7 ms·

Why are the Russians so good at chess?

53 points by edw519 17y ago

chaosmachine 17y ago
It's not a mystery. Why is country X good at Y? Because Y is popular and has better support/infrastructure there.
- WilliamLP 17y ago
  Sometimes it's largely statistics and genetics, and this is so unambiguously well supported that the only reason to disbelieve it is a desire to maintain a certain fantasy about human beings that isn't true but that nonetheless may be valuable or good for social function. (E.g. Kenya / Distance Running, Jamaica / Sprinting.) Of course then this effect becomes amplified by those places getting a better support and infrastructure.
  - gizmo 17y ago
    Physical differences are undeniable, but chess is not a physical sport. There's a nice documentary "My Brilliant Brain" that shows how people can get extraordinarily skilled by (surprise surprise) making an extraordinary effort). In the documentary a guy decides he wants his daughter to become a chess grandmaster, and trains her from a very young age (4 years) for 6 hours a day. The combination of intelligence, aptitude and effort made her one of the first female grandmasters in chess. If _that_ is the result of dedication, the statistics and genetic factors (if they even exist) must pale in comparison.
    - xiaoma 17y ago
      The brain is still a physical object, and its development is a mix of genetics and upbringing, just as height and musculature are. The difference is that chess playing abilities isn't so readily visible as bulging muscles are. There are some people who have a substantial advantage when they start their training and others who could never be grandmasters with any amount of training. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3346580/What-makes-us-human.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3346580/What-makes-us-... Blind ideology and little else could lead one to believe that genetic factors don't even exist.
      - vlad 17y ago
        There are some people who have a substantial advantage when they start their training and others who could never be grandmasters with any amount of training. Genetic differences are often overstated by comparing one extreme to another. Instead, consider the personal limits of any given individual to be the best in strength/physique contests, chess competitions, programming contests, time to run a mile, or playing in the NFL. The brain is still a physical object, and its development is a mix of genetics and upbringing, just as height and musculature are. The difference is that chess playing abilities isn't so readily visible as bulging muscles are. Such limits are unknown until the given person puts many, many years of work into a particular goal (often at least five years.) That's because limits are not defined by where one starts, but where one plateaus for multiple years following some kind of improvement over the prior five, ten, fifteen years. Genetics may help push somebody over a plateau they would otherwise have hit sooner (just as having a good coach, training regimen, knowing one's own body, etc, will help as well). But discovering that one is genetically superior (which, for somebody with a given gift, could simply mean that he or she is able to accomplish something one second faster than somebody else with the same training experience in the entire lives--something hard to duplicate) doesn't displace the years of work it took to reach a point where genetics start to be the limiting factor. For every person a journalist might say has a gift, there are hundreds of other people with the same level of achievement nobody writes about. There are about 2,000 active NFL players. There are many grandmasters. There are many active runners, swimmers, etc who are comparable to the fastest people of 50 years ago, but are slower than the current world record holders. All of these people have to train hard to get to where they are. For example: it's possible that somebody on Hacker News has the kind of muscle fibers that speed runners dream of. However, that person would never know they are athletically gifted because they never got to the point where this ability mattered; e.g., their cardiovascular system runs out of gas quickly and they never bothered to keep trying, to see how good they could actually be. Recap: do genetics matter at differentiating the best from the best? Yes. Are people who are not the best in a particular arena missing those genes they need to be Gary Kasparov, Randy Moss, Wayne Gretzky? Very unlikely. It's more likely they are missing the 5, 10, 15 years of exerted effort at that particular mission. The best in the world are better than those who have tried to do the same professionally for many years. However, there are hundreds of millions of people out there who could be close to the best, who have not even tried (often, for the sake of a career, family, education.) Genetics are really one of the least important differentiators when comparing a professional (anything) to somebody who is doing something else. Therefore, the genetic argument is very, very weak.
    - catzaa 17y ago
      > There's a nice documentary "My Brilliant Brain" that shows how people can get extraordinarily skilled by (surprise surprise) making an extraordinary effort). There is also something called the g-factor that is a measure of intelligence. A significant amount of research shows that the basis for the g-factor is innate (i.e. due to genetics). It also turns out that this has to do with the physiology of the brain. A good starting point for papers on this subject is Haier et al. You can find some of his papers at : http://www.pediatrics.uci.edu/faculty/neurology/haier/haier.html http://www.pediatrics.uci.edu/faculty/neurology/haier/haier.... http://web.mac.com/rjhaier/iWeb/Haier/Welcome.html http://web.mac.com/rjhaier/iWeb/Haier/Welcome.html It is somewhat shocking that intelligence may be an innate factor. This is a fairly controversial topic (even without bringing gender or race into the conversation). But have you thought about the repercussions if intelligence is proven to be innate? A good example would be to classify people with a low intelligence as disabled (with the employment equity and disability aid that comes along with it).
