⚡ Diagnosing Conceptualization Mistakes (Quick Lesson)

0:00This is a quick conceptualization lesson from Aidan, don't move. Let's get straight into it. Hi, it's Aidan. The other day I completed a my third Thursday group coaching session for members at don't move until you see .it. This is a monthly session that we run as a community check-in and opportunity for me to talk about whatever the particular topic for that month is and get some of that group coaching atmosphere around it, um, bit of a forum for questions, all of that good stuff, and mostly a community hangout and check-in. And this most recent one, I decided to broach a topic that I haven't spent a lot of time talking about, but it's something I do every single day. And that is how can we go about diagnosing the root causes of our conceptualization mistakes?

1:04So the weird glitches we experience in games or the weird moments where intuition runs away with us and we end up completely forgetting half of the board exists. These sorts of things, how can we work backwards from the mistake that we've just made and work out from there what we need to be doing, what went wrong, how we can fix it? So this is something I do every day. It's something I do with my coaching students, it's something I do in my own games. It's something I reverse engineer to create the exercises, working with Tiana to create the exercises. And if I'm honest, it's something I think about when I'm playing my own games as well to sort of see how can I force my opponent to make a conceptualization error. I might talk about that one day as well, I think that'd be fun. But I've never really crystallized it into a set of steps.

2:04It's quite a complicated topic because a lot of it's based in my expertise and years now of having done this and working with so many different brains and the sorts of things that it does. But I wanted to try to condense it down to something that someone who's reasonably familiar with my work and the stuff we talk about and working memory and intuition and all that good stuff, seven slots like someone who can, who's aware of those ideas can review one of their own games, find a spot where they had a mental glitch of some kind and work out what went wrong. If you aren't yet familiar enough with what I mean when I say things like seven slots and vacated squares and dormant ideas and all of that, then this technique might not be useful for you yet. But if you do have that background information, then this may prove useful. I'm still in my early stages of presenting and working out what shape this takes.

3:07And this is the first time I've spoken about this outside of that one member session from last week. So this may be clunky, it may not work, but I hope at least some part of this is useful and we'll continue to refine this as we go. So in order to diagnose your conceptualization mistakes and try to work out what caused them, we can go through this five step process. The five steps are, and I'll do this in more detail in a second, don't worry. Number one, is it a chess era or a slot era? Number two, what was the working memory pressure at the time? Number three, what are all the details involved in the mistake and where did they show up? Number four, what else happened on the move or on the moves, those details appeared that may have contributed to us missing or forgetting some detail.

4:09And lastly, with all of that information, step five, look at it from your working memories perspective. Okay, now we'll explain each of those in a bit more detail. Step one, we have to work out, is it a chess era or a slots era? Basically, was the cause of this mistake? Something that could be solved with more knowledge, whether it's an end game idea or a pattern you're unfamiliar with, a line you don't know when you're opening a positional idea, something like that is the mistake, something that could be solved by learning something new or was it a mistake that was caused by something happening in your brain? Whether it's forgetting, freezing, freewheeling, was this a result of your brain doing something a bit strange or your working memory letting go of something? The slots errors are the only ones that this technique makes any sense for, so if the knowledge error, go to knowledge sources to work out what to do with that.

5:12If it's a slots error, then you can continue down this set of steps. Second, what was the working memory pressure at the moment of the mistake? So this is where we put on our empathy for our own brain. What was our brain doing in that moment? It's really useful to look at time pressure. Time pressure is an extremely powerful force and our working memory and it sort of makes everything way harder to do. So if we're under time pressure, we're going to make more conceptualization mistakes. Was there an emotional shift, sometimes just as the momentum shifts in a position or in a game, we can feel this emotional weight, positive or negative. Like if we go up a pawn or go up a piece and we realize we're winning, that's actually quite a difficult working memory load. It's quite a lot of emotion flooding through that system that our brain has to prioritize. Same with realizing we're losing, same with making a mistake, same with lots of complexity

6:16in the position, same as a very complex move. That was happening pressure-wise at the time. Third, we need to look at the error and identify what are all the individual details involved in the mistake and when did they appear. So this one's a little hard without being able to show you what I mean. But let's have a really obvious basic example that we can all sort of conceptualize together. You've got a queen on G4. Or a opponent. So white's going to queen on G4. Black moves. I'll play as D5, right? Maybe we've also got a bishop on C4 just for the purpose of this. So white has a bishop on C4, a queen on G4, and black plays D5. Now a bunch of stuff is involved in an error there. Let's say that the area you're looking at is you move your bishop out of the way to protect the bishop and their bishop takes your queen.

