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>The first enables self knowledge, molds character, and helps develop a mental model transferable to other pursuits;

That's what quickly got me out of chess, when it was me playing with my brother as a kid it was about thinking really hard and trying to explore as many options as I could - it was really about who can think faster and outsmarting eachother since we only knew the rules.

When I decided to look into chess I found out it was about learning openings, recognising patterns, traps, etc. I didn't feel any smarter learning those, I just learned more about chess. You can draw up silly strategic methapores with any activity, but chess does seem to have that Sun Tzu status.

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I kindly disagree. It may appear that chess is a memoization game, but when or if you want to become a master of the game , you'll notice that rote learning will not take you there.

You do need to understand phases of the game, set up strategy, estimate your position, know when to attack or to defend, and have confidence in your technique.

Mind you, that is only for the plain master title (FIDE or even a national master). Grandmasters are a whole new level in comparison, aliens.

But this wasn't my critique. Chess strategy is again chess specific, the things that translate are going to be superficial. You can draw parallels between many domains, like there are phases, strategy and coordination in many competitive online games, and I'd argue that the cooperative nature translates better to most real world than chess.

Chess has this poetic image of playing around with kings, queens and pawns that lets artist paint grandiose metaphors about real world, but at the end of the day spending a bunch of time on chess is going to make you good at chess, doubt it will do much better than any other similar hobby for transferable skills.

Kasparov wrote a book called „How Live Imitates Chess“ that tries to prove you wrong.

Agreed. Taleb coined this the “ludic fallacy”:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy

“… the focus on those pure, well-defined, and easily discernible objects like triangles, or more social notions like friendship or love, at the cost of ignoring those objects of seemingly messier and less tractable structures.”

Any hobby falls to the same criticism.

Which is exactly my point, chess is just another game but it has this social status where it's a sign of intelligence or whatnot. The whole thread is in response to OP making such claims.

Learning doesn't make you smart, but it can makes you wiser.

but studying hard topics can teach you thinking tactics for analyzing problems and looking for thr big picture.

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