      - randallsquared 17y ago
        It is somewhat shocking that intelligence may be an innate factor. It's only become shocking to people in our culture in the last few decades, since it undermines the Truth that everyone is essentially of equivalent ability, and trying hard is the only reason some are better at some things than others.
  - idlewords 17y ago
    Soviet chess grandmasters came from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds. There's no genetic argument to make.
    - WilliamLP 17y ago
      I'm not making an argument for chess. I'm making an argument for the possible existence of a single counterexample to the "obvious" claim that if a group of people are good at X, regardless of the nature of X, then it is necessarily only due to cultural factors.
  - raganwald 17y ago
    William, I am not disagreeing that genetics may play a dominant role, but I do think it is a very weak argument to compare chess playing aptitude to running. From what I have read, we know a great deal about what physical traits (fast twitch muscles, bone length ratios, and so forth) make someone a fast runner. We know a fair bit about the role genes play in developing these traits. With chess-playing aptitude we have indirect evidence of genetics gathered statistically. Can we measure a trait like seratonin to dopamine ratios? Can we measure a physical trait like the size of the brain or the pattern of the folds of the neocortex and statistically associate it with chess aptitude? Not to my knowledge. So while there may be a statistical and indirect argument to make about chess aptitude and genetics, I think it should be made as such rather than making an argument comparing chess aptitude to something like running where (at this time) we know a lot more about the direct traits involved.
    - WilliamLP 17y ago
      Yes, I agree with you. I was reacting to the common attitude illustrated by the parent post that goes "Why does any group of people excel at something? It's necessarily because of culture and social support and you're stupid for considering anything else." Postulating variations in the human brain is socially off the table, and perhaps this is the best way for it to be. The evidence people are willing accept as absolute proof that human brains are basically equal is weaker by several orders of magnitude than that which would convince them that there is any statistical difference in the brains of any populations. One indication of this is that people who think that there is no significant statical pattern in variations of human brains never take that thought further toward interesting scientific questions. (For example, why have all groups of humans had the exact same evolutionary pressures on all kinds of intelligence, or why is intelligence seemingly unable to evolve in different directions, given that however you measure it it seems highly, highly heritable as shown by twin studies and other evidence?) So basically, I'm just a mood to explore really politically incorrect and dangerous ideas, many of which may also be wrong. However, people who explore these ideas are not stupid, and reactions like "duh, it's the society" aren't really warranted. It may be socially irresponsible to think about ideas like this, and I'm agnostic about whether that's so. It quite possibly could be indicative of a very poor political sensibility too (see James Watson, Larry Summers.)
  - joe_the_user 17y ago
    Actually, there are cultures which foster intense distance running so I think even the genetics/distance running argument isn't a "slam dunk" - ie, to just act like the point is proven is a cheap, unsupported argument.
    - philwelch 17y ago
      Aha, but what if those cultures persist over countless generations? The degree to which one fits into one's culture partially determines one's reproductive success. Wouldn't this weed out the genetically poor distance runners while advantaging the genetically good distance runners?
- pixcavator 17y ago
  My guess is that soccer received more support than chess in the Soviet Union, but the results weren't impressive at all.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - mechanical_fish 17y ago
    Hypothesis: Your country's likelihood of fielding a world-class soccer team is roughly proportional to the number of person-days of access that the average kid has to an unfrozen soccer field. Isn't this like asking why US colleges north of, say, Virginia have so much trouble recruiting top-class college baseball players, such that the College World Series always seems to be "some team from Florida vs some team from Arizona"? Aspiring players of professional baseball prefer to play for teams whose home field thaws out before April. Of course, the opposite is also true. Great hockey players are more likely to be hail from Russia, Canada, New York, or Massachusetts than from Brazil, Italy, London, or California.
  - mahmud 17y ago
    Dynamo Kiev was pretty much the national team of the USSR :-)
  - listic 17y ago
    Honestly, I don't understand a point of professional team sports at all. If every team of every country can in principle hire every player from every country, constrained mainly by its budget and negotiating abilities - it becomes mainly a battle of budget, and politics also.
jcapote 17y ago
Probably the same reason they are amazing programmers
- AlexTheFounder 17y ago
  And scientists. The reason I think is in the traditionally more system-oriented education.
  - dzlobin 17y ago
    And a very advanced education system where calculus and physics are taught in 5th and 6th grade
