First off, this post is not about chess. I’m a beginner player, progressing to intermediate. It’s not like I could hope to put together two coherent sentences about the game.

No, this is about an entirely different topic. It’s about a little something called systemic thinking.

In simple words, systemic reasoning is about two things:

1. Giving good luck a big target to hit
2. Giving bad luck a small target to hit

We use “systemic” as opposed to “linear” or “straightforward”. In linear reasoning, if you want to go from point A to point B, you walk in a straight line.

In systemic reasoning, we account for the possibility of the straight line proposed by the linear guy going over a river. The straight line would be the fastest way… if we didn’t end up drowning, or losing a whole lot of time figuring out how to get across the river.

Systemic reasoning is the science of how the easy and obvious choices may end up coming back to bite us in the ass. That’s gotta have at least some carry over to your own life — don’t try to tell me “simple” has not yet blown up in your face.

Switching gears: “straight for the kill” vs. “positional pressure”

Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.

— Tartakower

Everyone knows that the goal in chess is… checkmate. Put the enemy king against a wall and let it beg for mercy. I hope no one is surprised by that.

When I learned how to move the pieces, my instinct told me (…and still tells me) to try to formulate a deadly attack as soon as possible and be done with it. Be directly and unapologetically offensive. Seek to either capture important pieces or pose a direct threat to the king. All my moves would have the unique goal of trying to attack something.

That’s usually a very bad approach. Direct attacks only work against people who barely know how to play the game. Get an opponent who is a tiny bit more sophisticated and you will fail miserably. You will get yourself in really shitty positions while trying to carry out your attack, and your opponent will take advantage of that.

That means that you will get on your own way. You will con yourself. And then you will lose.

Think of it this way. When you want to do something quickly, you tend to forget stuff along the way, or otherwise stumble around. Classic examples are getting dressed or making a meal. If you try to do them fast, you will make many mistakes that slow you down on your way. If you relax and allow yourself a bit of time to think before actually doing things, it’s likely you will fare much better.

So going straight for an action (following the receipt as fast as possible) that looks in agreement with your goal (having a cake in 10 minutes) is not always the best choice. Your cake will end up in the thrash. These clear sets of steps towards achieving a goal are called tactics. Tactics are exactly like a receipt. They are a perfect information thing. You follow the steps and you get your result.

And you indeed got a cake in 10 minutes. The problem is that it tastes like shit and is no good whatsoever.

The problem here is that you forgot to account for something. You didn’t just want a cake in 10 minutes. You wanted a cake in 10 minutes that actually tastes good. And not set the house on fire in the process.

There is no clear set of steps to do that. Why? Because there is no clear definition of what “tastes good” is and how to achieve it. Not setting the house on fire is something you want to avoid doing. No clear set of steps for that either. Tactics alone won’t help.

You need strategy.

The idea of “strategy” is as follows. It’s not clear how exactly to make a cake that tastes good. With strategy you leave the realm of perfect information, to step into probabilistic land. What you do is to place yourself in a position such that the result you want looks pretty likely.

In the cake example that means:

• You question whether the receipt you have fits your ingredient, skills and time available.
  • In the first case, perhaps you neglected to find out whether you actually had the necessary ingredients before getting started.
• You make sure each step of the receipt is working not only towards your goal of having a cake, but towards your goal of having a cake that tastes good.
  • That means you need to make sure the ingredients mix well. That the oven is set up correctly. And probably lots of other things — I’m not a cook.
• Using that framework, you then implement the tactics to do things quickly.
  • That could mean getting out all the elements first and laying them on the table, being mechanically fast, clearing up the way, warming up the over ahead of time, etc.

Granted, this is a silly example. But this silly switch of gears, when applied to many different situations, forms the foundation of systemic thinking.

It’s been said many times in chess that your tactics need to flow naturally from your strategy. That is, your attention needs to be on having a strong position and then the appropriate tactical opportunities will present themselves. What you don’t do is trying to pursue a given tactic you came up with and letting that guide your positioning.

Appropriate tactics follow naturally from a strong positional or strategic understanding.

Just like in the case of the cake. If you understand the general principles of making a tasty cake and how to adapt a receipt to your needs, the tactics for making it fast (or cheap, or whatever) will present themselves naturally. If you are missing ingredients you will be able to replace them by something that works similarly. You will be able to set up your material on the kitchen in a way that makes the process more efficient. You will know where to invest your attention and when you can afford being “faster”.

