Magnus Carlsen became a chess grandmaster at the age of thirteen and is now, at nineteen, the youngest player ever to be ranked no. 1 in the world. The natural assumption is that Carlsen’s success is largely due to his incredible intelligence. In this recent interview with Der Spiegel, however, Carlsen himself claims that one can be too smart to succeed at the game:
SPIEGEL: Mr Carlsen, what is your IQ?
Carlsen: I have no idea. I wouldn’t want to know it anyway. It might turn out to be a nasty surprise.
SPIEGEL: Why? You are 19 years old and ranked the number one chess player in the world. You must be incredibly clever.
Carlsen: And that’s precisely what would be terrible. Of course it is important for a chess player to be able to concentrate well, but being too intelligent can also be a burden. It can get in your way. I am convinced that the reason the Englishman John Nunn never became world champion is that he is too clever for that.
SPIEGEL: How [is] that?
Carlsen: At the age of 15, Nunn started studying mathematics in Oxford; he was the youngest student in the last 500 years, and at 23 he did a PhD in algebraic topology. He has so incredibly much in his head. Simply too much. His enormous powers of understanding and his constant thirst for knowledge distracted him from chess.
SPIEGEL: Things are different in your case?
Carlsen: Right. I am a totally normal guy. My father is considerably more intelligent than I am.
I highly doubt that Carlsen is just “a totally normal guy.” I don’t think anyone can become a grandmaster (much less the no. 1 player in the world) without having unusually high intelligence at least in some ways. However, he may be on to something here. The key variable, however, is not so much intelligence as insufficient specialization.
A person like Nunn who is interested in many different fields may never devote enough time to any one of them to achieve true greatness. The interesting question is whether extremely smart people are especially likely to underspecialize. The idea that there is a correlation between intelligence and underspecialization is at least plausible. Very smart people might have a taste for variety in intellectual stimulation and may more easily get bored with any one subject.
The issue of underspecialization interests me because it’s been a problem in my own career. I’m interested in many different political and legal issues, so I don’t have the patience to focus all or most of my work on just a few – even though that’s usually the best path to academic success. In academia, we often speak of the importance of having a coherent “research agenda.” Unfortunately, I’ve got three or four of them. In my mind, they are all interconnected (the common theme, as I see it, is the superiority of “voting with your feet” over political processes controlled by ballot box voting). But few other people see it that way.
Of course, I’m not nearly as smart as Nunn (or Carlsen, for that matter). In my case, the underspecialization is probably caused by factors other than being too smart. Maybe it’s caused by not being smart enough! Still, the difficulty of avoiding underspecialization is a problem for many people, and may be more likely to be an issue for the highly intelligent or highly educated.
Mark Buehner says:
Chess isn’t about intelligence, its about image recognition. Which is why the best chess player in the world is a computer.
March 17, 2010, 2:36 pmd says:
I must say that “underspecialization” has a better connotation than “dilettante.”
March 17, 2010, 2:41 pmvonneumann says:
The very brightest people who ever lived — Newton, Einstein, Leibniz, Aristotle, von Neumann, etc. — excelled in a variety of fields from philosophy to mathematics to naturalist sciences. But they may in fact be the exception, like the “five tool” player in baseball. Far more numerous are the specialist who advance a particular field but do not transform it.
March 17, 2010, 2:54 pmJohnF says:
While genius is often tied to obsession, e.g., Bobby Fisher, Paul Erdos, sometimes it’s not, e.g. Richard Feynman.
March 17, 2010, 2:58 pmMaryanna says:
Mark Buehner: If I understand what you mean, then Go is also about image recognition. However, an average child player can easily beat any computer at Go.
A chess computer program (such as Deep Blue) tries millions of combinations of moves by brute force and picks the one with the highest probability of success. In Go, there are exponentially more possible moves and combinations of moves than in chess, and a computer simply cannot handle them.
Both games require a lot of intuition to be truly great. It seems to me that good intuition is a hallmark of intelligence (although I am most assuredly not a cognitive psychologist).
March 17, 2010, 2:59 pmIlya Somin says:
The very brightest people who ever lived — Newton, Einstein, Leibniz, Aristotle, von Neumann, etc. — excelled in a variety of fields from philosophy to mathematics to naturalist sciences.
Most of them lived in an era when there was less specialization in general than there is today. In Newton’s day, it was still possible for an academic to become great in several fields at once because each field was much less complex than it is today. Einstein and von Neumann – the most recent people on your list – were much more specialized than the three who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago.
