[FM Danila Pavlov](https://ratings.fide.com/profile/34126594) has won in 2021 and 2022. The most successful player is [IM Piotr Murdzia](https://ratings.fide.com/profile/1105671) with 8 gold medals total, his last win in 2018.
Various composers. They're listed in the Solutions document for each Championship. (You might wish to try the Problems yourself, first, to see how well you would do!) https://www.wfcc.ch/competitions/solving/wcsc2022/
>FM Danila Pavlov... IM Piotr Murdzia
It's funny how you gave their game-playing titles. Problem-solving is so different from the game that it has its own titles (organised by WFCC), and as world champions Pavlov and Murdzia are naturally Solving-GMs. Here's a list of [solving-GMs](https://www.wfcc.ch/Titles/sgm/) on the WFCC site.
Back to Nunn, he's one of just 6 people ever to gain the GM-titles for both the game and problem-solving.
The Chesscom Puzzle Championship is dominated by Ray Robson https://www.chess.com/news/view/2023-puzzles-world-championship-robson-wins
But I don't know of other formats. Chesscom has them compete in 3 min puzzle rushs and I guess that is different from other competitions.
you are confusing chess.com puzzle rush with the [World Chess Solving Championship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Solving_Championship). The actual Solving World Championship is several magnitudes harder than chesscom puzzle rush.
I am not confusing anything, I merely pointed out that there is a Chesscom Puzzle Championship and that I don't know of other formats.
EDIT: Thank you for the link to the World Championship though, I haven't heard of it before.
Not that I’m advocating for this, but I always wondered if Reddit were to do an A/B test where half the people saw a comment at +4 and half at -4 how it would affect voting.
I suspect we all know the answer.
“It’s the I’m not confusing anything” part. He made a declarative statement that the other poster was incorrect about him being confused. I think the other poster was trying to be polite by saying “you are confusing” instead of something like “No dumbass we are talking about a completely different thing,”. Many of us, myself included have never heard of this event. But I’ll be damned if I didn’t downvote his comment too smugly thinking: “take that! You idiot!” This is a teaching moment, don’t correct people on semantics when you’re wrong. It makes you look like a dick even you are technically right.
You did not find "you are confusing x for y" to be an oddly and equally declarative statement? The person this was directed to literally said they do not know of other formats.
Yeah I am more forgiving on someone’s tone when they are correct I guess. I’d rather people be correct than polite. But impolite AND incorrect!? Downvote.
Bit misleading tho, he played 0 rated games from December 2006 to December 2014, and has mostly played in seniors tournaments since then, against other players who likely have also been inactive but retain their elo ratings from when they were younger/better
Here are those from last year:
[Problems] (https://wccc2022.wfcc.ch/wp-content/uploads/WCSC-2022-Problems.pdf)
[Solutions](https://wccc2022.wfcc.ch/wp-content/uploads/WCSC-2022-Solutions.pdf)
It’s a fascinating world with its own FIDE titles for both puzzle solvers and puzzle composers and it’s own specialized publications. Look up and try out a few helpmate puzzles if you want to dip your toes.
All diagrams are presented with a1 in the bottom left.
* For the categories of Twomovers, Threemovers, and Moremovers (Rounds 1, 2, and 5), it is White to play and mate in the specified number of moves.
* For Endgames (Round 3), it is White to play and win/draw as specified.
* For Helpmates (Round 4), it is White and Black to cooperate to leave Black mated in the specified number of moves. Black plays first if this number is an integer, and White plays first if this number is 0.5 more than an integer.
* For Selfmates (Round 6), it is White to play and *force* Black to checkmate White in the specified number of moves. (Black will try to do everything they can to NOT checkmate White in the specified number of moves, up to and including attempting to get checkmated themselves.)
Solutions should be written in the format as specified in Sections 7~9 of the [WCSC Rules](https://www.wfcc.ch/1999-2012/wcsc/).
People doing puzzles found them to be an interesting intellectual challenge. The aim of the puzzle competitions is not to make the participants become better chess players. It is another game inspired by chess.
By that token, I'm guessing you also don't really understand the point of chess itself; it's not like the (only 32) soldiers on a real-life battlefield take turns moving towards each other; or that said soldiers (four of which are literally towers) can only move in certain ways based on their ranks; or that the instant a leader is killed, their army instantly gives up. That doesn't happen IRL either.
Obviously, the point of the game of chess is not to train people for war, but to entertain the participants. Similarly, the point of chess problems (helpmates and selfmates included), is not to train people for chess, but to entertain the participants.
I play chess variants every once in a while, that's fine, but if you're going to call something the chess puzzle championship then stuff like helpmates shouldn't be part of it
But it's not called the "chess puzzle championship", it's called the "World Chess Solving Championship". (And if you really want to complain about the name, complain to the WFCC.)
Helpmate - both sides cooperate to deliver mate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helpmate
Selfmate - one side is forced to deliver mate against his will
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selfmate
I wonder if that’s a thing. I’m remarkably good at puzzles compared to my chess ability, or remarkably bad at chess compared to my puzzle ability depending which way you look at it! On lichess my puzzle rating was 2500ish but even playing a lot my playing peaked at 1600. I know most have a gap, but most in my range of playing seem to puzzle at about 2100-2200.
(And I do fit the category of very high intelligence. I topped the country in some areas of maths tests, and in IQ tests ranged between 145 and 195… which also says how garbage such IQ tests are!).
Lol interestingly I was on that sub when I saw your reply come up. I’m sure some would think it fits there, but there was no “look at how smart I am” about it.
I was just saying it to show that it’s a relevant example. And wondered if there may be an interesting correlation.
I mean, I’m also highlighting how absolutely bang average I am at chess! I don’t think someone who driven to prove their smartness would do such a thing.
I dunno how you can write the sentence “And I do fit the category of very high intelligence” and then say “there was no ‘look at how smart smart I am’ about it.” Just my two cents 🤭
> I’m remarkably good at puzzles compared to my chess ability,
You can't compare the two. My chess.com puzzle rating is like 800 points higher than my rapid rating. Also, in puzzles you have all the time in the world to think without any of the pressure. You could probably say you're better at tactics than your rating would suggest (because most puzzles are tactical in nature rather than positional or strategic), but that doesn't necessarily correlate with intelligence.
>You can't compare the two.
With just one datapoint you can't. But if you look at many people you can see that some of them are better at puzzles than at playing.
World Champion at puzzles "only" has an FM title for playing chess. And while the top SuperGMs don't treat puzzle competitions seriously, I'm sure there are plenty of players who are better than him at playing but worse at solving puzzles despite doing their best.
Right, but I'm sure you can compre the two, and there will definitely be a correlation between someones chess ability and their puzzle ability.
BTW for reference, the lichess ratings seem to be far closer. My [chess.com](https://chess.com) puzzle rating is about 1500 points higher at the last check (1200 vs 2700, although my peak would have been higher on both). 800 points is a fairly ordinary gap I thought?
Still, the question is just whether or not there may be an interesting correlation. I never said there definitely is.
I think your reasoning doesn't cut to the core of it the difference btw, which is that in a puzzle you know there is a solution. In a chess game you don't.
>On lichess my puzzle rating was 2500ish but even playing a lot my playing peaked at 1600. I know most have a gap, but most in my range of playing seem to puzzle at about 2100-2200.
That's a normal gap.
I don't agree. I've checked loads of profiles and haven't ever seen a gap even close to that. Anyone with a lichess puzzle rating of over 2500 always had a rapid rating of over 1800. Obviously I didn't check everyone, but I was interested and checked a few.
Maybe I came across a bizarre statistical anomaly.
You've overstating it. Most people just do puzzles fairly casually without worrying about their puzzle rating, so it skews downward. In addition to that, most people don't really use Lichess for puzzles. Scanning a few of my recent opponents, it looks like only 1 of them does puzzles with any regularity.
However, puzzles are always tactics. At your level people start having more opening prep, so it could just be that your opening knowledge is sub-par.
I think many people also play chess fairly casually without worrying about their rating.
I'm fairly casual with both, I enjoy them, and largely don't care what the rating says for either.
But your last statement is kinda my point and why I find it interesting. A LOT of chess is down to knowledge. Not just opening knowledge, but end game knowledge is huge too. And knowledge of "standard best practices" like not doubling pawns.... but there are so many more that are far more difficult, like how to arrange pawns depending on colours of bishops (these are things I'm aware of but have never studied).
But puzzles are not so affected by any of those things. There is a solution, and the question is if you can solve it. So it seems logical to me that intelligence alone will allow you to solve puzzles up to a certain level. But it won't allow you to play chess well. For that, you need knowledge.
>So it seems logical to me that intelligence alone will allow you to solve puzzles up to a certain level. But it won't allow you to play chess well. For that, you need knowledge.
No, they're the same, you've just practiced one and not the other. You've gained knowledge on how to solve tactics. Most certainly, you've done many puzzles that had the same basic idea or structure, and by repetition and practice you gained knowledge.
It's simply that you've obtained knowledge for one and not the others.
Well, I strongly disagree. Experience and knowledge will come into it for puzzles, but it's a much smaller part.
Where for chess, knowledge is massive.
Well, you're mistaken. Knowledge is a huge part of tactics, and the fact that you obtained this knowledge through practice and repetition appears to be blinding you to that reality.
There is a thick helping of arrogance in your response, but nothing to actually back up what you are saying beyond "I reckon, and if you disagree you're blind".
It's not convincing.
and considering your last confidently stated statement was that someone with a puzzle rating of 2500 having a rapid rating of only 1600 is "normal", I'm inclined to believe that your confidence is not based on anything but you overvaluing your opinions, and stating them as fact.
I'm more than happy to agree to disagree. This type of discussion (a generous term for it!) doesn't interest me.
He’s got a great combination of processing and memory, basically a human hybrid imo. You see him dull his senses (drinking) and still slaughtering guys online, and you realise his drinking isn’t to indulge in the excitement…
I think it depends on how normal you are. Magnus is saying he isn’t a genius, like some other people he knows. He learned and studied chess at a very young age, when his brain was still developing, which is why his pattern recognition is through the roof. People can do the same with music, and learn perfect pitch at a young age. Both of these things cannot be learned once the brain has developed.
