Prison chess clubs helping rehabilitate inmates
bbc.com
bbc.com
He said he learned all of his chess in prison and was really excited to happen to find other people playing.
He also had no idea how to use a chess clock, I guess they didn't have those in prison.
Strikes me as an exceptionally good use of taxpayer money. Prisons suck at rehabilitating people and thus just make things worse in the long run when you release the people. Anything you can do to blunt that negative effect is a win.
edit: edited for a rough typo
[0]: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/80699/8-prison-animal-pr...
The goal of prisons is to make the rest of society safer and a better environment so it is in our interest that they don't reoffend or don't learn how to be better criminals in prison. Ultimately that is also a food investment, because prisons cost money and people in prison are not contributing to society in good way. Everybody that does not return is money safed and improves the social climate. So investing at least a bit in order to make them better people is a no brainer.
But sadly there are many who still share the delusion that "tougher punishment will show them" and that "they will think twice if the punishment is harder". This is irrational and there is the data to show it.
I'd rather have the rare hardcore criminal treated to lightly than many troubled people that could be rehabilitated becoming more hardened criminals. Not because I am a good samatarian, but purely out of self interest.
I'm not involved in the system personally, but I do remember someone bringing up this sentiment in another thread, and a person responding with some stats showing that prison rehabilitation programs are way more effective than the average person thinks. There are some great people working in the sector that genuinely prevent criminals from returning to their old ways.
I guess it's just one of topics (like homelessness or immigration) where a lot of people have strong, differing opinions but reality says one thing clearly.
In America it is very difficult for ex convicts to get work, to support themselves or family. It can easily lead into the exact same pressures that caused the crime in the first place.
I also think most people wouldn't be super against rehabilitation if we had some way to know which offenders are genuinely beyond help. The people who truly will always harm others if they are free to.
On other sports like football (soccer) there were prison teams however participating in the normal league system. With the little difference that they only had home matches. It was said, while I never checked, it was the fairest team by amount of yellow/red cards.
Although its a double edged sword. Untimed chess games tend to leak for me even after the game is over. I keep thinking about them long after.
Classical chess is probably the last analogue activity that completely sucks me in.
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/private-prisons-in...
Overall, it's about 8%, but if you look at per-state numbers, it is kind of a bimodal distribution. Looking at some of the more populous states, California has 0%,Florida has 15%, Tennessee has 35%. The trend in states with larger populations in private prisons is that it is also increasing, but there are exceptions (Texas) and you should look at the numbers yourself.
But the checkers players always ranked way under the chess players, no matter how well they did in competition. There were usually 3 to 4 per cell and they were not allowed to look the Go or chess players in the eye.
Checkers players died on the average 14% more often than chess or Go players.
</kidding>
I can't remember the name, but it's one of the CoreCivic ones.
His unfortunate childhood lead him into severe alcoholism despite being a promising boxer. He ended up living a rough life on the streets of London, moving in and out of prison.
On one of his stints inside he was taught chess and it turned his life around.
It's pretty raw but a good book and worth a read IMHO.
There's also a documentary about John Healy called Barbaric Genius[2], which I think is on Netflix and other streaming services.
With time, prisoners who gain a lot of skill could contribute to open source projects or create entirely new libraries and use their contributions as a way to reduce their prison sentences.
I can imagine a custom Linux based OS designed to run on these prison computers, that could have special features that allow prisoners to see how much prison time they have remaining and run processes based on what access levels and security requirements they have attributed to them. And of course all communication on this OS would be surveilled by some centralized security system.
Prisoners to programmers: How Take2’s graduates are faring in the tech sector https://thespinoff.co.nz/business/18-10-2022/prisoners-to-pr...
Slightly different example but as far as a constructive approach to incarceration goes schemes like this will always be a net positive. Far cheaper than locking people up.
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/aug/17/prisons-c...
The stupidest part is that the """"justice"""" system never trained him or let him learn to drive. So every time he gets out he has to go to impoverished city centers where he meets right back up with the groups that eventually get him back in prison.
He could've made a fine career of being a truck driver if America wasn't so stupid.
