Judges sentence youth offenders to chess, with promising results | Hacker News Reader

Judges sentence youth offenders to chess, with promising results

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174 pointsokket79 comments

> In life, like chess, every move has a consequence.

This is all pretty hyperbolic post-hoc reasoning.

My guess is that against the alternative of juveniles just sitting in a cell and being neglected any program that stimulates them, invests time and effort into them, and gets them passionate is going to have promising results.

disclaimer: I think this is a great result, and should be promoted but the pseudo-scientific explanations just get to me...

How is making an analogy for action and consequence is hyperbolic post-hoc reasoning?

ramblerman interprets "In life, like chess, every move has a consequence" to mean "The reason this program is effective is it teaches offenders that moves have consequences" and considers that a post-hoc explanation.

I work in an industry which encourages ADD. Chess is one of the ways I maintain my attention span. My game tells me when I’m tired, stressed, inattentive or missing forests for trees.

Me too. I notice a distinct drop in my tactic exercises when I'm underslept.

Not sure what that has to do with my initial point though.

Some times people just like to say things that add to the conversation without driving someone else's point. It's not a problem.

Agree on the limits of post-hoc reasoning.

In my limited experience, these kids may reacting positively not due to anything specific about chess or the program, rather to the fact that people seem to care about their development and options. Plus the fact they are being put through a non-antagonistic and less dangerous program than juvie.

I also think it's a great idea.

In the same vein, it's unfortunately pretty common for pilot programs like this to be successful, in part because there's lots of attention and focus on success. Then you scale it up and the good results evaporate.

Agree. Who do you get to do the pilot program for this sort of thing? The person who really has a passion for chess and believes that everyone can learn and even excel at it OR the person who's just trying to avoid going home where they have their own problems they are trying to avoid.

Also, which person do you imagine having a good effect on troubled youth.

And finally which person do you imagine they'll get when they mainline the program.

Particularly true if your "scaling up" assumes you can reduce costs at the same time (other than economies of scale).

Besides, if we skip science, the tetris analogy seems way more accurate than chess.

To bring it full circle...

any program that stimulates them, invests time and effort into them, and gets them passionate is going to result in philosophical statements like "everything I know about life, I learned playing rugby" or "In life, like chess, every move has a consequence."

Yes, if this had backfired I wonder if people would talk about how chess "Makes you see everything in black and white. You win or lose, or rarely draw. There is no team work!"

It would be interesting to know if chess is more effective than, say, reading or making movies. There is something intellectual about it.

I imagine there's something beneficial in the fact that it's competitive, and therefore non-solitary. You're forced to interact with your opponent.

Depends on the definition of interaction. In professional chess you aren't allowed to interact with opponent (talk etc) at all. All you do is greet, make moves, record them and offer draw, resign or accept resignation. You can have some interaction later.

It's not that every move has a consequence, it's that chess requires you to think about the long-term ramifications of each move. Petty criminals often become so because they lack the capacity for such long-term thinking ability, or so goes the popular psychological theory, in which case chess may be an easy way to develop it.

Yea I think that's spot on, at least the long-term thinking in chess part. I think that thinking about future actions is more often involved in chess than soccer or many other activities. In soccer the players on the board change positions too quickly to think very far ahead.

That's a huge leap. Impulse control is an emotional/subconscious behavior, not a failure of planning. People with poor impulse control (most "stupid" criminals), can make plans but fail to execute them. Similar goes for ADD (which affects criminals and non-criminals).

Reminds me of the NBA ads claiming life and basketball are "so similar".

These creative sentences are great when they work, but are there any checks and balances on this? What if a judge thinks religious studies are the best way to reform a child? Are they obligated to participate, or is it an option for the kid to go to juvenile hall instead?

> > In life, like chess, every move has a consequence.

> This is all pretty hyperbolic post-hoc reasoning.

Sure, but OTOH it is literally true.

I’ve been exploring the idea of an alt-prison startup.

I imagine things like nature, skills, community, art, trauma healing, etc. could all be a big part of it.

I've thought about these ideas, as well.

One concern I've had to add to my thinking: That non-incarcerated people also have access to these things. Nature, and all the rest. And simply time to seek them out and take advantage of them.

We shouldn't get to the point, where incarceration is the means by which such things become accessible.

Making sure they're accessible, outside of incarceration, might help to prevent incarceration in the first place.

I'm all for rehabilitation. Just, it should start before things come to law-breaking. In other words, focus on quality of life as a primary "deterrent".

Quality of environment seems a fundamental part of that.

I agree with this of course.

I’d want our education system to be modeled after these ideas as well.

Ironically, many schools look and function a lot like prisons.

It’s been said the way a society treats it’s prisoners is a bellweather of its health.

Perhaps by bringing cutting edge practices to prison we can lift the entire society.

When I was a teenager (in the 90s) I was a chess teacher/coach. I won't quote cliches and metaphors which I believe are trite and gloss over the point.