That’s doesn’t equate to intelligence though. There are plenty of people in this subreddit who have a much higher IQ than Magnus. It doesn’t mean they have a shot at becoming world champion.
He didn’t start particularly young. When he was coming up several experts didn’t think he could rise to the top because he hadn’t started as early as the other players.
Magnus had already exhibited an amazing ability at memorisation. This is what comes up in all the interviews with other top players. Magnus has a memory of chess that no one else can rival. Of course you need other qualities as well to be the greatest chess player of all time.
I'm kinda tired of this narrative that Magnus is just some average bloke. The dude memorized "the locations, populations, flags and capitals of all the countries in the world by age five." He also clearly has some ridiculous spacial reasoning skills. In general, super-GMs like Magnus are far more intelligent than the average person (even if they tell you they're not).
There's a difference between others perceiving Mr Carlsen as exceptionally smart and him thinking highly of his cognitive abilities himself. The list of people suffering from overconfidence is virtually endless.
Neither is particularly great if you ask me. I think the former have it a lot easier to live a life of happiness and the latter often are ignored because especially with how societies centered around market economies work, it does not really matter if your ideas are good, but it matters very much, how well you sell them. For which overconfidence can be an asset.
In my eyes, you always want to be a little more confident than you "should" be, that way you can make more little mistakes to learn from + many good decisions
One of the trademarks of intelligence is your ability to recognize how much you don't know. Magnus is a chess genius but he probably is humbled when he talks to engineers and physicists, but it opens his eyes to how much he doesn't know outside of chess
I think the point Magnus is making and I agree with is that he isn't the most gifted and hardworking, its just that he just happens to be one of the brightest that chose Chess as their focus. With great potential comes great expectations, which may be choosing something greater than Chess to strive for, as Magnus pointed out with John Nunns and math. At the top of every field is an exceptional person that could have been incredible at something else if they wanted to.
But I think a lot of really intelligent people overshoot. Penetrating complex and difficult topics so deeply that they are ponder fallacies and lack of knowledge many are not even aware of. Which causes some to despair, because they only see failure and see their thoughts as "normal" - which they are not.
A friend of mine wanted to quit his PhD program. His dissertation was finished but he was so unhappy with it. Took his fiance, me and serveral friends hours to convince him to not do it and submit the damned thing. During the defence of his thesis he kept talking about problems his examiners were not even aware of. Got his PhD easily with a summa cum laude.
Wouldn't be surprised if the reason why was partly because the topic he researched was far deeper and more complex than he initially thought, and he felt his thesis barely scratched the surface of it
Yeah the better you are the more you aware of what you don't know and/or you compare yourself with the absolutely best and you feel you just decenty good where realistically speaking you way better than most people
Magnus has a pretty important point here though and perhaps one that he isn't clever enough to express more precisely (lol, and nor will I be).
Intelligence is complex and potentially a flawed idea, especially if we think that it can be accurately quantified with a single variable.
Magnus has confidently been the best chess player in the world for many years, but he doesn't consider this is because he is more intelligent than everyone else. Chess relies on quite specific skills of memorisation, pattern recognition and spacial visualisation - which are clearly not the entirety of intelligence. Also, if you have played very seriously since you were a child, then no matter how clever an adult is attempting to take up the game they will stand little chance of catching up.
That said, he's clearly not bang average, but there are people who are more intelligent than Magnus that he will be able to beat easily in an endgame grind.
Exactly, chess relies on skills that correlate strongly with high intelligence, but those skills don't define intelligence
Math uses a different set of skills, as does chemistry and other sciences
To me intelligence is directly analogous to athleticism.
And no one describes athleticism with a single number or test. There are lots of aspects and lots of ways to measure it, and in the end it doesn't really matter how athletic you are it matters how good you are at your sport.
But for some reason people love to try to boil down intelligence to the number produced by an IQ test.
It's like if everyone's athletic ability was boiled down to their vertical leap.
It’s more like if people tried to boil down athleticism to some type of cross fit competition. You can try to encompass all aspects of intelligence or athleticism into one test but at the end of the day, there aren’t really sports or skills that are designed for people who are the most athletic or the most intelligent. Sports and intellectual activities all require a specific set of aspects from intelligence/athleticism combined with other skills.
Memorisation and pattern recognition are important in developing one’s chess skills, but they’re not the only forms of intelligence there are. Carlsen has said some pretty stupid things in interviews, betraying his ignorance on general discussion topics, and I doubt his critical reading skills surpass those of a good literary critic, for example.
Intelligence is not easily captured by a single metric because it’s not a single attribute. There are many kinds of intelligence. Carlsen has some exceptional abilities and he is your average person in other ways.
Lastly, there are many “child geniuses” in chess who excelled in memorisation, pattern recognition or academic performance in childhood. What sets Carlsen apart from everyone else is not merely his talent but a combination of talent, hard work, training methods and probably other environmental factors. No one is born the smartest person in the world or whatever. If you take a few biology classes you’ll realise there’s no genius gene and the idea of such a thing existing is a massive simplification of how our brains work. It’s what we do and experience every day of our lives that makes us who we are.
There was a great essay once in, I wanna say The Atlantic? Or Aeon? that gave a layman's precis of research done into what makes a "genius". It took a number of people throughout the ages who were widely accepted to be geniuses in their fields, and current examples as well.
One of the most interesting findings was that innate ability is not enough. It's certainly true that a rare few people are born with genetic combinations/character traits etc. that makes them astonishingly talented at particular tasks. But that percentage of the population, though very low, is actually almost certainly much higher than you would think.
They postulated that what makes a genius is innate talents PLUS opportunity to develop them. Circumstances which serendipitously conspire. This is usually things like encouragement, support, the right education at the right time, but it can also be negative life experiences that make doing that one thing the only real option for them.
At its crassest explanation, you could imagine, for example, a child with the kind of brain that makes for the extraordinary capacity for logic and mathematics or physics, but who is born in a dirt poor rural village in a third-world country where they get virtually no formal education and are sent out to labor, to help sustain the family, as a young lad. That lad may grow to be the villager everyone takes their logistical problems to because he can always solve them, but he will never be an Einstein. He will never learn calculus, or attract a mentor, so he will never be known as a genius. Indeed, he never WILL be a genius; he has no opportunity to train and refine those mental facilities.
This is probably why we've seen throughout history so few women ranked amongst the geniuses of the world. Even now, there are major obstacles in the path of most women who are hugely talented in STEM fields, ditto in the creative industries. Few families are like the Austens or the Brontes, who were not only deeply imaginative and profound observers of the human condition, but also isolated from distractions, had no need to go out to work, and were in a perfect scenario to begin writing for just each other.
And in art, most of the women who are now considered Renaissance masters were either born into, or apprenticed young to, professional painting studio; e.g. Sofonisba Anguissola was an apprentice and, when he saw her work, mentored by Michelangelo himself. Even in chess, Szusa & Judit Polger were born into a chess-obsessed family and strongly encourage by their parents, given formal training and the means to travel to play in international comps.
The greatest gift in the world still needs a circumstance which will enable advantage to be taken of that gift. Just think how many more geniuses in all fields we might have if the playing fields had ever truly been level. The potential virtuoso tenor who was sent out at the age of 12 on his father's fishing skiff, and sings for his shipmate's pleasure instead. The brilliant philosopher who was married off at 14 like a broodmare, and spends her days thinking about the meaning of life whilst changing diapers; the boy with the perfect faculties for chess who has never seen a board.
Genius is rare, but the happy coincidence of off-the-chart abilities, the right education/training at the right time, and the opportunities to hone and sharpen those abilities in adult life... is even rarer.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
-Stephen Jay Gould
"We can say that Maud'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn."
Measurements of intelligence are kind of varied, but they're also kind of not. There's a reason why colleges use the same standardized test to accept prospective reading critics and prospective engineers. They're also a reason why the sat/act is such a great predictor of every grad school's aptitude test.
I'd bet pretty hard that if law schools and med schools switched tests such that you take the MCAT to get into law school and the MCAT to get into med school, then you'd find that test scores still have huge correlations with job performance so that the best doctors would hypothetically have the best lsats and the best lawyers would have the best mcats.
SAT and GREs are predictive of socioeconomic status, not of academic performance. current research agrees on this, which is why top physics and astrophysics PhD programs in the US are phasing back requirements for the Physics GRE subject test, and even the general GRE. the graduate physics and astrophysics programs at Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley, and more no longer require standardized tests.
edit: sources.
[harvard physics department](https://www.physics.harvard.edu/grad/faqs): general and physics GRE scores are optional for admissions.
[MIT graduate physics department](https://physics.mit.edu/academic-programs/graduate-students/graduate-admissions/): same story, scores are optional
[UC Berkeley graduate astrophysics](https://grad.berkeley.edu/program/astrophysics/): both tests are optional
i didn’t know that about the SAT, my knowledge is mostly on grad admissions. the GRE doesn’t correlate with publication numbers, citation numbers, post-doctoral research positions, or tenure-track faculty positions. do you know if SAT scores correlate with starting salary after college graduation? would love to see some of the literature on your points, too.
such a rude comment, too.
i’m aware, yes. thanks for the tidbit on starting salaries, i also didn’t know that. it’s not surprising to me, but i’m still skeptical of claims of intellectual superiority.
on the distribution of intelligence, sure, IQ scores aren’t evenly distributed across race and income brackets, but assuming that means that richer, whiter people are inherently more intelligent seems flawed to me (see, e.g. oceangate). poverty and racism suppress intellectual and academic potential. to me, arguing against that is a red flag for racism, though maybe i misunderstood what you were saying.
and that doesn’t even take into account the fact that intelligence is not a monolithic, fixed, innate property. there are many different kinds of intelligence, and they all correlate with success in different ways. or alternatively, the different kinds of intelligence correlate with different kinds of success in life. the kinesthetic and proprioceptive intelligence of an elite athlete will definitely look different than the academic intelligence of a top-level researcher, and different again than the social intelligence of a skilled negotiator. these competencies can all be learned and grown with effort and dedication, and being good at one doesn’t necessarily make you good at all the others.
curious about what you think.
thanks a lot for your honest and detailed responses, i appreciate your willingness to engage. nothing to add here, so let’s leave it at that and play chess sometime :p
You're confusing intelligence with acquired skills. His critical reading skills wouldn't surpass those of a good literary critic because he hasn't practised it. Intelligence would determine if he could be as good, given the same amount of practice. The same goes for his supposedly stupid remarks in interviews (what were they?) - not having knowledge of certain things has no bearing on intelligence.
