I recently had the opportunity to interview Milton Bradley. No, not that Milton Bradley, though there is a board game connection. I happened to stumble across Milt’s site, where he talks about the benefits of the ancient board game of Go, why he finds it far superior to chess, and how he taught it to hundreds of kids in an experimental after school program.
Perhaps most interesting to me was his claim that many of the world’s biggest problems are caused by poor decisions resulting from undeveloped reasoning skills, and that we can actually make progress towards solving them by learning this game. I couldn’t pass up the chance to ask him a few questions.
Hunter: First things first. What is reasoning, and why is it important?
Milt: Wikipedia says: “Reasoning is the cognitive process of looking for reasons, beliefs, conclusions, actions or feelings.” I prefer to think of it more simply, as “the logical mental process through which one arrives at answers to real world problems.”
My own definition appears in the Preface to my autobiography. [Bottom of the post]
Hunter: Don’t schools already teach reasoning? Maybe not explicitly as a subject in its own right, but don’t we pick it up along the way? And if not, then what is the purpose of formal education?
Milt: No, absolutely not! The emphasis in the schools is primarily on facts and the application of formulas to the solution of problems with exact solutions (e.g. math and the sciences). The vital subject of decision making in messy real world situations is really never addressed.
Hunter: You say that a full solution to the problem would require that schools teach reasoning, starting in pre-school and continuing throughout one’s entire academic career. Noting that this isn’t going to happen anytime soon, you suggest an alternative partial solution – teaching the strategy board game of Go, which can start right now.
Most people in the West have never heard of Go. I had barely heard of it until recently, and while I’m beginning to gain an appreciation for it, I know I’m far from really getting it. So I’m sure you’ve encountered a lot of people who are skeptical of your ambitious claim. Tell us, how can a board game play an important role in solving the world’s problems?
Milt: In terms of learning the process of situational appraisal and then deciding upon an appropriate strategy and the specific tactics with which to implement it, the process in Go is much like that involved in solving real world problems. So mastering the former process theoretically should help learning it in the latter, but there remains the difficult problem of skill transference from the neat, clearly defined realm of the Go board to the messy, immensely complex real world (especially considering its emotional implications). So whether or not my inference in this regard will prove correct is currently unknown.
Hunter: In the U.S., we play board games with a large element of luck, such as Monopoly, Life, and Sorry (to say nothing of roulette, the lottery, and Super Bowl squares). Eurogames, such as The Settlers of Catan, Puerto Rico, and Imperial, require much more thought and planning. And in Asia, they play Go and games resembling chess.
Does this tell us something about the different cultures, or am I reading too much into it?
Milt: Hard to be sure, although that’s a reasonable inference. But that’s a possibly unknowable question about historical origins which is almost entirely irrelevant to the key issue of what we do with and about the games we now play.
Hunter: I’m very interested in brain plasticity, the ability of our neurons to adapt to new experiences, an ability that decreases with age. I don’t think it’s true that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but let’s face it, some tricks are much easier for young dogs. Perfect pitch is a good example; anyone is probably inherently capable of it, but if you don’t speak a tonal language or receive musical training very early, the window closes forever.
It seems that all the great Go players started learning from a very early age. Go Seigen was an exception, becoming possibly the greatest player of all time, despite not starting until the ripe old age of 9.
For people who are far older than 9, is it too late to learn Go, or reasoning?
Milt: A good question. It’s certainly harder to attain the highest levels of proficiency, and the main reason for that is that Go is a game of pattern recognition, and it seems that the brain’s ability to absorb and internalize patterns declines quickly as a child ages. And a key here that should not be overlooked is that these top players who began as small children only were able to do so because the patterns they were exposed to as young children were on a very high level, so what they learned “by osmosis” was correct. If their exposure had been to error full low level play the result would have been quite different!
