Is chess good for teaching critical thinking?

Zelenius

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Zelenius
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As a long time chess player, I often wonder just how beneficial chess is for the mind, for schoolchildren in particular. There are few things said as often by skeptics on this forum and elsewhere about the need for teaching critical thinking to children, and to people in general. Which leads me to ask: Is chess a good way to teach critical thinking?

My own personal belief based on experience and the readings of some interesting studies indicates it may help improve reasoning ability and educational attainment(which are not the same exact thing as "critical thinking" but they come close). I believe chess has helped improve my own critical thinking skills. I could be wrong though, and we may be dealing with the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy with many of these studies and even my own belief about chess improving my critical thinking skills.

If chess does increase critical thinking skills, should it be included in the curriculum of all schools in the U.S? Should it be taught in conjunction with critical thinking, or taught alone, expecting students to apply the thinking patterns they learned while playing chess to decisions in their every day lives? Or is there a better way to teach critical thinking?

One of the main reasons I bring this up is that critical thinking is under assault in the U.S by far right-wing Christians. Texas Republicans have explicitly stated they are against teaching critical thinking in schools.

Which leads me to wonder if this would make chess an even more valuable tool for teaching critical thinking to children. Maybe the anti-intellectual right wouldn't have a problem with simply teaching chess, not knowing it teaches the critical thinking skills they abhor.

Here is an in depth look at this issue - Chess Teaches Critical Thinking
 
It has to be critical thinking e.g. if you examine your own or your opponent's plan and find a flaw in either.

I also answer the OP with a firm 'yes'.
 
When I'm losing I use it to demonstrate the slippery slope fallacy.
 
No, I don't see any critical thinking necessary in chess. Analytical thinking, sure. Is it a good excercise for children's abstract thinking abilities? Sure. But I don't see what it has to do with what we traditionally call critical thinking.
 
I got more into chess recently when I already considered myself a critical thinker already.

It helped me order my thoughts better and keep track of more variables for a longer period of time. I think it has made me better as I can follow arguments more deeply before my brain rebels.

I knew how to play chess since I was younger though and it did not help with any critical thinking skills. The benefits came later after I had learned critical thinking and looked to improve my chess.

Chess in schools would not have an effect until the people wanted to get better at it.
 
As a non-chess player, I have no meaningful opinion on chess specifically. But I definitely think some games can teach critical thinking skills. There's one that I think is particularly good for it, which is simpler, more popular and less intimidating game than chess: Minesweeper.

Yes, I'm serious. Obviously it requires logical and analytical thinking to deduce where the bombs are. But more importantly, when you lose, it's usually because you made an incorrect assumption along the way: "I thought this space had a bomb in it, and therefore the space next to it had to be empty. But I was wrong about the bomb in the first space, which made my assumption about the next space wrong too." It's a quick, accessible demonstration of how believing one wrong thing can cause you to believe other wrong things as well -- and how those other wrong things can be dangerous, even if the original one wasn't.

There was a time when I used that very analogy in real life, when debating with a woman who was just starting to be sucked into the anti-vaccination line of BS. At one point she asked why I even cared so much, since I didn't have kids and wasn't planning to. I said because beliefs have consequences, and wrong beliefs tend to have bad consequences. And because I knew she played minesweeper, I continued with, "It's like when you're playing Minesweeper and..." etc. It actually worked. With that analogy, she saw my point. Later she looked further into the facts, and realized it the anti-vac thing was a load of crap. It was one of my few real-life skeptical victories.
 
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I think chess is good, period. As a tool for critical thinking, my intuitive feeling (that is, conclusions I've reached without full knowledge of every step of the processes involved) is that computer programming is probably better.

When your stuff doesn't work, it may be because the computer didn't understand something you told it to do (call it analogous to attempting an illegal move in chess). If that's the case, it will immediately inform you of that fact, making those errors easy to identify.

The errors that are most difficult to find (or the outcomes you didn't expect) are the ones that occur when YOU didn't understand something you told the computer to do, necessitating a debugging process which is essentially a search for flaws, mental shortcuts, and hidden assumptions in your own thinking. There's often an "Aha!" moment waiting at the end of that search, where you go, "Man, what a dope I was". I guess my feeling is that it's more helpful because you're confronted more directly with that. It's not a matter of having been outsmarted -- at least, not by anyone other than yourself.
 
I don't think chess can teach critical thinking skills.

At the lower levels, it's merely learning the rules. This may be analogous to learning the rules of debate, but it's certainly not identical to it--the rules of chess, like all games, are arbitrary, in a way that the rules of debate and argument are not. Further, chess has a limited scope, while critical thinking really doesn't.

At the higher levels it's worse. "Extra Credits" did an episode about ballance in videogames that highlighted the issue with chess: the fact that the game is so perfectly ballanced means that the overwhelming majority of tactics have been tried, perfected, named, and classified. One learns to recognize tactics and utilize counter-tactics. In argument and debate this is akin to someone who merely shouts out the name of the fallacy they think the other party is using (not that fallacy sniping isn't fun--it's just neither critical thinking nor useful).

You can use it as an analogy, or as a teaching tool, but to say that it teaches critical thinking because of that is to say that Skittles teach the principles of stratigraphy. It's useful, but only in a limited sense and over-extending the metaphore can be very, very hazardous to your end goal.