March 17, 2010, 3:05 pmAlan Gunn says:
The thing I always liked about law, and about tax law in particular, is that it’s a career where you don’t really have to specialize much. (People who aren’t tax lawyers think we’re specialists, but it’s not true; tax people have to know a little bit about all sorts of things, and a tax practice gets you a lot of variety: much more variety than a litigator who might spend months on one case.) Nothing to do with being smart, I think, it’s more that some people like a lot of variety. One of my law school classmates did antitrust work. He said it was a lot of fun because he got to learn everything there was to know about a particular industry during a two-year stint on one case. Would have driven me nuts.
March 17, 2010, 3:05 pmTerry Vance says:
As a teenage tournament chess player who was permanently distracted by other interests, I would say that there is probably a loose correlation of chess ability with intelligence but only up to a relatively low IQ ceiling, at which point it becomes much more random. There is a very strong psychological component; try to get a top player to “throw” a casual game just for fun! If you don’t mind losing a chess game, you will never be top (or even very good) player, regardless of innate intelligence and skill.
March 17, 2010, 3:07 pmMark N. says:
While underspecialization may be a career problem for the people in question, I think it’s good for fields as a whole that they exist, especially if a significant proportion of the underspecializers are among the brighter researchers. A lot of fields have the problem that ever-smaller sub-sub-specialties operate in surprising isolation from other specialties, to the extent that two large bodies of expert consensus in areas that really ought to be related have developed so independently that they sometimes literally contradict each other: people in sub-field A take X as axiomatic, whereas people in related sub-field B studying similar issues take ~X as axiomatic.
Usually the contradictions are less dramatic, but I think there’s a lot to be said for engaging multiple disciplines and being familiar with how assumptions, methodologies, and consensuses vary— if the goal is that academic research as a whole ought to advance human knowledge, as opposed to simply producing lots of divergent discourses.
March 17, 2010, 3:08 pmSeaDrive says:
It requires a very special kind of very good memory to be a chess master. Memory is very important in any advanced field since otherwise you spend too much time going back to the beginning to refresh your memory.
It also takes a certain personality to be a champion in most any field.
March 17, 2010, 3:18 pmyankee says:
Why would smart people have more of a taste for variety than less smart people? Most subjects can be explored to near-endless levels of depth, so there’s no reason a smart person would necessarily become bored in dealing with them. It’s not at all hard to imagine a brilliant scientist with an endless passion for theoretical physics but who rapidly becomes bored with art, literature, social science, or biology.
Just considering board and card games, there are a lot of games that “cap out” in terms of strategy. There’s only so much to figure out about the strategy of checkers, so one would expect a smart person to become bored more quickly. But no on has ever come remotely near exhausting the potential levels of strategic depth in more complex games like Go, chess, or poker. Becoming bored with chess is a matter of personality, not of understanding the game so well that there’s nothing more to figure out.
March 17, 2010, 3:20 pmyankee says:
Well, part of this depends on how one counts subjects (how many subjects did Einstein excel in?), and on how one determines who the brightest people are. Do Mozart and Shakespeare make the list?
March 17, 2010, 3:26 pmRowerinVA says:
And, perhaps more importantly, they had no Internet. Which meant fewer distractions so that they could actually get something accomplished …
March 17, 2010, 3:40 pmPersonFromPorlock says:
Of course, Feynman was famously not a genius, IQ-wise. Or so he said.
March 17, 2010, 3:51 pmCornellian says:
He’s right about John Nunn. It’s scary how smart that guy is. He’s also written some excellent chess books.
March 17, 2010, 3:55 pmDesiderius says:
“Why would smart people have more of a taste for variety than less smart people?”
Because genius-level intelligence is all about finding unexpected conceptual connections across diverse fields of thought.
There may be (and likely are) Shakespeare/Euler level geniuses in our midst entirely unrecognized by the self-appointed potentates of our over-specialized disciplines.
March 17, 2010, 3:58 pmIchthyophagous says:
I get interested in all kinds of things, but bored of studying any one thing for a very long time. Certainly it would be pleasant to think of my boredom as a manifestation of extremely high intelligence.
March 17, 2010, 4:00 pmme says:
Smart people often have trouble making decisions. They see all sides or possibilities to an issue and can have difficulty choosing among (what they perceive as) very similar options. They over think the problem and get stuck. This is why you have incredibly intelligent people who don’t know what to wear in the morning.
You can’t be indecisive and a grandmaster.
March 17, 2010, 4:01 pmSeaDrive says:
Even Feynman wasn’t right about everything.
IQ is one of those simple notions that gets more and more complex the deeper you look into it. I would say, though, that if some measure of intelligence does not rate Feynman high on the scale, the measure itself is suspect.
