Is Chess Culture Important for Improving at Chess?

I don't think this statement by Sielecki is controversial at all. In fact, taken literally, it is a truism.

What he literally says is that there is no reason to read old books instead of newer ones (which implies there is nothing valuable in old books that is not covered in new books). He doesn't even say it's inefficient for improvement or even bad for your chess to read old books (something that I think would even be warranted to a certain degree, as a lot of analysis of the pre-engine era is flawed, knowledge and technique wasn't as refined, etc.).
He says "Old books are not better than new books". How could anyone disagree. But I think the stronger version "Old books are worse than new books" is true as well. This is where a debate would start.

Almost invariably the people claiming such things about old chess books (a vast and ungeneralizable subset of literature as a whole) are also the people attempting to hawk their regurgitated versions of those same books to a generally naïve and uncritical chess public.

Sielicki's statement is mostly nonsensical. The fundamentals of positional play, tactics, endgames, etc. haven't changed much since 2000. The main thing that has changed is cutting-edge opening theory, and that doesn't matter much if you're under 2300 FIDE.

Take a book like Jeremy Silman's excellent "How to Reassess Your Chess" (1st ed., published in 1993). Could it be improved if we used computers to double-check its analysis? Maybe very slightly. But the critical thing that the book teaches you is how to think *like a strong human chess player*. It teaches you heuristics, rules of thumb, and ways of evaluating a position. It teaches you how to plan and how to combat your own bad habits.

@Toscani said in #15:
> humsci.stanford.edu/feature/study-reveals-how-cultural-factors-influence-chess-move-choice
> royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2023.1634
it might be a different sense of culture there. but good angle.. hmm.

edit: nope. it does seem to be internal chess culture about the social aspect of chess knowledge sharing or access to others behavior data. Good find @Toscani. interesting to me at least.

> The researchers’ analysis of chess games revealed three types of biases described by the field of cultural evolution, which uses ideas from biology to explain how behaviors are passed from person to person.

> Specifically, they found evidence of players copying winning moves (success bias), choosing atypical moves (anti-conformity bias), and copying moves by celebrity players (prestige bias).

Well, it is not the sense of "culture" that is transmitted from generation to generation via structure written material, and its diffusion by other humans among new generations. That other meaning of the word.

It seems to be a more ethological sense of culture, more of social contemporary influence nature.. I guess I don't know what "field of cultural evolution" is beyond the natural language of the phrasing, but the second sentence gives some clue.

So maybe dismissing books and their possibly autonomous take home ways of thinking (if taken for what they are or were, not as bibles), might make a lot of room for that type of culture dynamics (some of which might be actually how we learn as a group, anyway, but since we are aware, we might want to check about the extent of such).

direct to source paper (open access): Cultural transmission of move choice in chess
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2023.1634
supplemental material link (well can be found above, just suggesting to look at that too):
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/suppl/10.1098/rspb.2023.1634
github.com/EgorLappo/cultural_transmission_in_chess

si porque antes todos eramos monos y ahora somos monos

I think the tweet was correct. Books written before 2000 are considered outdated because openings are always changing and eventually the old books wouldn't be relevant anymore. Maybe some books before 2000 could be useful but I have yet to find any book before 2000 useful to me at least. The point is that the past books will soon be forgotten and covered up with newer and present books that are more essential and useful.