6 ms·

yeah, not to belabor it, but if you can do something like be a champion in go or chess, chances are you have the mental skillset to do something exponentially m

yeah, not to belabor it, but if you can do something like be a champion in go or chess, chances are you have the mental skillset to do something exponentially more lucrative.

_yosefk 11y ago
I dunno, Bobby Fischer was kinda deranged, for instance, and that often hurts outcomes in otherwise "lucrative" positions. Incidentally, he is credited with raising chess player compensation through his demands. Generally I'd guess you're right though.
- iheartmemcache 11y ago
  Maybe not a leadership position but I've worked on the engineering side of quant work and am familiar enough with fairly advanced Go / Chess players (e.g. national youth champions for age brackets for the US) to know that most of them could make enough to retire off one years salary during the boom years of algorithmic trading (~2003-2007ish). I'm not sure how you define "deranged" (AFAIK, that's not a medically defined term within the DSM-IV) but most of those brilliant people end up being a little 'off'. My father was an academic, one of the people he went to graduate school with was working in Boston while I was a child. He was absolutely groundbreaking work but he's so difficult to collaborate with (think: the mannerisms of Richard Stallman) that he's been floating around universities until his welcome is worn out. He can figure out remarkable things in higher level computational chemistry, but he can't really figure out humans. Had he decided instead during the 80s to work at Renaissance instead of pursuing academic research, he almost certainly would be worth in the low hundreds of millions.
- V-2 11y ago
  Well, mental issues did break his chess career just the same.
b3n 11y ago
With the number of tournaments he has won (many of which have a winner's purse of <$100 000) I suspect he is already a millionaire.
- gohrt 11y ago
  Those are the big tournaments -- do the little tournaments stack up, or is it a year of practice leading up to an annual big win?
danneu 11y ago
Though being able to compel yourself to do great things seems like a completely different skill set from being able to do great things on someone else's dime or on a team. For example, my brilliant programmer friend that can't hold a job. Or the artist that can only paint their own inspirations. Or the savant that doesn't get along with anybody.
- tenementfunster 11y ago
  He's probably a huge asshole?
CydeWeys 11y ago
This is not true. Scientific studies have shown that skills in abstract strategy games are so specific to the game that they do not transfer to other tasks. The urban legend about Chess grandmasters all being geniuses is false, in other words. They're actually worse at most jobs than people who've been doing those jobs for awhile, because they lack the experience, and they aren't more predisposed to having a genius intellect that would let them overcome that. A Chess or Go champion is probably doing the single-most lucrative activity that they are capable of.
- rifung 11y ago
  I'm not sure you're disagreeing with the person you're responding to. Just because the skills involved are very specific doesn't imply that the people with those skills only are capable of obtaining said skill. What the person you're responding to means is that if they have the mental capacity (and also discipline) to play the game at such a high level, they could probably also excel in other professions if their goal was to make money instead of doing something they loved. Of course we can debate whether they would achieve such success if they were doing something they didn't enjoy as much, but I think most people would argue that most chess or go champions could make more money or in other words do more "lucrative" activities if they chose to do them instead of dedicated all their time to the game.
  - CydeWeys 11y ago
    You are relying too much on the concept of a generalized mental capacity, which many researchers (maybe even most) would say does not exist. You seem to be assuming that grandmasters are just amazingly smart and they happen to apply those smarts to one particular skill, but what's closer to the truth is that they happen to be particularly amazing at that one skill, in a way that doesn't really correlate strongly with having amazingly high skill in other areas.
    - marvy 11y ago
      But what about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)?

yeah, not to belabor it, but if you can do something like be a champion in go or chess, chances are you have the mental skillset to do something exponentially more lucrative.

_yosefk 11y ago

I dunno, Bobby Fischer was kinda deranged, for instance, and that often hurts outcomes in otherwise "lucrative" positions. Incidentally, he is credited with raising chess player compensation through his demands. Generally I'd guess you're right though.

iheartmemcache 11y ago
Maybe not a leadership position but I've worked on the engineering side of quant work and am familiar enough with fairly advanced Go / Chess players (e.g. national youth champions for age brackets for the US) to know that most of them could make enough to retire off one years salary during the boom years of algorithmic trading (~2003-2007ish). I'm not sure how you define "deranged" (AFAIK, that's not a medically defined term within the DSM-IV) but most of those brilliant people end up being a little 'off'. My father was an academic, one of the people he went to graduate school with was working in Boston while I was a child. He was absolutely groundbreaking work but he's so difficult to collaborate with (think: the mannerisms of Richard Stallman) that he's been floating around universities until his welcome is worn out. He can figure out remarkable things in higher level computational chemistry, but he can't really figure out humans. Had he decided instead during the 80s to work at Renaissance instead of pursuing academic research, he almost certainly would be worth in the low hundreds of millions.
V-2 11y ago
Well, mental issues did break his chess career just the same.

b3n 11y ago

With the number of tournaments he has won (many of which have a winner's purse of <$100 000) I suspect he is already a millionaire.

gohrt 11y ago
Those are the big tournaments -- do the little tournaments stack up, or is it a year of practice leading up to an annual big win?

danneu 11y ago

Though being able to compel yourself to do great things seems like a completely different skill set from being able to do great things on someone else's dime or on a team. For example, my brilliant programmer friend that can't hold a job. Or the artist that can only paint their own inspirations. Or the savant that doesn't get along with anybody.

tenementfunster 11y ago
He's probably a huge asshole?

CydeWeys 11y ago

This is not true. Scientific studies have shown that skills in abstract strategy games are so specific to the game that they do not transfer to other tasks. The urban legend about Chess grandmasters all being geniuses is false, in other words. They're actually worse at most jobs than people who've been doing those jobs for awhile, because they lack the experience, and they aren't more predisposed to having a genius intellect that would let them overcome that. A Chess or Go champion is probably doing the single-most lucrative activity that they are capable of.

rifung 11y ago
I'm not sure you're disagreeing with the person you're responding to. Just because the skills involved are very specific doesn't imply that the people with those skills only are capable of obtaining said skill. What the person you're responding to means is that if they have the mental capacity (and also discipline) to play the game at such a high level, they could probably also excel in other professions if their goal was to make money instead of doing something they loved. Of course we can debate whether they would achieve such success if they were doing something they didn't enjoy as much, but I think most people would argue that most chess or go champions could make more money or in other words do more "lucrative" activities if they chose to do them instead of dedicated all their time to the game.
- CydeWeys 11y ago
  You are relying too much on the concept of a generalized mental capacity, which many researchers (maybe even most) would say does not exist. You seem to be assuming that grandmasters are just amazingly smart and they happen to apply those smarts to one particular skill, but what's closer to the truth is that they happen to be particularly amazing at that one skill, in a way that doesn't really correlate strongly with having amazingly high skill in other areas.
  - marvy 11y ago
    But what about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)?