kaberett | {up on the watershed/standing at a fork in the road}

It is commonly asserted, in popular culture (or at least the parts of it that I frequent), that chess grand masters when given a board set up mid-game and asked to list all possible moves... won't. In contrast to amateurs, who'll get a rather more complete set, because -- goes the anecdote -- grand masters just don't see the bad moves.

I have been unable to unearth any actual corroborating evidence for this; I've found a lot on "chunking", on the ability of chess grand masters to recreate mid-game but not random boards they've seen very briefly to a relatively high degree of accuracy -- but that isn't actually what I wanted to set up this post, so instead I'll just present it on the meta level (and gratefully accept any offers of references).

Because the thing I want to talk about is unlearning, well, precisely that.

I've been thinking, recently, about the psychological trick of looking at your catastrophic thoughts, your worst-case scenarios, your Only Possible Explanations, and -- learning how to address them by means of sitting down and just... writing a list (of ten, or five, or three) alternatives that do not have to be realistic or plausible. "She's not replying to my message because she's on a highly classified Mars mission and she's got far enough out that the lightspeed delay is significant." "He's having a tea party with a dinosaur and can't get over the feathers." Anything, anything at all, that gets you out of the space of discarding anything but the Worst Case Scenario as impossible, before you've even really consciously considered it.

You're (re)learning how to see the "bad" moves. You're learning how to see options.

And it's generally much easier to start, to practise those skills, with things you're not even trying to make yourself believe -- where the extent of your emotional engagement is resentment of the exercise -- than with anything that feels threatening because, for example, it involves vulnerability, or uncertainty, or hope. It's got other benefits -- it's distracting; it might even be amusing -- but that's the core of it: you're learning not to dismiss out of hand the options that are obviously impossible.

Like, you know, "maybe they don't actually hate me".