The Collider Effect and Intelligence

You can go to kitted k It d. shop and use the code smart fifty SMART five zero at checkout And you will get half off a set of thinking superpowers. in a box If you want to know more about what I'm talking about Check it out middle of the show t. How the go The You are not so smart podcast Episode three hundred forty People think about chess players, they think that we think really far ahead and that we analyze ten, twenty moves deep, which is really rare That is the voice of Jennifer Sahade, one of the friends of the show and one of the friends of David McRey, who is me, your host. and Jennifer Sahade is a three time United States chess champion. She is an officially recognized woman grandmaster, a grandmaster of chess. is also Chess Olympic medalist and Chahari was the first woman to win the US junior Op. She plays lots of chess and wins lots of tournaments. and The same is true poker. She has won poker tournaments in Prague and London and Las Vegas In fact, she is a two time global pooker Aard winner and she also writes books about this stuff, especially about how to apply chess thinking to life thinking. She's been on this show before back in episode two hundred and thirty seven and she told us all about her book Chess Queens, which is about the greatest women Play the game. of all time In this episode, we are going to discuss her new book thinking sideways a book that's not really about lateral thinking. It's about thinking sideways It's very relevant to my current line of research into creative thinking and problem solving as it relates to our folk concept of genius I'm writing a book about all that. And one of the things that I'm obsessed with is something that Sahade is also obsessed with and that she writes about in her new book. I thought this would be a great chance to interview her, make an episode about it, promote her book, all those sorts of things The thing that I'm obsessed with is decision trees. More specifically, there's this myth, it's a common misconception that amazing poker players and other people who do sort of this kind of thing, but poker players specifically There's a myth that people who get labeled as geniuses within that domain as genius poker players that they think dozens of moves ahead, hundreds of moves ahead, thousandousands of moves ahead and that they see the world that way that they imagine thousands of possible futures in a this will lead to that and then that will lead to this. and then therefore, if I do this and that and this and that, hundreds of steps like that. Down the line They think this way so they can do something now that will guarantee a desired outcome. or avoid an undesired outcome. C cool idea. You may have seen this portrayed in movies and TV shows Supposed geniuses will often be depicted as if they are thinking hundreds of causes and effects ahead. Hey, what was that ward in time iew alternate futures that they see all these branching potential futures in a strange multiverse kind of way. How many did you see fourteen million six hundred five How many we win And so they choose their actions based on that kind of superhuman foresight It's certainly cool to think that an incredibly powerful brain could do this It's just not something brains can do, no matter how dense their gray an or white matter may be. According to the science, according to the evidence on issues such as this It's just not something that brains are capable of doing Even a genius Should such a person exist, which is highly debatable and mostly a myth. Even that sort of demigd version of intelligence and foresight would not be able to produce this kind of forward thinking this kind of predictive analysis of future states of the universe. It's just not doable by brain stuff And you'll learn about that in this interview and you'll learn what master chess players actually do, which is They think, as Shahade puts it sideways You use your experience with chess, your priors, all of the practice you put into it All that time you've spent play. and identify on the current board the three or four moves available to you right now And then you rank those moves by imagining what your opponent will do in response. best one of those three or four moves And if two of them are equally good, you just one of those at random and you just make the move And then you repeat that again when it's your turn That's not to say you don't think ahead a little bit when ranking those moves in that moment, but you limit that to maybe two, three moves ahead at the most But even masters of the game rarely do that much work. Most of the time, as Sahade will explain They think sideways. They think in terms of the moves available right now and how they compare right now to each other right Now. This, as you can imagine, is applicable to lots of other kinds of decision making, whether that be in your profession, your job opportunities, your relationships, your education, and so on. and that is what Christnifer Shahade writes about in herner new book. Thinking sideways follows is our discussion about that book and a few other side tangents as we nerd out over the collollider effect and the Einstellg effect and decision trees. in psychological studies into IQ versus hours of practice and more And so here it is. My conversation with Jennifer Shahadder All right, I'm Jennifer Chhahati and I am a Chess champion, poker player, and author of the new book, Thinking Sideways And you also sometimes punch people in a chess related ways. am I wrong about that? Oh yeah, that's right. I recently played in my first chess boxing exhibitions where I alternated between Punching and playing chess. You know, this is a sport I have long admired And I didn't really imagine getting into the ring myself, but I have to say I love the combination of mental and physical fitness feels so complete It's so weird. likeike chess boxing is the perfect like let's just I I did not know this existed until I saw your updates about this. I was like chess boxing, off course, of course. why not? Like I can see a poetry competition where we also do it's like poetry, Judo. we could do that So Uh For anyone who's never heard of this, which is going to be almost if they're like me u lots of people like What do you do in chess boxing? Is it is it legitimately you just moveo a piece and then you getting the ring for a minute. I mean, how does it organize Well, the first ever chess boxing match happened twenty five years ago in Amsterdam, and it was actually invented by a German artist. who was very good at boxing and very good at chess, but not nearly good enough to become the world champion or professional And his concept was that by combining the two sports and literally you play a round of boxing and then you play four moves of chess And then you go back to the ring and then you go back to the chess that by combining the two, maybe he could become the world champion. And