These types of articles are frustrating because it helps the public feel good about themselves when they have a decades long disaster rolling around with no change.
Assuming that you can find a car to drive, you will take a lap around the block to demonstrate that you can steer, stop and maybe parallel park.
The barrier to entry is pretty low.
If only the US was smaller...
That's a lot for an ex-convict.
I don’t know much about prison/jail but I do agree it should focus on re-habilitation they should have systems to help you study and get a drivers license while in there for example.
I understand if you have offline computers. I understand if the computer needs to be behind a plexiglass wall and the mouse and keyboard need to be chained down. But quickly these will pay for themselves. Data Entry pays significantly more, I imagine there are plenty of white collar criminals with tech skills that could make $30-$100/hr.
Even if you only let the inmate keep 20%, the inmate is getting skills, money, the system is getting extra money, the company getting the data entry is getting cheap labor.
I can't see too many downsides other than the initial set up cost. Pretty sure the right side of the aisle will see the $$$ and approve. The left side should also see the $, but also know how humane and potentially rehabilitating.
The inmate is also getting dignity and practice at regular life, which might convert a % of them to non-criminal life (I forgot the word for it).
Still doesn't mean taking 80% of the wages of prison laborers is anything but exploitative.
Although, I find the idea interesting that we could solve a supply issue in a field by training our prison population. Too bad the American Medical Association would never allow competition :P
EDIT: Allowing prisons to profit from the labor of prisoners creates a perverse incentive for the companies running prisons to keep prisons full. Maybe it works in places where prisons aren't run for profit.
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
There's a film on it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film)
The fact that imprisoning people costs a lot of money is one of the few things keeping the U.S. prison population in check. That's not a problem that needs solving.
In Germany prisons are to large parts "self sustaining" thus inmates do the cooking, washing, carpenter work, metalworks, car mechanics works, ... including proper apprenticeships in different fields compliant with Germany's apprenticeship system.
Some prisoners also work on service for external customers, one can even buy products directly from jail: https://jva-shop.de/
However pay is very low, way below minimum wage and different cost the state charges prisoners is directly deduced and while in jail the only place they can spend the money on is the shop inside, for cigarettes, sweets, TV sets (requires special permission), ... while that shop owner charges prices based on his monoply ...
But the general idea of German jail system is that after jail inmates should have a chance to find a job with some education etc.
Often failing for different reasons, though.
(I do believe that rehabilitation, or more accurately in the case of people who never were instilled with a moral compass, "habilitation", is often possible and always desirable, but I don't think the system itself can or should be entrusted with that responsibility. It should just make the conditions for habilitation possible, and then outside society can intervene as it will.)
I agree. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. There is still legitimate debate on how much role society has to play in making sure it's as nice as possible for the horse to get to water.
Obviously in GP's uncle's case an injustice was done to him (by his father, it sounds like), but it is still up to him as an adult to become a productive member of society. I like the way some put it, when talking about people from troubled backgrounds (whether from abusive parents, mental issues, what have you): it wasn't your fault, but it's still your responsibility to deal with it, once you are an adult.
Every policy choice has an opportunity cost and sets up an incentive. If we don't do something, that resource gets used elsewhere; if we make the imprisoned experience very nice and comfortable, it takes away a disincentive for committing crime. So you can never look at anything in a vacuum.
I'm sure you've had an experience where you had a friend or relative in hard circumstances who you kept on trying to help, but they seemingly fell on their same bad habits over and over again, leading you to be exhausted and unable to manage your own life.
And yet the scandinavian justice system is much nicer to their prisoners compared to the american one, yet they have much lower rates of re-offenders. Why does this seemingly work for them? Why don't they have to treat their prisoners as bad as the US does to get a better outcome?
> So you can never look at anything in a vacuum.
But that's what you're doing. You're looking at something like "the prison experience is bad", and you decide that if it's improved, you take away disincentives for committing crime. But you don't consider the positive effect on rehabilitation and everything else. That's why I said: why don't we look at the effect of policies? You are randomly choosing aspects to focus on, because they support your thesis. I'm saying: let's throw away our theses and just accept what the data tells us.
