Relationship between Chess rating and I.Q?

FWIW I assume IQ is weakly correlated with success in all sorts of areas, chess included. It just makes sense. By not throwing in an "I assume" I was giving you a hard time.

And yeah it's just online, no need to give you the 3rd degree. This is supposed to be a casual place to chat with fellow hobbyists.

But posts are annoying. I generally don't like it here

The idea of max potential rating was put forward in post #1, so my statement was addressing the OP and/or the thread title. Obviously if we are talking about IQ vs current rating, there is zero correlation. If it makes sense at all to talk about correlation, it only makes sense for IQ vs some upper limit on rating.

Years ago, by looking at rating graphs of top players, I noticed they all seem to stop improving after about 8-10 years. So my idea is that after 8-10 years of hard work people will stop improving at chess. So even though I gave you a hard time, I already have some notion of a max rating (I didn't read or don't remember the OP).

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As for IQ and rating, I've often though the opposite, i.e. that if it matters anywhere it's at the beginning. A high IQ person is more likely to improve quickly... but after the initial period, everyone is on an approximately level playing field. Figuring things out faster than others doesn't matter when it's common to have 10+ years of experience.

Having said that, I suppose max rating makes sense too... I never really thought about it. I've never met or read or seen an interview of a GM that came across as extremely smart... but that sort of impression is really difficult unless you're in the room and talking to someone. Also for most GMs there's a language and cultural barrier, so I may not be able to tell in any case... but anyway, that plus the fact GMs seem to all the time rebuff interviewers who suggest they're geniuses, I don't think of GMs as particularly high IQ individuals. I mostly associate IQ as being useful for beginners.

Hah! Did you see my suggestion in the Niemann thread that chess.com should give ratings for the comments section? It could work on upvotes and downvotes. Upvoted by a higher-rated commenter, you gain more rating points. Ratings could be negative, if you have a negative rating, your upvotes and downvotes have no effect. Easily subverted though, there would need to be some defense against people gratuitously upvoting each other....

I used to get annoyed by other people's wrong/inane/malicious/etc posts. But more Yoga means more detachment. So more and more I look at those posts as simple facts which say more about the poster than about the world. And when someone makes a post that makes me think, whether I agree or disagree, then I appreciate that one.

There are a lot of controversies about how to measure intelligence so do not be bothered by it a lot. You have to know a lot about a person you are judging yourself and even though you had a capacity to do it up to the extent that you read people's minds you still cannot explain the intricacies and complexities of a living being since most of us are not made not by a single entities but a vast majorities of connections and influences.

@XOXOXOexpert - Agree. I have observed people make hasty judgments about intelligence based solely on speech, especially vocabulary. And there are some actual biases as well, for example tall people are judged as smarter, ceteris paribus. (See what I did there? )

I can think of two specific NMs (whom I know in person) who can act as opposite ends of the "chess and IQ are correlated" argument.

One of them is quite cerebral. The other is ... not. The former would likely score quite well on an IQ test. The latter would probably struggle (and he'd agree with this suggestion, too).

But they both play chess at a master level - despite the very clear indication that their IQ scores would be quite different.

At the board, their ideas and knowledge can compete on relatively equal terms (they're both around 2200 FIDE). Away from the board, though, their intellectual abilities (and interests) diverge ...

most of my family consider me not to smart /not hip/ not ahead of the game of life/ one step up from a loser type of guy -- well i am  still in the very bottom of play here 100 to 130 most days- so my anecdotal evidence- is that smart people have high scores not so smart people have low -my play seems to uphold that theory also when i play high score people usually i lose by move 25/30 -- when i play lower or similar to me scored players  i usually lose by 45/50 moves-

just input for the discussion presented here  

"I may not look smart because I don't act smart, but that's just an act.  I r smart."

This sentence got me to respond.

UNESCO disagreed strongly with the sentiment that Einstein’s genius is limited to physics. They commissioned him to write a correspondence with another Nobel laureate of his choosing on the topic, “Why War?”.  He chose Sigmund Freud and their correspondence should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in international relations or global politics.

Einstein’s genius was not limited just to the field of physics.