While we had a large group of behaved kids, some parents would send their troublesome children to learn chess as a way to socialize in a healthy intellectual environment with a strong value and ethics system. As a coach it was very difficult, especially since I was socially awkward and troubled myself as a teen. We wouldn't just play chess though - which can get very competitive and one sided. We also enjoyed team activities like the chess variants bughouse and kriegspiel, and we'd get outside and play soccer and kickball too - I found those to be the most helpful (I love those two variants I mentioned much more than chess).

In short, the rewards were real and long-lasting. Chess helped turn me around personally, and gave me an exposure for responsibility (and I fucked up a couple times but that's part of learning from mistakes in life). I know many of the children in our club went on to have responsible and successful lives, and while it wasn't really our goal (we were just playing games!), it makes me happy that it was a side effect.

In Australia, they have (or were) using flying lessons to try and rehabilitate drug addicts [1]. Apparently the idea was to stall the plane and have the patients recover from the stall, as a way of teaching them about taking control of their own life. I don't know what the long term results are, and it's part of a longer term rehab program so it would be hard to narrow it down specifically.

Regardless, it's an interesting approach. It's good to see that authorities are realising that the traditional approaches to addiction and criminal rehabilitiation are ineffective and trying other options.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-australia-43369891/austral...

I can imagine the board meeting where they were discussing an alternative "high" they could offer the drug addicts.

I've noticed people often object to these types of schemes because they see them as rewarding people for bad behaviour.

I'm not usually one of those people (If it works, it works, right?). But I feel like giving out flying lessons (a lifelong and unaffordable goal for many people) would be a pretty tough idea to sell to the tax paying public.

Add it to the long list of shit taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for, except prison. Incarceration costs $70-120k/pp/year. Keeping someone in custody for 10-20 years vs paying to learn a trade seems no nsensical. But that’s what the voters and politicians want.

The counter argument would be we should spend less on prisons, not more on other stuff. People who struggle to make ends meet within the confines of social norms and laws would say lock them up six to a cell and feed them rice and beans.

Being receptive to such arguments is the purpose of keeping people in poverty, which is otherwise completely optional in today's world.

This argument is deeply flawed, since moving people into prisons is just throwing them away from your view. Many people are unjustly convicted and the idea of taking even more rights away from the incarcerated is barbaric and detrimental to our society. Prisons are micro-totalitarian regimes with abuse and violence as a part of every-day life. We should do everything we can do to reduce the number of people in prison and allow them to lead healthy and productive lives.

I'm inclined to agree. I think if we can't stop a person from continually hurting others, like a serial killer, then yea we should probably put him/her/etc. somewhere safe. But other then that (and I am sure a few other cases) this whole locking people up thing seems inhumane. I don't advocate theft, but I don't think people should be kept in cages for it. After all we were born with nothing but our bodies to start with. Also one shouldn't be prosecuted for what they put in their own body. It's pretty odd that folks will bust down my door and lock me up for posession of heroin, but the doctor can deal it all day down the street.

Do you think that people who struggle to make ends meet think that prisoners have a better deal than themselves?

It is inherently expensive to lock people up. It costs food, room, board, building maintenance, and labor (in the form of guards), all of it 24/7. None of this is cheap.

It's also unconstitutional to lock up people inhumanely.

People who advocate for inhumane confinment should be ignored.

Yes, just torture them a little bit. Then when they eventually serve their term and are let free (Amendment 8) we'll wonder how they ended up more violent and mentally broken. And when they recede we'll double down on the violence.

Drug addiction is a disease, not a "bad behavior"

I agree completely, but not everyone does. Either way, my point still stands. I think it'd be just as much of a tough sell if people with (for example) depression were being given free flying lessons.

People have a hard-wired need to feel that things are "fair". I think we'd probably all get along a lot better as a species if we could drop that notion and concentrate on what A) works and B) is cost effective.

Having stalled aircraft many times, I don't see how this would be linked. Un-stalling is the easiest thing in the world (assuming you aren't close to the ground). Doing it perfectly to military standards takes practice, but simple recovery is a nothing task. Either way, it is done and over in seconds. It's a little scary if you haven't done it before, but after the first time it's nothing. Recovery from drug addiction takes years, requiring many thousands of difficult decisions.

If you've possibly never even been in a plane before, let alone flown one, it would be a pretty wild experience.

It's a single tool in a box of tools towards recovery. I don't think it was meant to be the adrenaline rush that's meant to be helpful, but rather giving them an experience to hold on to, and to try and teach them to take control of their destiny. At least that's what the video says.

I'm also skeptical as to its benefits. But anything is better than locking addicts in a box and expecting them to be magically cured. In my experience, it's a lack of support networks and associating with the wrong people that keeps most people locked in a cycle of crime, addiction, and poverty. There are a lot of people who are "rehabilitated" and full of optimism, but then they go back home, to the same toxic environment and fall back into the same cycle.

Slightly off topic but I would like to mention that if you play chess online, the best one is lichess.org. It is free and opensource: https://github.com/ornicar/lila.

