House of Eratosthenes

I considered calling this something like “Chess: The Perfect Blend Between Process and Outcome,” since that drives more to the heart of the matter, but it’s too long and it takes too much reading-between-the-lines to get there. Anyhow, the point made is brilliant, as is the chess analogy:

Picture the situation: you know that putting your knight on e4, for example, leads to a counterattack that ruins your position. You move your bishop there instead. A normal opponent would think about what you were conceding to do that instead of the knight move and react accordingly. The Cuttlers, however, would go ahead with the sequence of moves, even though with a bishop there it will ruin their own position instead. And then they will insist that, because they made all the correct moves, that in reality the game is theirs, even as their queen and both rooks decorate the side of the board where you keep the captured pieces. The game WOULD have been won if the knight had been there, therefore your bishop doesn’t belong there, the move was invalid and the game is won, QED. Or do you deny that their moves were not perfectly in accordance with the rules?

Misses the point by a bit, don’t you think?
:
…[A]n expert can be reasonably expected to know about a specialized topic. Wouldn’t you ask an expert about it? But the point isn’t in merely asking, because a question is a tool designed to get a good answer. If the answer is wrong, then it misses the point of having asked someone skilled in the field – I can give you bad tax advice a lot more cheaply than your expert accountant.

Here we can see again the difference between condescension and humane behavior. If you question the bad advice, how does the expert react? Does he explain the reason for his advice? Does he accept if the reason doesn’t apply here? If you share something you’ve learned, does he take the time to show why that knowledge is irrelevant, or better, does he say he’ll read about it and then get back to you? That’s humane – it recognizes that what one has learned may be learned by others, that to be an expert is not to be flawless even in that realm of practice, and it shows a willigness to grow.

Or, you know, the expert could be insulted that someone else did a little research, discount the new information because of its unworthy source, openly question why you’re questioning their opinion in the first place, and then go right ahead and be stubbornly wrong about it, because experts say so. The bishop never belonged on that square. The reply moves were all well within the rules. Just tip your damned king, you peon.

That’s the funny thing about something like chess – the pieces are the same for each player, from a grandmaster to a patzer like me. One side’s bishops don’t suddenly start scooting sideways; the grandmaster’s rooks don’t level up to move twice per turn; my queen can’t shoot lasers just to make it fair.

Life is rather chesslike in this regard…

It’s easy for non-experts to interpret expert opinion way beyond the boundaries of what it really is. It’s obvious to anybody who’s ever been an expert about anything. And even if you’ve never been an expert about anything, you can ask an expert about something within their expertise and practically see it in their eyes: What’s the premise of the question, is it a valid one, who’s my audience, how are they going to misunderstand this. And, do I really know what I think I know.

Of course, now we live in a time in which a lot of experts make their expert-living off of doubting any uncertainty. And that’s perhaps worth a whole post in & of itself.

Ahhhhh…the ol’ sneak “Bishop-in-place-of-a-Knight” trick.
SURELY history holds an Episcopalian joke or two in there somewhere?
- CaptDMO | 06/07/2014 @ 16:22

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Chess: The Great EqualizerSaturday, June 7th, 2014

Chess: The Great Equalizer
Saturday, June 7th, 2014