When this question appeared this week on our Quora site, https://www.intelligence-and-iq.com/the-many-faces-of-intelligence/, it generated a lot of discussion, revealing some different perceptions of IQ. Who do you think would win such a contest had it been possible? The reason why this “thought experiment” has value, is that your answer reflects your perception of the meaning of IQ.
In the original post, Jerry Olsen stated:
We don’t have to wonder. Einstein did play chess, and here’s a link to a game he played with fellow physicist Robert Oppenheimer:
https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1261614 Incidentally, it’s known that Einstein was a friend of Emmanuel Lasker (Chess World Champion for 27 years from 1894 to 1921).
But no, Einstein would not have been able to beat Bobby Fischer at chess. Not even close. Fischer was much stronger at chess than Einstein could ever hope to be. On the other hand, Fischer would not have been able to beat Einstein at theoretical physics. Einstein developed theories that vastly advanced our understanding of reality; Fischer… not so much.
When this was posted, Otaku Sama responded:
What you wrote has nothing to do with the question nor the answer that Olsen provided. First of all Bobby Fischer was a genius and it was possible that he had an IQ higher than that assigned to Einstein(160). What Olsen mentioned was a very uneducated guess (answer) as many studies show that if you have a higher IQ you would learn chess faster, thus probably be a better player if you put in the work.
A study in particular concluded that it would take a person 2 years to become a chess world champion if they had an IQ of 200.
The strongest female player in the history of chess had an iq of 170. So if we would assume that Fischer had a lower IQ than Einstein the its very reasonable for Einstein to be stronger than Fischer if he had dedicated some of his time for chess just like his friend Emanuel.
To this, Tom Ensalada responded:
Perhaps an analogy from the athletic world may help shine some light on this topic. Let’s say you have an MMA fighter and a professional boxer both of whom have great reaction time, muscle strength, flexibility, and CV endurance with maybe the boxer having a significant edge in each of these domains. So, in terms of underlying athletic physiology, they are both exceptional. The difference in their underlying athletic ability will likely not be the deciding factor in who wins when one competes in the others sport. This is called the Principle of Specificity in athletics and it is reasonable to suspect that this principle operates in the intellectual arena too.
What do you think? My answer is contained in a free chapter accessible at: https://www.intelligence-and-iq.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Intelligence-IQ-Perception-Free-Download-1.pdf I invite your responses on this Quora site.