Tactics alone blind you to your true, holistic purpose. And the result will be exactly what you asked for, but nothing like what you expected.

Mental microenvironments or why darkness and light blind all the same

Let’s see how the mind handles all the kitten videos and information overload you throw at it. This will be really basic, but it will hopefully be useful as a little idea to have in the back of your mind.

Attention works roughly like a focused light beam. You know, like the ones they use at the theatre. The width of the beam can change a bit, but it will never light up the entire stage. Your attention is just like that: it filters out most of the information, letting in only a tiny bit of it. Sometimes it lets in a bit more, sometimes a bit less. But it’s never anywhere near letting in all of the information hitting your senses.

Because otherwise, you would very quickly go insane. Some degree of sensory overload is present in a variety of conditions, and it usually poses a challenge.

But I don’t really want to talk about processing incoming information. I wanna talk about how you think about the information you already have (that is, all the kitten videos you have already watched, no coming back from that!).

See, you cannot hold that much information in your conscious thought. Your working memory has a finite size — and a small one at that. That means you have to choose which information to import from either your long-term memory or outside sources (books, notes, etc) into your working space.

I’ll leave aside a really important issue here, about the synthetization of knowledge (hint: as you work with your information, it can get smaller in size).

Anyway, you are left with a mental spotlight to the information in your working space… and darkness everywhere else. You start to work with this information, absolutely ignoring the darkness. In the previous example of making a cake, you blindly followed the receipt, and ignored everything else.

Darkness everywhere, except at one, well-defined spot. The beam cannot move at all.

This situation of working with only with the information you import and leaving everything else in the dark is what I will call a mental microenvironment.

When you cooked your ugly, awful cake above, you were fully locked down in a mental microenvironment. Mental microenvironments are the stage within which tactics take place. Tactics require shutting out everything but the immediately relevant information. Nothing but the logical sequence of steps matters.

Strategy or positional understanding is something else entirely. They involve knowing which information to put into the microenvironment in the first place. But not only that, they also require figuring out when the information that we are currently working with is not enough, or not appropriate. Strategic understanding means that we can move the focused light beam around, and that the beam is not all that “focused” — it has some fading going on.

Even though there is still a lot of darkness going on, the glow lets us see what is around us a bit. These lights can move.

Now, if your beam goes wider, more powerful or moves more than expected, you go into information overload again. You simply cannot handle that amount of information flowing into your consciousness. You can see it there, but you cannot do anything with it — not even understanding it!

An example of this? Decision paralysis!

Seeing too much or not seeing anything at all can be equally disastrous. However, there are ways to expand a little bit what you are able to see (i.e. making your beam wider, more powerful or more able to move around). And there ways to do that while also not losing your shit.

Once again, strategy emerges as the guide of tactics. Being locked down inside a mental microenvironment means you lose capacity for progress. You will get in your own way, by not being able to see how things fit in the bigger picture. Mental microenvironments force you to work with very limited information; if you want new information, you have to close the working area and set up a new one.

In simpler words, this is what will happen:

1. You encounter a problem
2. You find a solution and move on
3. You encounter the same problem
4. You forgot you even encountered this problem before, so you have to go through the process of finding a solution again
5. You encounter the same problem
6. (You get the idea)
7. …(this continues)
8. …at some point, hopefully, you realize you have been a fucking idiot (optional)

Not that this ever happened to me…

And it’s even worse. Your solutions will likely not be perfect: it’s very possible that they create their own problems. So, by using tactics alone, at best, you will need to rehash your same processes to find solutions many times, leaving you no time for actual progress. At worse, you may have exponentially increasing problems and almost no previous experience on how to deal with them.

As we will see a bit in the next section, bringing in proper strategy can limit the amount of problems you create to a manageable size.

So you don’t end up biting your own ass.

System effects or how to bite your own ass

I’m gonna show you how to bite your own ass, even if you have no flexibility whatsoever. No need for yoga when you have the power of your mind. Or even better, I’m gonna show you how to not bite your own ass.

You see, biting your own ass is amazingly easy. So easy you will do it without even noticing.

So let’s see how that would go.

Apparent factors vs. effective factors: the illusion of causality

We are really quick to start guilt-tripping people or things.

