not everyone can reach 2000

Based on personal learning experience and observation, sure. It's at least enormously more reasonable than "either it's magic or it's all work." 

Although it's true I may have a bad habit of stating reasonable explanations as if they're absolutely true.

Mostly I want someone to think about what I said and find something wrong with it I didn't think of and point it out to me.

Well, it's just very easy to take a narrow line of logic that works just fine and then it doesn't totally apply to how things really are. For example, if you wanted to argue for capitalism, you could talk about how it makes sense for people to make the amount of money they actually earn, have the economy take care of itself based on supply and demand, etc -- capitalism is based on some pretty noble, and logical, principles at its base. But when you apply this theory to the real world full of variables, obviously it's not always going to work as one envisioned it. Communism sure didn't, either.

we're surely in danger of overanalyzing this gentlemen.

BUT, I have to slyly defend MrD- whats wrong with just going with personal observations combined with a consensus amoung many chess authors?

if you really want scholarship about how to improve- the book for you is "chess for zebras"...

otherwise, I really see no point into prolonged discussion, irrrelevant analogies, and long and time consuming posts about it.

Nobody has ever gotten good endlessly philosophizing about chess improvement (that I know of)- I think its much better to come to something that you think you know and embrace it- and let it motivate you to the Big task of actually getting better at this game.

(but dodgy philosophizers rarely Know anything- they just doubt everything)

Who's Mr.D?

Well, for me believing in something means more when I have a reason for it. Otherwise it feels kind of fake. Feeling strongly about something feels awesome, but only if it's a genuine feeling. It loses its point if I just arbitrarily decide to believe something.

Point taken. In the future I'll moderate my comments to be plainly unreasonable like everyone else's lol

Again, I agree it's not the absolute truth, and I'm open to criticism of my idea or alternative ideas.

well I won't

what fun would that be?  things always get really interesting when someone comes along and hates against the philosophizing.

frankly capatilism/communism just seeems,well, irrelevant.  whats your thoughts Elubas?

Ok, so I'll elaborate a bit on my personal experience.

When I was a kid I was good at games. Board games, video games, card games, whatever. I noticed while other people gravitated towards the graphics or story line or surprising or gimmicky play, but I literally found those things annoying. I would try to break a game down to its core components figure out optimal play.

This doesn't mean I was the best... other people have the same personality and are smarter and/or harder working than me. I wasn't a world champ. But at least in the circle of people I knew, I was usually the best at whatever we did and within a short amount of time.

Sometimes the tricks and concepts I wanted to use didn't work out, and I'd have a re-think things.

So now back to chess. If someone is all wrapped up in appearances like "it's a war game" or with gimmicky tricks like "I'll only attack with knights because they're movement is so unique!" then they will have to struggle more to improve.

If someone tries to break the core ideas down and rationalize what correct play is then they will be better... if they have years of experience with this kind of thinking (simply because they've always thought this way even before they knew anyone else was different) then that's even better.

And finally, if their favorite methods of deconstruction, conceptualization, and strategy happen to be correct for chess, then they'll improve even faster than those who attempt to do the same.

That, a good memory and enjoying learning and playing chess, is what goes into super talents like Carlsen IMO.

Yes, this is biased and based on my experience, but hopefully this answers why it makes sense to me.

Somehow I didn't find this until recently... google "newtons flaming laser sword" haha  "If something cannot be settled by experiment or observation then it is not worthy of debate."

And sure, I won't improve by talking about it... but if I wanted to improve I wouldn't spend so much of my free time on the forum in the first place!

of course, i'm guilty as well.  but I thought I'd throw it out there before the thread got too ridiculous.

btw, I loved you the way you explained your personal experience.

I think it was very well written. 

Well, communism is one of those things that can be idealized easily before actually putting it into practice. So here I'm saying binary's theory may be logical, but we don't know if in practice it would hold true. When we're talking about something for which we know very little about (what makes a person improve at chess), there are going to be some inherent limitations to how sure we can be. All we can do is theorize. I actually agree with you, binary, it's better than a lot of others, but theorizing can only get you so far. Unless you're solving a math equation or something :)

Your point to all this being?

"If something cannot be settled by experiment or observation then it is not worthy of debate."

I completely disagree! :) Responding to inputs is something even calculators can do :) Humans can go a bit deeper than that.

nonetheless it is roughly the consensus of a lot of coaches, and collectively they teach many thousands the game (perhaps millions if you count the books and videos).

can't you trust that?

this is like saying you don't trust kindergarden teachers to teach the alphabet.

mr D's thoughts again seem senseable.

maybe I'm just not built the way you are.  I don't like long drawn out posts, where its all a matter of opinion and persuasion.  (with no hope for a consensus)

and any way you don't persuade too many with tl;dr posts.....

Is this a response to me? I was saying that binary's theory is just a theory, and it's hard to know whether or not it's really right.

It's basically impossible for chess skill to be 100% talent or 100% hard work. But it can be hard to know how to allocate to these two things because something you think is talent might just be hard work. You might think a certain way of acting is natural because you've done it a lot. So on one hand, we know that some parts of chess skill really are talent, but we can't tell which ones are which because of our biases.

Well not really because all of them have their own theory on how to improve :) Out of hundreds of theories, how can I pick which one is right?

I'm undecided on how liberally it's worth applying this idea. Certainly not in all situations. But when I see a long debate over something trivial it comes to mind.

If only for the imagery though, it's funny to point out. Maybe most people are aware if it, but I only recently came across it.

Well yeah but your personal disposition towards me doesn't automatically make me wrong.

Well, just my personal preference I guess. If you ask what does 2+2 equal, the answer will be 4, and there is no more discussion -- you're just observing a simple rule of math. But if you ask why does 2+2 equal 4, that's a lot more interesting, and could lead to discussing what does math really represent, how does it relate to the real world, cool stuff like that. Just my opinion though :)

I don't know how the quote is used or how it was intended.

But to me that's not debate, that's more like exploration, and I agree it's interesting.