    - osipov 17y ago
      BS. i took 5th, 6th grade in Soviet Union. we had no calculus and purely conceptual, primarily arithmetic oriented physics.
      - deleted 17y ago
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      - borism 17y ago
        dunno about 5th and 6th grades, but yes, physics and calculus are definitely introduced in middle school (junior high for our american friends).
        osipov 17y ago
        physics in 5th grade,an equivalent of American precalculus in 9th grade and calculus in 10th grade
    - carbon8 17y ago
      Not according to this: http://www.emis.de/projects/Ref/doc_ems_pdf/EMS_NATIONAL_PRESENTATIONS/EMS_RUSSIA.pdf http://www.emis.de/projects/Ref/doc_ems_pdf/EMS_NATIONAL_PRE... "Traditionally, in grades 7–9 mathematics comprises 2 school subjects, geometry and algebra that are taught in parallel (e.g., 2 hours per week for geometry, and 3 hours for algebra). In the senior school [16-17 years old], also two subjects are taught, geometry and algebra and elements of calculus. In grades 5 and 6 (and in primary school) we have a united course of mathematics." For comparison, the US high school math curriculum (for students 14-18 years old) is generally algebra, geometry, precalculus/trigonometry and calculus, although students can still graduate with just algebra and geometry. That said, I don't doubt that there is a cultural and educational emphasis on math in Russia.
amichail 17y ago
If someone is smart enough to play chess at the highest levels, wouldn't he/she be better off as a mathematician?
- jefffoster 17y ago
  Is there any evidence that there is a strong correlation between playing chess at a high level and being a great mathematician?
  - pixcavator 17y ago
    In my experience mathematicians become quite good at chess - if they take it seriously. That's why I gave up playing long time ago.
    - mquander 17y ago
      In my experience, anyone of average intelligence becomes quite good at chess, if they take it seriously.
  - varjag 17y ago
    If you are a great chess player you wouldn't have time to become a decent mathematician.
- tomjen2 17y ago
  Not really, a mathematician would likely make less money than a toplevel chess player.
  - pg 17y ago
    But the falloff is sharp. A friend of mine was once ranked 44th in the world, and he switched to programming because he couldn't make a living playing chess.
  - mquander 17y ago
    Fat chance. There's only perhaps a few dozen people in the world who can actually even make a living playing chess (as opposed to teaching it on the side.) It's notoriously difficult. Many American chess players switch to poker or a different profession.
ig1 17y ago
It's a nice story but it's wrong, Russia has had a strong reputation in Chess since the 1700s several hundred years before Krylenko's chess schools. Merim Bilalić's team did an extensive study that was published by the Royal Society to find out why there are so few strong female chess players. Their study concluded it was purely statistics, less female players overall meant that there were less female outliers (i.e great players). I imagine something similar is at play here.
- pfedor 17y ago
  I used to play chess a little as a kid and what I know is in more agreement with the article than with what you say. Prior to the Soviet chess explosion there used to be great Russian players (Chigorin, Petrov) but also many great players from other countries (Philidor, Anderssen, Morphy, Zukertort.) If you look at the official list of world champions, there was only one Russian champion (Alekhine) before 1948 and only one non-Soviet champion between 1948 and the collapse of the Soviet Union (Bobby Fischer, and I read he learned Russian to have access to first-class chess literature.) In the SU the chess players enjoyed privileges unavailable to the general population, e.g., they could travel abroad (at least as long as they were winning, I read that Taimanov had his passport confiscated after losing to Fischer in the Candidates Match.) They also were favored at the higher education institutions, i.e., as a successful chess player you didn't have to study much to pass and get a degree. As an aside, I heard from a guy who knew David Bronstein personally that Bronstein could have easily won the World Championship from Botvinnik in 1951, but it was made clear to him that it was considered undesirable for a Jewish player to beat Botvinnik. Bronstein according to my friend was a broken man after that, became excessively extravagant and never played with the same strength again.
  - cema 17y ago
    You say: "it was considered undesirable for a Jewish player to beat Botvinnik". What, Botvinnik was not Jewish? That's news to me. I am sure there may have been some pressure, perhaps a lot of pressure, but Jewishness is unlikely to have played a role.
    - 17y ago
wsprague 17y ago
Let me echo what some people are saying .... training and education. Duh.
known 17y ago
"You are a product of your environment." --Clement Stone
- teeja 17y ago
  Exactly. As the movie "Looking for Bobby Fischer" made clear, we in the US live in a non-chess culture. Like mathematicians, chess players and honor-roll students in high-school are ignored while jocks get lots of attention. Belonging to a subculture can be empowering for people who aren't world-class out of the gate like Bobby, but that's only available for a very small minority in cities. Elsewhere, there's little heavy competition or opportunity to evolve. The US gets it's ass handed to it in international math competitions because math, as with most intellectual endeavors in the US, gets no respect. The news proves everyday that 2/3's of us are clueless about most things that developed in the 20th century.
  - known 17y ago
    I think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs also plays a good role in producing good chess players.
akrymski 17y ago