he did. He became the world Champion. And so in my book Thinking S sideways, I use this as a metaphor for the way that all of us should kind of think about our careers. Because if we can't be Magnus Carlson or Lenox Lewis or you know Kobe Bryant, Serena Williams, maybe we can find an intersection like chess boxing to be the best at whatever we're doing I can totally understand this. I I couldn't find We were talking about this before we hit record. L I was like There's no genre for this book idea I've got going here who ca careres I'll just make up a genre, whether this is a thing or Just pretty much my entire not have a boss history of my life has been I guess I'll just do this thing where there's no thing for that thing yet and that's okay. That's fine. You don't have to this is this is totally covered in your book. Chess booxing is an excellent example of this. How what What do you say is your version of this Well I've always been very creative. and analytical at the same time And I think that is my chess boxing and that when I'm in a room full of chess and poker players, I'm looking at things from a more artistic angle But if I'm in a roomull of artists, I'm looking at things from a more mathematical analytical angle. So I feel like I provide extra value in either sphere. Okay, this is so in line with with like for people who listening to this, they're used to this happening When I'm working on a book, a lot of the people that I want to talk to I'm going to ask you about the book because you know how this is. When you're working on a book, everything you're doing is the book. so you're You you're you someone It's somebody's birth party and you walk around and go you know what you think about it, birthday parties are a lot like anything if you' you're cooking lasagna and you're like, you know, when you think about it, lasagna is a lot like and you'll end up taking a note and it might end up in the book I knew that your book thinking sideways would be somehow related to the work of this psychologist, this cognitive scientist, Robert Weisberg, who sort of help pioneer research into creative processes and A lot of what he writes about is like, hey, this whole genius thing is just a hand wavy word to not actually think about what's going on when a person makes a leap of insight of some kind I have This old used copy of some of the early research you could see the that This is I know you're familiar with this. This is one of the oldest things in psychology, the candle problem. We have some you ask people, you give them a box full of tacks some matches and a candle. And you say Your goal is to get this candle to be on the wall burning and free floating on the wall without anybody touching it and let the candle burn. How would you do that go and People approach this problem from a bunch of different perspectives and a lot of them can't quite figure out what to do they ask them to Say out loud, like to speak out loud. what are you thinking right now? What are you thinking right now? What are you thinking? Like through the problem openly so we can record it and measure what's going on and The people who eventually actually solve it, they always follow a path that is so similar to what you write about in your book They this is actual, u quotes from the research. This is the person talking. they're like candle has to burn straight. so if I took a nail and put it through the candle H. No It takeakes several nails make like a row, then I can set the cel on that that's It's not going to stick out. Oh if I took the nails out of the box, I could nail the box the wog but the cattle So what almost always happens is people They start imagining a couple of different candidates for solutions And then they start noticing that those candidates won't work And then they switch to the problem is to make the candidate set viable and then they move down the roow broden it out and then they center in on and instead of getting stuck on the original goal, they change the goal to this goal midway and then they almost always arrive if they arrive with the solution This for I thought of this every all the way through reading the book, I was like Oh yeah, that's thinking sidewways stuff. That's what creativity is all about. is adding creativity to analytical thinking and they're trading off one another down the line instead trying to think gettingting stuck in the tunnel of like I have to get to the goal. Like coming up with a solution and then trying to make everything happen. like you have to get burnt out on it I know I'm going on around, but So lear to know I'm connecting this very deeply right over Czen pointint. Oh yeah, this makes total sense to me. Let me not talk for you. Let's start with this. Lets You wrote a whole book about this and you did this. you carved a genre out of the world, which is Books that are about chess, but they're not about chess. They're about like things you've learned while doing a lot of chess stuff. and it makes it easier for the reader to make sense of things they wouldn't make sense of otherwise And I love all your books and this one's included This one's called thinking Sideways. So Jennifer And its just sort of a rough summary What is thinking so? Thinking sideways came out of the realization that when people think about chess players, they think that we think really far ahead and that we analyze ten, twenty moves deep, which is really rare. What we do better as you describe with this candle problem is we look at more options and better options. So it's both that our intuition is more refined from playing lots of games, but that we also are good at that initial step of looking at the different possibilities to further check And surprises a lot of people because they think of chess players as just being more mathematically inclined, more able to crunch much longer variations into the future and to predict the future and less about people who are creative about looking sideways as I like to call it about the different options. And I think that To me, this is a beautiful metaphor for people who are successful in life They are able to discard their plan, be flexible And be confident that if they see a path that other people aren't picking It's worth pursuing That part's very tough, I think, that It's about confidence and analysis confidence to go your own way if you assess that it's the right. Choice. And know with your work in changing minds, I think this is a particularly important one that sometimes requires you to do things that are different than what other people are doing. And so you have to be pretty sure that it's worth pursuing Yeah, the Your book, I'm telling you this is I was like Jennifer got way ahead of me already on this because this is I was like, Oh, I'm going to introduce some of this stuff to people No, you already got there, which is okay because I know you and I can just cite you and say, yes, sure, read this book. but the the