Life In 19x19

I do hope those people who have been beating some of us about the head with the need for precise rules, and telling us how stupid the Japanese are, are reading this with red faces and tingling ears.

Nothing to do with one mode of thought being better than the other, but I hope it is a salutary reminder that in international go we are dealing with people who can be noticeably different. Using either mode of thought, I would imagine that a sensible conclusion would be to respect the differences.

entropi wrote:When I tell you Mr. X has brown eyes, this information is not visual. It becomes visual only when I show a picture of his eye.
But ok, that's a matter of definition. If you want to call it visual as soon as you see the word "brown", be my guest. Let's call it visual.
Even if we call it a bunch of smaller visual memories, it does break something down to understand it.

When you tell me Mr. X has brown eyes, the information is verbal. But what does verbal have to do with analytical? This is part of where you're losing me. If I recall a component part in my memory that I have seen, it is visual. If you convey a sentence to me describing it, the component is verbal. In both cases, being a smaller part of the whole (the face), though, you would consider it to be analytical. Furthermore, that is not the example you gave:

Try to remember somebodies face analytically. He has brown eyes, short black hair, long nose, etc etc etc. You need tens of items like that and you are still far away from the real appearance of the face.

The implication is that this is distinct from anything visual. I just don't see how that's the case. Recalling part of what you have seen is just as visual as recalling the whole thing.

In your example the facial features are being recalled. Recalling the eyes of a face is visual. There was nothing mentioned about conveying information into sentences whatsoever. However, since shifting it to an issue of identification rather than recall makes more sense I'll just proceed with that in mind. It's certainly not how you presented it, though.

It is not magic, it is a different part of human brain operating. You don't recognize peoples faces by recalling the eye color, the length of the nose etc. But if you want to describe a criminal to the police, you can use this analytical method if you don't have any visual information like a picture.

But you're only using the so-called analytical method because there is no singular word in the language used to designate this unique face unless the name of the individual is known to both you and the police ("It was Al Capone!"). This has nothing to do with analytical vs visual, it has only to do with the pragmatics of verbal communication.

I can just as easily argue that the process you're describing as "another part of the brain operating" is unconscious analytic thinking. The brain identifies a face to answer the question "Is this Al Capone?" by analytically cross-referencing known features since the actual photo you are going to see will be, as a whole, distinct in a number of ways from all your other visual impressions of Al Capone. Otherwise how would it be recognizable? The fact that this appears to happen as a magical form of "visual thinking" is simply a product of the processing being unconscious.

Then the counterpoint can be made that the same ought to apply even to the more fundamental components of the face which would require regress unless there is some basic capacity for recognition. The scale of whole to part is always going to be relative. This may be side-stepped if analytic processing relies on being able to generalize colors such as "brown" which is the opposite of breaking something down, but allows for recognition by creating a new 'whole' which decomposes into its constituent exemplars (or is that really how categories work? Maybe not). Where do such categories fit into the analytic/visual dynamic? Why is the opposition to the analytic visual anyway? Why not tactile, aural or olfactory?

I'm sorry, I just innately and violently resist the notion that 'thinking' is divisible into such handy-dandy discrete binary categories, especially when they supposedly align more-or-less neatly with geographical partitions of the globe. It's not really a big step beyond the idea that there is an "Intelligence" quotient expressible on a single quantitative scale.

EDIT: Edited to clarify a little. Also to post this link, which clarifies the problems with generalizing styles of thinking to Cultures like East and West better than I can (don't worry, despite the title containing the word "Orientalism" it's not really about that specifically):
http://neuroanthropology.net/2009/04/30 ... sychology/

Trivially: It's been said that East Asians do not really use eye colour (or hair colour) to describe a face (kinda understandably), as an example somewhere. I was under the impression that at least in (some?) Chinese, people have swathes of terms for eye shape - are they triangle-y? Phoenix shaped? This to me doesn't seem very different to noting the colour.

More trivially: The study initially linked suggests that spatial reckoning is the thing for go. I do not necessarily see that cultural holism and spatial reckoning faculty are closely related. I think it is not necessary at this point to look for further factors [as to why non-East-Asia has not equalled East-Asia in go professionals] than lack of popular interest and access in non-East-Asia. Razors and all that.

Edit: Realized something I said and bolded it.

Monadology,
I honestly don't understand what is bothering you so much about my face recognition example.

In a nutshell, what I am saying is: There are (at least) two different ways of thinking (or describing or remembering or...) somebodies face.
1-visualising it - I call this one visual thinking
2-analyzing it and recalling the details verbally (e.g. brown eyes) - I call this one analytical thinking

What exactly is it that you don't agree? Do you think they are the same way of thinking, or is there something else bothering you?