Chess has always been very popular in Russia, I struggle to think of anybody I met there who doesn't know how to play. Having said that, mathematics is also taught a lot more than in Europe or USA. When I moved from a Russian school to a European one, math teachers would give me homework that was 3 grades ahead of me. And even then it was English that caused issues more than anything =)
varjag 17y ago
The article is correct. It's the same attitude that with any form of competition that was deemed a matter of national prestige in USSR: popularized by state throughout all outlets, industrialized through a ranks of special schools and training facilities, and usually devoid of fun that was initially behind the whole thing. You'd have same approach with sports, ballet, or even high-school level contests in natural science. If there'd existed a world-renowned competition in crosswords, rest assured USSR would have had a nation-wide network of crosswording schools that would've enlisted talented kids at age of 5, three state-approved categories of crossword-manship (and one for juniors) and crossword solving discretely featured in every third motion picture. But I digress. If you ever got to being a candidate for, say, a national senior-school physics competition, you'd be transferred to region's best teachers. They would train you like a circus dog, showing you the tricks and running you through hundreds of assignments encountered in previous years, with no focus on the essence of physics. Granted you'd know a lot about pulleys and levers and displacement, but it wouldn't make you any good physicist.
- catzaa 17y ago
  > If you ever got to being a candidate for, say, a national senior-school physics competition, you'd be transferred to region's best teachers. This is not a bad thing. It is completely the opposite to some Western ideals to ensure that everyone gets the same (bad) education. I think that the motto for a lot of guys on the left is that if everyone is kept behind no-one loses. What is incredibly interesting to note is that Russia and several eastern bloc countries perform better than the USA in math (school age – according to OECD TIMMS test). Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathematics_and_Science_Study http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathema... This is quite shocking since the USA spends a lot more on education and is a few times richer. > Granted you'd know a lot about pulleys and levers and displacement, but it wouldn't make you any good physicist. In all fairness, the USSR did produce quite a few excellent physicists. Per capita it probably outranks the USA for Nobel Prize winners in Physics.
  - varjag 17y ago
    > It is completely the opposite to some Western ideals to ensure that everyone gets the same (bad) education. School education is not a good predictor of future performance. I would venture to say that above some (fairly modest) threshold of quality, the difference in schooling is irrelevant. > What is incredibly interesting to note is that Russia and several eastern bloc countries perform better than the USA in math (school age – according to OECD TIMMS test). This is not what made the great Russian mathematicians though. You don't get feynmanns and turings by locking up kids to solve monotonous puzzles. > In all fairness, the USSR did produce quite a few excellent physicists. Per capita it probably outranks the USA for Nobel Prize winners in Physics. Of course it doesn't. Even the UK is way ahead of USSR on that metric. There were plenty of great Soviet physicists and champions in other sciences, but bear in mind that at least half of them were product of pre-Soviet, imperial school system.
yannis 17y ago
Exceptional Ability = Practice + Availability of Time for Practice + Motivation
newsdog 17y ago
I haven't read the article yet, so I'll guess at it's contents then check it to see how well I did. TRAGAC because they teach every kid the country chess in school - identify the gifted - send them to chess camp - identify the more gifted - send them to chess school - keep filtering - concentrate the best of the best into more and more intense training - Botvinnik ran a chess school at the very top that trained both Kasparov, Karpov and Krammnik. Make sure the talented get their 10,000 hours in with no distractions, like having to have a job. Easy, peasy.
- newsdog 17y ago
  O,k I read it. It DID have some mention of the state support system, but said it was for more ideological reasons. Ayn Rand wrote an essay on WTRAGAC and she pointed out chess was a very CAPITALISTIC game. Why? In chess, you own all your own pieces. Just about the only private property in the USSR. No Central Committee or Five Year Plan can tell you how to place your rook. At no time will your rook ever be nationalized by the state just when you need it the most. Second, only you get to push your pieces. It is NOT collectivized. Third, you are rewarded for being strong in a non socialist manner. You and the other guy start out with the same number of pieces, soon the stronger player has more. They don't NEED more, being stronger, but, as in life in the West, the rich get richer! Rand argued that the TRAGAC because they used it to escape an unnatural Socialist system.
Anaid9 17y ago
Because chess is so much more popular there. Here the emphasis is on money-making activities, such as sports- that have rules that can be easily understood by the large masses, and that are easier to market. In addition,there is much more support for chess there, and chess is highly admired; here there are a lot of mixed opinions and myths about chess - for example, that in order to be a good chess player you have to be intelligent, chess is for nerds, etc. Now that chess is finally entering the US and increasing in popularity, hopefully it will be much better understood and appreciated in the future, but it may take a long time before it becomes really popular here.