In the work of the psychologist, they talk about analyzing chess players and people who are really who have you good track records Oh exactly what you describe, which is like they bring a lot of experience to the game but then they don't think six thousand moves ahead. They think, Oh, this is very similar to a situation I've been in before. I know there are good options and bad options here. Let's take a look at the. And you describe that in detail. I think that's Incredible U I I think a lot of people do think this. when you play you imagine that super amazing chess players are thinking six thousand moves ahead at every possible the complexity of the universe is laid out before them. They've seen the movie a beautiful mind. they imagine that's happening in their head and it's like they're seeing equations futureures unfolding, something from like Doctor Strange world is happening in their head The you make a point in the book that there are notot just billions of possible chess games. the number is nuts so. how many possible combinations of things could be happening after just the first couple of moves. Yeah, please tell me a little bit more is in the observable universe. It's pretty wild. Of course These are games that are often completely terrible, right? And that's part of the point that the possible games are such a mind blowing number But great players are very good at winnowing that down and understanding which moves you should actually look at because you would go insane if you look at all of them But you would also be playing pretty badly if you always picked the first movie you say. So it's about balancing looking at a reasonable amount of moves, a Goldilocks option. I really like to start with people with a number three because I think it's very easy to just tunnel in one move and then the next level is you get into binaries and you look at two possibilities I like to be able to stretch to three. Sometimes you need to look at four or five But three is really a good starting point for many vPall In fact, when I have students and we're looking at a game, a lot of times I tell them, just give me three options. This is not a test where you have to find the best mood. This is a test where you just have to give me three options. Of course, that's hard for people becauseuse they don't want to give me bad moodves, right? They're used to like having a teacher them for correct answers. And here, of course, there's probably going to be some answers that are bad, but I want you to give me three That's the game. You start out talking about how there's just twenty There are only twenty options at first, but there's twenty options like as your first move Super chess players like yourself You don't go hmm, which of these twenty like there's Three or four they are kind of like your favorites. Three or four that you're like, I have a move, I have a skill set that follows from these four. Am I right about that Yeah, there's about four moves that are considered to be the strongest possible first moves And great chest players will choose between them. Now occasionally as a surprise weapon, some players will choose like the fifth or sixth or seventh best move. They're not like terrible, but in general, it's like those top four that we're picking from And we can imagine Anybody who's fascinated by complexity science or chaos stuff is like Once butterfly effect of even chess begins to kick in with after just a couple booze we have, Ohh boy Billion possible ways this could go from here If we were to imagine a supercomputer person brain expert Genius level, super thing trying to imagine moves that you were going to do Azillion, you know moves in the future It's impossible. Brains are not set up to do this sort of thing. Yeah But you can we've all experienced this where we get stuck on a goal that we know will take about seven or eight. I'm talking about life goals. We get stuck on an idea that we want to accomplish F or six moves ahead and everyvery step forward in this procession is introducing Thousands and thousands and thousands of possible things that might happen that are going to affect whether or not you're going to make another decision. I always try my think for this is like the person who orders the second drink is not the person who ordered the first, like the decision maker who decided to drink the first drink is not the decision maker who's had that first drink and moving forward from that, this is going to be true for most life situations. You do a great job of like helping us understand all this in steps, building a foundation and You sort of separate, even though we can agree that there are M nuances and variations of human problem solving and planning we can sort of take it down into two buckets is what you do with the book. You've got sort of the scanners. versus the if you could help me understand this What's a scanner do versus what is a tunnel or do in situations like this Well, this gets into to common issues when people look at a chest position or look at a life position So a scanner will look at all of their options, but sometimes they take this too far And they continually scan. You see this for sure in dating in all sorts of scenarios with buying things, making big life decisions that people just want to continue to information gap. So they'll scan, scan, scan, and sometimes they scan so long that the decision is made for them. they can't choose as many options as before in chess, they would literally lose on time And then the other person is a tunneler who you know sees the move that they want and they just play it without looking at their options. Well, Obviously, as in many cases in life, the beautiful thing to do is to find a option which is in the middle to Scan intelligently and to try to find a move. that both satisfies looking at a reasonable number of options, but also not spending so much time on your search that you're wasting time for future decisions and there's someome mathematical puzzles that reckon with this idea, famously the secretary problem is this idea that if you have a number of applicants for a job and you have to decide on the spot who to hire? and who to neglect and let walk out the door So it's a bit of an artificial stipulation. You have a hundred potential candidates, and each time you interview someone, you have to immediately let them go or hire them The math shows you that the best way to tackle this problem is the thirty six percent where you interview thirty six percent of the possible applicants and then at that point, you pick anyone better then who you've seen in the first thirty six percent Can I get that right one second? I think it's thirty six, right? thirty seven. Let me do that again Why did I No, no That's. You looked it up. This is good. Yeah. This is I had it in my head that it was thirty six or thirty seven and I picked the wrong one. No, that's good. I think I think we're within one percent