[HN Gopher] Scrabble and the Nature of Expertise (2015)
___________________________________________________________________
Scrabble and the Nature of Expertise (2015)
Author : sergeant3
Score : 41 points
Date : 2024-05-19 10:10 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| martinclayton wrote:
| I was going to write a "Previously on Hacker News" comment, but
| no one commented the one time this was posted before ...
| password4321 wrote:
| There was a small Scrabble-related discussion recently:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40391290 _Scrabble,
| Anonymous_
| smitty1e wrote:
| > For example, it may one day be possible to give people precise
| information about their abilities, and of the likelihood of
| achieving success in particular domains given those abilities.
|
| As a technical matter, sure.
|
| However, part of me would like to suggest that using tech as some
| sort of Delphic Oracle for human lives (especially the young) may
| not be in optimal taste.
|
| Possibly just letting life be life, and not getting too frisky
| with putting boundaries on human potential, may be preferred.
|
| Shifting from the singular to the plural, this kind of analysis
| might actually be helpful. Telling the young person that the
| marriage has a diminishing likelihood of existing over time could
| help to cool some hormones.
|
| And then, obviously, corporate risk management is not new, and
| anyone making large moves without banging the numbers won't be
| making large moves for long.
|
| Just don't tell the kids to stop believing. Hold on to "that
| feeeeeeeling".
| jrussino wrote:
| > using tech as some sort of Delphic Oracle for human lives
| (especially the young) may not be in optimal taste.
|
| I feel like we have plenty of dystopian science fiction warning
| us not to go down this path. GATTACA is a personal favorite of
| mine.
|
| > Possibly just letting life be life, and not getting too
| frisky with putting boundaries on human potential, may be
| preferred.
|
| I'm inclined to agree... but all life is competitive.
|
| For example, the idea that we might someday be able to cheaply
| and effectively choose or alter babies' genes gives me the
| "ick" in a major way. And yet, someone is going to do it. And
| the ones who do will probably end up out-competing the ones who
| don't. What to do about it?
| smitty1e wrote:
| Correcting well-understood genetic issues isn't an ethical
| stretch.
|
| Taking performance past natural, OTOH...
| CrazyStat wrote:
| I had an English teacher in high school who was ranked like #3 in
| competitive Swedish scrabble. He didn't speak Swedish in any
| meaningful sense, just memorized all the good words.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| At one point, the world champion of French Scrabble was Nigel
| Richards, a New Zealander who doesn't know any French:
| https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/21/new-fre...
| hellogoodbye wrote:
| Memorizing the words is one thing, but as the article mentions
| it's a lot more strategy involved. Rack management, memorizing
| the right hooks, knowing when to use the right hooks, closing
| up the board for your opponent etc.
| jasonhong wrote:
| Minor tangent, one of the main subjects of this article, Conrad
| Bassett-Bouchard, was a student in our Master's of Human-Computer
| Interaction program at Carnegie Mellon University many years ago.
| He joined after winning the National Scrabble Championship. I had
| the pleasure of teaching him in one of our courses (Programming
| Usable Interfaces, sort of an intro to prototyping and
| programming for non-programmers). I briefly quizzed him one time
| about how many words you can spell using hexadecimal (0xDEADBEEF,
| 0xCAFEBABE, etc).
|
| He went on to be a UX designer and manager on Google Store and
| Google Fi (see his home page at https://www.conradbb.com/).
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-05-20 23:00 UTC)