Sure, playing chess needs intelligence, dedication, and good chess players are smarter than an average person. But it’s waaaay exaggerated in movies. I’m a math researcher, and in any movie, my department will be full of chess geniuses. But in reality, only about 10% of them even play chess.
I’m not the guy you’re replying to, but it is a bad analogy since learning to read a language leads to more exciting things, even if you don’t enjoy reading books. You can communicate, do science, watch movies with subs etc. But learning chess does not make you good at anything else. (Tbh, I’m speaking out of my ass here, and will stand corrected if presented with research showing otherwise.)
Your points are correct but I think you misunderstand what my analogy was intended to do. None of this makes it a bad analogy.
I don’t disagree with you that reading opens the doors to so many other things than chess does.
I also never intended to imply chess is a transferable skill. Chess skill, for matters of this discussion, could be entirely useless outside of the specific context of a chess game.
The reason i made the analogy betwen learning to read and reading for fun is because I’m trying to illustrate the difference of 500 ELO chess and 2500 ELO chess.
If you play 500 ELO chess you DO NOT KNOW what 2500 ELO chess is, you could not explain the reasons behind a single move which is made in strategy, you can barely identify how to move your horse.
That’s part of my point. If we were talking about painting then the skills might well be useful for other stuff, but everything I’ve read says that it’s just a game. It doesn’t build other useful skills.