Hunter: Forgive my playing devil’s advocate, but they already play Go in Japan, and that’s not exactly a utopia. Like any other country, they have their pros and cons (see my discussion with Akemi Gaines where we compared the U.S. and Japan, or my tongue-in-cheek 10 Reasons America is Better Than Japan).
Is this because Go has been insufficient to fully develop reasoning in the Japanese, or because good reasoning isn’t enough?
Milt: Both! And because of the skill transference problem I alluded to earlier. It’s relatively easy to be objective in playing Go compared to the real world where all kinds of emotional issues intrude on the decision making process. As earlier noted, this is a key issue that must be addressed.
Hunter: Being smart isn’t considered cool. Any ideas on how to change that?
Milt: What you’re talking about is a quite temporary (and manifestly counterproductive) artifact of our current prevalent “pop” culture! Our society has enough problems that we aren’t currently coming near to solving for this sort of mass stupidity to continue indefinitely without sounding its own death knell! So this will either change sometime in the fairly near future or our survival prospects will be even dimmer than they already are.
Milt’s Go Page is filled with insightful articles about the benefits of Go and his experience with teaching it to kids after school for eight years. When I asked him to write a bio for this post, he provided the entire preface to his autobiography, so read on for more content!
In January 1943, age 15 years and 10 months, I graduated from the newly created Bronx High School of Science, then arguably the best high school in the entire United States. At the same time I was also an overweight, friendless, indifferent student who was seriously contemplating committing suicide! But on my 16th birthday only two months later, thru sheer force of will I overcame that negative thinking, and began to transform both mind and body to turn my life around.
As a result, I can look back today with pride at the creative output and epiphany of my “retirement” years, which have resulted in the writing of 8 books, 3 of which are in print and one that’s published FREE on the internet, all brought to fruition after the age of 75, with the last just this year at age 82! But I’m now also unquestionably in the twilight of my life, suffering from incurable, invariably fatal Acute Myeloid Leukemia, while my 88 year old wife has fallen victim to both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. But I soldier on despite those burdens, still writing, and still hoping to see my most significant work published. This autobiography is high in that category as is my novel The Vigilante Murders, but first and foremost is what I consider to be my most important work, Reasoning And Problem Solving, which is the result of some unique insights which I believe have made my life worth living and writing about.
The primary theme of this autobiography can be viewed as the story of my triumph of wit and will over adversity. But that’s an oft told tale, not infrequently by others who’ve had far more serious challenges to overcome than mine. So a reasonable reader might question why they should be interested in a rather detailed exposition of my life and its accompanying problems, trials and triumphs. The most straightforward answer is that I believe my story is intrinsically interesting! But even more important is that it lays out the intellectual substrate upon which my sometimes unique insights were generated.
This memoir begins with a brief look at my familial pre-history, then continues by relating the events and circumstances of my childhood that brought me to the devastating state of mind noted above, in which I was prepared to prematurely end my then still very young life. It then proceeds through my WWII Navy service and subsequent “GI Bill” education, meeting my wife and beginning my now 62 year long marriage, and the many, often traumatic professional and personal triumphs and tragedies that followed during my working career.
Among the most unusual and noteworthy of my many personal interfaces detailed herein were intimate daily contact with four individuals who made local and national front page headlines! The first of these occurred at Bronx Science, when for 3 years I sat at the next desk to Harold Brown, who later went on to become US Secretary Of The Air Force in The Johnson Defense and Secretary of Defense in the Carter Administration. Slightly more than a decade after that, I spent 4 years as a Quality Control Engineer at the RCA Receiving Tube Plant in Harrison, New Jersey, working daily with John Butenko, who soon after was unmasked, tried and convicted as the second most important Soviet spy ever in the US! Fast forward another decade or so to when I was supervising the redesign of the NYC Parking Violations Bureau’s computer system, when I spent year long daily working interface with PVB’s Deputy Director Geoffrey Lindenauer, who was soon thereafter exposed as a leading conspirator in their infamous scandal! And not too long after that, Eric Klein, who had been one of my personal programmer/analyst staff at the NYC DOT, was arrested and convicted as the largest counterfeiter of subway tokens in City history!
