Besides being full of good advice, this is really fantastically well written!
As a practising artist (a wire sculptor) I am all too familiar with this conundrum. How do you see the world like a child when you are an adult? Picasso had a few pithy one liners that addressed this point. It seems to me that the trick is not to abandon knowledge, but - equally - not to worship it.
I really like your take on it. We need to fit more stuff into socks!
Thank you for an inspirational and very actionable post.
...
The road to wisdom?—Well, it's plain
and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again,
but less
and less
and less...
>Maybe this whole neuroplasticity thing is bullshit.
It is. And this is the most important sentence of the post. You can absolutely learn new things (not just chess) as an adult and get GOOD. The dogma that you turn stupid when you turn ~25 (Ding Liren is 30) is defeatist and pessimistic. You just have to be willing to try and suck at it for a while, without your ego getting hurt.
there is a difference between plasticity and pruning.
read some more.. i guess i am in the middle now... I wanted to salute the idea that some situations where the theoretical concept are exagerated are worth more than just random experience. so in some ways having been exposed at least once to such concepts through another persons words (with enough motivating graphic support, usually well chosen diagram), does seem to be somewhat of a "winning" combination for adults..
that the adult can then autonomously guide future experience toward testing such concepts ideas or hypotheses (there are until tested enough) in the real (feeling, smelling, sensing....etc) what was initially a word with few examples to give a rough contour approximation to the meaning meant by the various authors who had so much experience themselves, that to them, the words have more tangible ring when put on paper or told. ok i stop here... i might have not finished correctly my past sentence.
this is a good blog.. each chunk.. different aspects.. the toddler point does reoccur, i might have lost its whereabouts now in the middle... might need to read again. I guess it is about driving own experience with curiosity and questions and not flinch about losing.... the pleasure of discovery for its sake.. initially wide questions... not preexisting dogma. (or misunderstood ideas as dogmas to restrict and give a false sense of knowledge).. i may be over interpreting.
It's gotten so bad because I worked for almost 2 years to get an over 1k Blitz rating that after I got it I stopped playing on that other site and joined this one just so I could play Blitz without tarnishing my rating. Now my Blitz rating is frozen in time like a time capsule that's full of used diapers. No one cares! Yet I can't bring myself to play again with that account....