Author: Andre Godat
Date: 11:26:19 01/09/02
Go up one level in this thread
Marilyn Vos Savant is very intelligent, but it's a shame that she has concentrated her alleged genius on jacking up her scores on IQ tests, writing a trivia column, and writing uninspiring self-help books. In other words, she hasn't really done much of anything with her gift. She could chop her IQ in half and write most of that stuff. By comparison, let's take Kasparov. Suppose his IQ is 150. That's a whopping 80 points below hers. That would make him, compared to her, what an idiot (IQ 20) is to the average person (IQ 100). Without devoting all of his time to chess, he has still managed to become, arguably, the greatest chess player of all time. So who's the real genius here? Someone who excels at writing trivia and doesn't bother to learn enough about mathematics (where she obviously has potential) to become a real mathematician? Or is it someone who does something--i.e. play chess at a profoundly high level--that is, at the very least, considerably harder than writing trivia? A reasonable counter-argument is that chess itself is trivial and geniuses should be curing cancer or putting men on the moon, instead of playing a board game that is, at least to outsiders, purely an end in itself. But Isaac Newton didn't waste his genius trying to see how high he could score on IQ tests. Einstein didn't have a write-in column barely above the intellectual level of "Dear Abby." And whatever time-wasting they did is immaterial, considering what they did do with their intelligence. I don't think IQ tests are meaningless. A person who scores extremely high on such a test is probably capable of great things. Unquestionably, someone who scores extremely low is incapable of playing good chess or even writing lame self-help books. What Marilyn has demonstrated is that the most significant skill detected by IQ tests is the ability to score high on IQ tests.
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.