I am not a neuroscientist (maybe you are, I don't know) but I am just describing my view about different ways of thinking, which I see is in line with the passages cited by daal.

But if you are indeed a neuroscientist I will try to better understand what you are saying. Otherwise, I will probably not reply any further on this specific subject. Thanks

entropi wrote:I cannot give reference but I heard from different sources that chess grandmasters have a very high IQ on average. Why should it be different at Go?

Maybe because Go masters are from the far east where the visual thinking is culturally more dominant than analytical way of thinking. In the west this is the other way round. And since IQ tests are more oriented towards analytical thinking, this could explain it.
Of course I am just specualting. But this is a rather interesting issue.

One story is that aspiring go professionals are more likely to be excused from academic obligations than chess professionals. Someone more aware of the chess scene should probably confirm that, though.

FWIW Entropi, I thought your analogy was very clear and informative (and feels intuitively sensible to me too)

Monadology - I'm confused, do you or do you not understand the example of two ways to remember a face - one analytic and one synthetic? I think it's a great example, but if you're struggling with the concept I can give you many more.

If your objection is only to crude dichotomies - I sympathize, and I think that it's sad that most fMRI researchers understand neither statistical significance nor theoretical coherence, but do you really deny that chopping up phenomena into smaller parts (analysis) and spontaneously recognizing patterns (synthesis) are fundamental and distinct mental powers? Do you deny that some people are better than others at each of them?

entropi wrote:Monadology,
I honestly don't understand what is bothering you so much about my face recognition example.

In a nutshell, what I am saying is: There are (at least) two different ways of thinking (or describing or remembering or...) somebodies face.
1-visualising it - I call this one visual thinking
2-analyzing it and recalling the details verbally (e.g. brown eyes) - I call this one analytical thinking

What exactly is it that you don't agree? Do you think they are the same way of thinking, or is there something else bothering you?

I am not a neuroscientist (maybe you are, I don't know) but I am just describing my view about different ways of thinking, which I see is in line with the passages cited by daal.

But if you are indeed a neuroscientist I will try to better understand what you are saying. Otherwise, I will probably not reply any further on this specific subject. Thanks

I am not a neuroscientist either, I am just trying to have a discussion describing my view about what I can understand of your view about different ways of thinking.

Your conceptions are simply too vague from where I'm standing. They don't make any sense as some kind of dichotomy. I've gone into pretty good detail (e.g. what about recalling the details visually? Is this both analytic and visual? Another kind of thinking?). Visualizing is just the act of producing a representation, how does that involve any kind of thinking? If it's a kind of thinking, it should be applicable to all sorts of problems that are not resolved simply be recalling something you have seen. If it is simply recalling something you've seen, then why not recalling something you heard or smelled? What does this have to do with the 'whole picture' of the problem? I've enumerated many questions such as these. If you do not feel like answering them, that is fine.

Visual thinking as you've described it doesn't seem to be in anything like the same ballpark as what is described as analytical thinking (not even apples and oranges, more like apples and street-lamps). It doesn't even seem to have any well-defined attributes beyond visualization. And yet it is being assigned a (hypothetical) significant role in distinguishing between cultures and explaining low IQ scores in a certain group. Either the example is the problem or visual thinking as a counterpart to analytical thinking is simply not coherent. I've been focusing on the example because it's more charitable not to assume the latter. It's not just the visual thinking, though. In my last post I also tried to indicate that analytic thinking probably involves more than decomposition by posing similar questions.

jts wrote:Monadology - I'm confused, do you or do you not understand the example of two ways to remember a face - one analytic and one synthetic? I think it's a great example, but if you're struggling with the concept I can give you many more.

No, I get that. I just don't see how it's an example of thinking. It's an example of recall. Furthermore, they are operating on different levels. If you cannot remember the whole face at once, that is because your recall is imperfect for some reason. You can deal with this by trying to recall bite-sized parts of it. But if you can remember the whole thing you aren't really taking some kind of different, synthetic approach to a problem because there is no problem to solve in the first place. Hence there is no 'thinking'. You are simply recalling the face.

If you can describe an equivalent approach to resolving the problem of imperfect recall by decomposing the parts of the face and remembering them individually that would be synthetic, I would very much appreciate it.

EDIT: I think I've pinpointed the conceptual problem with the example. If the problem is "How do you reproduce the whole?" I do not see how "Reproducing the whole," which would be the holistic/synthetic 'thinking' is actually a method of problem solving. It's simply the solution. Thus it produces a one-sided case. The only way, outside of simply already having the solution (the whole) is to work analytically.

