You also have to remember that if his daughters ended up being unexceptional at chess, we would probably have never heard of them or this experiment, the same as the likely many kids whose parents unsecessfully tried to raise them to be great at chess (or anything else).
True, think piano/soccer/nobel ... (Albert Einstein was pretty disappointed about his son - who just made it to a PhD). Though Polgar 'succeeded', choosing chess AND having daughters raised his chances to get to the top! Smart and all that training+zeal: sure, you can make it to grand-master! Which is a LOUSY career-choice, if you are a guy + neither the national champ nor in the Top-20. Tyler Cowen (ELO 2350 at 16) gave up on it, to follow an academic career:
“Chess is all or nothing, like an addiction” he said. He looks back at players he knew growing up and wonders what more they might have done with their talents if they had spent less time at the board. Meanwhile, those who moved on were able to achieve great things. He points to GM Kenneth Rogoff, Ph.D., for example, who is a leading economist and former director of research at the International Monetary Fund. - end of quote - How much again were the lifetime earnings of this three genius ladies? I assume my cousin (she holds a PhD in econ.; top management) makes a lot more. The Cowen interview: https://kenilworthian.blogspot.com/2006/09/interview-with-former-youngest-new.html
(I remember my school - a PE-teacher started a girl's-softball-team. Without any outstanding talents, they quickly rose to the top-ten in Germany. As there were hardly more than 10 teams nationwide. - Yes, I am aware those 3 daughters played in the guy-league. But if they had been boys with the same results: Would they impress us as much?! - If the kid of Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf made it to the Top 200 in Tennis, would that count as success or failure?)
Me and Cowen agree: A genius might do better than moving pieces on a chess-board. Or turning his kids into experts at moving those pieces. None of his daughters could beat a chess-program today. "Stupid is, who stupid does" (Forrest Gump's Mom). - Legal wealth is usu. earned by providing something of value to others. “Money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism.”― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
This is an important point. I would be surprised if a fair number of parents haven’t been inclined to similarly intensive home schooling programs, but gave up in the early years when it was clear their efforts were not bearing fruit.
This would be true if it was only one daughter. But the fact that all three of them ended up as at least grandmaster level is astounding, even controlling for selection effects. Something is in need of explanation here. I think Emil's explanation is quite good: moderately high genetic predisposition combined with a game that is only somewhat g-loaded and responds to early and aggressive tiger-parenting.
The most interesting takeaway is that chess seems to have a critical period where you need early exposure in order to be truly great. I can't think of a single chess grandmaster that started playing seriously as a teenager. Contrast this with something like basketball where plenty of the seven foot players from Africa (Olajuwan, Embiid) started playing at 15,16, but still were able to become all-time great players in contention for the best player in the world.
What other fields require starting as a child? I guess gymnastics, but that seems like cheating.
Golf these days seems to require starting by adolescence. Back in the 1980s, two of the top 20 players of the decade, Larry Nelson and Calvin Peete, both started playing golf in their 20s. But I haven't heard of that happening since. Lots of team sport superstars like Michael Jordan take up golf around college age or early 20s and fall very much in love with it, but they almost never develop enough to have notable careers on, say, the Senior Tour for over 50 golfers.
Pianists who do not start in early childhood are said to struggle with hand independence. However (as with football players), there have been a few great pianists who only started playing seriously in their teens.
Start naming people who you think of when you see the word “genius”, people who were part of Western civilization for the past, say 600 years. Preferably name a couple of dozen, to make the sample plausible.
Now, how many of those people were known as chess masters? (I specified Westerners not because chess is confined to the West, but because I doubt if many people would know about chess masters outside the region and time period specified.)
I’m anything but a chess afficionado, but I don’t think I’m being rash when I suggest that chess is a very poor indicator of “genius” in any but a trivially narrow sense. It is an even poorer indicator of the possibilities of education.
Chess is a much narrower field than, say mathematics, or any of the physical or natural sciences (the ones that are actually sciences). Chess problems, unlike such fields, or messier ones such as military strategy, political leadership, etc., (or real life, for that matter), are not complicated by an infinite number of highly heterogenous external factors, which a genius in another field is expected to deal with as a matter of routine.
Chess is accordingly much easier to train for from earliest childhood. Perhaps that’s why Polgár chose chess--could he have trained his children that intensely in any of the sciences? Could he have been sure of finding and hiring teachers who could have trained them?
And what are the chances of choosing the right specialty in which to train the baby through to adulthood? Polgár’s method depends on years of intensive training in one specific field. What if you choose mathematics and the kid is a born naturalist who wants field work to keep his mind engaged? Or a born athlete? You could wind up twisting a child very badly that way. Education, as it is currently practiced, twists too many children as it is.
What are the chances that the parents, whatever their IQs, will be actually capable of managing the child’s education program?
And in any case, training children that intensely in demanding real-world fields would not to any significant extent be an option for homeschooling. If such training became the goal, the State would be looked to for the resources. The State has been given total charge of education many times in the past, and in many places in the present, and the results have not been good.
