Tuesday, February 10, 2015

DG XVI: Not So Brilliant




Garry Kasparov is shocked. Shocked, I tells you.

You wonder how the erstwhile World Chess Champion finds the time to lecture the President of the United States of America. What with having to get himself to Oslo to pick up his Nobel Prize for sorting out dementia and all.

It’s not that I disagree with Gazza’s central thesis (that Putin is a bit of a see-you-next-Tuesday) you understand. More that I find it hard to value somebody’s opinion on Topic A if I know that they’re prepared to claim authority on Topic B despite having little knowledge of and even less interest in whatever that other subject may be.

Could it possibly be that Sarah Hurst’s assessment of leading chessers
... chess brilliance has nothing to do with high intelligence in other areas, but tends to give top players a false idea of their own high intelligence. They equate their FIDE rating with their IQ. In fact they have devoted so much time to chess that they may not be so brilliant at other things.
applies here?



Chess and Dementia Index

6 comments:

Jonathan B said...

Good news. Gazza is heading to London today.

https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/564957304374956032

Oxford Martin’s twitter bio?

"Bringing together world experts to tackle the challenges of the 21st century"

Uh huh.

David R said...

How Life imitates chess. Except mercifully, it doesn't

an ordinary chessplayer said...

"I find it hard to value somebody’s opinion on Topic A if I know that they’re prepared to claim authority on Topic B despite having little knowledge of and even less interest in whatever that other subject may be."

I think you just identified a new logical fallacy. Let's call it "appeal to egotism". He thinks he's so smart, therefore he must be wrong.

It is no doubt true that strong chess players over-estimate their general intelligence. That's not remarkable. Olympic athletes probably do the same, as well as Ph.D.s, rich people, tall people, dictators, and just about anybody who is a couple of standard deviations to the right on any arbitrary "success" scale. Heck, I do it myself, and I'm pretty much average in every department.

Niall Doran said...

What's the Obama history lesson about?

Jonathan B said...

Ukraine. Consult Gazza K twitter account for more details

ejh said...

I'm not sure what IQ has to do with it anyway. I've no particular reason to think that high-IQ people are politically wiser or even better-informed than other people.

Come to that I'd have thought that the more people considered their IQs important, in other words the more that they view the world through the prism of their being smarter than other people, the more they were actually likely to get things badly wrong, because it's actually a very warped and misleading viewpoint.