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Comment by xanderlewis | Hacker News Reader

> The superiority of chess masters comes not from having acquired clever, sophisticated, general problem-solving strategies but rather from having stored innumerable configurations and the best moves associated with each in long-term memory.

I guess that's why we don't seem to hire chess players as generals or... really, anything else. Being good at chess — whilst it clearly necessitates a certain level of intelligence — is basically just being good at chess. The cultural image of the great chess player being a deep thinker doesn't seem to line up with the evidence. I find it particularly interesting that, with very rare exception, none of the world's best chess players seem to go on to contribute anything intellectual other than their chess games.

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And I suppose this is supported by current evidence too, where grandmasters have been beaten by computers, which hold more long-term memory, have memorized more moves, and can enumerate the state tree more deeply. Rote state space exploration, nothing intellectual.

It is actually pretty remarkable, you’d think given the automatic reputation advantage that a chess grandmaster gets as a serious deep thinker, at least one would have managed to work that into a political career.

Politics is all about soft skills; being really good at anything hard pretty much makes you unemployable there, because you'll come across as a weird nerd.

This is the D&D / video game fallacy — that being really good at hard things means you had forgo points in other skills. It should be encouraging and liberating that this isn't true and you can be smart (in multiple fields), athletic, artistic, charismatic, a social butterfly, and everything in between.

Definitely true, but sinking large amounts of time into learning very technical things in huge detail can often involve long periods in isolation during which one’s social skills are likely to atrophy.

Also, for some, being a ‘social butterfly’ is perfectly possible (with some effort) but is boring. This tends to be true the more into ‘hard things’ you are. Chatting to people about banality isn’t hard, so it isn’t interesting.

It is fundamentally true, though, because you "level up" those skills through concentrated effort, which requires focus and time, both of which are finite resources. It may feel you can improve on all without sacrificing something, but that just means you're operating far from Pareto frontier - i.e. you're not particularly good at anything.

> It is fundamentally true, though, because you "level up" those skills through concentrated effort, which requires focus and time, both of which are finite resources.

I dunno. My experience is that it's true for some fields, such as videogames/sports.

What I've found is that people who have true expertise in a field (excluding videogames/sports) are generally competent in a number of other fields. The characteristics required to become an expert oil painter or an expert in applied mathematics (for example) are focus, concentration and the ability to recognise new patterns as patterns, and then apply them!

IOW, someone who is an actual master in a certain field should easily become at least competent in other things that they try.

Kasparov might have had a chance — if Russia wasn’t the way it is.

True! He’s like the exception that makes the rule, and through coincidence, ended up not even really an exception.

Gary Kasparov was actually involved in Russian politics, maybe he would have had some small chance of a career if Putin hadn't quickly quashed him.

Kasparov seems to be a respected public intellectual or at least it’s debatable which is more than you can say for most others (though maybe that’s the exception that proves the rule).

I think he’s a thoughtful and wise man anyway; it doesn’t seem to have much connection to chess.

Is that because he is actually a genius, or is it because he has a platform to talk from, and he talks from it?

Because I find that there's a very wide range among 'well-regarded (by some) public intellectuals.' Some of them say things worth thinking about. Many others, not so much, the only noteworthy thing about them is that they stand on a soapbox.

To be clear, this is not just chess. To quote the paper:

"[these] results have been replicated in a variety of educationally relevant fields, including mathematics (Sweller & Cooper, 1985)."

Now, I would agree that I wouldn't want to hire a mathematician as a general (on the basis of their being a mathematician), for the same reason that you wouldn't want to hire a chess player as a general (on the basis of their being a chess player).

I just want to emphasize that this applies to math too.

I’m pretty sure mathematics is slightly more general of a subject than chess…

It is hard, though not impossible to generalize expertise.

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