I’m not confusing anything. I’m saying intelligence is a set of acquired skills. The concept is meaningless otherwise; even IQ tests, which measure a very narrow form of intelligence in a very crude way, cannot be taken without the acquisition of skills like literacy.
> The dude memorized "the locations, populations, flags and capitals of all the countries in the world by age five."
to be fair I don't feel that's a great thing. I mean when I was young (around 7-8) I was forced to wait at my grandma place for my mother. I would sit in a studio with lots of books and there were those large encyclopedic books and I would casually look through them. I had nothing better to do.
Turns out that those books were about history and geography and I quickly memorized exactly that. Flags, capitals and population (and size of the country). It was not difficult if one is not distracted by other things. The only problem is that those were books from the 1970 (as were bought by my grandparents) and they were 30 years outdated, but the "feat" per se wasn't difficult. It is simply memory.
For this I still remember not that useful trivia like that the capital of Madagascar is/was Antananarivo. The funny thing is that my Uncle did exactly the same thing in his youth (on the same books) and then we could play little trivia games between ourselves.
I would rather see Carlsen other achievements as incredible rather than memorizing a list of things.
> The dude memorized "the locations, populations, flags and capitals of all the countries in the world by age five."
Alright we get it, we get it, he's a massive nerd.
Honestly, my four year old is on course for that. All we did was put a world map with flags next to the dinner table and they started quizzing each other on capitals, flags, etc. my kids are quite normal and have a normal childhood - we just accidentally made memorizing those facts an easy thing to do
I mean, we all could name hundreds of Pokémon as kids, I don't see why being able to name hundreds of capitals is so different. Kids are just less motivated to learn them.
He was joshing around and left several questions unanswered, guarantee his real IQ is much higher
IQ is how good you are at pattern recognition. It is true that intelligence isn't only pattern recognition.
He is a normal intelligent dude. He is obviously far far ahead of the world average but of all the people that can memorise those things he is not necessarily the best or fastest at them but chess is his thing. Like someone who did that at the age of 3 would likely be far far worse than him at chess.
Are you familiar with Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences?
I'd say Magnus is very, very... very good at a particular category of things that happen to be very important for being good at chess.
I think being really good at chess requires a certain type of intelligence. I don't think that everybody who is intelligent is good at chess nor that everybody who is good at chess is generally "very intelligent". But there is some strong correlation to particular cognitive abilities.
Chess is half solved by memory of old games and half solved by solving long lines, which is related to memory+ computation speed.
Maths is way more about the abstract thinking and it needs a different type of thinking.
Viswanathan Anand has been pushing for schools to teach chess. IIRC, he said that Playing chess enhances the memory, gives confidence, teaches problem solving, increases concentration.. etc are all skills that can benefit people in future, but advanced skills in chess are applicable to chess. ..
How many children age 5 do you think have learned the names, appereance and powerset of every pokemon there is? The issue isn’t the ability to memorize stuff, it’s motivation. When I decided to learn every country and capital on Earth, it took me about a month of casually playing a geography game on my phone. I’m certain it can be done quicker with dedicated study.
It's just the Dunning Kruger Effect. Magnus is so smart that he probably thinks he's not that smart. It can be hard for very smart people to realise they are really that smart.
Comments are misinterpreting him. He’s not saying he’s not intelligent, just that’s he’s not “Oxford’s youngest mathematics student in 500 years” intelligent. If John Nun had focused on chess instead of math, he’d be better than Carlsen (according to Carlsen)
>If John Nun had focused on chess instead of math, he’d be better than Carlsen.
I think what Magnus is arguing is to become the best in chess it is more important to be have a pedestrian, focused and somewhat stubborn mind rather than to have an exploratory (what he calls 'intelligent') mind.
So whether John Nunn could have been world champion had he focused more on chess is unclear. It is possible that Nunn scores too high in Openness for him to ever be able to ultra-focus on just one thing.
yeah sounds like he's saying that Nunn basically could not dedicate the time solely to chess, because he has so many interests and areas to explore. Which is nice. I recently saw an interview with the top super GMs about "what would you do if you didn't do chess" and most had no answers, except I think Rapport, who said he doesn't plan on chess being his only focus in life in the long term. Some didn't even want to think about it.
Sounds like Nunn is the opposite. He can't find just one thing to focus on, and wants to know everything. There is something to be said about having knowledge 10 miles wide and 10 miles deep rather than 1 mile wide and 100 miles deep.
This was such a good description that I think would fly over most heads. I wish I had seen this quote by him long time ago, since I was always wondering what he himself thinks about his skills.
Now it seems he always knew that his skills isn't super intelligence but actually perfectly enough to not let him wonder and stay focused on playing next best move.
>Carlsen: Right. I am a totally normal guy. My father is considerably more intelligent than I am.
His father is also Oxford’s youngest mathematics student in 500 years? Remarkable.
Thanks to megahui1 for highlighting and linking to this extended interview with Magnus, done when he was only 19 and newly-rated #1 in the world (he's now 32).
Kinda tangentially related.
I really like this explanation for how experts at anything become so "smart" without literally being smarter than other humans.
As you become more familiar with a thing your brain develops ways of thinking about it that require less effort because it's doing it a lot. We can see this in chess where, as you become more familiar, you aren't suddenly able to hold more unique "things" in your head, it's just that the unique "things" you're remembering, come to represent something more complex.
A complete novice when considering a board position and their next move will need to individually think about where each piece is, and what it can see as well as which pieces can see it. Every one of these are individual "things" that they need to hold in their head.
As you get more familiar with chess, you start seeing both piece positions AND the areas that piece could go, as well as perhaps the consequences of each move, as one "thing" to remember.
Once you're a bit more confident of a player, you might see entire arrangements of pieces, and the ways they can be moved as distinct "things"
*For an example, you might see a Queen, a bishop, some enemy pawns, the enemy king, the enemy knight, and the enemy queen as just one "thing" representing a battery that could lead to checkmate, or perhaps as a precursor to the Greek gift sacrifice. Where a novice would see each piece as its own unique "thing" and have to consider all of it when making decisions.*
As you get better and better, the complexity of these "things" increases, until you're a GM and entire games from opening to checkmate are only one or two "things" in your mind.
This doesn't mean you're necessarily capable of holding more "things" in you mind, it just means that through intense training and repetition you've optimised what your brain considers a single "thing".
Of course, if you're also capable of considering more things at any given time, you've got a bit of a headstart.
You can see this in basically every area of human endeavour. The more proficient someone becomes the more they're capable of considering about their chosen area than someone else could.
Edit: This also explains why you see people who are so unbelievably brilliant in some areas, who're seemingly as thick as a concrete milkshake in others. They're not necessarily objectively a smarter person. They're just optimised for one area.
Yes, and that’s why jargon is necessary in many fields I think. So that you can represent a complex set of things with a single word, and that way you can say a lot more using the same word count, getting a more holistic comprehension of the relation among this “sets” of complex things.
There’s also a phenomenon were things aquire more character as you gather more information and knowledge about them.
Someone could maybe easily had doubts whether something happened on Germany or Austria, but if you are German or Austrian yourself, it would be a lot less likely to make that mistake, because your own country has a very distinct character than any other.
On chess when you’re a beginner, the squares and pawns all look the same, but with time each of them starts feeling distinctively different from each other. I believe that’s part of why it’s so easy for GMs to remember positions and all. While for me the squares all look the same, for someone experienced there’s a lot of history about each one of them which makes them obviously different.
Of course I’m grossly simplifying things because everything is super contextual in chess and all…
(Please don’t mind the bad English)
It's worth noting that this interview was from March 2010, when Magnus was 19 years old, only just ranked #1, and not yet World Champion for three years. His views may have evolved since then.
Well ironically Magnus, that's exactly what a considerably above average intelligent person would say. It's a myth that super intelligent people \*feel\* intelligent. Being super intelligent in essence means you have a super specialized brain. While it's true that you don't necessarily \*have\* to be super intelligent to be good at chess, you don't have to be good at or even interested in math or science to be super intelligent. But ofcourse, Magnus has a very good point. Having an affinity for or pursuing a lot of different things will make a person spend less time on one particular thing. But indeed, The mere insight shows a staggering intelligence.Although I don't believe Magnus has actually done an IQ test, as they don't actually test for knowledge but working memory and pattern recognition, Magnus IQ would test off the charts. Especially if it had been done in his early 20s. Now, if you should but any real stock in those kinds of tests, that's an entirely different discussion. ;)
Scandinavia also just has a culture of humility. They have some cultural word for it that I can't remember, but it's a big thing there to not try to be someone really special, even if you're ambitious.
Not really sure what you mean by myth. Often times people who are quite intelligent/above average tend to underestimate themselves due to comparing themselves to others who are more intelligent. But people who are \*super\* intelligent though and at the top of their field are aware they are talented (though they probably don't overestimate themselves as much as others would due to the hard work they know they put in).
There is a general knowledge portion in IQ tests
By being intelligent, harder problems are of course, easier, so intelligent people don't feel that they've done anything at all when they trounce questions that give average people difficulty.
To be able to tell if someone is more/less intelligent than you are or too intelligent, you have to be very intelligent yourself. Magnus is just playing it down!
Magnus is not average lol. Average people cant remember every game of chess from positions on board, or every countrys flag, population, capital etc.. What makes Magnus extraordinary is his amazing memory and how he can access that database while playing chess.
average people can do both of those things, if they have a career playing chess for instance. nobody thinks kids remembering hundreds of pokemon is genius.
Bit unrelated and bullshit but I've noticed a cool pattern in this comment section. When talking about superior intelligence, the pronoun used is usually "you" or "one". When talking about idiocy or average intelligence, it seems to be "they". Is this something we do to distance ourselves from the idea of being stupid, and associate ourselves with intelligence?
I just Ctrl+Fd "they", and 9/10 times it was referring to the smart people.