Finally, Polgár’s experiment, and his results, are far from new. Many have tried the same experiment. Is it that unusual for parents to more or less intensively indoctrinate their children for some goal they believe worthy? The Spartans were famous for doing it on a city-statewide scale. (Or read, for instance, the autobiography of John Stuart Mill, who was raised that way by his parents, but trained in a much wider field of knowledge. The autobiography gives me the impression that the education came at a certain personal cost to him, despite his genuine achievements.)
Even allowing for the possibility that genetics is a factor, and therefore concluding that such a method of education should be used only for children of genetically suitable parents, such risks and previous experiments as those noted above suggest that the outcome even for such children, and for their society. will not be desirable.
Polgár sounds to me like a very common variety of crackpot, whose results are not really very interesting on any terms.
One obvious takeaway from the Polgar experiment is that we are producing far fewer chess masters than we could if we really tried to do it. And that's good! "The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the
world. It slaps the theory of natural selection in the face. It is the
most absorbing of occupations, the least satisfying of desires, an
aimless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man. You have, let us
say, a promising politician, a rising artist, that you wish to destroy.
Dagger or bomb are archaic, clumsy, and unreliable--but teach him,
Another interesting father who raised several geniuses, is the father of Michael Jackson. He trained them very hard (using an iron stick) but managed to get most of his children up to a very high level.
The patriarch Polgar sounds precisely like a typical Jewish communist. Wasn't it Thomas Edison who said that genius was 1 %inspiration and 99 %perspiration?Or was it 10 %and 90%?!
"Wasn't it Thomas Edison who said that genius was 1 %inspiration and 99 %perspiration?Or was it 10 %and 90%?!"
Thomas Edison was not a genius; he was a tinkerer. He had no scientific talent but capitalized on others' genius and talent. So it is little wonder he thought genius was 1 % inspiration and 99 % perspiration. Contrast that with a true genius, Albert Einstein.
"Thomas Edison was not a genius;but a tinkerer. He had no specific talent but capitalised on others" 'genius and talent ."And the standout figure amongst those unnamed others is of course Nikola Tesla who in my book is a hair's breadth behind good old Albert. Interestingly Tesla was Serbian by ethnicity and eschewed female company as he believed that it would damage his creativity. Meanwhile Einstein was a womanizer and a serial cheat on his very high IQ Serbian wife....
"Thomas Edison was not a genius;but a tinkerer. He had no specific talent but capitalised on others" 'genius and talent ."And the standout figure amongst those unnamed others is of course Nikola Tesla who in my book is a hair's breadth behind good old Albert. Interestingly Tesla was Serbian by ethnicity and eschewed female company as he believed that it would damage his creativity. Meanwhile Einstein was a womanizer and a serial cheat on his very high IQ Serbian wife....
Intelligence/genius = the ability to achieve what you want. And chess gives many basic building blocks for outcompeting others, which is often what you want so in this context it greatly affects intelligence
A certain Andrew Tate had a father who was a chess champion and he's spoken about playing chess as a boy and relishing beating kids a couple of years older. So maybe those early years playing chess has helped Tate to master other fields too..
You could argue that Tate achieves what he wants despite disadvantageous background of Eastern Europe. So definitely top percentile in intelligence, even if that sounds very counterintuitive given who he appears in sm
"You could argue that Tate achieves what he wants despite disadvantageous background of Eastern Europe."
Never mind that Tate has no Eastern European background. However, as for the 'disadvantageous background of Eastern Europe,' some of the most brilliant minds come from Eastern Europe.
Very interesting post. I thought about looking into it after it went viral. I agree with the points you make, given the data.
Two additional thoughts: First, was László Polgár a chess teacher before training his daughters (i.e., were there domain-specific skills pre-existing in the family)? Second, for every such case, how many failed attempts were there by parents who tried very hard to get their children to excel at something and failed (e.g., school scores, musical instruments, sports)? The drawer effect may be large here.
I had the same question. It appears based on his published books listed on Wikipedia, that he only became a chess teacher after starting this with his daughters. If you read some of the articles, they make it seem like a chance event that chess was chosen as one daughter found the game in some cupboard.
This would be like a pro athlete reproducing with another athletic woman, and intensively training the daughters to be gymnastics champions from an early age. Don't think many would be surprised if the project succeeds.
Hard work is important no doubt. But I am skeptical when people like Kasparov, Nigel Short and Feinman claim IQ’s around 130. Perhaps they had off days. Or perhaps some people like to play down the validity of IQ because they think this number is inhumanely deterministic of human worth. Fischer and Carlson reported IQ’s of 180 and 190, respectively, which is more in line with what one would expect of top talent in such a cognitively demanding activity.
Unsure about Short and Feynman, but Kasparov’s score comes from an IQ test he took. I believe you’re granting excessive primacy to the importance of IQ in chess skill. The correlation between chess skill and IQ is tenuous and a monstrous memory seems to be more important than anything. Many grandmasters can recall positions from games they played years ago - and this exceptional memory stems beyond chess as some can recall past conversations word for word. Sure, Chess is cognitively demanding, but everything indicates that it seems to tap into savant abilities rather than general intelligence.