March 17, 2010, 4:01 pmHouston Lawyer says:
The editor in chief of the Texas Bar Review flunked the Texas bar the year I took it. He was surely one of the smartest guys taking the test.
Very smart people are often not practical. They seem to get too much pleasure out of analyzing questions that don’t concern others.
March 17, 2010, 4:14 pmuh_clem says:
The idea that one can assign a single number to a person as a measurement of intelligence is silly.
Imagine trying the same for physical analog, call it PQ for physical quotient: would Tiger Woods have a higher PQ than Bode Miller? Or Itzhak Perlman?
Or imagine trying to come up with a single number to describe “large”. Is a pool cue larger than a bowling ball?
IQ is one of those notions that the more you look into it, the sillier it becomes. A one parameter model does not begin to approach the complexity of simple notions like “large”, let alone the much more complicated idea of human intelligence. Anyone who thinks a one-parameter model is meaningful is simple-minded.
March 17, 2010, 4:40 pmd says:
I picked up some interesting insight on raising children that relates to this topic.
There has always been a strong push of parents who tell their children that they can do whatever they put their mind to and to tell them that they’re “smart” or otherwise explain their boredom in class as the class going too slow for them because they’re so intelligent.
The flip-side strategy for raising children is to praise hard work rather than intelligence. This particular piece of advice also included a theory that if you praise intelligence alone, then you risk having someone give up on a topic once it becomes hard.
I, for one, will raise my children to believe in hard work. Intelligence will be subsumed into part of hard work.
March 17, 2010, 4:51 pmDuffy Pratt says:
Who was smarter, J.S. Bach or Rembrandt?
March 17, 2010, 4:52 pmbailey says:
Yet there are lawyers who think that their legal education/law degree gives them almost omniscient knowledge about practically any subject. Conduct of war, national security, economics-trust me, I have a law degree.
March 17, 2010, 5:03 pmArkady says:
Funny Einstein story. He played the violin, somewhat. Once he was invited to play a benefit with the New York Philharmonic, with Leopold Stokowski conducting. Einstein was to play a short solo in some piece. At the rehearsal, Einstein never seemed to be able to come in for his solo on time. Finally in exasperation, Stokowski threw his baton down an yelled, “Goddamit Albert, can’t you count?”
March 17, 2010, 5:05 pmmrcausality says:
Anyone who has read Bobby Fischer’s hand-written diatribes against the U.S., Jews, and other lightning rods quickly would realize that his cognitive abilities in chess certainly didn’t translate into anything intelligible on paper.
March 17, 2010, 5:37 pmTRE says:
It is no accident that his father is a good club player and taught him at an early age. JS Bach’s father was a music teacher and so was Mozart’s. Intelligence can only go far without access to specialized knowledge. So I find Magnus’s explanation for his success mostly credible. He is obviously conscious of remaining and appearing humble.
Undoubtedly it is far more useful for success in chess to have a motivated teacher at an early age rather than some fraction more intelligence.
Tangentially, imagine a genius born into a dysfunctional family entering the first grade at a typical American public school. What are this person’s prospects? Thankfully a lot better in the present day with the availability of computers and knowledge over the internet.
March 17, 2010, 5:41 pmlucia says:
What about Hedy Lamarr or Ben Franklin?
I once had a conversation with a guy who was very proud to be super specialized who insisted neither could be considered truly intelligent because true genius simply was focusing on a specialty and making repeated incremental contributions to that specialty.
Mind you, if one is fairly bright and wishes to see himself as a genius, that notion that can foster behavior that does result in advancing the field of knowledge, one’s own career and which many would encourage their children or employees to exhibit. Still, despite having frittered away his time on a broad range of things, I think Franklin probably deserves to be included on lists of geniuses. Lamarr may well belong there too, though admittedly, her life was such that she didn’t actually make contributions in many different fields. There was just that one very surprising one.
March 17, 2010, 6:26 pmjcm says:
Da Vinci . He was the Renascence Man. Her excelled in architecture, painting and technology. And in the Art field , there is no question about exploding knowledge,
March 17, 2010, 6:36 pmEinstein know nothing out of mathematics . His opinion on economics and politics were at the low bottom
The higher iq person in the 70´s worked as telephone operator
Apperception says:
Lalala magical thinking lalala…
BTW, Nunn has been World Chess Solving Champion. Seems like he did pretty well in chess.
March 17, 2010, 7:22 pmleo marvin says:
You’re conflating intelligence, ideology and mental health.