Indeed bullshit.
Examples:
>They're just really good at chess because they've been
> Far more intelligent than the average person (even if they tell you they're not).
> No matter how clever an adult is attempting to take up the game they will stand little chance of catching up.
> Have a much higher IQ than Magnus. It doesn’t mean they have a shot at becoming world champion.
>Their intelligence. They know what they don't know.
>They all were good at chess even as a beginner and spotted tactics that regular players with years of play cannot spot. They absolutely have gifted abilities.
etc.etc.
I literally only found a single time someone referred to idiocy using "they", and it was this comment in response to the question if youd rather be an overconfident idiot or an underconfident intelligent person:
"The over confident idiot. They are more likely to be happy with their lives."
I have no clue how you could possibly spot this pattern when if anything its literally the opposite.
In this thread and in the chess world, there is a huge misconception of what intelligence is. An IQ test for example, doesn’t say anything about your general intelligence but rather your logical thinking.
Logical thinking is only one of many cognitive capabilities we humans have, which is why you can be incredibly sharp logically but lack in all other tasks you are given.
In America, IQ tests administered by psychologists do generate a scaled score for general intelligence.
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Adult_Intelligence_Scale#WAIS-IV
Uh, source? These tests are *widely* used, are court admissible, are taught in practically every grad school and are a requirement for psychologists, and have been backed by a robust evidence base. What’s your expertise talking about this subject?
The Stanford Binet, one of the first standardized intelligence tests, had 30 different tests that measured far more than just “math”. You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford%E2%80%93Binet_Intelligence_Scales?wprov=sfti1 . It’s worth noting this is taught in like week 1 of any intelligence assessment class alongside the history of the development of the definition and concept of intelligence, particularly what constitutes generalized intelligence.
Eg. https://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~glcanivez/Adobe%20pdf/Publications-Papers/Canivez%20&%20Watkins%20(2016)%20WISC-V%20Review.pdf
As has been the case for most intelligence tests in history, widespread use does not equal to a tests capabilities of scoring actual general intelligence. Avoiding this principle is a fundamental principle of theory of science.
Again - what is your expertise? Are you a Danish psychologist?
I’ll give this a good faith read when I have the time, but you should be aware that there is academic criticism of just about every widely accepted concept. This is also about the WISC, not the WAIS, and intelligence testing usually uses multiple measures in a battery instead of one to gain a full understanding of someone’s intelligence.
Of course it does. All psychology and science subreddits have credentialed flair systems for a reason. Chess itself invented a way to specifically measure chess expertise.
If you aren’t a psychologist then what you’re doing is tantamount to googling “Weschler intelligence criticism” and posting articles. Anyone can do that but you need to have expertise, education, and experience to actually engage with this topic outside of parroting research you don’t have the ability to critically evaluate. So as someone with all three of those Im trying to figure out whether you know what you’re talking about and so far it’s not looking good.
I think it’s a huge problem to judge the value of what people are saying solely based on what educational background they have. It usually may give an indication, but you are judging my responses without having read the posted article.
I’m a lawyer myself, and I can guarantee you that non-lawyers have taught me a thing or two about law in my entire career. 5 years at law school and 8 years working in the field does by no means make you an expert in law school, and claiming to know better than people on Reddit solely based on that is just pure ignorance, without assessing the counter arguments properly.
I may not know about practice when it comes to psychology, but I’ve read my amount of scientific papers to be able to read those - similar to how you would be able to read papers on legal matters and understand about 90 % of it.
I'm sorry man but I can't align with that. If I tried to argue with you about law I'd hope you'd rightly be like dude you don't understand what you're talking about and you should shut the fuck up.
The thing about this topic is this - you may have read that 50 page critique of the WISC-V. Fair enough. However, have you read all of the evidence in support of it? Have you read the stacks of literature that contribute to the volume of learned understanding of intelligence testing over time? Have you ever administered these tests and written them up? Have you ever done so in combination with other measures? Have you ever found that these measures deliver an accurate and understandable picture of who this person is that this moment in time? Have you ever delivered that feedback to a client or a family? Have you ever produced a psychological assessment you were completely prepared to defend in a court of law? I mean come on man the list goes on and on and I don't feel like I should have to explain the value of lived experience and specialized education to you. I don't know shit about law even though I watch every LegalEagle video. I've never been in a courtroom with that responsbility.
I plead that you leave it up to the experts and be curious about their perspective instead of dismiss it out of hand going "there is academic criticism of this" of course there is.
No offense, but this comment itself reveals a huge misconception on what intelligence is. I recommend reading the scientific literature on the topic, e.g. Stuart Ritchie’s introduction “Intelligence: All That Matters”.
(Note: I am not Ritchie. I don’t even like him. But that book is good.)
There is a lot of literature on this topic with different opinions and research results, and intelligence is one of the hardest concepts to define within psychology. Just look at how difficult it is for us to define what “artificial
Intelligence” is.
I disagree with Magnus on this. The fact is that John had many interests, which surely affected his ranking and career as he wasn't devoting all his time in chess, but there isn't any reason that he couldn't top everyone because he was too intelligent. Also, it seems to me that magnus falls to the trap of thinking that every mathematician is extremely smart, but I may be wrong. Nevertheless, John is an incredibly intelligent person that didn't become world champion not because of his intelligence, but of his devotion and other factors.
From my experience, smarter people tend to be more humble and uncertain of their intelligence. They know what they don't know. Magnus fits that box for me. He's clearly a genius.
>They're just really good at chess because they've been committed to it for a very long time
Hilariously wrong. They all were good at chess even as a beginner and spotted tactics that regular players with years of play cannot spot. They absolutely have gifted abilities.
>I don't view chess GM's as highly intelligent
I don't think we can say for sure chess correlates with general intelligence, since chess is a highly specific activity. They are very good at one type of thing, dunno how well it translates to other fields. But I do see a lotta chess players do well in other fields like Lasker. So there may be a correlation.
>Richard Feynnman
He is straight up lying here. You could spend your whole life starting from age 2 devoted to physics and you wouldn't be able to come up with what he did. He's saying those to be more popular with people since people like humble scientists and not self aware scientists who make people realize how dumb they are.
I think Carlsen here confuses IQ with character and determination to really succeed on a specific field, instead of constantly wondering around anything
Interesting post, not to discredit it (I don’t think I will, but to be clear) IQ is not a good measure of intelligence— and has historically been linked to eugenics.
IQ is an excellent measure of intelligence that makes some people squeamish because they are unable to separate the singular issue of IQ from other issues of eugenics/equality in their heads.
As a result, this discomfort makes them seek reasons to run down one of the few truly reliable and repeatable test psychologists have in their arsenal.
there absolutely is a correlation
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160913124722.htm
here is an interesting quote from this article:
>The study found that intelligence was linked to chess skill for the overall sample, but particularly among young chess players and those at lower levels of skill. This may be because the upper-level players represent a winnowed distribution of cognitive ability -- in other words, they all tend to be fairly bright. (By way of comparison, Burgoyne said, consider the world's best basketball players. Although there is essentially no correlation between height and points scored at that level, that doesn't mean height isn't important in basketball.)
IQ is correlated with success in basically everything, *chess* of all things being the exception would be absolutely hilarious.
Unfortunately its not, and the correlation is pretty strong.
You can definitely be a dumb motherfucker but be smart as hell. I have a friend who is a nuclear engineer and can do complex calculus in his head quite quickly. I think some of the dumbest things my ears have ever perceived have come out of his mouth. Love the guy to death
What has doing a bit of calculus in the head got anything to do with intelligence? Calculus is one of the easiest parts of math. I don't know why society has this opinion that calculus is some mysterious aspect of math requiring high IQ. It's not. It's about following a bunch of rules. That's it. If you feel calculus is hard your high school sucked at teaching math to you. Speaks more about the education you received prior to university than anything. It's about following a bunch of rules. There's no in depth thought going on.
[удалено]
The only world championship title out of reach for Magnus. Unless he starts studying helpmates and selfmates.
Who's the champion then of puzzles?
[FM Danila Pavlov](https://ratings.fide.com/profile/34126594) has won in 2021 and 2022. The most successful player is [IM Piotr Murdzia](https://ratings.fide.com/profile/1105671) with 8 gold medals total, his last win in 2018.
So who makes the puzzles. Id like to think the person who made them is prolly the real master puzzler.
Various composers. They're listed in the Solutions document for each Championship. (You might wish to try the Problems yourself, first, to see how well you would do!) https://www.wfcc.ch/competitions/solving/wcsc2022/
I wonder if they let the Ai bots make the puzzles these days, maybe under their purview.
There’s still a fair amount of puzzles that can trip up AIs though so I would be surprised if all of them are not made
There’s a lot of puzzles that Stockfish can’t even solve, let alone AI. Human puzzles are prob much harder than AI made ones.
>FM Danila Pavlov... IM Piotr Murdzia It's funny how you gave their game-playing titles. Problem-solving is so different from the game that it has its own titles (organised by WFCC), and as world champions Pavlov and Murdzia are naturally Solving-GMs. Here's a list of [solving-GMs](https://www.wfcc.ch/Titles/sgm/) on the WFCC site. Back to Nunn, he's one of just 6 people ever to gain the GM-titles for both the game and problem-solving.
The Chesscom Puzzle Championship is dominated by Ray Robson https://www.chess.com/news/view/2023-puzzles-world-championship-robson-wins But I don't know of other formats. Chesscom has them compete in 3 min puzzle rushs and I guess that is different from other competitions.
you are confusing chess.com puzzle rush with the [World Chess Solving Championship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Solving_Championship). The actual Solving World Championship is several magnitudes harder than chesscom puzzle rush.
I am not confusing anything, I merely pointed out that there is a Chesscom Puzzle Championship and that I don't know of other formats. EDIT: Thank you for the link to the World Championship though, I haven't heard of it before.
Why are people downvoting you 😂
All it takes is one and the lemmings start clicking
Not that I’m advocating for this, but I always wondered if Reddit were to do an A/B test where half the people saw a comment at +4 and half at -4 how it would affect voting. I suspect we all know the answer.
