[hinkley]

I’ve known this guy off and on for years. When we first met 15+ years he was slightly better at Go than me, which was middling amateur. All the Go books say if you want to be a pro you have to start as a child.

But he studied, and studied, and last I knew he was 3 dan, which is about the point you can entertain the idea of becoming a pro (if I just worked harder).

Kids have a lot more free time to sink into a singular concern. Warnings about how something are out of the reach of adults aren’t actually hard rules, they’re just really good rules of thumb. But if you can make the time, it’s not impossible.

I don’t think chess is any different there. Small improvements may set reasonable expectations, but there are people who can blow right past them.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

You're right I think. Most adults really don't improve at chess very often. They do when it's a new hobby, but then they plateau. And it's not that they couldn't improve further, it's just that they're not able or willing to do the things necessary, which is usually a lot of exercise and study. It's just a hobby for most people at the end of the day, and they'd rather spend an hour at the club discussing and blitzing some silly openings with friends than spend an hour solving puzzles or studying endgames. We still all carry the illusion of some prospect of improvement, that's the human condition. But most people don't take it very seriously and are more in it for social reasons.

[hinkley]

It clearly aggravated some of the people at the Go club that I was not improving past hobbyist. But the thing I didn’t share with them is that all through my childhood, I would try new things and if I wasn’t instantly mediocre or better at it I would decide this was no fun and drop it. If you are good at enough things you can fill your weeks with activities and ignore the things you aren’t good at.

Being bad at Go and still playing anyway was an exercise in personal growth.

[nebulous1]

> but there are people who can blow right past them

Ultimately, I think this is what's often downplayed in these conversations. Just because your friend was able to excel at Go in those 15 years, doesn't imply that any other specific person would be able to do the same, even with the same study. You'll find many people who attempted this but simply couldn't get past a lower plateau.

So, when you say "if you can make the time, it’s not impossible", I'm not sure that that's true. My suspicion would be that for a significant portion of the population, it would in fact be literally impossible. (edit: I was reading a different thread where somebody was asking about becoming a FIDE CM, that's what I was referencing here as being impossible for many, I don't know anything about Go ranks).

[hinkley]

I’ve known too many people who get into their own heads about certain topics. They lock up and become impervious to new information.

There are certainly people who need new genes. And there are people who need a new teacher. But boy oh boy are there a lot of people who would get better at difficult tasks if they got therapy.

[pmontra]

A friend of mine devised an empirical rule to predict the highest Go ranking that a player will reach: the ranking after the first 4 years of play plus 4.

You can check that on https://europeangodatabase.eu/EGD/ and pick some players at random.

They have a nice date/rank graph and all those graphs start with an almost vertical growth which slows down and flattens. Some players play less often and get weaker but that's not the point.

I have no idea if it applies to chess too, possibly with different parameters, but why not? They are both games played with the brain by humans.

[prometheus76]

I think this might be related to the pareto distribution of productivity in my line of work (steel fabrication). Our most productive employees are literally 10 times more productive than the least productive. And it's always the same people at the top of the list, and always the same people at the bottom. If you pair them together, the productive employee loses 10-20% of productivity while they're together, and the less productive employee improves by 5-10%, but as soon as you separate them, they go back to where they were before.

[pmontra]

I'm curious about this.

One question is what happens if you pair two of the top performers or two of the bottom ones? My prediction is that nothing changes.

The second one is related to the point of my comment. Can you build a graph date/performance? That could show curves similar to the ones of the go players and show how long it takes to flatten the curve.

[prometheus76]

If you pair two top performers, they get slowed down by 10-20% because they each have their own way of approaching the work, and there's usually conflict as they are each convinced of their own way. They work even faster, however, if you put them next to each other, but working separately. They watch each other and start tacitly competing. You'll get another 10% out of them generally.

As for pairing the two lowest producers, they'll sink even more as they are confused by what the other person is doing and it slows them down.

Changing someone's level of productivity is essentially untrainable in my experience. It's not a training issue. The people at the bottom know how to do the work, but any attempt to show them a more efficient way of doing it is overwhelming and confusing to them, and they shut down.

[me_me_me]

They say you need to start as a kid for 2 main reasons, one as you mentioned time. Second is survivor bais. There are way more kids that suck as chess/whatever and stop playing than prodigies on path to become grandmasters.