March 17, 2010, 7:28 pmNick says:
And how does one define intelligence? To assume a) that it is innate, and b) that it is measurable are both assumptions that many, if not most theorists would no longer adhere to, and at best are problematic and unprovable assumptions. That intelligence is even one thing is hotly debated int the field.
March 17, 2010, 7:45 pmDesiderius says:
uh-clem,
Thanks for the illustrations. As a HS teacher, with different tracks of students so tracked for a wild diversity of reasons, those will hit the spot in explaining a point I not infrequently stress.
March 17, 2010, 7:52 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
This presupposes that we want, or should want, to focus in on something and be the world’s best at it. It could be that many potential grand masters at chess aren’t known b/c they didn’t like it enough to pursue it to the exclusion of everything else.
March 17, 2010, 8:01 pmPersonFromPorlock says:
Funny Stokowski story. After a concert, a matron, overwhelmed, rushed up to him and cried “Oh, Maestro! You… are God!” Stokowski paused for a moment, then replied “Yes, Madam, and such a responsibility!”
March 17, 2010, 9:33 pmCato The Elder says:
I’m very suspicious of the story that Feynman tested at only 120 IQ. It sounds like the typical apocryphal BS to me, much like that of Newton only being so-so in his studies or Einstein failing in elementary school that are routinely bandied about; people’s attempt to reduce staggering genius to a more mortal plane.
March 17, 2010, 9:49 pmMark Field says:
Agreed.
Feynman himself tells the story.
March 17, 2010, 10:32 pmIlya Somin says:
Anyone who has read Bobby Fischer’s hand-written diatribes against the U.S., Jews, and other lightning rods quickly would realize that his cognitive abilities in chess certainly didn’t translate into anything intelligible on paper.
A person can be highly intelligent while still having stupid views about matters outside his areas of expertise. It happens all the time. Unlike Nunn, Fischer was highly specialized, focusing nearly all of his attention on chess (until he dropped competitive play after 1972). Moreover, Fischer was mentally disturbed.
March 17, 2010, 11:35 pmAnatid says:
Let’s see …
- Pattern recognition & prediction
- Decisiveness
- Curiosity and desire to seek novel stimuli
- Obsession with a specific topic
- Ability to focus on a single, specific topic
- Theory of mind and deceit
- Ambition and drive
… and more
All of these might make someone a better chess player. Many of them correlate with one another only loosely. All can be classified as “intelligence.” The specific factors that contribute to this abstract notion of “intelligence” are presently under study, only partially-understood, and are far more complex than the English language presently has the vocabulary to describe. This makes conversation about intelligence, to put it lightly, difficult.
But we’re smart enough to get around that, aren’t we?
March 18, 2010, 5:40 amDesiderius says:
“Feynman himself tells the story.”
All the more suspect.
March 18, 2010, 7:43 amDon Miller says:
I think I might be an example of what you are talking about.
My whole life, my IQ has been tested at 145+ consistently. I have over 180 college credits and no degree.
I have dabbled in too many things and focused on nothing. Mechanical, Nuclear and Marine Engineering, Production and Operations Management, Computer Programming, Computer Network Design, Structural Fire Fighting, Wildland Fire Fighting, Emergency Medicical Technician, Emergency Management, Law, Economics. The list could probably be longer
There is just too much to know and I want to know it all. My current employer is the only one who has ever really grabbed onto this and let me run with it. I am the only IT person for a 45 employee manufacturer. Not only do I take care of the computer equipment, but I run the Health and Safety program, I do new employee orientation, I am Chairman of the ESOP committee, I am on the new product design team, I am the lean manufacturing champion. Everytime we think about new technology, I am assigned the lead role in doing the initial investigations, and initial ROI calculations. They keep me busy moving from task to task learning new things constantly.
At 43, I will most likely never get a college degree, but I probably don’t need one anymore either.
March 18, 2010, 10:15 amMark Field says:
Cato suggested that others tried to reduce transcendent geniuses like Newton or Einstein to mere mortal status. That wouldn’t be the case if Feynman himself were the source of the story.
As for whether Feynman might have been trying to downplay his own genius, that’s certainly possible but let’s just say that was probably the only time in his life he did so (assuming he did).
March 18, 2010, 10:22 amDesiderius says:
MarkField,
I’m pretty sure I was joking, but I still wouldn’t put it past the old trickster.
The regular guy vs. the elites vibe was pretty strong with that one, at least in his stories (the only way I have to know him). To his credit, “regular guy” Feynman was as often the butt of his jokes as the elites were.
March 18, 2010, 10:54 amMark Field says:
My humor detector is erratic.
