try, but ultimately, ..yeah, not really.)

And we intuitively understand and are able to do lots of things that we can't verbalize the reasons for. One example is a native speaker's use of language. Few people can explain to a non-native speaker the rules of grammar, or why we say this instead of that.

There are a lot of stories of great players/athletes/writers/artists/etc. being poor teachers. In chess, one could easily imagine a master intuitively grasping the right move or plan in a position, but being unable to explain why. Of course, such an intuitive player probably shouldn't be a teacher. 

It is this dogmatism in the chess world I am addressing and krudave's examples are exactly on point for this discussion.

Go is an interesting counter-example. I can't speak to the nature of the Go community but I do know Go is a much more fluid game whose positions can't be easily reduced to a single numeric value as chess can.

One of the standard books of Go instruction is called Go Proverbs, which are lightweight, sometimes poetically worded, guidelines for choosing a move that are not nearly so cut-and-dried as the principles of chess.

I can see how Go players might not be so dogmatic as chess players.

WK: I'm not sure of the distinction you are making.

It is true that an explanation never confers full knowledge of what is being explained.

The map is not the territory.

But a map and an explanation can be darned useful. If an expert can't supply those in some fashion, I do wonder about that expert's understanding.

The ability to do and the ability to explain are different. 

Well that's certainly true! I remember a job interview where I was asked to explain what I was doing on a past project and my mind went blank.

I didn't get that job...

Lasker died in his early 70s ... 

Well, it's said Maroczy played a game against Korchnoi.