> I'm sure you've had an experience where you had a friend or relative in hard circumstances who you kept on trying to help, but they seemingly fell on their same bad habits over and over again, leading you to be exhausted and unable to manage your own life.
Maybe the right thing to do isn't to ignore them, but to get them help that actually helps them? In your described situation I am not the right person to try and help them, but I can help them get there with much lower personal efforts.
> Why does this seemingly work for them?
Scandinavian countries are for the most part ethnically homogeneous with a monarchy and a state religion, all things that improve social cohesion. (The one Scandinavian country that became markedly less ethnically homogeneous recently is struggling with an unprecedented rise in violent crime.) America is just about the polar opposite of that, and recently so much more so -- now it's considered racist to ask an immigrant to assimilate themselves to the mainstream culture, for example.
And there are legal systems that go the other way to achieve the same result of low rates of crime and reoffense; countries like Saudi Arabia or the UAE treat criminals extremely harshly and have some of the lowest crime rates in the world. Singapore puts drug traffickers to death and have opiate abuse rates of 30 per 100k vs. 600 in the US.
America, for better or for worse, is a vast land with a diverse population and constitutionally guaranteed personal liberties; that is to say, it's set up in such a way that deterrence is a big part of the justice system. In less diverse countries with more social cohesion, a big chunk of that deterrence comes from social pressure of people around you, who look like you and with whom you share a common cultural heritage. In America, where the people around you have little say in your behavior (and increasingly less so), it's a part of the justice system's job to be menacing.
> let's throw away our theses and just accept what the data tells us
What the data tells about Scandinavia is not likely to work in America for the reasons above. And let me ask you a question: a third of all shoplifting arrests in NYC, a city of 8.5 million people, were from just 327 people, who were collectively arrested over 6000 times[0]. How will you rehabilitate those 327 people, given that you don't have unlimited resources and you have a duty to keep them from harming other innocent, law-abiding people? Saudi Arabia would probably cut their hands off and be done with it. Norway might commit them to a lengthy term at a psychiatric facility on the taxpayer's dime. Neither is an option in the US.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arre...
If you don't, please take a second to reflect why you're pointing at this specific difference.
1. The 1954 "Toward an Understanding of Juvenile Delinquency" by Lander, which showed that the rate of "delinquency" rose for both whites and blacks as the ratio between the two reached 50%, and proportionally fell in areas where either whites or blacks held the majority.
2. The 1982 "Population Heterogeneity and the Sociogenesis of Homicide" by Hansmann and Quigley, which recognizes that though the issue is complex, their findings support the the idea that population heterogeneity is a "significant causal factor in homicide".
And of course, unacademically off the top of your head, it's likely that the lowest-crime places you can think of are generally ethnically homogeneous.
> If you don't, please take a second to reflect why you're pointing at this specific difference.
Hey, I'm not the one who held up Scandinavia (>90% white) as a model. I myself am neither white nor black and immigrated to the US, where I would much rather prefer to live, warts and all, than in Scandinavia.
> Hey, I'm not the one who held up Scandinavia (>90% white) as a model.
There you go again...
If you decide that a condition for access from outsiders is to rehabilitate people (with whatever metrics you can come up) then you have just privatised the job of rehabilitation... For what gain? Society as a whole would benefit if prisoners are rehabilitated and find that criminality is not worth it, isn't the job of the State the betterment of society? Why should we create convoluted ways to privatise that?
We may have fundamentally opposing ideological views here, but I see what you're asking. I would actually say that the job of Society is the betterment of the state. Ultimately it is people in society that create and man their bureaucracies; the government is infused with the skills and morals of the people that form it, and will not exceed their abilities.
I don't think that you could ever form a wing of a government that was capable of rehabilitating people without that wing being fully made up of very intelligent people with good intentions; and if you were able to assemble that group of people, they'd do a better job as a private endeavor (maybe not for profit, perhaps as a non-profit that only pays their salaries, etc.) I do think you could make a form of a government that was capable of keeping prisons far safer than they are now, as that's a much more discrete and amoral task that ensuring that convicted citizens (often low-IQ, often sociopathic, often abused, often with PTSD) are rehabilitated.