Yeah, I know, right? It's pretty good. It's pretty good That's fun. So if I'm getting this if I'm seeing this right, like I'm imagining it like and you can see like I when I was I was trying my best to map this out so I could ask you good questions. I've got this like drawn out where I'm like trying to see it as decision trees. Your trees go up, mine go down. I don't know why that is. But uh And I typically say that when I write about things because his mine's a tree Yours Mind the tree, yours is a L something else. Yeah like some people will say like metaphorically or're speaking like like the I'm trying to get a bird's eye view and sppirit trying like I'm trying to dive deeper. I'm trying to look, either way, I get what's like for some reason, I'm the let's go down to the bottom version But the I'm seeing it like the person who's tunneling and you should describe it like this wherere like, let's imagine goal I'm trying to reach and it's going to take ten steps to get there trying to like sort out okay, I gota this and that and this and that, this and versus I'm thinking of it more like an array of possibilities in front of you right here on the board as it sits. Here's what I have in front of me. label your candidates and then Imagine ree limiting yourself to three helps keep this from the cognitive load from being insane Beyond that is the Vveil of chaos. Like beyond that, there's too many possibilities to even consider and you're going to go nuts if you attempt to go that far out Am I kind of getting that that sort of the scanner view of things am I seeing that correctly Oh yeah, right, absolutely. But that's a thing. That's where it gets exponentially vast so quickly because I might look at three different moves. Do doesnn't sound like that many But then I have to look at my opponent's me And what if I have to look at three of their modes And then another two moves against each of their moes. And now you're starting to see how vast and difficult it is to really parse all of this. and that's actually a lot like life It is chaotic and it's very difficult to plan because there are so many things that aren't about you. They're about other people or they're about luck So you can only control so much. That doesn't mean you should throw up your hands and not try to make good decisions that like what will be will be. But it does mean that Thinking about more options tends to be a spot where you have more control Once you start going into the future, you lose even more control And that is why great chess players really need to think sideways even more than they need to think far ahead. Because if I think five moves ahead, but my opponent plays a different move and move three then the Booz four and five will have been a waste anyway It's not going to happen And that sometimes strikes me when people have Really good jobs, really good setups stable family life, everything is nice. Sometimes I meet up with these people and they always find something to worry about. But it's often like way down the line. O typical example would be they have like a toddler and they're worried about what high school the toddler will vote to And yeah, I mean, sure, that might be a problem in twelve years, but Honestly, if that's still the problem that you have in twelve years, it probably means that Things will have gone pretty well for you because more likely there's gonna be some other wrench that's thrown in that changes the variables enough that maybe you're not thinking about the question in the same way anyway. So why not just order another drink? You think about something else now I'm Yes., I have experienced that just in the last two years, you've experienced weird stuff with every one of us can go like, Hey, what's what weird things happened to you in the last two, three years that you absolutely had no idea what was about to happen and has deeply affected what's going to happen next I've had like eleven of those in the last two years. I think we've all experienced that And it never stops. So If I'm hearing correctly Pat, think I mean, who everybody wants parents who was considering the future of their children It's just you're plans are going to get scrambled by I think as do you write about this I legitimately wrote this out because there is unpredictable chaos beyond just a few steps in the future. The complexity grows grand. will be intermzos What is that in chess? and how does that relate to what we're talking about? When Inmetsoid chess is a move where It seems like you're going down a tunnel It seems like each player has a move that's so obvious you wouldn't even question it I take your queen. Well, what do you do? You take my queen back. It's the most powerful pece. What else can you do But once in a while, there's an internmetzo So I take your queen and somehow you have an unexpected move that allows you to take my queen later and win the game And these are so difficult to see that even the greatest players in the world will often miss intermatezs. They'll find them against unexpected opponents and they'll miss them themselves And I think that it really goes to show that even the greatest thinkers sometimes fall into this habitual tunneling. and that being able to work outside of it is so powerful In life, it often means taking a break from a problem Instead of going down the same path sudden interruption that gives you more time, that buys you more time, more information And in chess, they're the way that I've won so many important games. In fact, I'd say they're the most important tactic for any expert level justess player Because by the time we reach expert or mastery, in chess We already see the kind of basic tactics like the checkmates, the pins, the forks But they're more like arithmetic, right We're in In Mazzo is like a way of thinking You can get better at thinking, but you can't just like master thinking.. You got to keep doing it. by definiteition keep doing it over and over again. So you can't exactly master the in Metzo. You have to continually train your mind to be on the lookout. and not fixated and not habitually tunneling. And it's difficult because as our intuition gets better As we get More games under our belt, more years under our belt We deserve the right to follow more intu mion more You know, we've built up this experience and we're more likely to be right by our intuition. But the problem is just going too far with that concept And then you miss out on these life intermatzos I quote you here No this is a paraphrase It's not about how far ahead you can look. It's about how far sideways you can look Every chapter of this book brings us back to that idea, but it's such a beautiful thing that They going all the way back to the earliest days with behaviorism, likeike it's the very first days of psychology. They would notice when people enter into a novel situation They use their predictive processing. There's kind of two paths. They use their