7:18So let's say that's the mistake we're looking at. If we want to look at the details involved in that mistake, we can look at the queen being on G4, we can look at the bishop being passive and having not left its original square on C8. It's the black bishop. We can look at the white bishop on C4, or we can look at perhaps depending on what else is happening in the position, maybe why we put our queen there in the first place, maybe G7's tender or whatever. So we look at these details. Look at the fact that the mistake came down to the vacated square. So the pawn left D7 to reach D5, and that opened up the diagonal on the queen. We missed that that was part of it, but we did see that the pawn on D5 is now attacking our bishop and we reacted to that. So that's all really important information. If you go back through the game and find when each of those elements began, we also

8:19get a sense of when they first showed up in the game, we can also get a sense of what might have been happening in those moments that would cause us to either miss the particular detail or not really take it in, or maybe we did take it in and forgot it later. But what were we aware of, what weren't we aware of out of those details that added up to the blender as the game went on? Now a question for is really for more complex issues, and it's directly related to the past one, when all those details showed up, what else happened in those moves that might have driven us to notice or not notice these other details, sort of repeating myself there, but this is kind of, you need this as an extra stage in really complex sequences. Our example doesn't need this one here. But to give you an idea what it looks like, the question of what else happened on the turn where the blender showed up is the blender was the D7 porn emptied as the porn went

9:19to D5, the bishop hit the queen. But what else happened on that move is the porn is now attacking our bishop on C4. So that's a critical detail in amongst all this. In a more complex situation, you'd need to go deeper into where each of these individual details showed up to work out how they, how you miss them, or what patterns emerged in between the details that you did actually miss. The last point point five is to look at it from your working memory's perspective. So pretend for a minute that you are this automatic, somewhat primal creature, and you have this very limited resource that's in very high demand, and you're constantly trying to make choices based on where your person's attention is going on what to hold, what to that go of what gets your limited resource. It's kind of a fun exercise, but it's great once we've gathered those details, we put

10:21on that perspective of the working memory and go, okay, what, what were we doing at that time? What was the working memory doing? What was it focused on? What was it trying to juggle and what did it let go and why? If we look at that example we've been playing with with the Bishop and the Queen, it's quite clear what the working memory did. So it sees, we see a porn, leaving D7, arriving on D5 and hitting our bishop. Our working memory goes, okay, we're under threat, our bishop is being attacked, we need to resolve this problem, and you think about how you can resolve that problem. We actually think in those moments tend to think quite clearly about the position, but all within a frame of, we have to do something about the bishop, and these frames are really useful for our working memory. So what happened from a working memory perspective in that moment is the porn attacked our bishop,

11:22we solved that problem, and we're completely unaware the whole time of the other issue, because we never placed attention on the vacated square. So we have five steps, check if it's a chess era or a slots era, look at what the working memory pressure was, time pressure, emotional pressure, position pressure, three, look at all of the details involved in the mistake, and go back through the game to see when those details first showed up, four, check on each of those moves where the details first showed up, what else was happening in those moves? What may we have been fixated on? What may our attention have gone to instead? Why did we miss or forget those particular details as the game went on? And then lastly, with all of that information, look at it from the working memory perspective. What was your brain doing in that moment? What was it paying attention to? What was it holding?

12:23What was it juggling? What was it trying to achieve? Look at it in a forgiving way as you would a dog trying to sort this resource out for you. It's like, oh, this screws up, but he's doing his best. Once you've done that, and you can have a story of some kind as to what your working memory was doing in that moment or in one of the moments in those details that added up to the mistake, then you can start looking for patterns across your various brain glitches, conceptualization errors in your games. And from there, start to build a sense of what you should be doing to resolve it. If you go through this process and you put some of that work in and you found that pattern that's moving through your conceptualization errors and you want to know what to do with that. Shoot me an email at don't move until you see dot it, a ID and I don't remember to see dot it. I would absolutely love to hear from you and help however I can. Now this is only my second attempt at communicating this very complex topic, very difficult topic.

13:27I feel if I can get it right, then this would be hugely valuable to chess players. So any feedback you have on this, I know it's not quite there yet. I can feel it's not quite there yet. But as we've got feedback on this, I'd love to keep refining it and it will probably show up in an article at some point once I've got a sense of what it should be. So every bit of feedback and email or Spotify comments or whatever would help me greatly. What do you think of these five steps? Are they useful or is it still too complicated if you'd implement your own game? Let me know. Here's to the journey. I hope you found that useful. For more insights like this, check out don't move until you see dot it. Happy conceptualizing. Here's to the journey.