Scrabble and the Nature of Expertise (2015)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/winning-scrabble-and-the-nature-of-expertise/

by sergeant3 • 2 years ago

52 10 2 years ago

I was going to write a "Previously on Hacker News" comment, but no one commented the one time this was posted before ...

password4321• 2 years ago

There was a small Scrabble-related discussion recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40391290 Scrabble, Anonymous

smitty1e2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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?

smitty1e2• 2 years ago

Correcting well-understood genetic issues isn't an ethical stretch.

Taking performance past natural, OTOH...

zem• 2 years ago

relevant sff short: https://www.abelard.org/asimov.php

CrazyStat• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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/).

Scrabble and the Nature of Expertise (2015)

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