The expectation paradox
300 million years of evolution has equipped us with the skill to predict the future. To a certain degree. During our lifetime, we gather expectations of what we might meet next. These expectations help us to anticipate the future and to react lightning fast. These expectations are in the realm of system 1 (unconscious brain activity). We expect where the ball is heading, and we can hit it back before system 2 knows what is going on. In discussions, we learn how arguments can be met by counter arguments, and when we have enough arguments gathered, we can discuss fast, and without thinking.
Most of these expectations are gathered during our youth. At a certain age, your database with automatic expectations seems to be fully filled. Or you just run out of new patterns.
It is easy to see, that the art of anticipation makes us lightning fast. By anticipation, you eliminate the need for using system 2. Which is notoriously slow.
The two drawbacks of anticipation
Anticipation has two drawbacks, though. The first is, that your expectation can be wrong. If you anticipate that a deer is going to the left, and you throw your spear at it, you will miss it when the deer is going to the right. This is only a minor drawback, you will just have to hunt another day. If you hadn't anticipated but would have used system 2 to catch a deer, you would have perished from starvation long ago anyway.
The other drawback from expectation is that it creates a blind spot. You can only see what you expect to see. The more your system is filled with expectations, the more difficult it is to see something else. (there will come a day I will feel grateful to the man, but feeling a bit p*ssed off has still the upper hand today😈 ).
Plateauing
Once your database is filled with expectations, the quality of it is fixated. From that moment on, your tactical ability will plateau. Changing the quality of your database or working on the cues to retrieve from it has proven to be very difficult.
The good news being, that we get a more precise idea of what the problem is by the day.
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| There are no deers harmed during this investigation |
PART I:
ReplyDeleteI love that picture! It captures perfectly how blind we are to the "targets" right in front of us!
Temposchlucker wrote:
Anticipation has two drawbacks, though. The first is, that YOUR EXPECTATION CAN BE WRONG. . . . The other drawback from expectation is that IT CREATES A BLIND SPOT. You can only “SEE” what you expect to see. (Emphasis added.)
Our anticipation/expectation is firmly based on our experiences. If we have no experience, then we cannot anticipate how things should be “expected” to happen. For example, if we have no experience hunting deer, then we cannot anticipate how the deer will move when the spear is thrown. This gives us the hope (not certainty!) that by changing our experience base, we can develop better anticipation. This is fundamentally what the maxim “Practice.” “Practice?” “PRACTICE!” is all about.
As far as that “practice” maxim goes, it’s almost as useful as “Always make the best move.” If I could recognize/anticipate what the best move is, do you really think I would NOT play it?!?
The most important question is: “Practice WHAT?!?” The second most important question is “Practice HOW?!?”
Here’s an example case: the “Invisible Gorilla”. Prior to experiencing that video, most of us would “assume” that we would NOT have a “blind spot” for something so obvious. We watch the video (with no similar prior experience) and are mystified – “What gorilla?” Then we take a second look, only this time we change our expectation to actually “SEE” a gorilla, if there is one. Lo and behold, we then “SEE” the obvious gorilla. This changes our future expectations for similar videos. It is not likely that we will fail to “SEE” the “gorilla” under similar circumstances. In short, we will no longer focus in on what we have been told to do, to the exclusion of what is actually right in front of us.
The same thing is true of a classical visual illusion, but with an additional wrinkle. Here’s a link to the discussion of the ways that visual illusion plays out:
LINK:
http://www.mind.ilstu.edu/curriculum/mueller_lyer_illusion/res_visual_illusions_overhead.php
The additional wrinkle: In these classical illusions, you will still experience the “FEELING” that the sizes are either the same or different, regardless of your KNOWLEDGE of the way our visual-cortex system actually works. That “feeling” is built-in to our basic system. All we can do is recognize a situation where we KNOW our visual system will give us an erroneous “feeling” and use System 2 to compensate for it.
SO WHAT?, you might be thinking (if you got this far).
PART II:
ReplyDeleteWe can either gain first-hand experience (an often long, slow process which may or may not provide the relevant experience), or we can “learn to shave on someone else’s face” by learning from others experiences. Often, we THINK we have learned from someone else, only to find that what we have learned is merely that we didn’t learn anything useful for US.
Often times, the KNOWLEDGE that we study is in an abstracted form, generalized from specifics that the author experienced or observed, but giving us none of the visceral experience that would be required to “make it our own”. Case in point: almost all of the “principles” of good play (NOT the formal rules) are encapsulations of someone else’s experience. “Knights on the rim are dim” tells us that somebody (NOT necessarily us) had more than one bad experience with a Knight misplaced to the edge of the board. “Avoid placing (or leaving) your Queen on the same geometrical line as one of your opponent’s linearly moving pieces (Queen, Rook, Bishop)” Again, that maxim is easy to acquire as KNOWLEDGE, but it is (usually) only after we PERSONALLY experience the folly of failing to heed that advice that we acquire the System 1 “feeling” of unease whenever that situation occurs.
As I was thinking about this subject, I realized that the collection of MOTIFS described by GM Lasker and IM Neuman fall into the same category of abstracted generalizations, created as a substitute for experience for those of us at the lower levels of skill. In this way, we have a sort of vicarious “experience” which MIGHT (NOT necessarily) be substituted for actual experience. The same is true of the various tactical devices/themes and stock checkmate patterns.
If we do NOT “make them our own” by studying the finest details involved in many, many different examples, then we can hardly expect to have the use of them as if they represent our own experience.
It is not the specific physical positions of the pieces/Pawns that must be stored as patterns. It is the dynamic relationships between the various pieces/squares that must be recognized as a pattern. A case in point was the recent examples of “seeing” the potential for checkmate in two Rooks operating on parallel files. “Seeing” is not about the specific physical location of the Rook pair on the board; it is about the dynamic relationship of the action in relation to the opposing King.
One of the ways I’m finding that is helpful for improving my vision is to go down a level of detail. If I’m given an example of the Encircling Motif, I first try to “SEE” that this motif is applicable. Then I try to “SEE” WHY the individual details, when taken together, results in a specific case of the generalized motif. This process cannot be done quickly if long-term improvement is the goal.
Again, I think this is why the “Practice the same exercises while going faster and faster, until your eyes bleed (MdlM)!” is highly unlikely to result in significant improvement. Temporarily, you will experience a “feeling” of familiarity and “expertise” but after a relatively short time, that “feeling” will fade and so will that so-called “expertise.”
So, what opening do you want to study and discuss first?
The Sniper! with black
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