I am unaffiliated but really like lichess.

Quite serendipitously you reminded me that lichess.org exists. Thank you for that.

They are indeed a great example of an OSS success. Their website is great, apps run smoothly, great community and a very active founder - he insists on the project being open and adfree forever, supported by patrons: https://lichess.org/patron

I'm also unaffiliated, just a user.

Can also recommend lichess. Been playing there for a couple years now. They're a registered non-profit, and none of the features are hidden if you choose not to donate.

And written in mithril.js, no less! :)

Season 1, episode 3 of "The Wire" has a pretty inciteful scene featuring Chess as a metaphor for the criminal life ("Pawns get capped early."):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztc7o0NzFrE

As much as I love the Wire, it should have mentioned that collectively pawns are the most powerful. A good pawn structure controls the center and the game.

... if they don't get capped early. In a less-positional game, the players are going to capture pawns to build an edge, not attack the queen immediately.

The objective is to attack the king, not the queen.

I’d be interested to see its effectiveness vs any other activity involving high quality time with intelligent, motivated, caring adults.

Chess limits the blame game. You lost because you didn't think, son. Chess encapsulates an attitude that it starts and ends with yourself.

I do wonder, what, exactly they mean by non-violent crimes. It's early in the morning and my brain isn't quite up to snuff yet, but all I can think of are vandalism, copyright violation, and stealing...?

Most property crimes, such as theft, embezzlement, receipt of stolen goods, vandalism, and arson of personal property

Fraud, tax crimes, other forms of white collar crime

Drug and alcohol-related crimes

Prostitution

Racketeering and gambling

Bribery

From: https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/non-violent-v...

I don't think they're locking kids up in juvie for tax evasion...

Technically children do have to pay taxes.

Simply "not paying" taxes gets you a bill, not jail time. It's hard work to do the kind of evasion that gets jail time.

It would include drug crimes as well. I think you can take the words at face value (with an implied 'physically' modifying 'violent'), except that crimes involving only the threat of violence may count as violent crimes.

"Every move has consequences" - That is absolutely brilliant! Is there any better way to explain such an abstract life concept to kids who can't see the consequences of whatever they do?

At the wake of all these concerns around video games, I am gonna risk it still and say Video Games.

It teaches a lot about consequences. Perhaps not on par with chess, because, most popular games demands much less exercise in deliberation and strategic(/critical?) thinking.

What are the consequences? Respawning?

Losing the game, you might get a few chance to respawn, but most games have some sort of scoring system. It is not much different than a game of Chess, in many ways.

With chess at least you have to restart from the beginning, like starting your life over I guess, making you rethink your strategy. With video games you typically regain health and restart from the last save...

There are many games where death is permanent. It seems to be the default for roguelikes. Unfortunately the games of this kind are harder the longer you can play them, which means that the best ones are almost impossible to beat. That reminds me to try my hand at nethack again...

Not all video games are like that, what does it matter if the "typical" video game is like that?

> Not all video games are like that, what does it matter if the "typical" video game is like that?

I guess because the comment was talking about "most popular video games"?

In the middle ages, backgammon was more popular than chess as it was seen as a closer to real life than chess. In backgammon, you have the concept of luck playing a role too. The meta lesson is: Luck can play a big role, but you still need a strategy.

Life isn't quite as nondeterministic as backgammon!!

It depends on the game. They could play Civilization which gives someone an intro to strategy, history, politics and science all in a friendly looking package, and when you lose you have to start over from the ancient era.

Is Civilization different from, say, Age of Empires in this respect? Because in AoE you keep your card deck etc. and merely restart the battle, which still puts you at an advantage compared to when you started off.

Yes, there's no carryover between games of Civilization. Then again, I'm pretty sure the card deck you're referring to only exists in AoE 3 which makes it pretty unique in the genre. Almost every other RTS has you start from scratch each match.

Haha, yeah, I was referring to AoE3, since I haven't played the others. Good to know!

Then you better save first.

Not just direct consequences, but indirect consequences such as opportunity cost.

Yes you took that pawn, but now your knight is in a vulnerable position... maybe there was a better play.

I know a few "problematic" kids, from slackers to convicted violent robbers, and none of them deny the existence of consequences. What I see is overconfidence in their ability to predict them, or a fatalism about their lack of real options.

I can see chess helping with some aspects of their mental health (training calm logical thinking, coping with losing), but I don't think it actually teaches anything about consequences.

X-COM 2 has the same effect.

The great thing about chess is that it does not discriminate. A child can beat an adult, poor can beat rich, uneducated can beat educated, etc..

When I played as a kid, it gave me a lot of confidence because I could beat a grown adult in a game of intellect. This had a huge impact on my life.

I wonder if Go is a better game, it is quite easy to pick up (surround opponents with different colour) but also very long to play.

Chess will teach the youth to be better strategists, to better evade the authorities when they become adult offenders.

I bet they cheat. :)

Seriously, it seems like it would encourage discipline, a good thing.

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