The link below is not to the letters themselves, but a discussion of the importance of these letters.

https://bigthink.com/the-present/einstein-freud-letter/

chess need pattern recognition, memorization, visualisation, all of these things go into iq

If I ever felt like chiming in before I would have claimed a very weak correlation between IQ and chess strength.

But, how about we try to approach the question for the other way? After a quick check of my profile, I found that my Blitz rating of around 1800 or so (it changes a lot) is good enough for a 98.4% percentile. That would map to 2 standard deviations above the norm. An IQ of 130-135. Which I will admit is higher then my actual IQ. I don't remember any of my actual heavily G skewered test scores, but I am confident that I am only 1 standard deviations over the norm. 

The data sets of people who play chess and people who get intelligence tests are mismatched. So, we will not find a correlation in the data set even if one exists.

Oh, by the way, you don't have to believe what someone on the internet tells you about their intelligence. 

Being good at chess proves you're a good chess player, period.

IQ in and of itself is a subjective measure.  It does not encompass the whole of intellect and often  the tests for it are horribly flawed.  I have a good 20 point range depending on what test I took; one of the worst I had for example was from europe and an example question type that I recall was 'what does not belong' in a list of scrambled words that were euro-misspelled (from a US perspective) and worse regional stuff (city names, etc).   There were several of those with the words getting longer and longer too.   Modern tests have cleaned up that kind of garbage, somewhat but the cleaned up ones use only images, which some people are better at mentally rotating/mirroring images and some are better at other things, so that is also biased and flawed. 

Even if you can agree to some sort of IQ measuring strategy, there isn't any real relation to chess.  I suspect it forms sort of a half sigmoid ... super low IQ on the average probably can't play the game worth a hoot, may not even be able to comprehend the rules, but from average IQ on up it falls to linear as being 'smarter' fails to yield grandmastery.    I suspect your best players have a photographic or similar memory capability more often, and also some spatial ability that I don't know how to quantify.  

     The reports of Kasparov, Carlsen Fischer, and other super GMs having super-genius IQs lack verification and are mostly trumpeted by websites that want to get you to pay to take their online tests. Some may have even paid famous people to take their tests and then publish the so-called results as a marketing ploy. Whether these tests are accurate, or whether they just tell their customers that they have achieved a fine score no matter how they answer they do on the "test" is open to question.

I've never thought you were stupid. Sanity is a completely different spectrum from intelligence, and even then, you seem to have good days / moments and bad ones.

Reading that, IMO, he has a rather simplistic view of humans, governments, and war... which I don't hold against him because he was a physicist.

"Wow this guy is really smart in his area of expertise, let's ask him something topical" is not very interesting to me.

I would expect these letters to appear in a history class, but not sociology.

Plus he was mostly asking questions to Freud... I wonder why they don't report on Freud's response. Well of course, Freud is associated with cocaine, hubris, and overly-imaginative ideas on sex. Not quite the intangibles you're looking for when trying to dazzle your audience.

Humans are stupid like this.

IIRC in the 90s some big companies hired chess GMs as consultants. Even though these GMs had no knowledge of business or finance, the thinking was they were good strategists who would see far ahead (whatever that means).

Needless to say, that experiment didn't last very long.

Funnily enough, I've had some relatively recent interactions with people who self-report as having different mental illness diagnoses.

This is obviously not a technical or robust definition, but just intuitively, for me, I'd say sanity is observed when a person frequently makes the right assumptions. For example if I ask a person how their day was, and they assume I'm plotting against them or something... ok that is an extreme example, but to me, that's what insanity is like. A sociopath might read into a mundane interaction as being Machiavellian, a depressed person might read into a mundane event as meaning they're unlovable, etc.

We all need to make assumptions all day, all the time. Sometimes, IMO, your assumptions are way off. For example sometimes you've accused people of attacking or ganging up on you when I don't see that as a valid assumption. You've sometimes made the assumption that your intuition is superior to established knowledge (suggesting, even outright stating, things like all of mathematics is wrong and you're the only one to realize it).

According to whom?  His IQ is *not* 140+, and if you are relying on estimates...stop.

Fischer and Carlsen do not have "certified" 140+ IQs either.