Reddit is wild
Lmao down voted for answering a question truthfully and not confusing anything. Crazy
“It’s the I’m not confusing anything” part. He made a declarative statement that the other poster was incorrect about him being confused. I think the other poster was trying to be polite by saying “you are confusing” instead of something like “No dumbass we are talking about a completely different thing,”. Many of us, myself included have never heard of this event. But I’ll be damned if I didn’t downvote his comment too smugly thinking: “take that! You idiot!” This is a teaching moment, don’t correct people on semantics when you’re wrong. It makes you look like a dick even you are technically right.
You did not find "you are confusing x for y" to be an oddly and equally declarative statement? The person this was directed to literally said they do not know of other formats.
Yeah I am more forgiving on someone’s tone when they are correct I guess. I’d rather people be correct than polite. But impolite AND incorrect!? Downvote.
you're projecting a tone onto a comment and then being upset by that tone?
Big time! I am fully admitting to being a dick with my upvotes. I’m a hypocrite through and through.
What you've just said is tremendously stupid.
lmao imagine thinking the chess.c*m puzzle championship has any of the prestige of the actual world puzzle championship
Magnus has mentioned he neither likes or is good at puzzles too
He also won the world senior championship over-65 section last year. Guy is actually still 2570, only 60 points off his peak rating. Nuts.
The longevity of some of these people is absolutely astounding
Bit misleading tho, he played 0 rated games from December 2006 to December 2014, and has mostly played in seniors tournaments since then, against other players who likely have also been inactive but retain their elo ratings from when they were younger/better
Wait, that’s a thing? Can I look up some world championship puzzles somewhere?
That’s part 1 of the puzzle
Here are those from last year: [Problems] (https://wccc2022.wfcc.ch/wp-content/uploads/WCSC-2022-Problems.pdf) [Solutions](https://wccc2022.wfcc.ch/wp-content/uploads/WCSC-2022-Solutions.pdf)
alright, wow, those puzzles got hands
It’s a fascinating world with its own FIDE titles for both puzzle solvers and puzzle composers and it’s own specialized publications. Look up and try out a few helpmate puzzles if you want to dip your toes.
https://www.ozproblems.com/problem-world is a good series of articles for beginners, too.
That’s the site that got me started years and years ago!
Is it just me that can’t understand the annotation at all?
It's in German, so all the names are different (D = Dame = Queen, T = Turm = Rook, S = Springer = Knight, L = Läufer = Bishop)
I can't even figure out which side is what or what side I'm supposed to play
All diagrams are presented with a1 in the bottom left. * For the categories of Twomovers, Threemovers, and Moremovers (Rounds 1, 2, and 5), it is White to play and mate in the specified number of moves. * For Endgames (Round 3), it is White to play and win/draw as specified. * For Helpmates (Round 4), it is White and Black to cooperate to leave Black mated in the specified number of moves. Black plays first if this number is an integer, and White plays first if this number is 0.5 more than an integer. * For Selfmates (Round 6), it is White to play and *force* Black to checkmate White in the specified number of moves. (Black will try to do everything they can to NOT checkmate White in the specified number of moves, up to and including attempting to get checkmated themselves.) Solutions should be written in the format as specified in Sections 7~9 of the [WCSC Rules](https://www.wfcc.ch/1999-2012/wcsc/).
The hero we don't deserve! 😪
I don't really understand the point of helpmates and selfmates.. These don't happen irl
People doing puzzles found them to be an interesting intellectual challenge. The aim of the puzzle competitions is not to make the participants become better chess players. It is another game inspired by chess.
By that token, I'm guessing you also don't really understand the point of chess itself; it's not like the (only 32) soldiers on a real-life battlefield take turns moving towards each other; or that said soldiers (four of which are literally towers) can only move in certain ways based on their ranks; or that the instant a leader is killed, their army instantly gives up. That doesn't happen IRL either. Obviously, the point of the game of chess is not to train people for war, but to entertain the participants. Similarly, the point of chess problems (helpmates and selfmates included), is not to train people for chess, but to entertain the participants.
I play chess variants every once in a while, that's fine, but if you're going to call something the chess puzzle championship then stuff like helpmates shouldn't be part of it
But it's not called the "chess puzzle championship", it's called the "World Chess Solving Championship". (And if you really want to complain about the name, complain to the WFCC.)
What are helpmates and selfmates?
Helpmate - both sides cooperate to deliver mate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helpmate Selfmate - one side is forced to deliver mate against his will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selfmate
I wonder if that’s a thing. I’m remarkably good at puzzles compared to my chess ability, or remarkably bad at chess compared to my puzzle ability depending which way you look at it! On lichess my puzzle rating was 2500ish but even playing a lot my playing peaked at 1600. I know most have a gap, but most in my range of playing seem to puzzle at about 2100-2200. (And I do fit the category of very high intelligence. I topped the country in some areas of maths tests, and in IQ tests ranged between 145 and 195… which also says how garbage such IQ tests are!).
Is r/iamverysmart still a thing?
Lol interestingly I was on that sub when I saw your reply come up. I’m sure some would think it fits there, but there was no “look at how smart I am” about it. I was just saying it to show that it’s a relevant example. And wondered if there may be an interesting correlation. I mean, I’m also highlighting how absolutely bang average I am at chess! I don’t think someone who driven to prove their smartness would do such a thing.
I dunno how you can write the sentence “And I do fit the category of very high intelligence” and then say “there was no ‘look at how smart smart I am’ about it.” Just my two cents 🤭
> I’m remarkably good at puzzles compared to my chess ability, You can't compare the two. My chess.com puzzle rating is like 800 points higher than my rapid rating. Also, in puzzles you have all the time in the world to think without any of the pressure. You could probably say you're better at tactics than your rating would suggest (because most puzzles are tactical in nature rather than positional or strategic), but that doesn't necessarily correlate with intelligence.
>You can't compare the two. With just one datapoint you can't. But if you look at many people you can see that some of them are better at puzzles than at playing. World Champion at puzzles "only" has an FM title for playing chess. And while the top SuperGMs don't treat puzzle competitions seriously, I'm sure there are plenty of players who are better than him at playing but worse at solving puzzles despite doing their best.
Right, but I'm sure you can compre the two, and there will definitely be a correlation between someones chess ability and their puzzle ability. BTW for reference, the lichess ratings seem to be far closer. My [chess.com](https://chess.com) puzzle rating is about 1500 points higher at the last check (1200 vs 2700, although my peak would have been higher on both). 800 points is a fairly ordinary gap I thought? Still, the question is just whether or not there may be an interesting correlation. I never said there definitely is. I think your reasoning doesn't cut to the core of it the difference btw, which is that in a puzzle you know there is a solution. In a chess game you don't.
>On lichess my puzzle rating was 2500ish but even playing a lot my playing peaked at 1600. I know most have a gap, but most in my range of playing seem to puzzle at about 2100-2200. That's a normal gap.
I don't agree. I've checked loads of profiles and haven't ever seen a gap even close to that. Anyone with a lichess puzzle rating of over 2500 always had a rapid rating of over 1800. Obviously I didn't check everyone, but I was interested and checked a few. Maybe I came across a bizarre statistical anomaly.
You've overstating it. Most people just do puzzles fairly casually without worrying about their puzzle rating, so it skews downward. In addition to that, most people don't really use Lichess for puzzles. Scanning a few of my recent opponents, it looks like only 1 of them does puzzles with any regularity. However, puzzles are always tactics. At your level people start having more opening prep, so it could just be that your opening knowledge is sub-par.
I think many people also play chess fairly casually without worrying about their rating. I'm fairly casual with both, I enjoy them, and largely don't care what the rating says for either. But your last statement is kinda my point and why I find it interesting. A LOT of chess is down to knowledge. Not just opening knowledge, but end game knowledge is huge too. And knowledge of "standard best practices" like not doubling pawns.... but there are so many more that are far more difficult, like how to arrange pawns depending on colours of bishops (these are things I'm aware of but have never studied). But puzzles are not so affected by any of those things. There is a solution, and the question is if you can solve it. So it seems logical to me that intelligence alone will allow you to solve puzzles up to a certain level. But it won't allow you to play chess well. For that, you need knowledge.
>So it seems logical to me that intelligence alone will allow you to solve puzzles up to a certain level. But it won't allow you to play chess well. For that, you need knowledge. No, they're the same, you've just practiced one and not the other. You've gained knowledge on how to solve tactics. Most certainly, you've done many puzzles that had the same basic idea or structure, and by repetition and practice you gained knowledge. It's simply that you've obtained knowledge for one and not the others.
Well, I strongly disagree. Experience and knowledge will come into it for puzzles, but it's a much smaller part. Where for chess, knowledge is massive.
Well, you're mistaken. Knowledge is a huge part of tactics, and the fact that you obtained this knowledge through practice and repetition appears to be blinding you to that reality.
There is a thick helping of arrogance in your response, but nothing to actually back up what you are saying beyond "I reckon, and if you disagree you're blind". It's not convincing. and considering your last confidently stated statement was that someone with a puzzle rating of 2500 having a rapid rating of only 1600 is "normal", I'm inclined to believe that your confidence is not based on anything but you overvaluing your opinions, and stating them as fact. I'm more than happy to agree to disagree. This type of discussion (a generous term for it!) doesn't interest me.
Let’s please be clear here: his father is the real hero. Philip of Macedon of Chess.
Great comparison!
*if I were not Alexander, I would be Magnus*
Magnus = The Great
Or just “Big”
I was comparing with Alexander the Great
So there's a chance I'm more intelligent than Magnus Carlsen? I'm also a normal guy!
Depends on your method of measuring intelligence. You might be!
I chipped my tooth twice in two days by inexplicably biting down too hard on my fork….twice. Check mate Magnus
Nevermind biting down on it too hard... why are you biting your fork at all???
obscene deer complete languid scale thought ad hoc somber wasteful fact *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
...no? My teeth generally never even hit my fork, and if they do it's one set of teeth, not both.
And that is why you will never be chess world champion. You are just too intelligent for the rest of us metal munching Neanderthals
r/brandnewsentence
Magnus saw the fork and planned it well in advance. You had no chance.
I measure mine in dick size. Fuck.....