predictive processing to see if their priors like match and then they try to solve the problem using something they've done earlier in life that seem kind of similar to that and After a couple of rounds of that not working, people will tend to just introduce chaos. They will just do some scrambly weirdo stuff to try to create disorder in the system so that it has to jostle something sort of loose from the environment that will then match They' predictive processing. It's like, this doesn't match the way I expect things to go Maybe if I like Bow it up a little bit and then let the pieces fall where they may. Oh, now I can see a pattern here that I'm familiar with and in the writing of people like Picasso and others, they like those was like their whole life was like the way they live their lives. like there are no good options in front of me, at least nothing that my Systems are identifying as good options. So what if I scramble things up a little bit and then when I come back to it, o there will nowll be something that seems like a good candidate for moving forward Yeah Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of my favorite things about my book is its title. thinking sideways, To be rivaled only by my first book's title, Chess bititch. Chess bititch can't get you can't get better than Good names G n, good names. I feel like the reason you would think that Thinking sideways would be a concept that would already be like well taken and that it would be not a title that I hadn't already been covered, but I think that Sways actually has a very negative connotation. Things went sideways is like an idiom for things going wrong. I believe that that's actually kind of point right? The fact that people think of it And so bad is partly because we have this fallacy that we have to have it all figured out No you write about this. I keep looking at my notes. I love the I love these part I call this are the many possible futures collapse state You write these quotes, These are real actual direct quotes, not paraphrases. Beauty is in the paths we don't take. Th is something you wrote and put in a book and I read it. and there's another one which is Living with no regrets means you aren't thinking sideways enough. that I take from this and please correct me if I've got not seen this the way you're seeing it is Since there is unpredictable chaos beyond just a few steps into the future, there's Wave of chaos, a veil of unknowable complexity, butterfly effects in every direction That means you can rest easy and thinking sideways. Am I kind of on the right path there Yeah, it's a way to comfort people that They don't have to worry about the fact that looking at options will make them regret. And I think that this is very important for people to realize 'causeuse it's like if you're playing a chess game and you see a winning line that's very beautiful, but you somehow miss some detail so you don't do it A lot of people feel so devastated You know, we're in poker If they almost made this wild play, but then they chickened out and they didn't do it They feel so much regret and part of the regret is that they had an idea and they didn't follow through with it. But that's normal. If you have a lot of ideas, that's gonna happen. This This is the price you must pay for thinking too much. Yes. Exactly. Keep thinking. It's okay.re You're going to come up with good ideas that you didn't follow through on and That is exactly the price of thinking. seegues perfectly into here's some practical advice that's in the book and I love this. I've experienced this illion times, and we've mentioned this a couple of times in previous episodes, the I don't know how to properly pronounce it. We're going to just call it the Einstelun effect or Einstalung Effect, however you pronounce it, I'll go with that This is one of the biggest problems with tunnneeling. and you mentioned research in your book. I've seen other research in other places that more or less says that better chess players tonnel less. and One of the things that seems to be true about that is and this is how you put it when he's If you see a good move, The first thing you should do is Look for a better one. at that moment, I love this advice for anything in your entire life This comes from you Jennifer Wites paraphrasing if you see a good move, look for a better one Pretty much the best advice I think you can get in chass And the reason is that When you have a good position, it often has the properties of a great position So that's where pummeling goes wrong You just had a huge success in your career In sudenly you're getting lots of offers takeake the first offer. No, no, no, no. like the reason you're getting good offers is because you have the right conditions that you worked hard for So now this is when you definitely want to scan, right? A least Not necessarily taking a huge amount of time, but at least taking the time to look at your options And I think that In chess, this comes up again and again and we'll see players take a queen when they just have a checkmate on the board. So common. And in life, I feel that it's really important because unfortunately, you don't always have good positions Sometimes you have bad positions And the good position might only come up a few times in a game. So you really going need to take the advantage of it and maximize it. The research shows that we can measure this when people have Good move They often just play it Right? And so if they have a great move and a good move, they'll play the good move All they have is the great moon thenen they will find the great mode So that's interesting because it shows that a good move can actually be the enemy. Yes. this is directly this is the effect like when there's something that's familiar and as soon as you're in a state of ambiguity and novelty You're going to immediately attempt to assimilate this and try to sort this out, bring your priors into play and go, okay, o, okay let's try to make this familiar. Let's try to find a familiar thing within it because I have strategies for that. I have things I've done in the past. I've AB tested the world a little bit. And then if you Ping one, you're like, okay, yeah, can go that direction, right then With this in this chest study, they had as I read it, they had They produce this thing. theseese are people who understand chess. They've played it. They're not novices. There's two sort of strategies in front of them. One is more familiar and one is less familiar It's a little more novel, but it's the better one and you'll win faster if you go that way. And people tend to pick the familiar one Those two options are in front of them. But if the researchers take the familiar one away, they identify the other one. The other one becomes obvious Right. Exactly. And I think a lot of people understand that anecdotally, and that's why so many people in times of crisis find great opportunities, right? Like the