53 points by edw519 17y ago

chaosmachine 17y ago

It's not a mystery. Why is country X good at Y? Because Y is popular and has better support/infrastructure there.

WilliamLP 17y ago
Sometimes it's largely statistics and genetics, and this is so unambiguously well supported that the only reason to disbelieve it is a desire to maintain a certain fantasy about human beings that isn't true but that nonetheless may be valuable or good for social function. (E.g. Kenya / Distance Running, Jamaica / Sprinting.) Of course then this effect becomes amplified by those places getting a better support and infrastructure.
- gizmo 17y ago
  Physical differences are undeniable, but chess is not a physical sport. There's a nice documentary "My Brilliant Brain" that shows how people can get extraordinarily skilled by (surprise surprise) making an extraordinary effort). In the documentary a guy decides he wants his daughter to become a chess grandmaster, and trains her from a very young age (4 years) for 6 hours a day. The combination of intelligence, aptitude and effort made her one of the first female grandmasters in chess. If _that_ is the result of dedication, the statistics and genetic factors (if they even exist) must pale in comparison.
  - xiaoma 17y ago
    The brain is still a physical object, and its development is a mix of genetics and upbringing, just as height and musculature are. The difference is that chess playing abilities isn't so readily visible as bulging muscles are. There are some people who have a substantial advantage when they start their training and others who could never be grandmasters with any amount of training. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3346580/What-makes-us-human.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3346580/What-makes-us-... Blind ideology and little else could lead one to believe that genetic factors don't even exist.
    - vlad 17y ago
      There are some people who have a substantial advantage when they start their training and others who could never be grandmasters with any amount of training. Genetic differences are often overstated by comparing one extreme to another. Instead, consider the personal limits of any given individual to be the best in strength/physique contests, chess competitions, programming contests, time to run a mile, or playing in the NFL. The brain is still a physical object, and its development is a mix of genetics and upbringing, just as height and musculature are. The difference is that chess playing abilities isn't so readily visible as bulging muscles are. Such limits are unknown until the given person puts many, many years of work into a particular goal (often at least five years.) That's because limits are not defined by where one starts, but where one plateaus for multiple years following some kind of improvement over the prior five, ten, fifteen years. Genetics may help push somebody over a plateau they would otherwise have hit sooner (just as having a good coach, training regimen, knowing one's own body, etc, will help as well). But discovering that one is genetically superior (which, for somebody with a given gift, could simply mean that he or she is able to accomplish something one second faster than somebody else with the same training experience in the entire lives--something hard to duplicate) doesn't displace the years of work it took to reach a point where genetics start to be the limiting factor. For every person a journalist might say has a gift, there are hundreds of other people with the same level of achievement nobody writes about. There are about 2,000 active NFL players. There are many grandmasters. There are many active runners, swimmers, etc who are comparable to the fastest people of 50 years ago, but are slower than the current world record holders. All of these people have to train hard to get to where they are. For example: it's possible that somebody on Hacker News has the kind of muscle fibers that speed runners dream of. However, that person would never know they are athletically gifted because they never got to the point where this ability mattered; e.g., their cardiovascular system runs out of gas quickly and they never bothered to keep trying, to see how good they could actually be. Recap: do genetics matter at differentiating the best from the best? Yes. Are people who are not the best in a particular arena missing those genes they need to be Gary Kasparov, Randy Moss, Wayne Gretzky? Very unlikely. It's more likely they are missing the 5, 10, 15 years of exerted effort at that particular mission. The best in the world are better than those who have tried to do the same professionally for many years. However, there are hundreds of millions of people out there who could be close to the best, who have not even tried (often, for the sake of a career, family, education.) Genetics are really one of the least important differentiators when comparing a professional (anything) to somebody who is doing something else. Therefore, the genetic argument is very, very weak.
  - catzaa 17y ago
    > There's a nice documentary "My Brilliant Brain" that shows how people can get extraordinarily skilled by (surprise surprise) making an extraordinary effort). There is also something called the g-factor that is a measure of intelligence. A significant amount of research shows that the basis for the g-factor is innate (i.e. due to genetics). It also turns out that this has to do with the physiology of the brain. A good starting point for papers on this subject is Haier et al. You can find some of his papers at : http://www.pediatrics.uci.edu/faculty/neurology/haier/haier.html http://www.pediatrics.uci.edu/faculty/neurology/haier/haier.... http://web.mac.com/rjhaier/iWeb/Haier/Welcome.html http://web.mac.com/rjhaier/iWeb/Haier/Welcome.html It is somewhat shocking that intelligence may be an innate factor. This is a fairly controversial topic (even without bringing gender or race into the conversation). But have you thought about the repercussions if intelligence is proven to be innate? A good example would be to classify people with a low intelligence as disabled (with the employment equity and disability aid that comes along with it).