As to the 180 and 190 figures for Fischer and Carlsen respectively - the stratospheric numbers should raise some doubt. Fischer’s score of 187 comes from old Stanford-Binet scales and is actually about 155-160 in today’s terms on the WAIS. The 190 figure for Carlsen is most likely made up. Carlsen has never taken an IQ test (or at least never publicized his score).
They are reducing Fischer's IQ largely because of the Flynn effect, which is kind of meaningless. IQ scores are scaled relative to other test takers of the time, not in our time.
I wouldn’t say I give IQ primacy, as you put it, I simply mean that it correlates well with the cognitive abilities needed for chess. It’s not just a memory for past games that’s needed, though there is certainly that, but also an excellent working memory and good data analysis skills, a kind of logic I guess. All these skills, and probably others, are tested for on IQ tests.
I'm no expert but how is Marilyn vos Savant able to legitimately claim an IQ of around 220? At least Guinness World Records recognizes the score as legitimate and they do check such claims. And here is an essay on gifted children that mentions those with 190+ IQ's, written by a PhD in education. So I'm left confused. https://www.hoagiesgifted.org/underserved.htm
I see. Well, the correlation between ELO and IQ is rather unimpressive - something like 0.3. There are 140 IQ persons with lower ratings than 100 IQ persons, which to me is illustrative of the comparatively insignificant role of IQ. Chess is cognitively demanding, of course, but top players don’t seem to have the best track record when it comes to IQ. Nakamura (ranked #2 at 2800) scored 102 on an IQ test he took live, for example, but demolished the working memory test on Human Benchmark. It just seems to me that great chess players are not distinguished by their intelligence as much as they are by their exceptional prowess in certain abilities - almost like savants.
This is a good post. Only thing I'll say is that my memory is very strong -- not like Carlsen's or Morphy's, but very strong -- and I'm not a grandmaster, and not within a million miles of being a grandmaster. So I think memory is necessary to being a strong player, but not sufficient.
Another super GM, Nakamuro, took an IQ test and got around 100. You can find it on youtube. It was very suprising, and I suspect he overcomplicated some of the questions. I have a hard time accepting you can play at that level without a high IQ.
> Or perhaps some people like to play down the validity of IQ because they think this number is inhumanely deterministic of human worth.
They appear more modest when they downplay their talents, and they can afford it. Men like Hawking, Knuth or Einstein are so superior to most of us that no demonstration is necessary. But at work, expect that they do not suffer fools gladly, and they would aggressively defend their rank in the intellectual hierarchy should someone try to upstage them. Reportedly, Einstein was well aware of his importance in the history of science, but affected a modest public persona when talking about his achievements. Hawking too is said to have basked in the adulation of his many sycophantic followers despite saying "IQ is for losers". With his gifts, what man would not be tempted to call himself a god?
IQ claims above 140 (even 130) are highly suspicious. Most tests are simply not designed to measure the extremes, working reliably only at values of 80-120. Obviously, it becomes harder to say what it even means to be 3/4/5/6 SD above the average (and to give proper weight to verbal/logic/... skills). See Erik Hoel's post: https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/your-iq-isnt-160-no-ones-is
That link contains misleading information. Though Hawking did claim he didn't know his IQ, he was likely lying, probably for the same reason that so many geniuses do, as I explained out above. (I think this is evidence for my initial contention that people don't like IQ tests because they think they're too determinative.) Hawking took a Mensa IQ test his senior year at Oxford and scored around 200-250. Wikipedia used to report this but has buried the information. You can still find part of that information in "Stephen Hawking A life Well Lived", though his biographer didn't report the score. You can still find it reported here: https://www.eoht.info/page/Stephen%20Hawking
Usually, the point where IQ scores become less useful as a tool in delineating just exactly how smart someone is, is about 160, not 130 or 140. However, the findings of The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth indicate that even in the higher strata, differences on test scores as children are predictive of just how much one achieves as an adult.
Interesting, but I’m not sure that helping precocious youth with supplemental educational opportunities, whether reported or not, would have much differential effect on their outcomes as adults, as long as 95% were helped.
Well, as those with the higher results got the much better tutors/mentors (mentoring a genius-kid is more attractive to a professor than a smart kid) , it makes it hard to tell which interventions were relevant and to what extent. I do not claim - nor does Hoel - that high IQ at a young age is very relevant, and an IQ of 150 is "better" than one of 130. Just the study is mis-represented (also by its author) and thus over-interpreted.
A note about Kasparov. He was born in 1963 and grew up in a society that made an effort to find and train kids with a talent for chess. He was found very early, but lots of other kids in the USSR in the late 60s and early 70s were found and trained too. But of all of them, he was by far the best. "He was a moderately intelligent man who received excellent training" fails to do credit to his extraordinary talent for chess.
