Critical thinking in Chess, Research and Business
Self-doubt is critical for the chess player’s mindset. Young chess players learn from the very start of their career that optimism over the chessboard would not lead them very far. Ideas are abundant on the 64 squares. You could lead your team this way or another. However, the only way a player could figure out his way is by critical thinking.
When looking at a chess position an experienced player usually notices intuitively the candidate moves. However, to decide upon all those hypotheses one should apply a refuting thinking process. Just like Karl Popper’s theory of Falsifiability the chess player should seek to prove himself wrong. Otherwise, if trying to verify his intuitive assumptions that a certain move is good, he would be vulnerable to missing contradicting evidence in his calculations.
We may also take this analogy one step further. When checking the viability of a certain move the player must assess the consequences of all his opponent’s possible replies to this move. The question is in what order should we calculate those alternative replies? The answer lies in our “falsifying mindset”. We will aim to invest as little of time and energy in our calculating efforts (maybe chess is a sport after all?) and thus start by exploring the easiest reply to consider. This method may be compared to research in which we will start by conducting a pilot-study to falsify our intuitive hypothesis before we will invest more resources in having a well-established experiment.
In my opinion, advanced chess thinking has a lot in common with business and scientific thinking. It may not be easy to show in an empirical study the advantages of studying chess but from my anecdotal experience, the right guidance could lead to an immense impact in many areas of life.
What do you think?