cliche that well, it's not a cliche, but it's often cited that the Chinese character for Crisis has opportunity in it And I think that While that's fantastic that people are so resilient When things are going bad, I really would like to encourage people to have the mindset when things are going good. right? It's like I always like to say to people, there's that saying that you either win or you learn. I hate that saying, even though I must say that when I found out that Nelson Mandela coined it. I I have to give some respect to its history and its legendary origins, but I don't like it in a sports context I don't like it in a sports context because I always want people to learn from their wins too Be I feel like when you win, you sometimes just assume you played great. And a lot of times when you win, you have so much to learn from it. And I want to teach people, especially women that when you're winning, you can learn a lot because when you're winning, you have high leverage And that's where you can often maximize and you start building up that compound interest that you need for your relationships and your money later in life And so I really don't want everybody to be focused on their weaknesses and their down periods. becausecause a lot of times you just got to get through those periods. And where the real gains come is when you're winning and you're crushing getting more, finding better modves, the best modes. And you T it off of that into another thing that really destroys them but they're stuck in a tunneling mindset is Telling can create false binaries and This one for some reason really made the most sense to me When you have reduced things down to two options. You often don't takeake into account that maybe they both are bad Maybe neither one is the right one U which is I think why you often ask people to at least add a third, at least identify three candidates Tell me a little bit more about this Yeah, I think that it's great if you stop tunneling and you look for another option, but sometimes that ends up becoming like a sacrificial lamb. L you almost purposely pick one that's not as good too. That happens a lot in chats. likeike I want to sacrifice my bishop, but let me look at this like other terrible move where you can You can imagine like somebody really wants to hire You know, you're partners with somebody and they really want to hire somebody for a new position and then they're like, oh, well here's another candidate and they purposely bring like the worst candidate from the bile so that you're forced into the option that they wanted you to pick anyway. So expanding at to three really keeps you a little bit more honest with yourself that you're actually doing the work of scanning and not just toggling between Yay and A. Yeah, you talk about in the book about the People often try to advise people to do the Take it down to two so you can do the flip a coin thing and I felt your revulsion to this because like 'use know, supposly it shows you if it comes up the way you You don't want. you're like oh, it turns out you really wanted this way You're It's possible both options are bad. It's possible you have locked yourself into two things that aren't good for you and that you haven't even considered, Oh what about number three or four? And that's fascinating to me Yeah, absolutely. I feel that this Cin idea can't have its use case where you're Finally sure that you're You got your two options and you flip a coin and it's not to actually pick between them, but that when the coin is in the areir, you'll suddenly know whether you will want it to be heads or tails But yes, not always going work, not always gonna to work. And I bring up the example of naming my son, how My husband and I were stuck on the names Leo and Isaac for some time And you know, like more than just like, you know, I'm not talinking about like a day. like we were thinking about this for like a month. And when I found out that it was indeed going to be a boy, so we had to like really lock down our search process I called my dad and as a joke, because my dad is also a great chess player, I said that we narrowed down the names to Magnus or Faby because those were the two best chess players in the world at the time. And it was kind of like a joke like, Ohh, because I'm a chess player I'm a crazy chess mom and I need to name him like the number one or number two chess player in the world And then suddenly like it unlocked that actually Fabon was the right name s a wild experience. It was like almost right after I made that joke, my husband and I were like, wait a second I love that your child is going to get to tell this story over and over again. But yeah, this is u you This reminds me that I typeed it in and I looked it up to make sure I knew this pinged something it's an old Keer guard Do it or don't do it. you're gonna regret both I love that. neegativity as a form. Oh yeah. It's funny becausecause I was just texting my friends before this conversation. and I said that like God, I can't stand it when people focus on like the supposed biological inferiority of women in chess. It's so annoying because nobody is really born to play chess. You have to work at it whether you're a male or a female. And so I feel like The best response to this stuff is yes, women are bad at chess But so are men We will be right back This commercial break The schoolool of thoughtought I love this place. 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Top of receiving a set of thinking superpowers in a box Check all of this out Kided . shop or just click the link. in the showu And now we return to our program You mentioned this thing sort of using all this to make like a five year plan system. You quoted some people who use this where like you if you're trying to think about your actual life using some of this stuff And you talk about having a primary plan and an alternate plan, and then a one with no restraints Whatsoever U no people to be accountable to and no financial concerns. what would that plan be? And sort of like that in front of you and then use your system commit to it you find yourself tryrying to figure what Im going to do next? You just laid this out using these chess ideas. and I love it. sccan for candidates label three or four, predict About three or four steps for each one of them. rank each one one to ten, pick the best of ABC, and don't forget to falsify your moves. Let's start with this. Let's imagine we're doing this The first thing we do is scan for candidates. What does this step look like to you? Yeah. Well, scanning for candidates, Well first, you know, when you have a big decision, whether it's a chess move or you're choosing between colleges, you know I speak to a lot of high school groups. so they have big decisions in colleges. And one of the things I tell them is that First of all, give yourself some grace because one of the things I hear from a lot of them is like