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? @_@

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.

Mark Buehner: Chess isn’t about intelligence, its about image recognition. Which is why the best chess player in the world is a computer.

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.

John

Von

Neumann.

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.

Maybe I’m remembering the time line wrong about when Fisher became a world beater.

Gary

“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!

The Kung-Fu master in that David Carradine series could have taught you much, Grasshopper!

My humor detector is erratic.”

Link

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.

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.

I’m pretty sure I was joking

My humor detector is erratic.

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.

All the more suspect.

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).

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.

All the more suspect.

- 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?

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.

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

Agreed.

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.

Feynman himself tells the story.

SeaDrive:
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.

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.

Arkady: 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….

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!”

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.

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.

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.

mrcausality: 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.

You’re conflating intelligence, ideology and mental health.

uh_clem:
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 issimple-minded.

Lalala magical thinking lalala…

BTW, Nunn has been World Chess Solving Champion. Seems like he did pretty well in chess.

Do Mozart and Shakespeare make the list?

Who was smarter, J.S. Bach or Rembrandt?

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.

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.

yankee: Well, part of this depends on how one counts subjects (how many subjects did Einstein excel in?)

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?”