Those of us who will forever remain amateurs are most astonished by great players' ability to calculate -- to accurately see many moves into the future without touching the pieces. Of course that ability can be trained, but as with the violin and the jump shot, some are more trainable than others. With Kasparov (and Carlsen) that ability was joined with freakish memory, physical stamina, determination, and a ferocious will to win (and, in bad positions, not to lose).
Of course, the term genius is used rather loosely here. Chess is a game. A chess master's only ability is an inordinate ability to play it exceptionally well. There is no innovation, no insight, and no discovery involved.
This quote conveys my sense of genius: Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see - Arthur Schopenhauer
Judit Polgar is by far the best woman chess player in history. She was in the world top ten (with nine men) for about a decade around the turn of the century. If she hadn't done it, I would guess that no woman could ever reach the world top ten. But she did it ... and during a highly competitive post-Cold War era when east and west Europeans could play against each other whenever they felt like it.
Similarly, Tiger Woods was raised to be a child golf prodigy and for about a decade (1999-2008), he was the best golfer ever. Here's my review of his upbringing: "The Tiger Mother's Son."
On the other hand, Korean-American golfer Anthony Kim was tiger-mothered into being #6 on the money list at age 22, in 2008, but shortly thereafter melted down and only recently made his first tournament appearance in a decade.
When other Korean parents ask Kim’s parents how to raise a golf star, they now reply, “Don’t try.”
Considering that the Polgars didn't have any sons, their tiger-parenting Judit into world top ten seems roughly as impressive as if they had tiger-parented one of 3 sons into being a world champ.
Surely something more than moderate intelligence and hard-work (perhaps a savant ability of some sort) is a requisite to chess proficiency. Many masters can calculate 20+ moves ahead in a position. The capacity to play blindfolded also isn’t uncommon. The common traits of grandmasters seem to be a gargantuan memory + visualization, and additionally many show immense talent at their introduction to the game (see the early games of Morphy, for example). Grandmasters possess abilities that don’t seem to be learnable even with industry and a decent (or high) IQ.
Yes, exactly. Morphy was said to have memorized the entire civil code of Louisiana, to choose one example of many. I doubt that the full array of Kasparov's mental abilities is captured by his IQ score. Fischer's IQ was supposedly 187, though that sounds suspect.
Great point. Also (if I remember correctly) the 187 figure comes from obsolete Stanford-Binet norms; his IQ converted into today’s norms would be about 155-160 on the WAIS, which is still extremely impressive.
Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa (born 2005) is an Indian chess grandmaster ranked no 13 in the World. Prag and his sister Vaishali (born 2001) are the first brother-sister duo to both earn the GM title. They are also the first brother-sister duo to qualify for the Candidates.
Prag just beat Magnus the GOAT in a an official OTB game in Norway in classical time format.
Regarding the Polgars it's interesting that their rankings got better in reverse birth order contradicting the presumed birth order advantage Scott Alexander mentioned a few times. Probably their parents got better at chess training their daughters but if they should have had more of them they would have run out of resources to educate them.
Beyond everything else that has gone right in his life, Mr. Polgar now has six grandchildren? He must be a man well-satisfied with his life well-lived.
That is a good point that we should consider inclusive reproductive fitness. Nikola Tesla for example clearly brought more life into the world through science than he ever could have done as a parent.
But what if Tesla had dedicated himself to chess instead?
Of course, this is unanswerable. Perhaps chessmaster Tesla would have influenced people in subtle ways that exceeded even his scientific contributions.
However, I think we are all glad Tesla was not raised to play chess for four hours every day, even though he might have been bigger than Kasparov.
This is very interesting. I wonder if it's too late with my daughter, though mine and my wife's schedule aren't predisposed to such intensive learning.
You also have to remember that if his daughters ended up being unexceptional at chess, we would probably have never heard of them or this experiment, the same as the likely many kids whose parents unsecessfully tried to raise them to be great at chess (or anything else).
True, think piano/soccer/nobel ... (Albert Einstein was pretty disappointed about his son - who just made it to a PhD). Though Polgar 'succeeded', choosing chess AND having daughters raised his chances to get to the top! Smart and all that training+zeal: sure, you can make it to grand-master! Which is a LOUSY career-choice, if you are a guy + neither the national champ nor in the Top-20. Tyler Cowen (ELO 2350 at 16) gave up on it, to follow an academic career:
“Chess is all or nothing, like an addiction” he said. He looks back at players he knew growing up and wonders what more they might have done with their talents if they had spent less time at the board. Meanwhile, those who moved on were able to achieve great things. He points to GM Kenneth Rogoff, Ph.D., for example, who is a leading economist and former director of research at the International Monetary Fund. - end of quote - How much again were the lifetime earnings of this three genius ladies? I assume my cousin (she holds a PhD in econ.; top management) makes a lot more. The Cowen interview: https://kenilworthian.blogspot.com/2006/09/interview-with-former-youngest-new.html
(I remember my school - a PE-teacher started a girl's-softball-team. Without any outstanding talents, they quickly rose to the top-ten in Germany. As there were hardly more than 10 teams nationwide. - Yes, I am aware those 3 daughters played in the guy-league. But if they had been boys with the same results: Would they impress us as much?! - If the kid of Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf made it to the Top 200 in Tennis, would that count as success or failure?)