I'm so stressed about this decision and like then they become stressed about being stressed about it. I like what Actually, it's pretty rational to be invested in this decision because it is very consequential What you really want to do want to avoid decision fatigue on things that aren't that important, like What color shirt to wear during your interview You know, so I think Recognize that when you have these big decisions, it is correct to spend a lot of time. and there is a chance you're going to get it wrong. So I understand that a little bit of stress is going to come through And so figuring out how much energy and how much time you want to put into this decision is so crucial And I think in chess, it's usually pretty obvious. because It's especially to good players. when there's a lot of pieces and t And we can equate this to material situations in light What school you're going to go to, what job you're going to take, what house you're going to buy. There's a lot of material things at stake that is what Bezos called a one way door. It's not going to be that easy to reverse once you go through it. You can always reverse, but not easily. not without some additional costs Same in chass if you offer me a queen trade Well, if I do that, I'm not going to be able to get another queen except maybe in the end game when I promote a pawn So it's it's very consequential. So if I have fifty minutes left and I spend twenty five of them in this decision Not that crazy. logical We got our array. We've scanned for candidates. Y advice is At least here as you're learning how to do this, like threeree or four, like its like Yeah. Whatittle a doubt about three. And then you can There's a cognitive load introduedces here because we are going to go a little bit into the future, just like a step What are like three possible outcomes for each one of these and then You suggest you kind of do that as best you can with the time allotted And then you rank them you have a system of ranking them from one to ten. How do you do that What is your rank from one to ten system In chess, it works out well because you have to do all these calculations so quickly You have to understand that this is not a number that you will necessarily be married to forever It is something that is also based on uncertainty So you're estimating a number between one and ten And then it's just almost like a placeholder so you can compare it to the other situations that you're projecting Right? And then you do the same process for your second and your third option. And a lot of times, by the way, once you do this process, it's going to be like really obvious One, two or three. be pretty obvious because one will be like an eight and the others will be like fours, right? especially in chess. You might see that if you play this move, You know, they're they have a fantastic response and You know, there's no other choice. So by the time you're done with your analysis, you're just ready to go and you're confident. you make your move Sometimes the evaluation is going to be very much closer. So you're going to find that like at the end of the process, there's two moves that are eights and you have a tough time Diding And that's where the question of how pivotal and consequential the decision comes in If it's not that consequential If it's not like What college you're gonna go to or what city you're going to move to Then you can be confident that you've done a lot of rigorous analysis and either eight that you pick is going to be pretty great. So just go with one of them Now if it's a very important decision, that means you might want to call in more research, whether that means more advisors, more digging and try to find out which one's in eight point five and which one's in eight point one, right So It's a combination of analysis and also evaluating the stakes and how much you should spend into the decision, kind of the metaphan game My worst habit is you go looking for advice from other people, but you only pay attention to the people that tell you what you want to hear I have that I have people ask me for advice like that and you can see that They think I'm gonna say no, and that's why they're asking me for the advice And that's okay though. Sometimes they just want that they've already kind of decided and they want your stamp of approval, whichich is yeah, it makes sense. A lot of people now are going to LLMs with these types ofions which I think is very interesting. I'm not I'm not a big fan overall only because I think the people who are likely to make a good decision already will probably be able to do it without Oa Lambs and those who are maybe troubled make really bad decisions because of it. So you know, it's not that I think the LM's are going to be wrong that often, more just that the type of user could Be leted astray in a very negative way Yeah. My advice there would be Have the LLM not commit anything to memory, askk it. And then ask it the opposite back to back and watch it tell you that both options are awesome and that you're an awesome person for asking that question and so you can get a good feel for what's going on the other side there Exactly, exactly. It's very and even like small word choices can kind of influence them like what you want to hear or what They're going to say in this instance. The one pattern I have picked up on with LLMs that I think is worth noting is that they do have a tendency to advocate for action They're very action oriented and you know, agentic, if you want to call it that They are not afraid to encourage you to make changes. And I think part of that is because of the vast. data access that they have, which shows them that people often stay stuck in a rud and don't make big changes. And also they don't have the anxiety of movement and acting that we might have. So I do think that's actually kind of valuable once you realize that I would like to understand what you mean by this, sort of like a button on the end of the process Don't forget to falsify your move. What does that mean to you Well, in chess and in many life situations like negotiations, for example One of the reasons it's so important to think sideways is because if you think too far ahead You're by nature neglecting the most important thing in the process, which is your opponent So I say, I want to move my bishop, then I want to move my roook, Th then I move my queen, then I meate you. What's missing? All of your posts And I will tell you that this is how a lot of kids think And I mean, bless them, kids are so talented in tests and get better so much more quickly than they used to But that is kind of how the little kids think. They're like, I get to make three moves and you're like, this is why the game is so valuable for youngsters. because they realize there are other universes of desires and wants and chess moves and they're sitting right across from you and they're gonna checkmate you if you don't