Pros and cons of chess

I believe the appeal of chess is that it gives us a chance to control what happens in microcosm when we can't in the "real" world. I seem to recall at the end of "1984" Winston Smith is playing chess at the cafe after he has succumbed to Big Brother. In the Soviet Union, the lack of personal freedom somehow gave rise to many of the all time greats....and just perhaps on this basis countries like the US and UK will shortly be producing the best players of all time ! :-)

Chess is certainly less useful than say building little electronics gadgets or studying mathematics but more useful than boozing or watching football.

There must be a pro and con list about writing pro and con lists.

I see your point, but a person might regret anything in life later such as marrying someone they loved which ended up in divorce, basically if it's what you want to do at the time and gives you pleasure then do it. No point in looking back with the benefit of hindsight and looking for causes of regret.

Clearly

My favorite is watching documentaries on cops(who are of course brilliant enough to make these judgements), calling some criminal a "genius", or a, "mastermind", because somehow they were able to continue their crime spree without getting caught by the amazingly brilliant police force. That's just absurd

After reading about Canada during the G20, expect Canadian chessplayers vying, en masse, for the World Title along with the Americans, British, and Israelis...

It would be perverse to redefine such a well-known word, defined in every dictionary. The following one seems reasonable to me but, as I have often said, it is an example of a multifaceted characteristic loosely grouped in a single concept, like many others.

Just skip it, Elroch. If you had guts about it you would define your terms, not read from a dictionary. What you find to be intelligent, based on your dictionary definition, is just about anyone other than an infant nor one with brain damage. You won't say what a "high mental capacity" is?  Hell, you even get to consider yourself "intelligent" with that definition

I think Elroch should be excused from having to explain every single, common word he is using simply because trysts pretends not to understand it. 

 Defining the word "intelligent" for the sake of clarifying it as a  predicate is probably beyond you, but others don't find it problematic. But, I know why you would like to dismiss this, Tom_van_Diepen, because if defined, people may find out you only "pretend" to have a clue about anything.

Intelligence includes a range of mental abilities. People who play chess are likely to be more adept at a subset of those abilities than other people. I'm not sure I would like to meet them for that reason aside from the fact that I could get a few games from the encounter. But I don't understand Tryst's insistence on a precise definition of the word in what is a fairly innocuous statement. 

"Intelligent" is a word for many people denoting the 'value' of one's mental capabilities. Since 'value' judgements are notoriously subjective, people are free to define the term "intelligent" any way they wish. So when calling people "intelligent" or not, for the purposes of avoiding assumptions, it seems best to clarify what one means by the word. When I have conversations with friends, most of them avid readers of western philosophy, the word "intelligent" is rarely used, and when used, is defined by the user for whatever proposition they wish to advance. Therefore, what one would call a commonly used word, is rarely used in some circles to describe anything.

Good explanation. I thought you may have been driving at something along those lines. But I don't think Elroch's intent was malicious.

I hope Elroch doesn't believe that I thought there was anything malicious. My "laughing emoticon", was supposed to signify a jocose manner.

For tryst's enlightenment, the practice of communicating in a common language is based on the words used already having commonly accepted definitions, which since the 18th century have been collected in dictionaries. Every book, newspaper and webpage relies on the words having accepted meanings, avoiding the impracticality of everyone defining every word every time they use it. Every reader knows that if there is a word they do not fully understand, they can look it up in a dictionary (something which most of us probably do rather often). tryst may wish to single-handedly remove the basis of common communication, but I do not believe there will be a great deal of support for this. However, I am happy to elaborate on the nature of the concept referred to by the word "intelligence".

Intelligence is inherently a very broad, loosely defined concept, relating to many very varied abilities, some of which are more amenable to measurement than others. It is not in general meaningful to say someone is more or less intelligent than another, but it is meaningful to say that someone exhibits intelligence in some way, and people can be compared with respect to some very specific aspect of intelligence. For example controversial IQ tests are not a universal measure of intelligence, but are a weighted sum of a number of measures of specific chosen aspects of intelligence, implemented using certain tests. [By analogy, one could define a measurement of fitness by measurements of performance in a chosen set of exercises, but there simply is not a "best" set of exercises to choose]. Most people would agree that having excellent understanding and knowledge of a specific topic is a sort of intelligence, but this is deliberately excluded from IQ tests, for example, and I do not believe they are particularly good at measuring inate ability to develop this sort of intelligence.

Back to the original topic, I had the idea of using an economist's trick to quantify the value of playing chess. Suppose someone offered to pay you a fixed amount of money to not play chess for a fixed time, say one year (please ignore the unlikeliness of this happening). Unless you are extraordinarily keen on chess, there would be some amount of money that would be adequate for you to give up chess (statement 1), and unless you have not the slightest interest in chess, the amount of money would be greater than zero (statement 2). Given this you can define the value of a year's chess to you as the amount of money V that is the border between being adequate and inadequate to convince you to not play for a year (statement 3). [For precision it would be necessary to avoid you getting other benefits like extra time to do other things]. If anyone disagrees with the validity of this definition, please say which of the statements labeled (statement 1), (statement 2) and (statement 3) you disagree with. Note that (statement 3) is a mathematical theorem, making it rather invulnerable to disagreement.

Anyone like to say what the rough value V might be to them?

chess may or may not be a waste of time, however wasting time is very important to me!

My take is this: -

Pro - It does your head in!

Con - It does your head in!

It makes one think and much as the game frustrates and annoys me sometimes, I love it!

A "pro" in chess is one who makes their living from chess.

A "con" in chess is a chess player that is a convicted felon.

Simple.

Chess is just a game. People without much to do treat it something that gives them high. So they get addicted and make chess their life. I knew some of them they died playing it day and night. They'd think they can beat anyone. But not chess. Chess bites. No one will outlast chess. One should just enjoy it.