"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." - Paul Morphy
While I agree with most of your comments, it seems you use wealth gained to determine genius. There is a difference between talent and genius.
Me and Cowen agree: A genius might do better than moving pieces on a chess-board. Or turning his kids into experts at moving those pieces. None of his daughters could beat a chess-program today. "Stupid is, who stupid does" (Forrest Gump's Mom). - Legal wealth is usu. earned by providing something of value to others. “Money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism.”― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
"Stupid is, who stupid does"
The correct quote is, 'Stupid is, as stupid does.'
"Legal wealth is usu. earned by providing something of value to others."
Agreed, but that differs from how most wealth is gained in the U.S.
This is an important point. I would be surprised if a fair number of parents haven’t been inclined to similarly intensive home schooling programs, but gave up in the early years when it was clear their efforts were not bearing fruit.
This would be true if it was only one daughter. But the fact that all three of them ended up as at least grandmaster level is astounding, even controlling for selection effects. Something is in need of explanation here. I think Emil's explanation is quite good: moderately high genetic predisposition combined with a game that is only somewhat g-loaded and responds to early and aggressive tiger-parenting.
The most interesting takeaway is that chess seems to have a critical period where you need early exposure in order to be truly great. I can't think of a single chess grandmaster that started playing seriously as a teenager. Contrast this with something like basketball where plenty of the seven foot players from Africa (Olajuwan, Embiid) started playing at 15,16, but still were able to become all-time great players in contention for the best player in the world.
What other fields require starting as a child? I guess gymnastics, but that seems like cheating.
Golf these days seems to require starting by adolescence. Back in the 1980s, two of the top 20 players of the decade, Larry Nelson and Calvin Peete, both started playing golf in their 20s. But I haven't heard of that happening since. Lots of team sport superstars like Michael Jordan take up golf around college age or early 20s and fall very much in love with it, but they almost never develop enough to have notable careers on, say, the Senior Tour for over 50 golfers.
Pianists who do not start in early childhood are said to struggle with hand independence. However (as with football players), there have been a few great pianists who only started playing seriously in their teens.
Start naming people who you think of when you see the word “genius”, people who were part of Western civilization for the past, say 600 years. Preferably name a couple of dozen, to make the sample plausible.
Now, how many of those people were known as chess masters? (I specified Westerners not because chess is confined to the West, but because I doubt if many people would know about chess masters outside the region and time period specified.)
I’m anything but a chess afficionado, but I don’t think I’m being rash when I suggest that chess is a very poor indicator of “genius” in any but a trivially narrow sense. It is an even poorer indicator of the possibilities of education.
Chess is a much narrower field than, say mathematics, or any of the physical or natural sciences (the ones that are actually sciences). Chess problems, unlike such fields, or messier ones such as military strategy, political leadership, etc., (or real life, for that matter), are not complicated by an infinite number of highly heterogenous external factors, which a genius in another field is expected to deal with as a matter of routine.
Chess is accordingly much easier to train for from earliest childhood. Perhaps that’s why Polgár chose chess--could he have trained his children that intensely in any of the sciences? Could he have been sure of finding and hiring teachers who could have trained them?
And what are the chances of choosing the right specialty in which to train the baby through to adulthood? Polgár’s method depends on years of intensive training in one specific field. What if you choose mathematics and the kid is a born naturalist who wants field work to keep his mind engaged? Or a born athlete? You could wind up twisting a child very badly that way. Education, as it is currently practiced, twists too many children as it is.
What are the chances that the parents, whatever their IQs, will be actually capable of managing the child’s education program?
And in any case, training children that intensely in demanding real-world fields would not to any significant extent be an option for homeschooling. If such training became the goal, the State would be looked to for the resources. The State has been given total charge of education many times in the past, and in many places in the present, and the results have not been good.
Finally, Polgár’s experiment, and his results, are far from new. Many have tried the same experiment. Is it that unusual for parents to more or less intensively indoctrinate their children for some goal they believe worthy? The Spartans were famous for doing it on a city-statewide scale. (Or read, for instance, the autobiography of John Stuart Mill, who was raised that way by his parents, but trained in a much wider field of knowledge. The autobiography gives me the impression that the education came at a certain personal cost to him, despite his genuine achievements.)
Even allowing for the possibility that genetics is a factor, and therefore concluding that such a method of education should be used only for children of genetically suitable parents, such risks and previous experiments as those noted above suggest that the outcome even for such children, and for their society. will not be desirable.
Polgár sounds to me like a very common variety of crackpot, whose results are not really very interesting on any terms.
One obvious takeaway from the Polgar experiment is that we are producing far fewer chess masters than we could if we really tried to do it. And that's good! "The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the
world. It slaps the theory of natural selection in the face. It is the
most absorbing of occupations, the least satisfying of desires, an
aimless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man. You have, let us
say, a promising politician, a rising artist, that you wish to destroy.