March 18, 2010, 12:01 pmEric Rasmusen says:
Don’t take IQ tests too seriously at scores above 130. Remember: they’re designed to test the average person, which they do well, and tests get unreliable when they’re used on extreme data.
The most important question in the post is whether smart people underspecialize— that is, whether for the social good, a smart person should restrain his curiosity and focus on one subject.
One complication, which Prof. Volokh probably illustrates, is that one speciality is knowing about lots of fields and connecting them. Thus, knowing Law and Blogging has resulted in this blog. I illustrate that too; I am best known for a game theory book for economists generally which would not and could not have written by a specialist. And if I had specialized, I would not have been all that good a specialist anyway.
March 18, 2010, 12:22 pmA. Criminal says:
IQ and Chess strength
There’s equations and a table!
I beat the CU “go” (Japanese board game) champion the first time I played “go,” and tied the AZ HS chess champ (now an MIT math prof; 1W, 1L, 2D), although I rarely played, and I’m rilly stoopid. They were probably distracted by my facial deformities.
March 18, 2010, 12:27 pmdesiderius says:
“‘I’m pretty sure I was joking’
My humor detector is erratic.”
Link
March 18, 2010, 1:24 pmDan Simon says:
Don’t worry, Ilya–anyone who follows your blog postings should be able to reassure you in the strongest terms that you are not underspecialized.
March 18, 2010, 3:14 pmliamascorcaigh says:
“The issue of underspecialization interests me because it’s been a problem in my own career. I’m interested in many different political and legal issues, so I don’t have the patience to focus all or most of my work on just a few — even though that’s usually the best path to academic success.”
The Kung-Fu master in that David Carradine series could have taught you much, Grasshopper!
March 18, 2010, 4:59 pmliamascorcaigh says:
The Kung-Fu master in that David Carradine series could have taught you much, Grasshopper!
March 18, 2010, 4:59 pmGary Britt says:
Couldn’t it at least be argued that Bobby Fisher was kept from being recognized at an age between 16 and 19 as the world number 1 because of politics in the chess world that don’t exist in the same way today?
Maybe I’m remembering the time line wrong about when Fisher became a world beater.
Gary
March 18, 2010, 11:11 pmAmerican Psikhushka says:
Don Miller-
I have dabbled in too many things and focused on nothing.
Doesn’t sound too bad. No one was blocking your way in any of your studies or jobs, were they?
There is just too much to know and I want to know it all. My current employer is the only one who has ever really grabbed onto this and let me run with it. I am the only IT person for a 45 employee manufacturer. Not only do I take care of the computer equipment, but I run the Health and Safety program, I do new employee orientation, I am Chairman of the ESOP committee, I am on the new product design team, I am the lean manufacturing champion. Everytime we think about new technology, I am assigned the lead role in doing the initial investigations, and initial ROI calculations. They keep me busy moving from task to task learning new things constantly.
As long as they are paying you fairly and not trying to swindle you that sounds fine. Property rights are the key thing – you would have gotten nowhere without property rights. Consider yourself lucky they were honored.
March 19, 2010, 8:09 pmjohn conroy says:
Good post but I have a three-word counter-argument for your thesis that too much intelligence == lack of greatness in any specific field:
John
Von
Neumann.
March 20, 2010, 1:13 pmObsession>Talent says:
“If I understand what you mean, then Go is also about image recognition. However, an average child player can easily beat any computer at Go.”
Not even remotely true. The best computers are now dan-level — look up MoGo. And the average adult, never mind average child, is well below that.
As for the topic, it’s often cited that Bobby Fischer had an IQ in the 180s. Such numbers are well-known to be unreliable, but what’s clear is that he was obsessed with the game, which, combined with his talent, is what made him the greatest player of his time by far. He worked harder than anyone.
March 20, 2010, 4:37 pmEric says:
If you think that chess supercomputers are good at image recognition, you know nothing of how computers work.
March 20, 2010, 9:54 pmneil wilson says:
Today, the best go computer can play better than most casual players. However, they are millions of miles behind professionals.
Virtually anyone can study go full time for a few years and beat the best go computer. There is virtually no one who can study chess full time for a few years and beat the best public domain chess programs.
It ain’t hard to be dan level in go. If I can do it a lot of other people can too.
March 20, 2010, 10:00 pmmichinyuja says:
interconnection! thank you for that observation!!
the deeper you go into a subject, the more you see the connections between it and others.
one field, five fields. they’re all the same. i boil down pretty much everything into power. but your metaphor base may be different.
i think it’s overspecialization. you specialize in too many things.
we’re all smart enough to realize that public recognition is all political anyway. who’s to say it’s under or over? @_@
April 4, 2010, 9:51 am