Trick I learned from Nassim Taleb to get better at chess and chess variants fast

This is similar to how I overcame the game 2048. When that game first came out, I couldn't stop playing cause of all the dopamine hits. So one day I sat down, pulled source code for it off github, and made a little Q-learner. After watching that successfully learn the game, and how good it was (especially compared to me), it just felt pointless to keep playing

This reminds me of this guy who thought he could "hack" chess with a very similar method and beat Magnus Carlsen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFNv-FJFGTg (it does not go well)

As much as I like computer chess you will get better improvement if you just play against players rated ~300 better than you.

Regardless of effectiveness of this particular strategy; I really loved his Devil/Angel inner dialogue, because it reminds me of how I get a handle on "things that threaten to engulf me."

Right now for me it's "cryptocurrency bots." I could tell that without the dialogue, the possibility that I could get insanely rich with some coding would just eat me up, especially because I know that on one hand it's almost certainly possible, but on the other-- I am a bad-to-mediocre programmer.

So I know I have to "make a deal" with myself, and in some ways talk myself down, and figure out the logic that would get me to do this in a reasonable way (because I know that for me, "don't even try" isn't an option.)

I have convinced myself in the following way by coming up with this statement: "I probably cannot make a billion dollars with crypto bots, but I'm going to have to allow to try it out to make sure."

The author is taking the Taleb advice too literally and without enough nuance. One needs to calibrate the difficulty of the task. Ideally, one sets it so that it is in the region where it is just beyond the grasp of ones ability.

The author seems to have dialed up the difficulty way too high considering the author's skill level. This is like trying to learn to play violin and going straight to Paganini... it is not an effective use of time.

Just because Magnus Carlsen is using a computer to train does not mean a beginner should do the same.

I am applying the same technique trying to learn basic statistics by reading Taleb's "Statistical consequences of Fat Tails", the book he dedicated to Nicki Minaj

Great article, very glad I read it.