Dagger or bomb are archaic, clumsy, and unreliable--but teach him,
inoculate him with chess!" https://www.online-literature.com/wellshg/certain-personal-matters/30/
Another interesting father who raised several geniuses, is the father of Michael Jackson. He trained them very hard (using an iron stick) but managed to get most of his children up to a very high level.
"Another interesting father who raised several geniuses, is the father of Michael Jackson."
Talented but far from genius.
Your comments are spot on.
The patriarch Polgar sounds precisely like a typical Jewish communist. Wasn't it Thomas Edison who said that genius was 1 %inspiration and 99 %perspiration?Or was it 10 %and 90%?!
"Wasn't it Thomas Edison who said that genius was 1 %inspiration and 99 %perspiration?Or was it 10 %and 90%?!"
Thomas Edison was not a genius; he was a tinkerer. He had no scientific talent but capitalized on others' genius and talent. So it is little wonder he thought genius was 1 % inspiration and 99 % perspiration. Contrast that with a true genius, Albert Einstein.
"Thomas Edison was not a genius;but a tinkerer. He had no specific talent but capitalised on others" 'genius and talent ."And the standout figure amongst those unnamed others is of course Nikola Tesla who in my book is a hair's breadth behind good old Albert. Interestingly Tesla was Serbian by ethnicity and eschewed female company as he believed that it would damage his creativity. Meanwhile Einstein was a womanizer and a serial cheat on his very high IQ Serbian wife....
I agree with your comments. No one is perfect. LOL
"Thomas Edison was not a genius;but a tinkerer. He had no specific talent but capitalised on others" 'genius and talent ."And the standout figure amongst those unnamed others is of course Nikola Tesla who in my book is a hair's breadth behind good old Albert. Interestingly Tesla was Serbian by ethnicity and eschewed female company as he believed that it would damage his creativity. Meanwhile Einstein was a womanizer and a serial cheat on his very high IQ Serbian wife....
Intelligence/genius = the ability to achieve what you want. And chess gives many basic building blocks for outcompeting others, which is often what you want so in this context it greatly affects intelligence
A certain Andrew Tate had a father who was a chess champion and he's spoken about playing chess as a boy and relishing beating kids a couple of years older. So maybe those early years playing chess has helped Tate to master other fields too..
You could argue that Tate achieves what he wants despite disadvantageous background of Eastern Europe. So definitely top percentile in intelligence, even if that sounds very counterintuitive given who he appears in sm
Tate was born in Washington, D.C. raised in US and UK.
His Eastern European mentality appears very strong in his online content, why is it so?
"You could argue that Tate achieves what he wants despite disadvantageous background of Eastern Europe."
Never mind that Tate has no Eastern European background. However, as for the 'disadvantageous background of Eastern Europe,' some of the most brilliant minds come from Eastern Europe.
Very interesting post. I thought about looking into it after it went viral. I agree with the points you make, given the data.
Two additional thoughts: First, was László Polgár a chess teacher before training his daughters (i.e., were there domain-specific skills pre-existing in the family)? Second, for every such case, how many failed attempts were there by parents who tried very hard to get their children to excel at something and failed (e.g., school scores, musical instruments, sports)? The drawer effect may be large here.
I had the same question. It appears based on his published books listed on Wikipedia, that he only became a chess teacher after starting this with his daughters. If you read some of the articles, they make it seem like a chance event that chess was chosen as one daughter found the game in some cupboard.
This would be like a pro athlete reproducing with another athletic woman, and intensively training the daughters to be gymnastics champions from an early age. Don't think many would be surprised if the project succeeds.
An increasing percentage of star athletes are the offspring of couples who both played sports at a high level in college.
Hard work is important no doubt. But I am skeptical when people like Kasparov, Nigel Short and Feinman claim IQ’s around 130. Perhaps they had off days. Or perhaps some people like to play down the validity of IQ because they think this number is inhumanely deterministic of human worth. Fischer and Carlson reported IQ’s of 180 and 190, respectively, which is more in line with what one would expect of top talent in such a cognitively demanding activity.
Unsure about Short and Feynman, but Kasparov’s score comes from an IQ test he took. I believe you’re granting excessive primacy to the importance of IQ in chess skill. The correlation between chess skill and IQ is tenuous and a monstrous memory seems to be more important than anything. Many grandmasters can recall positions from games they played years ago - and this exceptional memory stems beyond chess as some can recall past conversations word for word. Sure, Chess is cognitively demanding, but everything indicates that it seems to tap into savant abilities rather than general intelligence.
As to the 180 and 190 figures for Fischer and Carlsen respectively - the stratospheric numbers should raise some doubt. Fischer’s score of 187 comes from old Stanford-Binet scales and is actually about 155-160 in today’s terms on the WAIS. The 190 figure for Carlsen is most likely made up. Carlsen has never taken an IQ test (or at least never publicized his score).
They are reducing Fischer's IQ largely because of the Flynn effect, which is kind of meaningless. IQ scores are scaled relative to other test takers of the time, not in our time.