    - randallsquared 17y ago
      It is somewhat shocking that intelligence may be an innate factor. It's only become shocking to people in our culture in the last few decades, since it undermines the Truth that everyone is essentially of equivalent ability, and trying hard is the only reason some are better at some things than others.
- idlewords 17y ago
  Soviet chess grandmasters came from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds. There's no genetic argument to make.
  - WilliamLP 17y ago
    I'm not making an argument for chess. I'm making an argument for the possible existence of a single counterexample to the "obvious" claim that if a group of people are good at X, regardless of the nature of X, then it is necessarily only due to cultural factors.
- raganwald 17y ago
  William, I am not disagreeing that genetics may play a dominant role, but I do think it is a very weak argument to compare chess playing aptitude to running. From what I have read, we know a great deal about what physical traits (fast twitch muscles, bone length ratios, and so forth) make someone a fast runner. We know a fair bit about the role genes play in developing these traits. With chess-playing aptitude we have indirect evidence of genetics gathered statistically. Can we measure a trait like seratonin to dopamine ratios? Can we measure a physical trait like the size of the brain or the pattern of the folds of the neocortex and statistically associate it with chess aptitude? Not to my knowledge. So while there may be a statistical and indirect argument to make about chess aptitude and genetics, I think it should be made as such rather than making an argument comparing chess aptitude to something like running where (at this time) we know a lot more about the direct traits involved.
  - WilliamLP 17y ago
    Yes, I agree with you. I was reacting to the common attitude illustrated by the parent post that goes "Why does any group of people excel at something? It's necessarily because of culture and social support and you're stupid for considering anything else." Postulating variations in the human brain is socially off the table, and perhaps this is the best way for it to be. The evidence people are willing accept as absolute proof that human brains are basically equal is weaker by several orders of magnitude than that which would convince them that there is any statistical difference in the brains of any populations. One indication of this is that people who think that there is no significant statical pattern in variations of human brains never take that thought further toward interesting scientific questions. (For example, why have all groups of humans had the exact same evolutionary pressures on all kinds of intelligence, or why is intelligence seemingly unable to evolve in different directions, given that however you measure it it seems highly, highly heritable as shown by twin studies and other evidence?) So basically, I'm just a mood to explore really politically incorrect and dangerous ideas, many of which may also be wrong. However, people who explore these ideas are not stupid, and reactions like "duh, it's the society" aren't really warranted. It may be socially irresponsible to think about ideas like this, and I'm agnostic about whether that's so. It quite possibly could be indicative of a very poor political sensibility too (see James Watson, Larry Summers.)
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  Actually, there are cultures which foster intense distance running so I think even the genetics/distance running argument isn't a "slam dunk" - ie, to just act like the point is proven is a cheap, unsupported argument.
  - philwelch 17y ago
    Aha, but what if those cultures persist over countless generations? The degree to which one fits into one's culture partially determines one's reproductive success. Wouldn't this weed out the genetically poor distance runners while advantaging the genetically good distance runners?
pixcavator 17y ago
My guess is that soccer received more support than chess in the Soviet Union, but the results weren't impressive at all.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- mechanical_fish 17y ago
  Hypothesis: Your country's likelihood of fielding a world-class soccer team is roughly proportional to the number of person-days of access that the average kid has to an unfrozen soccer field. Isn't this like asking why US colleges north of, say, Virginia have so much trouble recruiting top-class college baseball players, such that the College World Series always seems to be "some team from Florida vs some team from Arizona"? Aspiring players of professional baseball prefer to play for teams whose home field thaws out before April. Of course, the opposite is also true. Great hockey players are more likely to be hail from Russia, Canada, New York, or Massachusetts than from Brazil, Italy, London, or California.
- mahmud 17y ago
  Dynamo Kiev was pretty much the national team of the USSR :-)
- listic 17y ago
  Honestly, I don't understand a point of professional team sports at all. If every team of every country can in principle hire every player from every country, constrained mainly by its budget and negotiating abilities - it becomes mainly a battle of budget, and politics also.