Atleast in more sane countries, the corrections officers and prisons act as a form of community. A safe reprieve from the brutality of life, for one to be able to emulate a "normal" life, and "normal" interactions, and "normal" behavior. The brutality and isolation of an American prison only emulates a lawless society. The moral compass imparted within is simply might makes right. It takes Olympian acts of mental gymnastics to believe one is wholly responsible for one's own moral compass -- or that anyone but the most deluded can reject the reality they find themselves in, cast off all practical notions of operating oneself, and commit to abstract ideals. The only people who can do that are people who are so detached from any feedback loop on their survival, that it doesn't matter what they believe -- they have enough money and support that any insanity will never jeopardize them.
Crimes and morals are relative to the environments people find themselves in. Stuffing the spiritually ill into a crude box of suffering is on par with lobotomizing the "fussy and ill-tempered" housewives of the last century.
You and I agree that the current method of imprisoning criminals teaches them to be worse, and must change. However, I think you are either ignoring or not believing the fact that many people "in their community" are already monsters. (A "monster" in this case is someone who knowingly and purposefully spreads suffering, either for their own benefit or for fun.)
The behavioral patterns and beliefs that cause crimes that we jail for--duelling, honor killing, robbery, sexual aggression, petty theft, intimidation, etc.--are first learned from the families, friends, and neighbors that one grows up around. Removing the children of mafiosos from their environment isn't going to contribute to their learning of the culture of the Mafia any more than removing the children of rich WASPs would contribute to their learning of the stereotypically entitled behaviors and views on the lower classes. (It is a popular belief among progressives that it's the System in the first place that teaches them these behaviors, but this is a view that robs people of their agency. It implies that violence would be least in a more anarchist-adjacent society, when in fact the historical view shows that inter-group violence is staggeringly high in places with less strong governments.)
Apart from this, I don't think we disagree on the problem with modern prisons. My primary view of prison reform is that prison ought to be safe. We should, as a civilized society, guarantee people we imprison that when they are forcibly remanded under the care of the Department of Justice, they are no longer in danger from their fellow citizens, and answer only to their captors.
"Monsters," in my view, are those that are not and cannot ever be part of any cohesive human unit -- rather than those who cannot conform to a "global" moral or value system. The WASPs, mafiosos, inbred and insane aristocrats, mob-men, etc. are not what I consider monsters. They live and operate within a community. They almost always spread suffering, pain, violence, and other acts of villainy -- but that is an inescapable part of humanity. Locking them up away from the rest will not solve any long-term problems, aside from the career outlooks of politicians, district attorneys, and their ilk.
American Indians and other "primitive" tribes of people are another example (related to groups of people without strong government). All the war, bloodshed, acts of heinous despicably they commit against one another, is not something that can be whisked away by more subjugation. Brutality and suffering is a part of us. To think ourselves as civilized because we repress those urges into complete subjugation is foolhardy. Without active sublimation of these parts into socially-affirming activities, they will spill-over into other parts. We will not become "monsters," but we will do monstrous deeds unknowingly, within the comfort of our delusion of domestication.
Perhaps I lack the ability to "narrow in" on a certain issue. I miss the "trees for the forest," which makes it impossible for me to see a way to untangle this "ball of yarn" without methodically understanding the tangle of all the collective "strings". And for that, I do think your views are much more practical and applicable in the present.
> To think ourselves as civilized because we repress those urges into complete subjugation is foolhardy.
Given your belief about the existence of inherent brutality in humanity (which I agree with) is a "civilized person" actually an achievable goal? I have gone this far believing that the definition of a "civilized" person is some with normal, inherent uncivilized urges that effectively controls ("subjugates") those urges enough to create civilization. (Peace and prosperity via collaboration and material surplus.)
Also, if exile to prison is not actually solving any long-term problems, what do you think is a possibile course of action that does address long-term problems?
It's one thing when someone has life in prison without the possibility of parole, but if a man is eventually going to be let out, what good does it really do to prevent him from being able to function on the outside? Basically nothing, as far as I can tell. He is destined to be destitute and possibly go back to a life of criminality.