In attempting to establish a context in which an objective assessment of this autobiography is possible, I believe that it’s essential for the reader to consider some interesting facts. Even for those few in human history who have achieved great renown, the details of their daily lives all too often don’t offer much insight into the origins of their monumental achievements.
As a result, it’s reasonable to conclude that perhaps value in an autobiography shouldn’t be sought in the facts of the author’s life, but rather in the quality of the insights that his story generates in the reader. Or at least that’s what I try to convince myself of in attempting to justify this effort.
To really appreciate the uniqueness of my insights, it would help greatly if the reader understands (and hopefully agrees with) my most important premise – that most of the world’s myriad serious problems on the personal, interpersonal, group, enterprise, national, and even international level result from a single failing – an inability to adequately Reason objectively, unfettered by biases, prejudices, loyalties, and the “canned” prescriptions and proscriptions imposed by authority figures and institutions.
Although this precept seems to violate the principle that “Simplistic solutions to complex problems are almost invariably wrong,” I believe that this case constitutes one of the rare exceptions!
To be sure that there’s no ambiguity concerning what I mean by Reasoning, I conceive it to consist of:
1. The ability to objectively perceive and analyze an often complex problem situation, and then
2. Arrive logically and unemotionally at the course(s) of action required to best resolve the significant points of difficulty and/or contention involved.
When I arrived at this key realization of the almost universal difficulty most people experience in objectively solving real world problems, I believed that I had uncovered one of the central impediments to human progress throughout its history, and one whose conquest would rank among the most significant. And I also somewhat naively expected that this insight couldn’t possibly be one uniquely developed by me, but that surely some great thinker had long since both addressed this transcendentally important problem and solved it! But I discovered to my great surprise that not only was that not true, I was unable to find any reference to the fact that anyone had heretofore explicitly acknowledged that it was a even significant issue worthy of attention!
If this seems strange or improbable, I refer the reader to a bit of history in the field of mathematics by way of analogy (recognizing that, by their very nature, all analogies are necessarily imperfect). In this (possibly apocryphal) story, when John Napier, then an unknown Scot, published his treatise on Logarithms in 1614, it was so revolutionary that the head of the prestigious British Mathematical Society made a special trip from cosmopolitan London to semi-rural Scotland to meet him. As the story goes, on finally meeting Napier, the great man from London sat for perhaps a full half hour simply staring at him before finally saying something to the effect that “How can it be that this marvelous idea (of logarithms) escaped the best minds in all of humanity for thousands of years, yet was finally discovered by someone as ordinary as you?” I, of course, make no claim to intellectual equality with either Napier himself or his accomplishment, but mention this anecdote to emphasize my favorite dictum:
The validity and worth of an idea are unrelated to:
- Who proposed it.
- How long it has been believed.
- The number and importance of those who believe it.
- The vehemence with which they profess that belief.
History is replete with instances of the entire world believing something that was later acknowledged to be manifestly false (“The world is flat”), followed by a single man proposing an idea completely at variance with then conventional, accepted thinking, and ultimately prevailing. Galileo is perhaps the best known and most often cited example of this, and Einstein is another. But they were both operating in the world of physical science, where absolute proofs are possible. In the realm of ideas in which I’m operating no such absolute proofs exist, only opinion. Despite that, perhaps, just perhaps, it’s possible that, despite the uniqueness and novelty of my insight about Reasoning, I really might have discovered something that’s worth listening to!
Although I certainly wasn’t aware of it at the time, in retrospect it now seems that creating this new Reasoning paradigm was the goal toward which all of my training and life experiences had been pointing. How interestingly I describe those experiences and whether or not any of that really provides the reader with useful insights are crucial issues that only you can properly judge for yourself after you’ve perused what follows! Hopefully the result will satisfy us both.