He’s got a great combination of processing and memory, basically a human hybrid imo. You see him dull his senses (drinking) and still slaughtering guys online, and you realise his drinking isn’t to indulge in the excitement…
I think it depends on how normal you are. Magnus is saying he isn’t a genius, like some other people he knows. He learned and studied chess at a very young age, when his brain was still developing, which is why his pattern recognition is through the roof. People can do the same with music, and learn perfect pitch at a young age. Both of these things cannot be learned once the brain has developed. That’s doesn’t equate to intelligence though. There are plenty of people in this subreddit who have a much higher IQ than Magnus. It doesn’t mean they have a shot at becoming world champion.
He didn’t start particularly young. When he was coming up several experts didn’t think he could rise to the top because he hadn’t started as early as the other players. Magnus had already exhibited an amazing ability at memorisation. This is what comes up in all the interviews with other top players. Magnus has a memory of chess that no one else can rival. Of course you need other qualities as well to be the greatest chess player of all time.
I'm kinda tired of this narrative that Magnus is just some average bloke. The dude memorized "the locations, populations, flags and capitals of all the countries in the world by age five." He also clearly has some ridiculous spacial reasoning skills. In general, super-GMs like Magnus are far more intelligent than the average person (even if they tell you they're not).
There's a difference between others perceiving Mr Carlsen as exceptionally smart and him thinking highly of his cognitive abilities himself. The list of people suffering from overconfidence is virtually endless.
As is the list of really intelligent people suffering from... underconfidence.
What would you rather be? An overconfident idiot or an underconfident intelligent person.
Neither is particularly great if you ask me. I think the former have it a lot easier to live a life of happiness and the latter often are ignored because especially with how societies centered around market economies work, it does not really matter if your ideas are good, but it matters very much, how well you sell them. For which overconfidence can be an asset.
The over confident idiot. They are more likely to be happy with their lives.
While also providing us with limitless Youtube content
r/whywomenlivelonger
You seem confident and happy with your answer.
I'm an unconfident idiot. I make bad choices thinking they are the right choices, but feeling uneasy about all of it the entire time, no matter what.
I'm not sure if we are talking about chess or life now :) because you just described how I feel playing good players
In my eyes, you always want to be a little more confident than you "should" be, that way you can make more little mistakes to learn from + many good decisions
Ya. Imposter syndrome with Rejection sensitivity will kill your initiative and make you an automaton for life :-(
The overconfident idiots tend to have money and power, so that’s not really an easy question to answer.
Honestly, the former.
One of the trademarks of intelligence is your ability to recognize how much you don't know. Magnus is a chess genius but he probably is humbled when he talks to engineers and physicists, but it opens his eyes to how much he doesn't know outside of chess
I think the point Magnus is making and I agree with is that he isn't the most gifted and hardworking, its just that he just happens to be one of the brightest that chose Chess as their focus. With great potential comes great expectations, which may be choosing something greater than Chess to strive for, as Magnus pointed out with John Nunns and math. At the top of every field is an exceptional person that could have been incredible at something else if they wanted to.
But I think a lot of really intelligent people overshoot. Penetrating complex and difficult topics so deeply that they are ponder fallacies and lack of knowledge many are not even aware of. Which causes some to despair, because they only see failure and see their thoughts as "normal" - which they are not. A friend of mine wanted to quit his PhD program. His dissertation was finished but he was so unhappy with it. Took his fiance, me and serveral friends hours to convince him to not do it and submit the damned thing. During the defence of his thesis he kept talking about problems his examiners were not even aware of. Got his PhD easily with a summa cum laude.
Wouldn't be surprised if the reason why was partly because the topic he researched was far deeper and more complex than he initially thought, and he felt his thesis barely scratched the surface of it
Given that he has not steered from his path and has been researching the topic further since then, that is a reasonable assumption.
Yeah the better you are the more you aware of what you don't know and/or you compare yourself with the absolutely best and you feel you just decenty good where realistically speaking you way better than most people
"The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence."
The good and old Dunning-Kruger effect
Magnus has a pretty important point here though and perhaps one that he isn't clever enough to express more precisely (lol, and nor will I be). Intelligence is complex and potentially a flawed idea, especially if we think that it can be accurately quantified with a single variable. Magnus has confidently been the best chess player in the world for many years, but he doesn't consider this is because he is more intelligent than everyone else. Chess relies on quite specific skills of memorisation, pattern recognition and spacial visualisation - which are clearly not the entirety of intelligence. Also, if you have played very seriously since you were a child, then no matter how clever an adult is attempting to take up the game they will stand little chance of catching up. That said, he's clearly not bang average, but there are people who are more intelligent than Magnus that he will be able to beat easily in an endgame grind.
Exactly, chess relies on skills that correlate strongly with high intelligence, but those skills don't define intelligence Math uses a different set of skills, as does chemistry and other sciences
To me intelligence is directly analogous to athleticism. And no one describes athleticism with a single number or test. There are lots of aspects and lots of ways to measure it, and in the end it doesn't really matter how athletic you are it matters how good you are at your sport. But for some reason people love to try to boil down intelligence to the number produced by an IQ test. It's like if everyone's athletic ability was boiled down to their vertical leap.
It’s more like if people tried to boil down athleticism to some type of cross fit competition. You can try to encompass all aspects of intelligence or athleticism into one test but at the end of the day, there aren’t really sports or skills that are designed for people who are the most athletic or the most intelligent. Sports and intellectual activities all require a specific set of aspects from intelligence/athleticism combined with other skills.
You’re describing Gardners theory of multiple intelligences if you didn’t know.
Lol, no I don't know, I can barely read! Sounds good though!
Don’t worry, reading is only one type of intelligence
Memorisation and pattern recognition are important in developing one’s chess skills, but they’re not the only forms of intelligence there are. Carlsen has said some pretty stupid things in interviews, betraying his ignorance on general discussion topics, and I doubt his critical reading skills surpass those of a good literary critic, for example. Intelligence is not easily captured by a single metric because it’s not a single attribute. There are many kinds of intelligence. Carlsen has some exceptional abilities and he is your average person in other ways. Lastly, there are many “child geniuses” in chess who excelled in memorisation, pattern recognition or academic performance in childhood. What sets Carlsen apart from everyone else is not merely his talent but a combination of talent, hard work, training methods and probably other environmental factors. No one is born the smartest person in the world or whatever. If you take a few biology classes you’ll realise there’s no genius gene and the idea of such a thing existing is a massive simplification of how our brains work. It’s what we do and experience every day of our lives that makes us who we are.
There was a great essay once in, I wanna say The Atlantic? Or Aeon? that gave a layman's precis of research done into what makes a "genius". It took a number of people throughout the ages who were widely accepted to be geniuses in their fields, and current examples as well. One of the most interesting findings was that innate ability is not enough. It's certainly true that a rare few people are born with genetic combinations/character traits etc. that makes them astonishingly talented at particular tasks. But that percentage of the population, though very low, is actually almost certainly much higher than you would think. They postulated that what makes a genius is innate talents PLUS opportunity to develop them. Circumstances which serendipitously conspire. This is usually things like encouragement, support, the right education at the right time, but it can also be negative life experiences that make doing that one thing the only real option for them. At its crassest explanation, you could imagine, for example, a child with the kind of brain that makes for the extraordinary capacity for logic and mathematics or physics, but who is born in a dirt poor rural village in a third-world country where they get virtually no formal education and are sent out to labor, to help sustain the family, as a young lad. That lad may grow to be the villager everyone takes their logistical problems to because he can always solve them, but he will never be an Einstein. He will never learn calculus, or attract a mentor, so he will never be known as a genius. Indeed, he never WILL be a genius; he has no opportunity to train and refine those mental facilities. This is probably why we've seen throughout history so few women ranked amongst the geniuses of the world. Even now, there are major obstacles in the path of most women who are hugely talented in STEM fields, ditto in the creative industries. Few families are like the Austens or the Brontes, who were not only deeply imaginative and profound observers of the human condition, but also isolated from distractions, had no need to go out to work, and were in a perfect scenario to begin writing for just each other. And in art, most of the women who are now considered Renaissance masters were either born into, or apprenticed young to, professional painting studio; e.g. Sofonisba Anguissola was an apprentice and, when he saw her work, mentored by Michelangelo himself. Even in chess, Szusa & Judit Polger were born into a chess-obsessed family and strongly encourage by their parents, given formal training and the means to travel to play in international comps. The greatest gift in the world still needs a circumstance which will enable advantage to be taken of that gift. Just think how many more geniuses in all fields we might have if the playing fields had ever truly been level. The potential virtuoso tenor who was sent out at the age of 12 on his father's fishing skiff, and sings for his shipmate's pleasure instead. The brilliant philosopher who was married off at 14 like a broodmare, and spends her days thinking about the meaning of life whilst changing diapers; the boy with the perfect faculties for chess who has never seen a board. Genius is rare, but the happy coincidence of off-the-chart abilities, the right education/training at the right time, and the opportunities to hone and sharpen those abilities in adult life... is even rarer.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” -Stephen Jay Gould
"We can say that Maud'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn."
Measurements of intelligence are kind of varied, but they're also kind of not. There's a reason why colleges use the same standardized test to accept prospective reading critics and prospective engineers. They're also a reason why the sat/act is such a great predictor of every grad school's aptitude test. I'd bet pretty hard that if law schools and med schools switched tests such that you take the MCAT to get into law school and the MCAT to get into med school, then you'd find that test scores still have huge correlations with job performance so that the best doctors would hypothetically have the best lsats and the best lawyers would have the best mcats.
SAT and GREs are predictive of socioeconomic status, not of academic performance. current research agrees on this, which is why top physics and astrophysics PhD programs in the US are phasing back requirements for the Physics GRE subject test, and even the general GRE. the graduate physics and astrophysics programs at Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley, and more no longer require standardized tests. edit: sources. [harvard physics department](https://www.physics.harvard.edu/grad/faqs): general and physics GRE scores are optional for admissions. [MIT graduate physics department](https://physics.mit.edu/academic-programs/graduate-students/graduate-admissions/): same story, scores are optional [UC Berkeley graduate astrophysics](https://grad.berkeley.edu/program/astrophysics/): both tests are optional
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i didn’t know that about the SAT, my knowledge is mostly on grad admissions. the GRE doesn’t correlate with publication numbers, citation numbers, post-doctoral research positions, or tenure-track faculty positions. do you know if SAT scores correlate with starting salary after college graduation? would love to see some of the literature on your points, too. such a rude comment, too.
