Franklin and Chess - PEAK

Robert sent me a text that he tried to post as comment. Somehow Blogger had trouble to digest it. My comment is in blue.

PART I:

Perhaps it would be more cogent to reference a chess-related example given by Dr. Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool in Peak - Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Principles of Deliberate Practice in Everyday Life, IF YOU DON'T HAVE A TEACHER. In his autobiography, Franklin himself described his training process in some detail. The following excerpt is from the Ericsson and Pool book. Please bear with me: it’s rather long.

“The last time we encountered Benjamin Franklin in this book, he was playing chess for hours and hours but never really getting any better. This provided us with an excellent example of how NOT to practice—just doing the same thing over and over again without any focused step-by-step plan for improvement. [That certainly should sound familiar!] But Franklin was far more than a chess player, of course. He was a scientist, inventor, diplomat, publisher, and a writer whose words are still read more than two centuries later. So let us give equal time to an area in which he did much better than he did in chess.

“Early in his autobiography Franklin described how as a young man he worked to improve his writing. The education he had received as a child had left him, by his own assessment, not much more than an average writer. Then he ran across an issue of the British magazine The Spectator and found himself impressed by the quality of the writing in its pages. Franklin decided that he would like to write that well, but HE HAD NO ONE TO TEACH HIM HOW. What could he do? He came up with a series of clever techniques aimed at teaching himself how to write as well as the writers of The Spectator.

“He first set out to see how closely he could reproduce the sentences in an article once he had forgotten their exact wording. So he chose several of the articles whose writing he admired and wrote down short descriptions of the contents of each sentence—just enough to remind him what the sentence was about. After several days he tried to reproduce the article from the hints he had written down. His goal was not so much to produce a word-for-word replica of the articles as to create his own articles that were as detailed and well written as the original. Having written his reproductions, he went back to the original articles, compared them with his own efforts, and corrected his versions where necessary. This taught him to express ideas clearly and cogently.

“The biggest problem he discovered from these exercises was that his vocabulary was not nearly as large as those of the writers for The Spectator. It wasn’t that he didn’t know the words, but rather that he didn’t have them at his fingertips when he was writing. To fix this he came up with a variation of his first exercise. He decided that writing poetry would force him to come up with a plethora of different words that he might not normally think of because of the need to fit the poem’s rhythm and the rhyming patterns, so he took some of The Spectator articles and transformed them into verse. Then, after waiting long enough that his memory of the original wording had faded, he would transform the poems back into prose. This got him into the habit of finding just the right word and increased the number of words he could call up quickly from his memory.

PART II:

“Finally, Franklin worked on the overall structure and LOGIC of his writing. Once again, he worked with articles from The Spectator and wrote hints for each sentence. But this time he wrote the hints on separate pieces of paper and then jumbled them so that they were completely out of order. Then he waited long enough that not only had he forgotten the wording of the sentences in the original articles, but he had also forgotten their order and he tried once again to reproduce the articles. He would take the jumbled hints from one article and arrange them in what he thought was the most LOGICAL order, then write sentences from each hint and compare the result with the original article. The exercise forced him to think carefully about how to order the thoughts in a piece of writing. If he found places where he’d failed to order his thoughts as well as the original writer, he would correct his work and try to learn from his mistakes. In his typically humble way, Franklin recalled in his autobiography how he could tell that the practice was having the desired effect: “I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language, and this encouraged me to think I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable writer, of which I was extremely ambitious.”

“Franklin was too modest, of course. He went on to become one of the most admired writers of early America, with Poor Richard’s Almanack and, later, his autobiography becoming classics of American literature. Franklin solved a problem—wanting to improve, but having no one to teach him how—which many people face from time to time. Maybe you can’t afford a teacher, or there is no one easily accessible to teach what you want to learn. Maybe you’re interested in improving in some area where there are no experts, or at least no teachers. Whatever the reasons are, IT IS STILL POSSIBLE TO IMPROVE if you follow some basic principles from deliberate practice—many of which Franklin seems to have intuited on his own.

“The hallmark of purposeful or deliberate practice is that YOU TRY TO DO SOMETHING YOU CANNOT DO—THAT TAKES YOU OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE—AND THAT YOU PRACTICE IT OVER, AND OVER AGAIN, FOCUSING ON HOW EXACTLY HOW YOU RE DOING IT, WHERE YOU ARE FALLING SHORT, AND HOW YOU CAN GET BETTER. Real life—our jobs, our schooling, our hobbies [chess, anyone?!?]—seldom give us the opportunity for this sort of focused repetition, so in order to improve, we must manufacture our own opportunities. Franklin did it with his exercises, each focused on a particular facet of writing. Much of what a good teacher or coach will do is to develop such exercises for you, designed specifically to help you improve the particular skill you are focused on at the moment. But without a teacher, you must come up with your own exercises.”

PART III:

BRAVO, MR. FRANKLIN!

Except for “the rest of the story.” It would appear that Mr. Franklin mentally compartmentalized and constrained his improvement program to a single area of his life, and was completely unaware that his logical training method could be applied to ANY area of interest. Let us examine a passage from earlier in the book regarding Mr. Franklin and another [unrelated? Hardly!] area of passionate interest—CHESS—in which he failed to apply what he had learned regarding writing improvement. There is a relevant quote from Musashi Miyamoto’s Go Rin No Sho: The Book of Five Rings that might have alerted Mr. Franklin to the universal aspects of his writing improvement program.

“These things cannot be explained in detail. FROM ONE THING, KNOW TEN THOUSAND THINGS. When you attain the Way of strategy there will not be one thing you cannot SEE. You must study hard.”

