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Scrabble and the Nature of Expertise (2015)

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Scrabble and the Nature of Expertise (2015)

#11

Post by thaumasiotes »

Waterluvian wrote: post #10
thaumasiotes wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that TROOZE and KIBI are not legal words (or existent words), and AA, while derived from a real word, is misspelled.

Aa lava? I always spelled it that way in undergrad. Now I’m curious. I guess one could argue without the accents it’s incorrect. But then we get into the pedantry of how most words are wrong as they’re mostly borrowed and mutate over time. No true Scotsman in the dictionary.

Accents? It should be a'a.

The only native English word with a phonemic glottal stop, uh-uh, includes it in the spelling, for obvious reasons. You could write ah-ah, or a-a, on that model, but this isn't done.

Re: Scrabble and the Nature of Expertise (2015)

#13

Post by Waterluvian »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #11
Waterluvian wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aa lava? I always spelled it that way in undergrad. Now I’m curious. I guess one could argue without the accents it’s incorrect. But then we get into the pedantry of how most words are wrong as they’re mostly borrowed and mutate over time. No true Scotsman in the dictionary.

Accents? It should be a'a. The only native English word with a phonemic glottal stop, uh-uh, includes it in the spelling, for obvious reasons. You could write ah-ah, or a-a, on that model, but this isn't done.

But 'A'ā isn’t the right kind of correct either?

I’ve seen it written in a lot of ways from Aa to A’a to ah-ah to 'A'ā. So which true way do we accept and why? And does it matter?

Re: Scrabble and the Nature of Expertise (2015)

#14

Post by jasonhong »

Minor tangent, one of the main subjects of this article, Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, was a student in our Master's of Human-Computer Interaction program at Carnegie Mellon University many years ago. He joined after winning the National Scrabble Championship. I had the pleasure of teaching him in one of our courses (Programming Usable Interfaces, sort of an intro to prototyping and programming for non-programmers). I briefly quizzed him one time about how many words you can spell using hexadecimal (0xDEADBEEF, 0xCAFEBABE, etc).

He went on to be a UX designer and manager on Google Store and Google Fi (see his home page at https://www.conradbb.com/).

Re: Scrabble and the Nature of Expertise (2015)

#15

Post by paulcole »

Waterluvian wrote: post #6
bee_rider wrote: post #5

[flagged]

Indeed. The mistake is thinking it’s a language game. It’s about symbols and territory. Tournament winners often don’t know any of the language the symbols are borrowed from. But… when played less competitively, like with kids, it’s a wonderful word learning game. Also to your joke about Risk: I grew up with a math version of scrabble where you wrote equations. I loved it.

> Tournament winners often don’t know any of the language the symbols are borrowed from

This might be true in less than 0.1% of tournaments so I think "often" is overstating it.

You've got Nigel winning in French Scrabble which is 1 example. You've also got Thai people playing English Scrabble, but nearly all of them have at least some working knowledge of English.

Beyond that though the humongous majority of tournament scrabble games are played in English and won by native English speakers.

Re: Scrabble and the Nature of Expertise (2015)

#16

Post by thaumasiotes »

Waterluvian wrote: post #13
thaumasiotes wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accents? It should be a'a. The only native English word with a phonemic glottal stop, uh-uh, includes it in the spelling, for obvious reasons. You could write ah-ah, or a-a, on that model, but this isn't done.

But 'A'ā isn’t the right kind of correct either? I’ve seen it written in a lot of ways from Aa to A’a to ah-ah to 'A'ā. So which true way do we accept and why? And does it matter?

> But 'A'ā isn’t the right kind of correct either?

That preserves a bunch of information that can't exist in English regardless of how you write it.

"Aa" does the opposite, erasing information that is critical to the pronunciation of the word. There is no way to read "aa" as being more than one syllable long.

Re: Scrabble and the Nature of Expertise (2015)

#17

Post by madcaptenor »

CrazyStat wrote: post #12

I had an English teacher in high school who was ranked like #3 in competitive Swedish scrabble. He didn’t speak Swedish in any meaningful sense, just memorized all the good words.

At one point, the world champion of French Scrabble was Nigel Richards, a New Zealander who doesn't know any French: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/21/new-fre...

Re: Scrabble and the Nature of Expertise (2015)

#18

Post by hellogoodbye »

CrazyStat wrote: post #12

I had an English teacher in high school who was ranked like #3 in competitive Swedish scrabble. He didn’t speak Swedish in any meaningful sense, just memorized all the good words.

Memorizing the words is one thing, but as the article mentions it's a lot more strategy involved. Rack management, memorizing the right hooks, knowing when to use the right hooks, closing up the board for your opponent etc.

Re: Scrabble and the Nature of Expertise (2015)

#19

Post by jrussino »

smitty1e wrote: post #4

> For example, it may one day be possible to give people precise information about their abilities, and of the likelihood of achieving success in particular domains given those abilities. As a technical matter, sure. However, part of me would like to suggest that using tech as some sort of Delphic Oracle for human lives (especially the young) may not be in optimal taste. Possibly just letting life be life, and not ge…

> using tech as some sort of Delphic Oracle for human lives (especially the young) may not be in optimal taste.

I feel like we have plenty of dystopian science fiction warning us not to go down this path. GATTACA is a personal favorite of mine.

> Possibly just letting life be life, and not getting too frisky with putting boundaries on human potential, may be preferred.

I'm inclined to agree... but all life is competitive.

For example, the idea that we might someday be able to cheaply and effectively choose or alter babies' genes gives me the "ick" in a major way. And yet, someone is going to do it. And the ones who do will probably end up out-competing the ones who don't. What to do about it?

Re: Scrabble and the Nature of Expertise (2015)

#20

Post by smitty1e »

jrussino wrote: post #19
smitty1e wrote: post #4

> For example, it may one day be possible to give people precise information about their abilities, and of the likelihood of achieving success in particular domains given those abilities. As a technical matter, sure. However, part of me would like to suggest that using tech as some sort of Delphic Oracle for human lives (especially the young) may not be in optimal taste. Possibly just letting life be life, and not ge…

> using tech as some sort of Delphic Oracle for human lives (especially the young) may not be in optimal taste. I feel like we have plenty of dystopian science fiction warning us not to go down this path. GATTACA is a personal favorite of mine. > Possibly just letting life be life, and not getting too frisky with putting boundaries on human potential, may be preferred. I'm inclined to agree... but all life is competi…

Correcting well-understood genetic issues isn't an ethical stretch.

Taking performance past natural, OTOH...

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