Like I said, I don't think it's productive to argue about this, I just think it's a trap to think of chess performance as any kind of leading indicator of gener

Like I said, I don't think it's productive to argue about this, I just think it's a trap to think of chess performance as any kind of leading indicator of general intellectual aptitude. The skills are simply not transferrable -- the things that make you good at chess don't make you good at thinking generically. From the man himself: "I’m not saying that I am totally stupid. But my success mainly has to do with the fact that I had the opportunity to learn more, more quickly. It has become easier to get hold of information. The players from the Soviet Union used to be at a huge advantage; in Moscow they had access to vast archives, with countless games carefully recorded on index cards. Nowadays anyone can buy this data on DVD for 150 euros; one disk holds 4.5 million games. There are also more books than there used to be. And then of course I started working with a computer earlier than Vladimir Kramnik or Viswanathan Anand." Another quote from that same interview: "Carlsen: I’m not a genius." Some sources: https://www.chess.com/news/view/-misconceptions-about-chess-players https://www.wsj.com/articles/does-chess-make-you-smarter-1479403551 https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/05/31/do-chess-players-have-higher-iqs-11366 https://en.chessbase.com/post/magnus-carlsen-on-his-che-career https://www.chess.com/blog/RoaringPawn/magnus-carlsen-a-genius-or-automaton https://gardinerchess.com.au/fm-stojic-is-magnus-carlsen-a-genius/