People don't want money and resources to go towards training "violent murderers who didn't do anything to deserve what they're getting", but then what else do you expect other than that you're deferring the criminality to a later date? The odds are not in your favor that the prisoner be reformed by the time he gets out. Reforming criminals, and I mean actual reformation and not the horseshit we consider reformation today, is a cost society should bear for its own good so that prison actually means something. Why let prisoners out when they are likely destined to go right back to prison?
From whose perspective?
Part of the problem is that some powerful groups are incentived to keep people coming back to prison. Private prisons reap profits, politicians get an easy way to drive fear in their constituents, telcos can charge an arm and a leg for phone calls, commissaries clean up by charging exorbitant prices for toothpaste and ramen, etc.
Until we start connecting positive outcomes for those groups to positive outcomes for the prisoners, it'll always be an uphill battle.
As Upton Sinclair used to say, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
But that isn't what people refer to, and not the point I made. The common misconception is that private prisons themselves are the issues. Sure, the ancillaries are terrible, but relatively small by comparison. Sure, the government isn't providing those services, so private companies stepped in and monopolized. Regardless, they are providing a service for money. Not as shocking and horrible as it's made out to be.
Too many people rob / mug others and get arrested dozens of times only to be back on the street quickly. A single person can traumatize hundreds.
Even this part is a failure. Prisoners can and do commit crimes that victimize other prisoners, guards, and sometimes the outside public.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Is it any wonder that "enterprising" organizations take advantage...?
Even if we were to consider a nice prison focused around rehabilitation and not exploitation, there are still things the prisoner is forced to do. They are forced not to leave. They are forced to follow certain rules. They are forced to move between locations at certain times of the day. They may be forced to attend classes or do specific types of labor like cleaning their rooms or common areas. Unlike a job where you might be 'forced' to clean, but you can always quit, quitting is rarely a choice for the prisoner and will result in worse punishment. Even if the prison does not directly profit off the labor of the prisoner, this level of control seems to be a form of slavery. Rarely do I see slavery defined as requiring profit to be made off the slave, though slavery rarely happens where it isn't found to be profitable by the person doing the enslaving (based on the enslaver's own view of what counts as profit).
If we were to fully ban slavery even for prisons, then for even nice prisons to continue to exist we would have to define some other non-slavery action which would include having control of where a person lives, how they live, when they sleep, and all the other powers of a prison. In such a case, it would then be possible for a state to allow this non-slavery even for people not convicted of a crime, because it isn't slavery and thus isn't a violation of the 13th amendment. Generally things like kidnapping laws as they currently exist would prevent any private entity from doing this, but exceptions might be carved out. On realistic example would be teen rehabilitation camps which already can border on the legal limits of kidnapping, false imprisonment, and slavery. Some stories from these places already sound like they might be crossing the line, though that might only be allowed as long as they are dealing with minors with parental approval. I could reasonably see a state extending such treatment until the teen is 21 or such.
Random anecdote. Slavery means NO days off. If you are sick, you have to get up at 5:30am and go wait in line outside in the freezing snow for sick call (you also have to do this for 'pill line' if you have any meds, though you aren't charged the $5 a pop for that). Sick call costs $5 a visit. You make $5 a month. Then the doctor says 'drink water and take an aspirin' and clears you to go to work. Aspirin is only available from the commissary in large overprices bottles about to expire. You are REQUIRED to throw the bottle away when it is expired or you will get a shot for 'contraband'. You can not share aspirin with others. Hopefully you planned ahead and saved your $5 for 2 months to afford a bottle of aspirin in case you got sick, and it hasn't expired before you get sick. When you get to work, sick, no exception is made for your physical condition. If you work HVAC you're still climbing ladders in the snow to the roof.
Slavery means I was forced to shovel the compound with a shovel with a broken handle so exposed fiberglass that cut me up. I was issued a 'navy uniform' which is what we wear in the feds. So short sleeve shirt, thin khaki slacks, thin socks. And you get a light non-waterproof jacket. You want long underwear? Commissary purchase (4X monthly pay, $20 pants OR $20 shirt). Gloves? Commissary purchase (2 months pay $10). Hat? commissary purchase (1 months pay $5). So I shoveled snow for hours, soaked to the bone, in whiteout conditions, no hat, no gloves, with my hands bleeding. That is slavery. And I had it good. I was able to get the shovel fixed through connections, boy was the cop that made me do that pissed when next time I pulled the shovel out of the locked tool closet and somehow it was fixed even though he kept 'forgetting' to put in a work order.