Perhaps Go would be a better option--it's not perfectly ballanced (in fact, handicaps aren't uncommon at all, while they're unheard-of in chess), and there's a lot more wiggle-room, at least in Western cultures.
 
(derail)

Chess is not perfectly balanced. It favors White by between 2 and 5 percent:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_chess

That is of course close enough for the game to be playable, but I just wouldn't use the term "perfectly balanced" for it. :)

Go handicaps are common partially because the character of the game doesn't change that much when used, and partially because it's not very hard to calculate the needed handicap by playing a series of games.

Modern (since the 1930s) Go tries to compensate for Black's first move advantage by giving White some points for free, if the two players have the same skill rating. The exact amount of a balanced game is still in question, but it is currently believed to be between 5 and 7.

If the skill ratings are different, the weaker player goes first, and if the difference is large, will usually get several stones on the board at the start to serve as a handicap.

Each skill rank difference in Go is supposed to represent one stone worth of handicap. It fails to work that well over large differences in skill, but whatever. :)

So if I'm an 18k and you're a 15k, I go first and get 3 stones placed on the board as handicap, then you start.

(end derail)
 
Almo said:
Chess is not perfectly balanced. It favors White by between 2 and 5 percent:
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"Perfectly ballanced" was their term, not mine. They were saying that everyone has the same pieces and can do the same things. This contrasts with, say, Diablo II, where the Amazonians can do certain things and Paladins can do others. In chess I don't have to worry about your knights teleporting, or your pawns being able to kill my people standing in front of them, or that sort of thing. It's not about win/loss ratios, though I see where you're coming from. :) My point was that it's ballanced enough and old enough that unless you're one of the most skilled players on Earth, we've already figured out everything and catagorized it. There's no real way to do anything novel, which is a vital component of critical thinking.
 
Dinwar said:
My point was that it's ballanced enough and old enough that unless you're one of the most skilled players on Earth, we've already figured out everything and catagorized it. There's no real way to do anything novel, which is a vital component of critical thinking.
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I think you may be underestimating the combinatorial possibilities in chess. I'd also like to see you expand on the idea that novel thinking is a vital component of critical thinking. I mean, it seems to me that it is sometimes beneficial to set aside critical thinking while performing creative thinking -- even while playing chess. The daring sacrifice often begins with thinking crazy; examining lines of play which 'critical thinking' would never even see.
 
Dymanic said:
I think you may be underestimating the combinatorial possibilities in chess.
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I disagree. Chess has been around for hundreds, if not thousands, of years--we've had ample time to figure out all the potential moves. Lower-skilled players certainly can re-discover certain tactics, but that's what it is: rediscovery, not true invention.

I'd also like to see you expand on the idea that novel thinking is a vital component of critical thinking.
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Perhaps I'm not getting my point across....Upper-level chess isn't played move-by-move; there are standard suites of moves, standard gambits or tactics, that each player will use. This cannot be done with critical thinking--once you find yourself entrenched in such patterns you've become dogmatic. The reason chess can be played that way is because there are a limited number of potential options for each player. In a conversation, however, there is a much broader range of options for each next step; it's not unreasonable to say that they're functionally infinite. For example, instead of responding coherently to your post I could have put up a picture of a cute puppy. Makes no sense, but it's an option.

Basically, your opponent in chess can only throw so many different attacks at you. In a conversation, the number of attacks is more than any person can prepare for, so it may as well be infinite. You can't improve your critical thinking skills by wrote memorization of conversational gambits, and doing so is the mark of someone who's just gotten into the field (the epitome of this is, again, fallacy sniping--where someone merely calls out recognized [or presumably recognized] fallacies without giving them due consideration).

I mean, it seems to me that it is sometimes beneficial to set aside critical thinking while performing creative thinking -- even while playing chess. The daring sacrifice often begins with thinking crazy; examining lines of play which 'critical thinking' would never even see.
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I recommend you read the Horatio Hornblower series. First and foremost because they're fantastic books; but second, they show that this concept is incorrect. Daring is often a RESULT of critical thinking. Sometimes an action must be taken, despite the risks, and part of critical thinking is evaluatinig those risks and rewards.
 
Dinwar said:
I disagree. Chess has been around for hundreds, if not thousands, of years--we've had ample time to figure out all the potential moves.
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Heh. As I suspected, it's clear that you have no idea just how many potential moves we're talking about.

Perhaps I'm not getting my point across....Upper-level chess isn't played move-by-move; there are standard suites of moves, standard gambits or tactics, that each player will use.
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There are standard openings, to be sure, and various lines within each of them, often named for some well known player, but play is generally "out of the books" after maybe twenty or so moves. Beyond that, the odds against any given game ever being repeated move-for-move increase exponentially with each additional move.

Daring is often a RESULT of critical thinking.
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I won't disagree that the daring choice is sometimes the most logical choice -- or even that the craziest choice is sometimes the most logical choice. I'm just not sure what applicability that has for teaching critical thinking to children. If daring and crazy is the epitome of critical thinking, my observation is that most of them hardly need any teaching at all.
 
Chess is fantastic for teaching critical thinking. Just look how well it worked out for Bobby Fischer.
 
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