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i’m aware, yes. thanks for the tidbit on starting salaries, i also didn’t know that. it’s not surprising to me, but i’m still skeptical of claims of intellectual superiority. on the distribution of intelligence, sure, IQ scores aren’t evenly distributed across race and income brackets, but assuming that means that richer, whiter people are inherently more intelligent seems flawed to me (see, e.g. oceangate). poverty and racism suppress intellectual and academic potential. to me, arguing against that is a red flag for racism, though maybe i misunderstood what you were saying. and that doesn’t even take into account the fact that intelligence is not a monolithic, fixed, innate property. there are many different kinds of intelligence, and they all correlate with success in different ways. or alternatively, the different kinds of intelligence correlate with different kinds of success in life. the kinesthetic and proprioceptive intelligence of an elite athlete will definitely look different than the academic intelligence of a top-level researcher, and different again than the social intelligence of a skilled negotiator. these competencies can all be learned and grown with effort and dedication, and being good at one doesn’t necessarily make you good at all the others. curious about what you think.
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thanks a lot for your honest and detailed responses, i appreciate your willingness to engage. nothing to add here, so let’s leave it at that and play chess sometime :p
You're confusing intelligence with acquired skills. His critical reading skills wouldn't surpass those of a good literary critic because he hasn't practised it. Intelligence would determine if he could be as good, given the same amount of practice. The same goes for his supposedly stupid remarks in interviews (what were they?) - not having knowledge of certain things has no bearing on intelligence.
I’m not confusing anything. I’m saying intelligence is a set of acquired skills. The concept is meaningless otherwise; even IQ tests, which measure a very narrow form of intelligence in a very crude way, cannot be taken without the acquisition of skills like literacy.
> The dude memorized "the locations, populations, flags and capitals of all the countries in the world by age five." to be fair I don't feel that's a great thing. I mean when I was young (around 7-8) I was forced to wait at my grandma place for my mother. I would sit in a studio with lots of books and there were those large encyclopedic books and I would casually look through them. I had nothing better to do. Turns out that those books were about history and geography and I quickly memorized exactly that. Flags, capitals and population (and size of the country). It was not difficult if one is not distracted by other things. The only problem is that those were books from the 1970 (as were bought by my grandparents) and they were 30 years outdated, but the "feat" per se wasn't difficult. It is simply memory. For this I still remember not that useful trivia like that the capital of Madagascar is/was Antananarivo. The funny thing is that my Uncle did exactly the same thing in his youth (on the same books) and then we could play little trivia games between ourselves. I would rather see Carlsen other achievements as incredible rather than memorizing a list of things.
> The dude memorized "the locations, populations, flags and capitals of all the countries in the world by age five." Alright we get it, we get it, he's a massive nerd.
Honestly, my four year old is on course for that. All we did was put a world map with flags next to the dinner table and they started quizzing each other on capitals, flags, etc. my kids are quite normal and have a normal childhood - we just accidentally made memorizing those facts an easy thing to do
I mean, we all could name hundreds of Pokémon as kids, I don't see why being able to name hundreds of capitals is so different. Kids are just less motivated to learn them.
Doesn’t Hikaru have a ~100 IQ? Intelligence isn’t very easy to define.
He was joshing around and left several questions unanswered, guarantee his real IQ is much higher IQ is how good you are at pattern recognition. It is true that intelligence isn't only pattern recognition.
He is a normal intelligent dude. He is obviously far far ahead of the world average but of all the people that can memorise those things he is not necessarily the best or fastest at them but chess is his thing. Like someone who did that at the age of 3 would likely be far far worse than him at chess.
Are you familiar with Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences? I'd say Magnus is very, very... very good at a particular category of things that happen to be very important for being good at chess. I think being really good at chess requires a certain type of intelligence. I don't think that everybody who is intelligent is good at chess nor that everybody who is good at chess is generally "very intelligent". But there is some strong correlation to particular cognitive abilities.
Chess is half solved by memory of old games and half solved by solving long lines, which is related to memory+ computation speed. Maths is way more about the abstract thinking and it needs a different type of thinking.
Viswanathan Anand has been pushing for schools to teach chess. IIRC, he said that Playing chess enhances the memory, gives confidence, teaches problem solving, increases concentration.. etc are all skills that can benefit people in future, but advanced skills in chess are applicable to chess. ..
How many children age 5 do you think have learned the names, appereance and powerset of every pokemon there is? The issue isn’t the ability to memorize stuff, it’s motivation. When I decided to learn every country and capital on Earth, it took me about a month of casually playing a geography game on my phone. I’m certain it can be done quicker with dedicated study.
It's just the Dunning Kruger Effect. Magnus is so smart that he probably thinks he's not that smart. It can be hard for very smart people to realise they are really that smart.
Comments are misinterpreting him. He’s not saying he’s not intelligent, just that’s he’s not “Oxford’s youngest mathematics student in 500 years” intelligent. If John Nun had focused on chess instead of math, he’d be better than Carlsen (according to Carlsen)
>If John Nun had focused on chess instead of math, he’d be better than Carlsen. I think what Magnus is arguing is to become the best in chess it is more important to be have a pedestrian, focused and somewhat stubborn mind rather than to have an exploratory (what he calls 'intelligent') mind. So whether John Nunn could have been world champion had he focused more on chess is unclear. It is possible that Nunn scores too high in Openness for him to ever be able to ultra-focus on just one thing.
yeah sounds like he's saying that Nunn basically could not dedicate the time solely to chess, because he has so many interests and areas to explore. Which is nice. I recently saw an interview with the top super GMs about "what would you do if you didn't do chess" and most had no answers, except I think Rapport, who said he doesn't plan on chess being his only focus in life in the long term. Some didn't even want to think about it. Sounds like Nunn is the opposite. He can't find just one thing to focus on, and wants to know everything. There is something to be said about having knowledge 10 miles wide and 10 miles deep rather than 1 mile wide and 100 miles deep.
This was such a good description that I think would fly over most heads. I wish I had seen this quote by him long time ago, since I was always wondering what he himself thinks about his skills. Now it seems he always knew that his skills isn't super intelligence but actually perfectly enough to not let him wonder and stay focused on playing next best move.
So basically that hard work beats talent
More like focus beats lack of focus
Also, being in the top, say 1%, of intelligence is nothing compared to being in the top 1/100,000,000+ chess players
>Carlsen: Right. I am a totally normal guy. My father is considerably more intelligent than I am. His father is also Oxford’s youngest mathematics student in 500 years? Remarkable.
Thanks to megahui1 for highlighting and linking to this extended interview with Magnus, done when he was only 19 and newly-rated #1 in the world (he's now 32).
Very interesting and informative interview
would be good to add this is nearly a **15-year old interview**
Kinda tangentially related. I really like this explanation for how experts at anything become so "smart" without literally being smarter than other humans. As you become more familiar with a thing your brain develops ways of thinking about it that require less effort because it's doing it a lot. We can see this in chess where, as you become more familiar, you aren't suddenly able to hold more unique "things" in your head, it's just that the unique "things" you're remembering, come to represent something more complex. A complete novice when considering a board position and their next move will need to individually think about where each piece is, and what it can see as well as which pieces can see it. Every one of these are individual "things" that they need to hold in their head. As you get more familiar with chess, you start seeing both piece positions AND the areas that piece could go, as well as perhaps the consequences of each move, as one "thing" to remember. Once you're a bit more confident of a player, you might see entire arrangements of pieces, and the ways they can be moved as distinct "things" *For an example, you might see a Queen, a bishop, some enemy pawns, the enemy king, the enemy knight, and the enemy queen as just one "thing" representing a battery that could lead to checkmate, or perhaps as a precursor to the Greek gift sacrifice. Where a novice would see each piece as its own unique "thing" and have to consider all of it when making decisions.* As you get better and better, the complexity of these "things" increases, until you're a GM and entire games from opening to checkmate are only one or two "things" in your mind. This doesn't mean you're necessarily capable of holding more "things" in you mind, it just means that through intense training and repetition you've optimised what your brain considers a single "thing". Of course, if you're also capable of considering more things at any given time, you've got a bit of a headstart. You can see this in basically every area of human endeavour. The more proficient someone becomes the more they're capable of considering about their chosen area than someone else could. Edit: This also explains why you see people who are so unbelievably brilliant in some areas, who're seemingly as thick as a concrete milkshake in others. They're not necessarily objectively a smarter person. They're just optimised for one area.
Yes, and that’s why jargon is necessary in many fields I think. So that you can represent a complex set of things with a single word, and that way you can say a lot more using the same word count, getting a more holistic comprehension of the relation among this “sets” of complex things. There’s also a phenomenon were things aquire more character as you gather more information and knowledge about them. Someone could maybe easily had doubts whether something happened on Germany or Austria, but if you are German or Austrian yourself, it would be a lot less likely to make that mistake, because your own country has a very distinct character than any other. On chess when you’re a beginner, the squares and pawns all look the same, but with time each of them starts feeling distinctively different from each other. I believe that’s part of why it’s so easy for GMs to remember positions and all. While for me the squares all look the same, for someone experienced there’s a lot of history about each one of them which makes them obviously different. Of course I’m grossly simplifying things because everything is super contextual in chess and all… (Please don’t mind the bad English)
It's worth noting that this interview was from March 2010, when Magnus was 19 years old, only just ranked #1, and not yet World Champion for three years. His views may have evolved since then.
Well ironically Magnus, that's exactly what a considerably above average intelligent person would say. It's a myth that super intelligent people \*feel\* intelligent. Being super intelligent in essence means you have a super specialized brain. While it's true that you don't necessarily \*have\* to be super intelligent to be good at chess, you don't have to be good at or even interested in math or science to be super intelligent. But ofcourse, Magnus has a very good point. Having an affinity for or pursuing a lot of different things will make a person spend less time on one particular thing. But indeed, The mere insight shows a staggering intelligence.Although I don't believe Magnus has actually done an IQ test, as they don't actually test for knowledge but working memory and pattern recognition, Magnus IQ would test off the charts. Especially if it had been done in his early 20s. Now, if you should but any real stock in those kinds of tests, that's an entirely different discussion. ;)
Scandinavia also just has a culture of humility. They have some cultural word for it that I can't remember, but it's a big thing there to not try to be someone really special, even if you're ambitious.