That is not my argument.
My argument is that incarceration is a subset of slavery. Accepting one specific subset of slavery doesn't mean bringing back chattel slavery or legalizing sexual slavery. You ideally want to prevent any loopholes and keep a very specific limit on what is allowed for prisoners to avoid horrible things we see in modern day prisons and in prisons for the past.
>Slavery means NO days off. If you are sick, you have to get up at 5:30am and go wait in line outside in the freezing snow for sick call (you also have to do this for 'pill line' if you have any meds, though you aren't charged the $5 a pop for that). Sick call costs $5 a visit. You make $5 a month. Then the doctor says 'drink water and take an aspirin' and clears you to go to work. Aspirin is only available from the commissary in large overprices bottles about to expire. You are REQUIRED to throw the bottle away when it is expired or you will get a shot for 'contraband'. You can not share aspirin with others. Hopefully you planned ahead and saved your $5 for 2 months to afford a bottle of aspirin in case you got sick, and it hasn't expired before you get sick. When you get to work, sick, no exception is made for your physical condition. If you work HVAC you're still climbing ladders in the snow to the roof.
Even if you banned any labor, you could still have prisons who have extremely unreasonable charges for goods and services due to the, quite literal, captive audience. Imagine your same situation, except there is no work to get paid. You either have to have an external source of money from before being put in prison, have someone sending you money, or this gets added to a bill that eventually the government will have you repay once you are out of prison. No labor for profit, but still all the problems you point out.
>Slavery means I was forced to shovel the compound with a shovel with a broken handle so exposed fiberglass that cut me up.
Conditions of tools provided in prison are also independent of any notion of labor from profit. You can have a prison where people are given horrible tools for their daily rehabilitation tasks even though there is no profitable labor occurring. If you have people running the prison seeking to torture prisoners, they can do so even in a situation where there is no labor for profit. These are obvious bad things as well, but I don't see how these things being bad relate to my question.
All that's really left is deterrence. In the past (and in the present in many places) if you steal then the first time something like a finger gets cut off, and the next time the hand comes off, and the third time - well don't steal three times. But of course that's barbaric, so we need to do things that aren't barbaric, but what? And so enters the idea of prison. Rehabilitation is of course ideal, but in reality some people simply can't be rehabilitated. So what do you do then?
Separation of those who can and cannot be rehabilitated would ostensibly be ideal, but it's interesting to consider that in doing this you'd effectively be going full circle and recreating the asylum type systems of times long since past. It's unclear that this would be desirable even in the best of times, and we're certainly not in the best of times.
This isn't the case because outside of prison you have upwards mobility. It is easy to escape poverty if you put in the effort. In prison you are stuck there for however long your sentence is.
I think this is a nontrivial assumption
This lacks the details for me to know whether I should be sympathetic or not. Are you saying that he forged the check for some reason related to his dad being drunk, like his dad not buying any food, or that his dad agreed to let him write the check and then complained to the police anyway because he was drunk?
The trust that VICTIM will get justice keeps the society intact. Nobody cares what happens to the bad guy.
If someone took out all your money through fraud and gambled it away, what would you choose:
A) Justice: Put them in Jail for long time.
B) Rehabilitation: Put them in medical care for an year till their gambling addiction is cured. Then they are free to integrate back into society.
In both cases, you get no money back. What would you prefer?
A) Retributive Justice: Put them in Jail for long time.
B) Rehabilitative Justice: Put them in medical care for an year till their gambling addiction is cured. Then they are free to integrate back into society.
All else being equal, I would absolutely prefer B over A. However, there is also a third option C, which can be combined with either A or B:
C) Restorative Justice: Require them to do a certain type and amount of work for you or for the state to make up for an agreed amount of your lost money and moral damages.
Give me a mix of B and C any day, and throw A down the drain (in the sense of prison purely as punishment, I have nothing against using prison to protect society from certain criminals).
