Hidden Jumps

I read something yesterday that blew my mind; one of those rare pieces of information that totally shifts my mindset on something. I’m still thinking about all the applications of this new knowledge, but that’s why we’re here!

Here’s the pebble that starts the avalanche: If you take the top 100 chess players in the world and gave them all IQ tests, the best of that 100 would be the ones with the lowest IQs.

Let’s back up a bit and examine why. First, this is some major (and intentional) selection bias. We’re looking at the top 100 chess players in the world, not “chess players in general.” In order to become a member of that top 100, you need a large amount of a few specific qualities. Two of those qualities are “overall intelligence” and “skill at chess, specifically.” In the general population, those two qualities might be highly correlated, but they are separate things. Not every super-smart person is good at chess, after all. And (importantly) not every chess savant is super-smart overall.

But in order to get into that top tier, your total value of those traits, taken together, has to be higher than almost every other chess player on the planet. Imagine we put a number on “skill at chess” the same way we do IQ, so you can have a “CQ” of ~60 to ~160 the same way IQ works. Using that idea, we could say that in order to get into the top 100 chess players in the world, your total IQ + CQ has to be 320 or above (arbitrary number for this thought experiment).

So if all of the top 100 players have a total of at least a 320, what does that tell you about the ones with the lowest IQs? If their total is still 320, then their “CQ” has to be higher to compensate!

What does this mean for my (and maybe your) worldview?

Well, it basically means that whenever you’re looking at the top 0.1% of performers in any given category, their hyper-specific skill in that category is probably outweighing more general and related skills that the 99% of that category are seeing as correlated. For example, the general populace probably sees “general fitness” and “skill at pole-vaulting” to be positively correlated. But based on this, I would guess that if you took the top 100 pole-vaulters in the world, the best of that category would have overall lower markers for “general fitness” than their peers in that elite group. If they’re less physically fit overall, but still in the top 100, then they have to be better at the specific skill of pole-vaulting!

But besides being interesting, how does this apply to me?

Well, now let’s imagine that I’m trying to be an Olympic-level pole-vaulter. If the top champion of that sport in the world publicly says that he never does cardio, should I take that to mean that cardio is a waste of time for me? Hahaha, no! He doesn’t need cardio because he’s so insanely good at pole-vaulting that he’s making up for whatever cardio gives most people. And since that works for him, he’s making the intuitive but incorrect judgment that cardio doesn’t positively correlate with pole-vaulting in the general population. And since he’s the champion of his field, lots of aspiring pole-vaulters might consider that to be good advice.

In a way, this is a really advanced form of survivorship bias. You’re looking at the one guy who skipped cardio and became a champion, but you’re not seeing the thousands of people who also skipped cardio and never made it past their high school team, because they weren’t the wild outlier that the champ is. It’s like a guy who won the lottery telling you that the secret to success is to be lazy and unmotivated but buy lots of lottery tickets. Sure, that’s what worked for this one outlier, but if you averaged every person who adopted that strategy it wouldn’t look like a good idea any more.

So the lesson is: be careful about taking advice about your own goals from the absolute top-tier achievers of that same goal category. You’re better off finding out what works most often and applying your own personal deviations based on your local experiences than you are trying to emulate a person bought the right lottery ticket.