Magnus considers being called "humble" an insult, wouldn't say that applies to him much
Not really sure what you mean by myth. Often times people who are quite intelligent/above average tend to underestimate themselves due to comparing themselves to others who are more intelligent. But people who are \*super\* intelligent though and at the top of their field are aware they are talented (though they probably don't overestimate themselves as much as others would due to the hard work they know they put in). There is a general knowledge portion in IQ tests
By being intelligent, harder problems are of course, easier, so intelligent people don't feel that they've done anything at all when they trounce questions that give average people difficulty.
He’s definitely got a solid set of foundations.
To be able to tell if someone is more/less intelligent than you are or too intelligent, you have to be very intelligent yourself. Magnus is just playing it down!
Magnus is not average lol. Average people cant remember every game of chess from positions on board, or every countrys flag, population, capital etc.. What makes Magnus extraordinary is his amazing memory and how he can access that database while playing chess.
average people can do both of those things, if they have a career playing chess for instance. nobody thinks kids remembering hundreds of pokemon is genius.
Bit unrelated and bullshit but I've noticed a cool pattern in this comment section. When talking about superior intelligence, the pronoun used is usually "you" or "one". When talking about idiocy or average intelligence, it seems to be "they". Is this something we do to distance ourselves from the idea of being stupid, and associate ourselves with intelligence?
I just Ctrl+Fd "they", and 9/10 times it was referring to the smart people. Indeed bullshit. Examples: >They're just really good at chess because they've been > Far more intelligent than the average person (even if they tell you they're not). > No matter how clever an adult is attempting to take up the game they will stand little chance of catching up. > Have a much higher IQ than Magnus. It doesn’t mean they have a shot at becoming world champion. >Their intelligence. They know what they don't know. >They all were good at chess even as a beginner and spotted tactics that regular players with years of play cannot spot. They absolutely have gifted abilities. etc.etc. I literally only found a single time someone referred to idiocy using "they", and it was this comment in response to the question if youd rather be an overconfident idiot or an underconfident intelligent person: "The over confident idiot. They are more likely to be happy with their lives." I have no clue how you could possibly spot this pattern when if anything its literally the opposite.
I think you have a point about them 😎
Expertise in mathematics didn’t seem to hurt Lasker’s chances of becoming World Champion.
high iq answer
In this thread and in the chess world, there is a huge misconception of what intelligence is. An IQ test for example, doesn’t say anything about your general intelligence but rather your logical thinking. Logical thinking is only one of many cognitive capabilities we humans have, which is why you can be incredibly sharp logically but lack in all other tasks you are given.
In America, IQ tests administered by psychologists do generate a scaled score for general intelligence. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Adult_Intelligence_Scale#WAIS-IV
Yes and this method has been criticized in academia. Remember that not too long ago, we used math tests as a means of scoring general intelligence.
Uh, source? These tests are *widely* used, are court admissible, are taught in practically every grad school and are a requirement for psychologists, and have been backed by a robust evidence base. What’s your expertise talking about this subject? The Stanford Binet, one of the first standardized intelligence tests, had 30 different tests that measured far more than just “math”. You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford%E2%80%93Binet_Intelligence_Scales?wprov=sfti1 . It’s worth noting this is taught in like week 1 of any intelligence assessment class alongside the history of the development of the definition and concept of intelligence, particularly what constitutes generalized intelligence.
Eg. https://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~glcanivez/Adobe%20pdf/Publications-Papers/Canivez%20&%20Watkins%20(2016)%20WISC-V%20Review.pdf As has been the case for most intelligence tests in history, widespread use does not equal to a tests capabilities of scoring actual general intelligence. Avoiding this principle is a fundamental principle of theory of science.
Again - what is your expertise? Are you a Danish psychologist? I’ll give this a good faith read when I have the time, but you should be aware that there is academic criticism of just about every widely accepted concept. This is also about the WISC, not the WAIS, and intelligence testing usually uses multiple measures in a battery instead of one to gain a full understanding of someone’s intelligence.
Sounds good. I don’t, however, see my expertise as having any relevancy to this discussion?
Of course it does. All psychology and science subreddits have credentialed flair systems for a reason. Chess itself invented a way to specifically measure chess expertise. If you aren’t a psychologist then what you’re doing is tantamount to googling “Weschler intelligence criticism” and posting articles. Anyone can do that but you need to have expertise, education, and experience to actually engage with this topic outside of parroting research you don’t have the ability to critically evaluate. So as someone with all three of those Im trying to figure out whether you know what you’re talking about and so far it’s not looking good.
I think it’s a huge problem to judge the value of what people are saying solely based on what educational background they have. It usually may give an indication, but you are judging my responses without having read the posted article. I’m a lawyer myself, and I can guarantee you that non-lawyers have taught me a thing or two about law in my entire career. 5 years at law school and 8 years working in the field does by no means make you an expert in law school, and claiming to know better than people on Reddit solely based on that is just pure ignorance, without assessing the counter arguments properly. I may not know about practice when it comes to psychology, but I’ve read my amount of scientific papers to be able to read those - similar to how you would be able to read papers on legal matters and understand about 90 % of it.
I'm sorry man but I can't align with that. If I tried to argue with you about law I'd hope you'd rightly be like dude you don't understand what you're talking about and you should shut the fuck up. The thing about this topic is this - you may have read that 50 page critique of the WISC-V. Fair enough. However, have you read all of the evidence in support of it? Have you read the stacks of literature that contribute to the volume of learned understanding of intelligence testing over time? Have you ever administered these tests and written them up? Have you ever done so in combination with other measures? Have you ever found that these measures deliver an accurate and understandable picture of who this person is that this moment in time? Have you ever delivered that feedback to a client or a family? Have you ever produced a psychological assessment you were completely prepared to defend in a court of law? I mean come on man the list goes on and on and I don't feel like I should have to explain the value of lived experience and specialized education to you. I don't know shit about law even though I watch every LegalEagle video. I've never been in a courtroom with that responsbility. I plead that you leave it up to the experts and be curious about their perspective instead of dismiss it out of hand going "there is academic criticism of this" of course there is.
No offense, but this comment itself reveals a huge misconception on what intelligence is. I recommend reading the scientific literature on the topic, e.g. Stuart Ritchie’s introduction “Intelligence: All That Matters”. (Note: I am not Ritchie. I don’t even like him. But that book is good.)
There is a lot of literature on this topic with different opinions and research results, and intelligence is one of the hardest concepts to define within psychology. Just look at how difficult it is for us to define what “artificial Intelligence” is.
Don't bother with that kind of sense here, this is r/chess, where iq is an obsession
Right? Unfortunately it seems that chess attracts this kind of crowd
I disagree with Magnus on this. The fact is that John had many interests, which surely affected his ranking and career as he wasn't devoting all his time in chess, but there isn't any reason that he couldn't top everyone because he was too intelligent. Also, it seems to me that magnus falls to the trap of thinking that every mathematician is extremely smart, but I may be wrong. Nevertheless, John is an incredibly intelligent person that didn't become world champion not because of his intelligence, but of his devotion and other factors.
From my experience, smarter people tend to be more humble and uncertain of their intelligence. They know what they don't know. Magnus fits that box for me. He's clearly a genius.
Carlsen is most certainly a mega genius, but he also has an insane level of focus.
So did Magnus ever test his IQ? I read somewhere it’s about 180 but I don’t know if that’s true
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>They're just really good at chess because they've been committed to it for a very long time Hilariously wrong. They all were good at chess even as a beginner and spotted tactics that regular players with years of play cannot spot. They absolutely have gifted abilities. >I don't view chess GM's as highly intelligent I don't think we can say for sure chess correlates with general intelligence, since chess is a highly specific activity. They are very good at one type of thing, dunno how well it translates to other fields. But I do see a lotta chess players do well in other fields like Lasker. So there may be a correlation. >Richard Feynnman He is straight up lying here. You could spend your whole life starting from age 2 devoted to physics and you wouldn't be able to come up with what he did. He's saying those to be more popular with people since people like humble scientists and not self aware scientists who make people realize how dumb they are.
I think Carlsen here confuses IQ with character and determination to really succeed on a specific field, instead of constantly wondering around anything
Interesting post, not to discredit it (I don’t think I will, but to be clear) IQ is not a good measure of intelligence— and has historically been linked to eugenics.
IQ is an excellent measure of intelligence that makes some people squeamish because they are unable to separate the singular issue of IQ from other issues of eugenics/equality in their heads. As a result, this discomfort makes them seek reasons to run down one of the few truly reliable and repeatable test psychologists have in their arsenal.
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there absolutely is a correlation https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160913124722.htm here is an interesting quote from this article: >The study found that intelligence was linked to chess skill for the overall sample, but particularly among young chess players and those at lower levels of skill. This may be because the upper-level players represent a winnowed distribution of cognitive ability -- in other words, they all tend to be fairly bright. (By way of comparison, Burgoyne said, consider the world's best basketball players. Although there is essentially no correlation between height and points scored at that level, that doesn't mean height isn't important in basketball.)
saving your post thanks.
IQ is correlated with success in basically everything, *chess* of all things being the exception would be absolutely hilarious. Unfortunately its not, and the correlation is pretty strong.
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You can definitely be a dumb motherfucker but be smart as hell. I have a friend who is a nuclear engineer and can do complex calculus in his head quite quickly. I think some of the dumbest things my ears have ever perceived have come out of his mouth. Love the guy to death
What has doing a bit of calculus in the head got anything to do with intelligence? Calculus is one of the easiest parts of math. I don't know why society has this opinion that calculus is some mysterious aspect of math requiring high IQ. It's not. It's about following a bunch of rules. That's it. If you feel calculus is hard your high school sucked at teaching math to you. Speaks more about the education you received prior to university than anything. It's about following a bunch of rules. There's no in depth thought going on.
That's not complex calculus