Perhaps in an example where "How do you reproduce the whole?" was not the problem, I could understand it better.

Even more trivially: I think this issue may be further confounded by trying to use faces as an example. Faces are special to brains. You'll note in one linked article, a fish swimming in a pond is used. This is probably surprisingly different to faces.

First, for all that's been said here, we don't know that facial recognition works by seeing the whole picture. For all we've said here, it works by remembering an image of the mouth, the eyes, and some data about the distances between those things and the ears. The conscious mind would have no idea how it works, but it would be every bit as much a process of pulling out details.

It feels like we remember the whole face, but that doesn't mean we do, anymore than the fact that we don't notice the blind spot in our vision makes it the case that it's not there.

Second, how does this generalize? If face-recognition is our example of visual perception, how does that characterize the entire way that Asians think?

Monadology:
i am not sure if i can explain it any better than other before me, but i will try...

i think the example with faces might not be the best possible, nor the term "visual thinking", though both work for me.
lets try to illustrate the difference at playing go. i remember one Korean troll at KGS chat who repeated how Westerners can't be good at go and play terribly slow, because they rely only on reading all possible variations while Asians have much better whole board thinking and "feeling" for the game (i lack a better word here)

example right here at L19 might be Malkovich games - Magicwand's games can represent Asian style and i guess topazg's could represent western style

my explanation surely has some flaws you can argue about but if you want to understand, i hope it can help (and it is half past midnight here anyway, so i can't write anything better)

@Laman I've heard the exact opposite: that Korean players start pff fighting like crazy, and only later worry about the opening and subtlety, while Western players start asking about the newest research concerning the 3-5 point while they're DDK.

hyperpape wrote:@Laman I've heard the exact opposite: that Korean players start pff fighting like crazy, and only later worry about the opening and subtlety, while Western players start asking about the newest research concerning the 3-5 point while they're DDK.

I'm not sure if that's contradicting Laman, it sounds like you're rather supporting his point. Western players start asking about research and theory, Korean plays just fight because it's cool and feels good

"Much of the material in this book is definitely not available in English language Go literature. In fact, I doubt that this material can be found anywhere in the world because Mr. Yang did not formulate these ideas until after he arrived in the United States in 1986. He once told me that when he taught Go in China, his students would say, "Yes, Teacher, I believe you." After arriving in the US, however, he began encountering students who say, "Yes, Teacher, I believe you, but why? How is that a small change - one line up or down, left or right - can make such a drastic change in the analysis?""

Written by Joel Sanet on the back of Yilun Yang's fundamental principles of Go.

I have little doubt that there's a really strong mindset difference between Asian and Western culture.

The interesting question is not whether there are differences. Differences are obvious. Admission to Chinese universities is weighted much more to quantifiable, logical, rational processes (test scores) than American universities that look for a holistic picture of their applicants via personal essays (wait, what?!).

It's whether those differences are part of some big picture holistic vs. analytical thingamadoodle, and you can consistently categorize those differences in a way that isn't ad hoc and just looking for patterns.

For all my snark in the first paragraph, I think it's a fascinating topic. There's a half read book on my shelf, The Geography of Thought by Richard Nisbett (the badass social psychologist) that summarizes recent research on the subject. I had half a mind to do a review of it for L19, but never finished it, and also decided I wasn't in a position to review it very authoritatively.

Monadology wrote:I'm sorry, I just innately and violently resist the notion that 'thinking' is divisible into such handy-dandy discrete binary categories, especially when they supposedly align more-or-less neatly with geographical partitions of the globe. It's not really a big step beyond the idea that there is an "Intelligence" quotient expressible on a single quantitative scale.

EDIT: Edited to clarify a little. Also to post this link, which clarifies the problems with generalizing styles of thinking to Cultures like East and West better than I can (don't worry, despite the title containing the word "Orientalism" it's not really about that specifically):
http://neuroanthropology.net/2009/04/30 ... sychology/

I agree that binary categories are inappropriate when discussing such a broad topic as factors that influence thought, but that's no reason not to attempt to draw distinctions between an analytic approach (the circumference of a football is 2π r) or a visual one (The football is as big around as a plate). Likewise, aside from possibly offending people, there's no reason not to consider whether geography, genetics or culture play a role in how we think.

Just to be clear, the above quoted article points to faults in studies making sweeping generalizations about cultural differences; it in no way suggests that cultural differences are non-existent.