jcapote 17y ago

Probably the same reason they are amazing programmers

AlexTheFounder 17y ago
And scientists. The reason I think is in the traditionally more system-oriented education.
- dzlobin 17y ago
  And a very advanced education system where calculus and physics are taught in 5th and 6th grade
  - osipov 17y ago
    BS. i took 5th, 6th grade in Soviet Union. we had no calculus and purely conceptual, primarily arithmetic oriented physics.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - borism 17y ago
      dunno about 5th and 6th grades, but yes, physics and calculus are definitely introduced in middle school (junior high for our american friends).
      - osipov 17y ago
        physics in 5th grade,an equivalent of American precalculus in 9th grade and calculus in 10th grade
  - carbon8 17y ago
    Not according to this: http://www.emis.de/projects/Ref/doc_ems_pdf/EMS_NATIONAL_PRESENTATIONS/EMS_RUSSIA.pdf http://www.emis.de/projects/Ref/doc_ems_pdf/EMS_NATIONAL_PRE... "Traditionally, in grades 7–9 mathematics comprises 2 school subjects, geometry and algebra that are taught in parallel (e.g., 2 hours per week for geometry, and 3 hours for algebra). In the senior school [16-17 years old], also two subjects are taught, geometry and algebra and elements of calculus. In grades 5 and 6 (and in primary school) we have a united course of mathematics." For comparison, the US high school math curriculum (for students 14-18 years old) is generally algebra, geometry, precalculus/trigonometry and calculus, although students can still graduate with just algebra and geometry. That said, I don't doubt that there is a cultural and educational emphasis on math in Russia.

amichail 17y ago

If someone is smart enough to play chess at the highest levels, wouldn't he/she be better off as a mathematician?

jefffoster 17y ago
Is there any evidence that there is a strong correlation between playing chess at a high level and being a great mathematician?
- pixcavator 17y ago
  In my experience mathematicians become quite good at chess - if they take it seriously. That's why I gave up playing long time ago.
  - mquander 17y ago
    In my experience, anyone of average intelligence becomes quite good at chess, if they take it seriously.
- varjag 17y ago
  If you are a great chess player you wouldn't have time to become a decent mathematician.
tomjen2 17y ago
Not really, a mathematician would likely make less money than a toplevel chess player.
- pg 17y ago
  But the falloff is sharp. A friend of mine was once ranked 44th in the world, and he switched to programming because he couldn't make a living playing chess.
- mquander 17y ago
  Fat chance. There's only perhaps a few dozen people in the world who can actually even make a living playing chess (as opposed to teaching it on the side.) It's notoriously difficult. Many American chess players switch to poker or a different profession.

ig1 17y ago

It's a nice story but it's wrong, Russia has had a strong reputation in Chess since the 1700s several hundred years before Krylenko's chess schools. Merim Bilalić's team did an extensive study that was published by the Royal Society to find out why there are so few strong female chess players. Their study concluded it was purely statistics, less female players overall meant that there were less female outliers (i.e great players). I imagine something similar is at play here.

pfedor 17y ago
I used to play chess a little as a kid and what I know is in more agreement with the article than with what you say. Prior to the Soviet chess explosion there used to be great Russian players (Chigorin, Petrov) but also many great players from other countries (Philidor, Anderssen, Morphy, Zukertort.) If you look at the official list of world champions, there was only one Russian champion (Alekhine) before 1948 and only one non-Soviet champion between 1948 and the collapse of the Soviet Union (Bobby Fischer, and I read he learned Russian to have access to first-class chess literature.) In the SU the chess players enjoyed privileges unavailable to the general population, e.g., they could travel abroad (at least as long as they were winning, I read that Taimanov had his passport confiscated after losing to Fischer in the Candidates Match.) They also were favored at the higher education institutions, i.e., as a successful chess player you didn't have to study much to pass and get a degree. As an aside, I heard from a guy who knew David Bronstein personally that Bronstein could have easily won the World Championship from Botvinnik in 1951, but it was made clear to him that it was considered undesirable for a Jewish player to beat Botvinnik. Bronstein according to my friend was a broken man after that, became excessively extravagant and never played with the same strength again.
- cema 17y ago
  You say: "it was considered undesirable for a Jewish player to beat Botvinnik". What, Botvinnik was not Jewish? That's news to me. I am sure there may have been some pressure, perhaps a lot of pressure, but Jewishness is unlikely to have played a role.
  - 17y ago

wsprague 17y ago

Let me echo what some people are saying .... training and education. Duh.

known 17y ago

"You are a product of your environment." --Clement Stone

teeja 17y ago
Exactly. As the movie "Looking for Bobby Fischer" made clear, we in the US live in a non-chess culture. Like mathematicians, chess players and honor-roll students in high-school are ignored while jocks get lots of attention. Belonging to a subculture can be empowering for people who aren't world-class out of the gate like Bobby, but that's only available for a very small minority in cities. Elsewhere, there's little heavy competition or opportunity to evolve. The US gets it's ass handed to it in international math competitions because math, as with most intellectual endeavors in the US, gets no respect. The news proves everyday that 2/3's of us are clueless about most things that developed in the 20th century.
- known 17y ago
  I think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs also plays a good role in producing good chess players.

