[Kingston]

Allow me to muse on the "significance" of chess. It changed my thinking in three ways:

1. A much deeper appreciation of the logical complexity of life. If a limited game is this deep, imagine the implication for daily reasoning. I now feel how bounded rationality really is. This hit me hard as a brick around rating 1200.

2. Mental discipline. You have no choice but to think everything through, or lose. Even when you work hard you lose, and then you are forced to learn your lesson.

3. Intellectual humility. Because level and play is measurable, you see how much there is to understand about a subject, and how huge the difference is between beginner, intermediate, and a "black belt".

I also played Go, but not as much as chess. Go makes me appreciate subtlety and indirection more. Go taught me that any situation is far more neutral than it looks at first sight, so we have always enough reason to be less excited than we usually are.