In the Scientific American article that links to my blog, there’s a link to a study correlating chess skill with IQ. The correlation with general intelligence is 0.35 (see table 1), which is not a weak correlation, but not a strong one either.
When I was a kid I thought there should be an almost perfect correlation between chess and IQ, especially after my high school chemistry teacher defined intelligence as the ability to adapt: to take whatever situation you’re in and turn it around to you advantage. For chess is all about adapting to a changing board, and turning it to your advantage; maximizing strengths and minimizing weakness.
So why is the correlation not higher?
1) Practice: Malcom Gladwell popularized the idea that you need 10,000 hours of practice to be truly good at a complex mental task, and while that claim has largely been debunked, it applies more to chess than other fields because there are so many strategies that can be explicitly taught. Also, the tendency to practice chess to the exclusion of all else might be negatively correlated with IQ, since smarter people tend to have a wider range of interests and opportunities.
2) Chess is only one type of environment: A talent for chess might not correlate well with other situations where you must gain an advantage over a rival such as trial law or debate clubs.
3) IQ tests are not perfect measures of intelligence: I think chess measures a part of intelligence that IQ tests miss…and one of the most important parts. The ability to think strategically and the ability to make wise decisions; judgement.
”I think chess measures a part of intelligence that IQ tests miss…and one of the most important parts. The ability to think strategically and the ability to make wise decisions; judgement”
Chess is like measure the ability of dog to catch the ball. It measure cognitive ability** Oh yeaahh.
But, it measure the dog response in a danger situation in their REAL environment** Nope. Can correlate but is not the same thing. Is ”just” correlationable.
Both are similar, to the dog to catch the ball and to the dog to survive in a complex REAL situations.
Chess are similar with strategic thinking, but it correlate with previous memorization or learning on a particular strategic thinking to play this game AND NOT to answer in the REAL world.
As well happen in other iq tests, chess is a idealization of intelligence in a perfect artificial alegoric-cognitive environment and not in real long or short term situations.
I think to master level, the correlation between iq (general quantitative intelligence) and chess ability will be higher than 0,3.
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It’s starting to become a well known fact that chess ability only has a moderate correlation with IQ, despite the game’s previous reputation as the favorite game of all nerds. So much of chess nowadays is simply about memorizing strategy. And a lot of nerds aren’t gonna do that when there’s so many newer and more exciting ways for them to spend their time, i.e. playing real-time strategy video games or designing computer software. I had a buddy in high school who barely passed Calc 1 but was a top ranked chess player. Additionally, Go is become more popular among the crowd that would have previously been in to chess.
I’m interested, for personal reasons, in the correlation between IQ and music ability (another area people, perhaps mistakenly, have associated with high IQ). I play a variety of styles on guitar and piano (jazz, pop, rock, classical) and I know some genres have a reputation for being more intelligent than others. For the most part, my musician friends are above average intellect, but there’s some exceptions and some very eccentric personalities in the bunch. I would say classical musicians are on average the smartest, probably because of the cognitive demands of sight-reading and understanding classical compositional form. I notice my classical musician friends have the most intelligent conversations, discussing everything from Shakespeare to 20th century history to modern art. Simply playing by ear is not a highly g-loaded activity, so more stupid, yet musically-inclined people lean towards genres less reliant on reading music..
I think musical taste, when perfect cognitive-psychological combination happens (rational, higher charater…), this people tend to prefer beautiful instrumental compositions than popular vocal musics. And i think instrumental music is enphasize in melody (that is more cognitively challenged) while vocal musics tend to correlate with emotional states of people.
i agree with everything you said santoculto.
and if there were a cognitive domain associated to these two kind of music style, it will mathematics with classical music and verbal with popular music(rap is the archetyp)
btw how old are you santo ?