Lacks of explanations are uncomfortable. They force us to recognize our own ignorance and stupidity (and we have plenty of it). We prefer, by far, a really shitty explanation.

A lot has been written about that. So I’m not gonna rehash it. Because there is more.

In the presence of competing explanations, we tend to favor the one with a clear, direct causal chain than others involving random processes. For instance, in the post About conspiracy theories, I said the popular unconscious prefers to believe a virus was deliberately manufactured by some foreign power rather than believe it was the product of a series of random mutations.

This forms the basis for the causality trap mentioned in the beginning of the post linked above.

Today, I want to use this trap in reverse. The causality trap is about how we fall for entirely false explanations because they have clearer cause-and-effect lines. I’m gonna turn this around and talk about how when we want to achieve something we take the action that looks more clearly connected as “the cause” of our goal, rather than the one that is actually more likely to lead to our goal.

In chess, the goal is checkmate. So if there is a move that results in check (not checkmate!), many beginners (like me) will likely take it. Even though there is no connection between a temporary threat to the king, and checkmate. It feels like there is. But there isn’t.

Similarly, it looks like there is a connection between commanding respect and being an asshole “to let ’em know their place and show ’em who is the alpha here, bro”. It looks like there is a connection between being higher up in some hierarchy and handing out orders. It looks like there is a connection between truly desiring to achieve a certain goal and being one hundred percent dedicated to it, to the exclusion of everything else.

There isn’t.

They all show up as the “apparent factors” that will cause our goal to come true, but they aren’t really effective. Effective factors that will enable success come in many flavors, and usually fall into one of these:

1. Having the relevant pieces in the fight rather than outside the fight. This concerns what you are bringing in with you to achieve your goal.
2. Having the relevant pieces deployed in the right tactical positions. This means that whatever you brought in the first step needs to be given an appropriate purpose.
3. Having the relevant pieces work in coordination. In other words, the purpose of each piece must be designed in such a way that it fits in nicely with the purposes of other pieces, assisting each other rather than standing in each other’s way.

So you are not directly concerned with your goal, but with with managing your pieces, their positions and their mutual interactions. You are not “advancing towards your goal” directly, but rather creating systemic pressure to maximize the likelihood of your goal coming true. It takes an especially sophisticated mindset (not mind!) to be able to map things out in this way and resist the temptation of using the “straightforward” route.

Why? What makes it so hard? It’s because you are essentially letting the chips fall on their own. You are giving up direct control on the target and focusing on the process. It also forces you into a more abstract plane of thinking, which may at first feel intangible or immaterial when it comes to “real life”.

But by focusing on the process rather than on the goal you will avoid many potential problems. The pieces will work together and almost “magically” deliver. And if they don’t, at least you will have the system you built as your safety net.

System phenomena and the escaping turtle

Here comes the ass-biting part. That is, some of the things working against your intuition if you try the linear or straightforward approach.

As you go about marking off to-do lists and stuff like that, you will suffer the cumulative effects of randomness. Things you couldn’t possibly have seen coming or are not under your control will slow you down and demand your attention. Now you have your original task plus handling this new even that came up.

When handling this event, further random events will likely come. This leaves you with an ever-expanding battlefront. Tactics are not environment-proof simply because they live locked down within mental microenvironments.

One little change and… poof! Your tactics are now useless and need to be updated.

Good strategic placement systems handle this by means of synergy. Synergy is the mere observation that the way the pieces are related to each other changes their overall value. Pieces working together are way more valuable than the sum of their individual values: they cooperate to create a new organic entity. Similarly, pieces that are deployed poorly are less valuable than the sum of their individual values: they get in each other’s way and hence limit each other’s power.

Here is the thing. Having a synergistic system in place allows you to turn these happenstances into resources or tactical opportunities. What before, from the isolated tactical point of view, was an inconvenience, now is an asset.

It’s clear that moving forward is more about understanding the principles behind good systems engineering and less about plotting paths to Neverland. Focus on the process, make sure every moving part makes sense in the whole, and results will follow.

Otherwise, you will be chasing an escaping turtle. I can promise there is nothing more frustrating than that.

There is a final question, I guess. Are we willing to give up some control in order to get results? Or will we always end up sacrificing the checkmate for a mere, insignificant check?

Now let’s fucking play.