This is in reference to another post in which they asked who would win: Magnus Carlson right now or an average person with 10,000 years of training. My unpopular opinion is that Magnus would win 10/10 times, even if he were drunk and blindfolded. Just working hard and putting in time is not enough to make you the best. This goes back to another conversation that happened a while back about the NBA, where Brian Scalabrine challenged people who thought they could beat him in a 1 on 1 in basketball. By all means, he was not a good NBA player, but he was at least IN the NBA. Of course, he destroyed everyone who challenged him. The point wasn’t to make fun of regular people, but to show, in his words, that he “is closer to LeBron than you are to me”. Ie., no matter how good you think you are, unless you are in the top 1% of the top 1%, you will never even begin to GRASP just how big the gap between the average person (you, yes, the person reading this), and the best of the best.
Specifically, with the original question, an average person has an IQ of 100. Whether or not you like to emphasize IQ, it is still a benchmark for a reason. Just like you are born with a physical height and potential, you are born with a mental IQ and potential. You can train that to the best of your ability, but no amount of training for the NBA can overcome the fact that you might be 5’2, and have to try and beat LeBron James, who is 6’9, 250 pounds. Similarly, you could train for 10 million years and still never even be close to how good Magnus Carlson is. Unfortunately, the average person does not think about chess and patterns like Magnus. You can try and memorize as much as you want, but the average person struggles to remember stuff they learn in a high school math or history class for just one year, so good luck trying to “memorize” or “practice” your way out of chess.
The other thing that is deluding people into thinking that the person with 10,000 years of training will win is that they put themselves in that situation. “I’m sure if I had 10,000 years of training, I could put up a fight”. The good thing about average is that most people reading this are just that. Average. You probably have not been the top 1% of the top 1% at anything, and that’s fine. But, without that perspective, it really is just almost impossible to stress just how large the gap between your average Joe and the LITERAL BEST person is at something. Again, this is just my opinion, and since this sub is “unpopular opinions”, I hope to at least hear some of your takes and why you think I might be wrong. This is a super interesting topic to me, and I don’t mean to send hate or anything to anyone who disagrees with me
Edit: another way I think about it is that everything in life is asymptotic. There really is no skill in real life that you can linearly progress in. You are born with a “limit”, and you can spend time to get to that limit, but never pass it. For basketball again, you could technically gain every basketball skill every imaginable, but just never get over the hump of being 5’2 and then still lose to Shaq. Similarly, there are some things you just can’t force your brain to learn or be good at, such as how fast you can think or process, how deep you can calculate, and even how your brain thinks.
Edit 2: I used the IQ example because IMO it is very similar to height in physical sports. Height is not *technically* a barrier to being good at basketball, but having that genetic ability to be tall increases your overall potential. Take two players, one 5’2 and one 6’10 and give them a completel basketball skillset. On one end you have mugsy bogues and on the other you have Kevin Durant. So, in the same way, having a higher IQ necessarily increases your overall POTENTIAL. Again, the question is an average person, who has an IQ of 100, or with the NBA, a height of 5’9. Then I ask again, is that 5’9 guy ever going to beat Shaq or KD in a 1v1 even with 1 million years of training? (obviously no)
Edit 3: I think the large gap between people agreeing and disagreeing is due to people being in two main groups: 1) people who are average, and think that they could accomplish beating Magnus with enough training, but in reality are just in the beginning stage of the dunning-kreuger effect, and 2) people who got past that curve and realize that the gap between being top 1% in chess (2200 rating) and Magnus Carlson is A BIGGER GAP that someone WHO HAS NEVER PLAYED CHESS and someone who is 2200 rating. Unironically, the road from 2200 to Magnus is greater. If you do not agree, I would suggest you try and become the literally world champion at any skill of your choice. I think it is only by trying to prove it to yourself that you truly realize how big of a gap it is between being good and being #1.
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Talent is affinity. The more you have, the more return you get on your effort.
People spend way too much time trying to improve at things they’re bad at.
I mean, I’d like to see someone with 10,000 years of training before I’d write them off.
I disagree with your example and I suppose idea as a whole. If I had over 20 million hours (10000 years and full time job playing chess) I would wipe the floor with him. Talent only matters up to a certain point, so it’s just a matter of time before things equalise.
Edit; and isn’t the basketball example kind of off topic? Of course people who are untrained will lose against a professional, but your original point says that even with training people would lose which is not true at all, many people in the 1% can’t rely on natural talent to succeed.
i think you’re significantly underestimating how long 10,000 years is. all of recorded history is less than 10,000 years. chess was invented ~1,500 years ago. you think i couldn’t beat Magnus with if i had been training more than 6x as long as chess has existed? i’m sure it would take me many, many, many years to get good enough to consistently beat him, but saying Magnus could win 10/10 drunk and blindfolded is silly
the lebron argument makes more sense because of the physical advantages. i’m 5’9″ so pretty average, height wise. but with 10,000 years of practice? i’m hitting 100% of my shots, from every square inch on the course
Most of the time it’s the average people fooling themselves about hardwork beating talent. Like bro, the most talented people I know are also hardworking af. Don’t fool yourself and assume that all intelligent people are lazy.
I agree, which unfortunately means I have to downvote you.
People like Magnus have next level insight into their field. It’s not something you can ever learn.
The more interesting question is, knowing that you could never be “the best” at something with hard work alone, is that thing still worth doing? I would argue yes.
If you do something with the sole intention of being the best at it, you’ll be very miserable and eventually grow to resent it. You should do it because you get some kind of fulfillment out of it, regardless of whether you win or lose.
I’ve always felt that success is one part hard work, one part raw talent, and one part dumb luck
The basketball one like most sports, there’s genetic advantage (like height)
But I’ve noticed a lot of people think that practice = training, it doesn’t always. Just doing the same thing over and over will only improve your skills so much. Professionals have people watch them to correct things they’re doing wrong, they’re watching videos of others and themselves to see what they’re doing right and wrong. They’re constantly improving their techniques on a micro scale that most just don’t think about. If you train like a professional hard work can be enough in somethings. Chess would be one of them imo but not sports.
I think the problem is that people have a hard time accepting that there is a genetic component to intelligence (and the subsets of it: Memory, spatial reasoning, verbal acuity, etc), and that genetic component creates a hard limit of how successful any given person is going to be at an intellectual endeavor. Nearly everyone will accept that a 5 foot tall man will never dunk a basketball, but if you suggest it is a waste of time to teach Shakespeare to an 80 IQ kid, you are treated like the bad guy.
You often don’t need to be the best in the world to be successful. I’m not the brightest person but I outworked the other dimwits in my area and run a highly profitable home service business. While there’s guys with bigger and better operations in other cities, it doesn’t affect my market. Being the biggest fish in your pond is sometimes all you need, and hard work can potentially get you there.
I competed pretty successfully in a thing at the regional and national level in the US – and have thought about this a lot, and I concur. I’ve met dozens of people that can outperform me with their eyes closed; I mean wildly talented people that can make me look like a fool. Yet, I’ve listened to average (literally) performers say many times that they didn’t perceive any significant difference between me and someone I know to be much more talented than me when they competed against both of us. It blows my mind because sometimes it’s someone that I couldn’t hang with at all. But somehow, Steve couldn’t tell the difference. Lol It’s flattering, but it says a little something about Steve’s relative ability to do the thing.
The variance in human performance and understanding across different arenas is massive and really shows what our brains and bodies are capable of. There are people that are literally thousands of times better at doing things than other people are at doing those things, which is kind of wild, imo.
You are all over the place with this thing and you contradict yourself so much I believe that may be your skill but also show talent in bs.