Scrabble and the Nature of Expertise (2015)

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/).

> 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".

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.

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