[ExI] Life @ Playstation

[spike]

>...On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg
Subject: Re: [ExI] Life @ Playstation

On 04/11/2012 22:45, BillK wrote:
>> From the point of view of having a successful career I think that being
*too* clever can often be a disadvantage.

>...An interesting data point is the the anticorrelation with IQ and top
level chess ability. ...
http://v-scheiner.brunel.ac.uk/bitstream/2438/642/1/Does%20Chess%20Need%20In
telligence-revision-finalINT.pdf
Intelligence is a very useful tool for living a good life, but it is not a
sufficient tool.--
Anders Sandberg,


Thanks Anders, cool.  Please an anecdote:  in Palo Alto there is a chess
club that is invitation only, with nearly all the members being expert and
up.  I had a colleague who was a master, invited me even with my paltry A
rating.  So we played some fivers and such with the guys, about thirty,
among which was our own Lee Corbin, several years before ExI had been
formed.  The meeting started around 7pm, and I had a good time, won a few.
As 10pm approached, I started getting packed up to go home, and I noticed no
one else was even drifting toward the door.  This was a weeknight, not
Friday, but middle of the week.

Some yahoo gets up and says OK we are going to have this tournament, five
round robin, 25 minutes per player for the game, rounds start on the hour at
10pm.  I asked the one who invited me if these guys really intended to start
a chess tournament at 10pm on a Wednesday night and play until nearly 3am.
He assured me that it was standard operating procedure there, and that they
did this at least once a month, sometimes mid-month.  I asked if these folks
had jobs, and he pointed out that plenty of them did not.  This was in the
late 80s, when anyone who could do anything could get a job.  But here was
the SF Bay Area hard core chess players.

Another chess story: Bobby Fischer has been called the greatest chess player
of all time.  This is debatable, but no one would argue that he was by a
huge margin the best chess player of his time.  He dominated everything,
winning every tournament.   His over-the-board inventions astonish us to
this day with their creative brilliance.  Plenty of non-chess people who met
Fischer thought he was retarded, or at least seriously mentally deficient in
so many critical ways.  In retrospect, descriptions of his behavior would be
interpreted as what we would today call Aspergers Syndrome.  Fischer loved
chess so much and was rejected everywhere he went, except of course the
powerful Manhattan Chess Club, where he was treated as the god he was.  So
he hung out there most of his waking hours, dropped out of high school and
went on to become world champion, singlehandedly taking on the Russian chess
mafia and winning.

Anders' contention shows me evidence of the contention that there are many
different types of intelligence, and we are still developing ways to measure
them.

spike