pay attention to that other brain across the table from youle s great. L like you have to have empathy, sympathy, commiserate You have to have theory of mind. All these things have to come into play You can't just have a plan takeake it Negotiation it's so important because right like this happens in poker, happens in real life negotiations. If you're trying to think too far ahead like to, you know, what you're going for two years down the line or you know the bonuses you're going to ask for and you haven't really gone through the process of thinking like what if they don't even accept your number? you're going to get tripped up So it's much better to like really practice and think about what they're going to say back You know, hopefully, you can do it in writing so you have plenty of time to prepare But I think that is, yeah, that's really crucial, trying to make sure that You're thinking about their possible responses rather than only about what you want. Be that actually helps you get what you want understanding What? they're going to do and what they're going to ask for. The next thing that we're talking about in the interview is I brought up during the middle of our conversation news study that had just come out. And the study' title is, does chest neede intelligence a study with young chess players This comes from a journal called Intelligence And it's where people who study that papers and get them published And it's sort of a clickbay title. It's kind of misleading, but the actual study is very interesting. Basically they took people and they measured their IQs and they also measured how many hours they had spent practicing chess. and they found that once you have learned how to play well And you've done the practice, you've done the grind, you've been very persistent cus and the grind and the persistence is more impactful on your competitive chess performance. And so I asked Jennifer what she thought of that study What you're referring to is the study that showed that after a certain point of chess success, they were studying elite youngster players. The IQ actually negatively correlated with success And this is kind of a known phenomenon in statistics, which is called like the collollider eff fact. And the reason is that you need a relatively high intelligence and a strong work ethic to be good at chass. So once you start looking at a very Eite subset the second variable might win out. It might be true that working hard actually correlates even stronger with chess success. so those players are going to do better than the ones with like the higher measured IQ, which is kind of fascinating and honestly is a little bit like the principle of chess boxing that you kind of need them both and that it's more about having them in certain relationships as opposed to just having like all the Brawn or all the intelligence. And byy the way, I mentioned this study to my friend Christopher Sabriree, who And I told Chris. Yeah. and I told him I was going to be on your podcast and he was, Oh, that's amazing that you're talking about it there because he said he had great memories of being on the pod with you. Yeah ye. And yeah, I just wanted to I wanted to double check with him that this like was correct interpretation this collollider effect And it's great though. It's also very, I think encouraging because very few people have super high IQs, just like very few people can be the top boxer in the world by a lot of people can get really interested in something that they love. And so understanding that at a certain point that becomes the more important variable, I think is really cool. And you see this with a lot of people who end up not getting into chess and bless them. a lot of them end up doing even more important things like Demis Hasavis, who was a chess prodigy and at eleven years old, He had this revelation during a chess tournament that What if all this mental energy in the room could be used for scientific or medical advancements, he was eleven And he lost the game But that revelation ended up being like the seed of his interest in machine learning and he ended up founding co founding Depmind, of course, and now is like a household name There are other examples though, even the famous Polgar sisters. A lot of people say that Sophia was incredibly talented. I've heard people say she was the most talented and she ended up becoming an artist and not being as serious about chast as the other two Dr. John Non, Grandmaster and mathematician was sightited by the one and only Magnus Carlson is being too smart to just play chess So there really is some truth in it in a lot of different fields. yeah E chest You say there are two kinds of chest times. Very briefly, what are the two kinds of chest t Wow They are the time on your clock because every serious chess game is time Otherwise, and this did happen back in the day by the way players for the worldor Championship would end up spending hours on a game. M hours. I think it was actually fourteen hours for one game And they had to shut down the Paris caafe so the workers could go home at some point So you have to time the game. But then there's also the number of moves. And that part's unknown So there's one type of time that's very concrete, like the number of hours in a day and the fact that the world's going to keep turning three hundred and sixty five days a year And then there's also our own lies where we have an estimate of how long it will go, but we don't know for sure And I believe it's the same in chass where we don't know how to removes the game will last. But we know how much time we have on the clock And we have to juggle those two types of time That is it for this episode of the You're Not so Smart podcast for links to everything we talked about. Head to younaotssomart. com or check the show notes right there podcast player My name is David McCriny. I have been your host You can find my book How Minds Change, wherever they put books on shelves and ship them in trucks details David Mcraey. com and I'll have all of that in the show notes On my homepage, davidmacrany. com you can find a roundtable video with a group of persuasion experts featured in the book talking all about it Read a sample chapter, download a discussion guide, sign up for the newsletter Read reviews All sorts of things for all the past episodes of this podcast You were not so smart You can Follow me on Twitter and threads in Instagram and Blue skky and everything else that's like that at David McCrany, at Sybol, David McCraney llow the show at notot smmart Blog We're also on the Facebook slash you are not so smart If you'd like to support this one person operation, no editors, no staff, just me G to Patreon. com Slash you are not so smart pitting in it Any amount gets you the show ad free, but the higher amounts Thatll gets you posters and t shirts and signbooks and other stuff. 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