What would make me feel better in the long term is knowing that at least something good came out of my losing all my money. In case B as opposed to nothing at all in case A.
Why do we push games on society instead of work? Why is chess and MMOs fun, but not sewing a shirt or building a new app?
I would disagree, I find sewing shirts and making apps fun, MMOs can be grindy and chess is basically just studying.
I'm sure there are some relatively minor things like reward rate, physical exertion, etc... but I have to imagine much of it is cultural. Lets not take this to logical extremes, but rather, why don't we value group volunteer work more than playing chess? You have your social aspect, you have rewards, its often different and unique each time.
As I've gotten older, its a bit apparent to me that 'beating Zelda' is more akin to work, than it is to getting fulfillment. (However, then there are games like Divinity Original Sin(2) that feel extremely fulfilling, can't deny that.) You wonder how many people are playing Call of Duty because a leader of a friend group saw the advertisement, bought the game, and pushed their friends to do the same. Instead of playing football, they play COD.
Skills from one area do not necessarily transfer over.
If I make a move, I need to prepare for the inevitable response, which might or might not be obvious to my opponent. The game is inherently more and more complex after each move.
While things might not carry over directly in a provable way, there's a reason chess has survived as a game for hundreds of years - because there's definitely ways the game improves your thinking processes, pattern recognition, and abstract decision making skills.
No, you need science. This is Appeal to Tradition fallacy.
Chess was the 'in' game for the upper class/nobility through history. That is the reason it survived.
Wouldn't great chess players be fantastic outside of the chess world? Wouldn't kingdoms who had chess beat regional powers that didn't have the technology? Wouldn't chess players defeat their political rivals?
If any of this was true, we'd see evidence of it.
Yes, they don't have an impact from everything I've read.
Again, it should be easy to prove. Why not see how the best chess players in the world do outside of chess?
You'd think with all those abstract logic skills we'd have them running companies, universities, and being secretary of state. Instead all seem to be stuck as chess players.
>Science is not a good tool to win an argument with.
Feelings are better? No bud. It sounds like you just really want Chess to be useful.
Sounds like you're not familiar with what Kasparov (undisputed #1 player in the 80s-early 2000s) does outside of Chess.
Guy has told off Putin to his face, and has been a champion of human rights and democracy - getting arrested in his native Russia several times while protesting the one-party state Putin has built to enrich himself. He's also written books on geopolitics.
Magnus Carlson has done alright for himself too. He's won a few poker tournaments, and last season was the best fantasy soccer player on the planet.
Seems like all of his hard work paid off /s. Weird that he can beat Putin in chess but not IRL
>Magnus Carlson
"At two years, he could solve 500-piece jigsaw puzzles; at four, he enjoyed assembling Lego sets with instructions intended for children aged 10–14.[10]"
Doesnt seem like a chess thing though. I'd hate if someone attributed my success to playing runescape. But at least runescape teaches you economics.
Hope this was /s as well. Intelligence doesn't matter when you're up against the Don of the Russian Mafia, a former KGB boss who happens to be worth some $200-300 billion and has outright and undisputed control of the Russian state, which includes a powerful propaganda network and a nuclear-armed military.
>* But at least runescape teaches you economics.*
Need this to be confirmed with science. A computer game based around PvP combat probably teaches you less about economics than a game like chess teaches you about abstract logical thinking and planning.
Unfortunately I think chess does not help me at all in my job. I wish it did!
Chess is highly specific. Most players tend to learn and improve on those specifics. I know that bishops are more valuable than knights in an open position. I know several openings to a depth of ~30 ply. I know many theoretical endgames. These things do not help me at all in any arena besides chess.
tl;dr FUN!!
* Simple, indisputable demonstration of intelligence. People from deprived background often have low self-esteem and very little evidence to show for their smarts, even if they are in fact intelligent.
* It's traditionally a slow, thoughtful game, in stark contrast to the stress and demands of the outside world.
* It provides escapism by totally focusing your mental faculties onto the world of the board.
* There are few external expectations. No one will be upset if you make a silly move, like they would if you make some bad stitches.