There are many other useful training insights from Musashi which “hide in plain sight”, but chess players are generally unaware of Musashi’s wisdom.

Returning to our “hero” and his sad chess story in PEAK:

“This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: IF YOU NEVER PUSH YOURSELF BEYOND YOUR COMFORT ZONE, YOU WILL NEVER IMPROVE.  The amateur pianist who took half a dozen years of lessons when he was a teenager but who for the past thirty years has been playing the same set of songs in exactly the same way over and over again may have accumulated ten thousand hours of “practice” during that time, but he is no better at playing the piano than he was thirty years ago, Indeed, he’s probably gotten worse.”

[A familiar question: “Do you have 30 years experience, or just 1 year’s experience— repeated 30 times?”]

“We have especially strong evidence of this phenomenon as it applies to physicians. Research on many specialties shows that doctors who have been in PRACTICE for twenty or thirty years do worse on certain objective measures of performance than those who are just two or three years out of medical school. It turns out that most of what doctors do [JUST LIKE ADULT CHESS IMPROVERS!] in their day-to-day practice does NOTHING to improve or even maintain their abilities; little of it challenges them or pushes them out of their comfort zones. . . .

PART IV:

“Perhaps my favorite example of this lesson is the case of Ben Franklin’s chess skills. Franklin was Americas first famous genius. He was a scientist who made his reputation with his studies of electricity, a popular writer and publisher of Poor Richard’s Almanack, the founder of the first public lending library in America, an accomplished diplomat, and the inventor of, among other things, bifocals, the lightning rod, and the Franklin stove. But HIS GREATEST PASSION WAS CHESS. He was one of the first chess players in America, and he was a participant in the earliest game of chess known to have been played here. He played chess for more than fifty years, and as he got older he spent more and more time on it. While in Europe he played with François-André Danican Philidor, the best chess player of the time. Despite his well-known advice to be early to bed and early to rise, Franklin regularly played from around 6:00 p.m. until sunrise.

“So Ben Franklin was brilliant, and he spent thousands of hours playing chess, sometimes against the best players of the time. DID THAT MAKE HIM A GREAT CHESS PLAYER? NO. He was above average, but he never got good enough to compare with Europe’s better players, much less the best. This failing was a source of great frustration to him, but he had no idea WHY he couldn’t get any better. Today we understand: he never pushed himself, never got out of his comfort zone, never put in the hours of purposeful practice it would take to improve. He was like the pianist playing the same songs the same way for thirty years. That is a recipe for stagnation, not improvement.

“Getting out of your comfort zone means trying to do something that you couldn’t do before. Sometimes you may find it relatively easy to accomplish that new thing, and then you keep pushing on. But sometimes you run into something that stops you cold and it seems like you’ll never be able to do it. FINDING WAYS AROUND THESE BARRIERS IS ONE OF THE HIDDEN KEYS TO PURPOSEFUL PRACTICE.

“Generally, the solution is not “try harder” but rather “TRY DIFFERENTLY.” IT IS A TECHNIQUE ISSUE, in other words.”

Congratulations on continually “trying differently”—for 18 years!! It is finally paying off!!

A few random thoughts

I'm especially interested in what has been said about LOGIC. Since that is the core of my method.

Having no teacher means you have to become your own teacher. That is especially daunting when you have no idea what is important and what not. OTOH, in these times with computers you have a big advantage. In the end, any prodigy who wants to become better than his coach has to become his own teacher.

You have to be prepared to be very ruthless when it comes to judge your own work. Luckily we are guided by the most ruthless judge of all: Mr. Elo.

I was surprised to see in how many areas I performed poorly while I was thinking I was doing great. Apparently you need bias towards your own performances in order to preserve your mental health. But when you want to make progress, you must be brutally honest.

Feedback is the nec plus ultra for progress.

Be cautious to not misinterpret "out of your comfort zone". It sounds as if it is not or even worse may not be enjoyable. The core is that you need to overcome laziness in the vertical direction. Often we are prepared for immense efforts in horizontal direction while a vertikal effort is needed. Think of the priest who needed a cheat sheet for his prayers. His horizontal effort of 25 years reading the daily prayers was immense, while he was too lazy to make the little vertical effort to learn the prayer by heart in a few evenings.

The role of repetition is NOT to ingrain matters in system 1 but to force your system 2 to become precise. The repetition has no function in itself when you are disciplined enough to be precise from the get go.

All deliberate practice is geared around system 2. System 1 takes care of itself. A lot of time can be spoiled by trying to educate system 1. Focus solely on system 2 though.

Since feedback is the nec plus ultra for progress, the role of this blog must not be underestimated. Without a sounding board you can't make progress. Furthermore, it is useful to log everything you have tried and thought. To prevent you from going in circles instead of spirals. Luckily I can use chatGPT as a sounding board lately. Nevertheless you contributions are MUCH APPRECIATED!!

Be ready to doubt everything. Don't take anything for granted because a grandmaster or a world champion said so. That is not arrogance, it is common sense.

It took me 18 years to find the foot of the ladder towards progress. I don't consider that to be deliberate practice. It was used to find the method. Only since May first, I consider to have begun with deliberate practice.

I hypothesize that one needs 1000 hours of deliberate practice per 100 rating points. My starting point is a rating of around 1700 at May 1st 2023. Let's see whether there is any truth in this.

Besides training, I focus on improving the method. Since I now know that it is solely about logic, I can imagine a few experiments to improve the efficiency of the method.