Chess Players and Objectivity...

I disagree that lessons cannot be learned from the game of chess which may be transferred and applied in life.  The fact that grandmasters or amateurs make good or bad choices isn't evidence against this.  It simply indicates that not everyone applies principles they learn in chess and apply them to life.  One of the most obvious life skills one can learn is analytical thinking which has all sorts of applications in life.  Another is strategic/tactical thinking.  As to the main question of this post, I do not think objectivity can be developed in human beings.  We are all subjective thinkers and actors...it is impossible for anyone to think outside themselves and remain unaffected by their upbringing, training, education, or for that matter even their choice of food in their last meal.  Objectivity is a myth.

Maybe as an individual being, a certain person can't see a given thing completely objectively, but he/she can be a part of a social production mechanism that produces objective snippets of knowledge about things, which also affect our inobjective views of those and and other things too.

http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/0415436699/mockerybird/ref=nosim

By the way, about the OP, I do think chess players, if they want to improve, need to be objective about their chess, at least to a certain degree. But that unfortunately doesn't mean they can be as objective about other stuff, and not even chess in general.

Fischer would be a good example. Even his chess related ideas were far from objectivity, his remarks about "obviously cooked" games of Soviet players and the pure chess strength of Morphy for example.

@philidor_position - did you major in psychology... :)

Your point is insightful...

No, I just like philosophy.

I've played chess against myself, but I've never finished the game.

I don't know if that activity makes people think more objectively, I'm still trying to understand how playing chess changes the way our mind works.

That is not what I think, and I don't think that has anything to do with the OP in being objective. No I don't think any human can be 100% objective, just as for example a saint probably is not 100% good, just very high up there.

But to me it's quite obvious some people are more objective than others!

I always cheat when I play against myself.

@ivandh - probably because you are not accountable to anyone, when playing with yourself... :D

Love thy neighbor...

my bloody German neighbour has called the police in on me 6 times in the last two months - he a bloody difficult man to 'love'

I agree, and that is how I do it.  Evaluate it, calculate it, guess the move, then check.  Play over annotations.  What's great is you get every phase.  The reason I haven't done this with a boat load of games is like you said, takes a whole lot of time.  And I haven't figured out a way to cover up the 1 next move efficiently, I'm usually fumbling with the thing covering the next move.

I want to go through Fischer's 60, and I recently traded two of my books for 100 games of Korchnoi ("My Best Games" vol. 1 and 2) that'd I'd like to go through.

would you say the same thing, if your neighbor were a voluptuous, buxom German lady... 

Wild will and clam mind...