I wouldn’t say I give IQ primacy, as you put it, I simply mean that it correlates well with the cognitive abilities needed for chess. It’s not just a memory for past games that’s needed, though there is certainly that, but also an excellent working memory and good data analysis skills, a kind of logic I guess. All these skills, and probably others, are tested for on IQ tests.
Carlsen topped the millions of players of fantasy football recently because his genius is not limited to only chess. https://www.ft.com/content/3b802efa-2253-11ea-b8a1-584213ee7b2b
I didn’t know his 190 IQ was only an estimate. Thanks for the correction.
No one has a truly measured IQ of 190 because no test goes that high.
I'm no expert but how is Marilyn vos Savant able to legitimately claim an IQ of around 220? At least Guinness World Records recognizes the score as legitimate and they do check such claims. And here is an essay on gifted children that mentions those with 190+ IQ's, written by a PhD in education. So I'm left confused. https://www.hoagiesgifted.org/underserved.htm
I see. Well, the correlation between ELO and IQ is rather unimpressive - something like 0.3. There are 140 IQ persons with lower ratings than 100 IQ persons, which to me is illustrative of the comparatively insignificant role of IQ. Chess is cognitively demanding, of course, but top players don’t seem to have the best track record when it comes to IQ. Nakamura (ranked #2 at 2800) scored 102 on an IQ test he took live, for example, but demolished the working memory test on Human Benchmark. It just seems to me that great chess players are not distinguished by their intelligence as much as they are by their exceptional prowess in certain abilities - almost like savants.
Carlsen is also a decent poker player
This is a good post. Only thing I'll say is that my memory is very strong -- not like Carlsen's or Morphy's, but very strong -- and I'm not a grandmaster, and not within a million miles of being a grandmaster. So I think memory is necessary to being a strong player, but not sufficient.
There is no actual report of Carlson's IQ just random people making guesses because Magnus always plays down his IQ which is pretty smart.
Yeah, got corrected on that already, thanks.
Another super GM, Nakamuro, took an IQ test and got around 100. You can find it on youtube. It was very suprising, and I suspect he overcomplicated some of the questions. I have a hard time accepting you can play at that level without a high IQ.
> Or perhaps some people like to play down the validity of IQ because they think this number is inhumanely deterministic of human worth.
They appear more modest when they downplay their talents, and they can afford it. Men like Hawking, Knuth or Einstein are so superior to most of us that no demonstration is necessary. But at work, expect that they do not suffer fools gladly, and they would aggressively defend their rank in the intellectual hierarchy should someone try to upstage them. Reportedly, Einstein was well aware of his importance in the history of science, but affected a modest public persona when talking about his achievements. Hawking too is said to have basked in the adulation of his many sycophantic followers despite saying "IQ is for losers". With his gifts, what man would not be tempted to call himself a god?
IQ claims above 140 (even 130) are highly suspicious. Most tests are simply not designed to measure the extremes, working reliably only at values of 80-120. Obviously, it becomes harder to say what it even means to be 3/4/5/6 SD above the average (and to give proper weight to verbal/logic/... skills). See Erik Hoel's post: https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/your-iq-isnt-160-no-ones-is
Hoel gets a lot of stuff wrong though, while his basic point is true (ignore very high claimed scores, they are not reliable). https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/some-people-have-iqs-of-160?utm_source=publication-search
That link contains misleading information. Though Hawking did claim he didn't know his IQ, he was likely lying, probably for the same reason that so many geniuses do, as I explained out above. (I think this is evidence for my initial contention that people don't like IQ tests because they think they're too determinative.) Hawking took a Mensa IQ test his senior year at Oxford and scored around 200-250. Wikipedia used to report this but has buried the information. You can still find part of that information in "Stephen Hawking A life Well Lived", though his biographer didn't report the score. You can still find it reported here: https://www.eoht.info/page/Stephen%20Hawking
Usually, the point where IQ scores become less useful as a tool in delineating just exactly how smart someone is, is about 160, not 130 or 140. However, the findings of The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth indicate that even in the higher strata, differences on test scores as children are predictive of just how much one achieves as an adult.
Glad you mention "The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth" - Erik Hoel has a fine piece about this study:
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/iq-discourse-is-increasingly-unhinged
Interesting, but I’m not sure that helping precocious youth with supplemental educational opportunities, whether reported or not, would have much differential effect on their outcomes as adults, as long as 95% were helped.
Well, as those with the higher results got the much better tutors/mentors (mentoring a genius-kid is more attractive to a professor than a smart kid) , it makes it hard to tell which interventions were relevant and to what extent. I do not claim - nor does Hoel - that high IQ at a young age is very relevant, and an IQ of 150 is "better" than one of 130. Just the study is mis-represented (also by its author) and thus over-interpreted.
Could be.
A note about Kasparov. He was born in 1963 and grew up in a society that made an effort to find and train kids with a talent for chess. He was found very early, but lots of other kids in the USSR in the late 60s and early 70s were found and trained too. But of all of them, he was by far the best. "He was a moderately intelligent man who received excellent training" fails to do credit to his extraordinary talent for chess.
