Life In 19x19

I ran across this article on unconscious processing and expertise.

http://mindhacks.com/2010/10/11/the-unconscious-expert/

Food for thought.

Raja yoga, anyone?

In Go, at least, I'd think it would be much easier to deliberately orient yourself with conscious thought since you are effectively doing a very concrete form of calculation. Sports match prediction, on the other hand, is a lot more vague and nebulous than, say, a life and death problem. It probably is easy to get misguided by irrelevant factors, or give relevant factors too much or too little weight.

Monadology wrote:In Go, at least, I'd think it would be much easier to deliberately orient yourself with conscious thought since you are effectively doing a very concrete form of calculation. Sports match prediction, on the other hand, is a lot more vague and nebulous than, say, a life and death problem. It probably is easy to get misguided by irrelevant factors, or give relevant factors too much or too little weight.

Well, the same should go for chess, and expertise seems to be a factor. Isn't there chess research that shows that, given a problem position, chess masters immediately looked at the right answer while average players did not? OC, that is not the result of conscious processing, but neither is it the result of extended unconscious processing. So it is not conclusive, but it does indicate the importance of unconscious processing.

I mention raja yoga because it recommends making conscious effort -- as you say, conscious thought can orient the mind --, followed by unconscious processing. In my own experience, although it does not have anything to do with expertise, I jumped from about 11 kyu to about 7 kyu simply by pausing after my reading efforts to just look at the board for a couple of seconds. Since I suffered from the kyu disease of failing to tenuki, I attributed the jump in strength to shifting to a whole board perspective. But maybe allowing some unconscious processing to work was important, as well.

Bill Spight wrote:

Monadology wrote:In Go, at least, I'd think it would be much easier to deliberately orient yourself with conscious thought since you are effectively doing a very concrete form of calculation. Sports match prediction, on the other hand, is a lot more vague and nebulous than, say, a life and death problem. It probably is easy to get misguided by irrelevant factors, or give relevant factors too much or too little weight.

Well, the same should go for chess, and expertise seems to be a factor. Isn't there chess research that shows that, given a problem position, chess masters immediately looked at the right answer while average players did not? OC, that is not the result of conscious processing, but neither is it the result of extended unconscious processing. So it is not conclusive, but it does indicate the importance of unconscious processing.

I wasn't trying to suggest that unconscious processing wasn't significant in Go. I was only pointing out that unlike in match prediction, I doubt that conscious processing is going to make things worse most of the time.

Monadology wrote:I wasn't trying to suggest that unconscious processing wasn't significant in Go. I was only pointing out that unlike in match prediction, I doubt that conscious processing is going to make things worse most of the time.

My interpretation of the results was not that conscious processing made things worse, but that it was not as good as unconscious processing. (I still think that raja yoga is right, but doing, say, 1 minute of conscious thought on the problem followed by 1 minute on the memory task was not one of the experimental options.)

I definitely think priming the pump by conscious thought followed by some sort of unconscious processing is a useful approach to playing go. I like slow games and this approach can be effective if you don't mind taking 5 or 10 minutes to make a move.