Empiricism versus rationalism. And next up, McNeil Lehrer.

Rise and Shine said in response to a previous post:

There's no need to classify tactics unless you're writing a book on them. All you have to do is become familiar with them through study and your brain will classify and recognize them for you. This is a group of people dedicated to chess improvement. This is not a group of people dedicated to pontificating about a bunch of pseudo-academic gobbeldygook. If that kind of stuff floats your boat, then have fun with it. It will not make you a better player.

First, the anti-intellectual tone surprises me, given the practical nature of my questions about tactical classification. As I started to hit harder tactical problems that didn't fit into the simple beginner schemes, I wondered if there was a more general scheme that experts use, that they found just as helpful to them when they started to improve as the basic 'forks' etc were to beginners.

That is, the point of my posts was to ask how much more detail a classification scheme needs to be useful in practice, once you get beyond the basic motifs (which, incidentally, in practice were very useful to know). While it is a practical question, that doesn't mean finding the answer is simple and won't require some thought. What is obvious to the expert will be confusing to the novice (i.e., me) and require conscious attention (just like a kid learning long division). So I chalk his acrimony up to stylistic taste. I wasn't called the 'PBS of chess blogging' for nothing. If you get bored or impatient that is likely jusifiable.

Ok, enough crap about style. Let's get on to chess improvement. Taken at face value Rise and SHine is saying that we shouldn't worry at all about classifying tactical patterns, that experience is sufficient. This seems wrong for a couple of reasons.

First, the experiment I discussed shows that people do better in the future when they construct explanations of positions. This is not pseudo-academic. It is data. You can argue about its interpretation, but there it is, data about chess improvement that could have practical implications. Simply playing is not as good as playing with an eye to explaining what is happening in the position.

Note that this thesis is not new, or some out of touch academic theory. Chess instructors don't explain positions to hear themselves talk! Annotated game collections have more than variations in them for a reason. Tisdall (Improve your chess now) says it is extremely helpful, in practice, to construct internal narratives at a general level about the position. This was also discussed in a nice post at the Kenilworthian. Perhaps Rise and Shine thinks such higher-level explanations are not useful for tactics, or that tactical classification schemes are not needed in tactical explanations. Perhaps he will clarify in the comments.

Second, taken literally, Rise and Shine is saying we shouldn't teach beginners what a fork is, or teach them that, when you have a piece pinned, attack it. No need to learn all that, as it will happen automatically if you just play enough games (unless you are writing a chess book, in which case you will be teaching these useless classifications to beginners who apparently don't need to know them). There is something to be said for simply playing a lot, but there is a middle ground. If having an elementary conceptual toolbox helps someone learn tactics faster, then they should learn it. The question is, how far, if at all, do we need to go beyond the basic classifications in practice? I concluded that we don't need to go far at all, as most combinations seem to be built up from such elements.

An anti-intellectual conclusion reached from pseudo-intellectual premises.