Those of us who will forever remain amateurs are most astonished by great players' ability to calculate -- to accurately see many moves into the future without touching the pieces. Of course that ability can be trained, but as with the violin and the jump shot, some are more trainable than others. With Kasparov (and Carlsen) that ability was joined with freakish memory, physical stamina, determination, and a ferocious will to win (and, in bad positions, not to lose).
Of course, the term genius is used rather loosely here. Chess is a game. A chess master's only ability is an inordinate ability to play it exceptionally well. There is no innovation, no insight, and no discovery involved.
This quote conveys my sense of genius: Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see - Arthur Schopenhauer
Judit Polgar is by far the best woman chess player in history. She was in the world top ten (with nine men) for about a decade around the turn of the century. If she hadn't done it, I would guess that no woman could ever reach the world top ten. But she did it ... and during a highly competitive post-Cold War era when east and west Europeans could play against each other whenever they felt like it.
Similarly, Tiger Woods was raised to be a child golf prodigy and for about a decade (1999-2008), he was the best golfer ever. Here's my review of his upbringing: "The Tiger Mother's Son."
https://www.takimag.com/article/the_tiger_mothers_son_steve_sailer/
On the other hand, Korean-American golfer Anthony Kim was tiger-mothered into being #6 on the money list at age 22, in 2008, but shortly thereafter melted down and only recently made his first tournament appearance in a decade.
When other Korean parents ask Kim’s parents how to raise a golf star, they now reply, “Don’t try.”
https://www.takimag.com/article/white_men_cant_reach_steve_sailer/2/
Considering that the Polgars didn't have any sons, their tiger-parenting Judit into world top ten seems roughly as impressive as if they had tiger-parented one of 3 sons into being a world champ.
Surely something more than moderate intelligence and hard-work (perhaps a savant ability of some sort) is a requisite to chess proficiency. Many masters can calculate 20+ moves ahead in a position. The capacity to play blindfolded also isn’t uncommon. The common traits of grandmasters seem to be a gargantuan memory + visualization, and additionally many show immense talent at their introduction to the game (see the early games of Morphy, for example). Grandmasters possess abilities that don’t seem to be learnable even with industry and a decent (or high) IQ.
Yes, exactly. Morphy was said to have memorized the entire civil code of Louisiana, to choose one example of many. I doubt that the full array of Kasparov's mental abilities is captured by his IQ score. Fischer's IQ was supposedly 187, though that sounds suspect.
Great point. Also (if I remember correctly) the 187 figure comes from obsolete Stanford-Binet norms; his IQ converted into today’s norms would be about 155-160 on the WAIS, which is still extremely impressive.
This was all about Laszlo Polgar, and not about his daughters.
I'd think it to be clear as day.
Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa (born 2005) is an Indian chess grandmaster ranked no 13 in the World. Prag and his sister Vaishali (born 2001) are the first brother-sister duo to both earn the GM title. They are also the first brother-sister duo to qualify for the Candidates.
Prag just beat Magnus the GOAT in a an official OTB game in Norway in classical time format.
Regarding the Polgars it's interesting that their rankings got better in reverse birth order contradicting the presumed birth order advantage Scott Alexander mentioned a few times. Probably their parents got better at chess training their daughters but if they should have had more of them they would have run out of resources to educate them.
Birth order effects are relatively weak, so it is not super surprising that a given family can produce the opposite order. (I am a first born though.)
You can also just drug them with HGH and obligatory brain stimulating activities and get whole another level of genius compared to the ones studied.
Let us measure László Polgár's success by the implacable yardstick of reproductive fitness. How many grandchildren did he have?
Six, it turns out, because each daughter had two children -- better than sterile, but still a collapse to less than the replacement rate.
What does it profit a man to raise hypercompetent children if those children themselves do not reproduce?
Instead of posterity, he produces only history.
This is the fate of western man writ small: he fails to see the forest for the trees.
Beyond everything else that has gone right in his life, Mr. Polgar now has six grandchildren? He must be a man well-satisfied with his life well-lived.
Many great men contributed more to society than a million fathers did.
For the geniuses, innovating for the group is better than having children.
"For the geniuses, innovating for the group is better than having children."
But we are talking about chess here, a useless game that does nothing for mankind.
That is a good point that we should consider inclusive reproductive fitness. Nikola Tesla for example clearly brought more life into the world through science than he ever could have done as a parent.
But what if Tesla had dedicated himself to chess instead?
Of course, this is unanswerable. Perhaps chessmaster Tesla would have influenced people in subtle ways that exceeded even his scientific contributions.
However, I think we are all glad Tesla was not raised to play chess for four hours every day, even though he might have been bigger than Kasparov.
"Perhaps chessmaster Tesla would have influenced people in subtle ways that exceeded even his scientific contributions."
I can not conceive how. Chess talent has no benefit for humanity.
This is very interesting. I wonder if it's too late with my daughter, though mine and my wife's schedule aren't predisposed to such intensive learning.