[extropy-chat] Bluff and the Darwin award

[Russell Wallace]

On 5/17/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> This is why the ability of the world's most powerful chess players has
> been decreasing slowly over time; you can't learn chess except by
> playing against a better player and getting advice from better players.
>   Only the environment can teach you; there's no way to learn
> internally.  Thus, over time, more and more of the ancient chess
> techniques are lost, degraded from signal to noise.  Kasparov is
> probably barely as powerful as the average aristocrat of the seventeenth
> century.  And Deep Blue, which beat Kasparov, was programmed by aliens.
>

Come now Eliezer, I'm trying to discourage silly ideas, not encourage the
formulation of more of them!

At the end of the day though, your claim boils down to the idea that you can
become a grand master at chess _without ever having played a game of chess
in your life_; and in the silliness contest between your two ideas
(notwithstanding the intended sarcasm in one of them and the greater
difficulty of analysis of the other) a mouse could starve on the difference.
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