akrymski 17y ago

Chess has always been very popular in Russia, I struggle to think of anybody I met there who doesn't know how to play. Having said that, mathematics is also taught a lot more than in Europe or USA. When I moved from a Russian school to a European one, math teachers would give me homework that was 3 grades ahead of me. And even then it was English that caused issues more than anything =)

varjag 17y ago

The article is correct. It's the same attitude that with any form of competition that was deemed a matter of national prestige in USSR: popularized by state throughout all outlets, industrialized through a ranks of special schools and training facilities, and usually devoid of fun that was initially behind the whole thing. You'd have same approach with sports, ballet, or even high-school level contests in natural science. If there'd existed a world-renowned competition in crosswords, rest assured USSR would have had a nation-wide network of crosswording schools that would've enlisted talented kids at age of 5, three state-approved categories of crossword-manship (and one for juniors) and crossword solving discretely featured in every third motion picture. But I digress. If you ever got to being a candidate for, say, a national senior-school physics competition, you'd be transferred to region's best teachers. They would train you like a circus dog, showing you the tricks and running you through hundreds of assignments encountered in previous years, with no focus on the essence of physics. Granted you'd know a lot about pulleys and levers and displacement, but it wouldn't make you any good physicist.

catzaa 17y ago
> If you ever got to being a candidate for, say, a national senior-school physics competition, you'd be transferred to region's best teachers. This is not a bad thing. It is completely the opposite to some Western ideals to ensure that everyone gets the same (bad) education. I think that the motto for a lot of guys on the left is that if everyone is kept behind no-one loses. What is incredibly interesting to note is that Russia and several eastern bloc countries perform better than the USA in math (school age – according to OECD TIMMS test). Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathematics_and_Science_Study http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathema... This is quite shocking since the USA spends a lot more on education and is a few times richer. > Granted you'd know a lot about pulleys and levers and displacement, but it wouldn't make you any good physicist. In all fairness, the USSR did produce quite a few excellent physicists. Per capita it probably outranks the USA for Nobel Prize winners in Physics.
- varjag 17y ago
  > It is completely the opposite to some Western ideals to ensure that everyone gets the same (bad) education. School education is not a good predictor of future performance. I would venture to say that above some (fairly modest) threshold of quality, the difference in schooling is irrelevant. > What is incredibly interesting to note is that Russia and several eastern bloc countries perform better than the USA in math (school age – according to OECD TIMMS test). This is not what made the great Russian mathematicians though. You don't get feynmanns and turings by locking up kids to solve monotonous puzzles. > In all fairness, the USSR did produce quite a few excellent physicists. Per capita it probably outranks the USA for Nobel Prize winners in Physics. Of course it doesn't. Even the UK is way ahead of USSR on that metric. There were plenty of great Soviet physicists and champions in other sciences, but bear in mind that at least half of them were product of pre-Soviet, imperial school system.

yannis 17y ago

Exceptional Ability = Practice + Availability of Time for Practice + Motivation

newsdog 17y ago

I haven't read the article yet, so I'll guess at it's contents then check it to see how well I did. TRAGAC because they teach every kid the country chess in school - identify the gifted - send them to chess camp - identify the more gifted - send them to chess school - keep filtering - concentrate the best of the best into more and more intense training - Botvinnik ran a chess school at the very top that trained both Kasparov, Karpov and Krammnik. Make sure the talented get their 10,000 hours in with no distractions, like having to have a job. Easy, peasy.

newsdog 17y ago
O,k I read it. It DID have some mention of the state support system, but said it was for more ideological reasons. Ayn Rand wrote an essay on WTRAGAC and she pointed out chess was a very CAPITALISTIC game. Why? In chess, you own all your own pieces. Just about the only private property in the USSR. No Central Committee or Five Year Plan can tell you how to place your rook. At no time will your rook ever be nationalized by the state just when you need it the most. Second, only you get to push your pieces. It is NOT collectivized. Third, you are rewarded for being strong in a non socialist manner. You and the other guy start out with the same number of pieces, soon the stronger player has more. They don't NEED more, being stronger, but, as in life in the West, the rich get richer! Rand argued that the TRAGAC because they used it to escape an unnatural Socialist system.

Anaid9 17y ago

Because chess is so much more popular there. Here the emphasis is on money-making activities, such as sports- that have rules that can be easily understood by the large masses, and that are easier to market. In addition,there is much more support for chess there, and chess is highly admired; here there are a lot of mixed opinions and myths about chess - for example, that in order to be a good chess player you have to be intelligent, chess is for nerds, etc. Now that chess is finally entering the US and increasing in popularity, hopefully it will be much better understood and appreciated in the future, but it may take a long time before it becomes really popular here.