the Polgar experiment actually disproves the hard work theory
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Mar 4, 2016
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#23
Serena and Venus are exceptional. Their tennis dad wasn't unique, but they are. There are a few other examples of tennis playing siblings (the MacEnroes come to mind, and a few others), shows that there's more than just hard work and desire to consider.
This whole topic is extremely interesting. I have a few points-
1 I am almost certain that being taught chess, not the moves but quality coaching, at a young age makes talent. Its not the only element of course.
2 I think the fact that the Polgars produced 3 out of 3 players who made the top 10 women of all time, and all being able to speak several languages proves the theory. Though as someone said both parents were brilliant, still...
3 I don't know why Judith proved to be easily the strongest of the 3. According to Kasparov's books on chess history, she was as strong as Kasparov or Kramnik at age 15 but got little better. That is very interesting indeed and I have no explanation.
4 There are a whole bunch of factors that are needed to reach the very top in chess and stay there, talent is only one.
Kasparov is often considered the strongest player ever. I can name a number of players who likely had as much talent but achieved less. some of these are, with what I think the reason is, Fisher, Ivanchuk, Hubner (maybe) [all emotional stability] Reshevsky [years he didn't play, not a professional] Anand [?, reacted rather badly to his loss to Kasparov in 1995] and Tal [Poor health and lifestyle].
Klauer írta:
The TO is wrong with "experiment". It's a case study. Case studies are good for creating hypothesis. They can sometimes reject a hypothesis, in cases were they show something thought to be impossible is possible.
About this case study a lot of opinions (hypothesis) are possible. There has been a lot of serious research in the field of expertise. It shows how difficult it is to exclude innate or enviromental factors.
So SmyslovFan is right. There is more to consider. But this is very abstract. It becomes more concrete when devoloping hypothesis about selection of trainees or training surroundings or training material, etc.
Then you come very fast to questions like: What is talent, if it exists? And again opinions/attitudes have great influence on the perception of the questions to be looked at.
An example: From a Marxist view the man becomes man by his work. From a psycholinguist view the man becomes man by using verbal concepts. You can look now at the results from the work done and you can look at the results from the elaboration of the concepts an excellent chess player has.
As we all have personal concepts in the background we should be very careful (and respectful imo) handling the interpretation of others.
What the case of the Polgar sisters demonstrates: A woman can beat a world champion. A woman can become a top chess player. In chess history this has been proven by Nona Gaprindashvili earlier. But this was forgotten.
I think that's just outright offensive to the Polgár family.
It wasn't a feminist action, and shouldn't be considered as such.
If László's thesis was right, then if he had sons, they'd have become just as brilliant players as the girls.
The fact he had three daughters is completely irrelevant to the subject.
He never thought and believed that gender makes a difference in the experiment.
I don't know what this post is trying to prove, and I don't think it proved it. Passion is important. Judit was committed to the game of chess, whereas Susan seemed more interested in the politics of the game and that interest possibly went all the way back to childhood. On the learning end of it: most of the knowledge we use as adults was learned when we were children; as adults we might expand on that knowledge (I would hope so) but the foundation is there from childhood. Many world champions started playing chess as teens and pre-teens (Capablance started at age 3 or 4), but I don't know a single one that started playing chess at 20 something. Maybe the wrong question was asked. What about this: if you take away Judits learning experience, in her chess education, as a child do you think she would have gone as far?
power_2_the_people wrote:
Pastuszek wrote:
As far as I know, the ultimate goal of father's Polgar experiment was to create a world champion in chess regardless of gender. He wasn't far away from it but nevertheless he failed
Does it mean Nigel Short is right about women in chess?
Thats is the most outrageous idea that the ultimate goal of Lazlo Polgar was to create a woman world champion in chess. Its like saying he was a total idiot which is impossible .
''Laszlo, an educational psychologist by profession, had wanted to demonstrate that what we call 'genius' is not a naturally occurring or genetically created phenomenon, but could be achieved by any child, given intensive early tuition on a one-to-one basis. Chess was a natural way of trying to prove his theory to the world, partly because the game is viewed as a touchstone of the intellect, but also because results are easily compared and measured by a universal grading system. Thus, as Judit put it in her recently published autobiography, How I Beat Fischer's Record: "From the moment of my birth on 23 July 1976, I became involved f in an educational research project. Even before I came into the world, my parents had already decided: I would be a chess champion."
Lazlo Polgar might be crazy but not necessarily an idiot. I think I'd heard him talking ( in the movie The Polgar Variant) he wants making his daughter a chess world champion (not a women world champion!). It was his obsession.
I have a daughter who's like 5 now.
I can say with 100% certainty now that the Polgar experiment and results was over 90% genetics, and likely closer to 99% genetics regarding their chess gifts seen at an early age.
I didn't plan on making my daughter a prodigy, but it was rapidly apparent despite encouraging chess and exposing her to it as early as age 2, that there was NO chance of some accelerated learning curve simply due to teaching. From age 2-5, they don't even have the attention span to do it, and the concept of my daughter even seeing 1-move tactics reliably at age 5.5 is so for off her genetic potential that it's ludicrous - she can't even understand how a N moves, despite me showing it to her hundreds of times - her brain simply can't grasp it yet.
It's true that without Laszlo Polgar's early didactic training of his daughters, they very well would never have been discovered to have real chess talent, but for sure, talent is reasons #1-1000 as to why they are so strong.
Take 1000 kids, subject them to Laszlo Polgar's youth training system, and just about zero of them will be as good as the Polgar systems. You'll be lucky even if you have a handful that are even in their domain. Not too dissimilar to those rare Youtube musical prodigies who at age 5 can play with high virtuosity - their prodigy ability is FAR more a feature of their amazing talent than it is of the training they receive.
hhnngg1 írta:
I have a daughter who's like 5 now.
I can say with 100% certainty now that the Polgar experiment and results was over 90% genetics, and likely closer to 99% genetics regarding their chess gifts seen at an early age.
I didn't plan on making my daughter a prodigy, but it was rapidly apparent despite encouraging chess and exposing her to it as early as age 2, that there was NO chance of some accelerated learning curve simply due to teaching. From age 2-5, they don't even have the attention span to do it, and the concept of my daughter even seeing 1-move tactics reliably at age 5.5 is so for off her genetic potential that it's ludicrous - she can't even understand how a N moves, despite me showing it to her hundreds of times - her brain simply can't grasp it yet.
It's true that without Laszlo Polgar's early didactic training of his daughters, they very well would never have been discovered to have real chess talent, but for sure, talent is reasons #1-1000 as to why they are so strong.
Take 1000 kids, subject them to Laszlo Polgar's youth training system, and just about zero of them will be as good as the Polgar systems. You'll be lucky even if you have a handful that are even in their domain. Not too dissimilar to those rare Youtube musical prodigies who at age 5 can play with high virtuosity - their prodigy ability is FAR more a feature of their amazing talent than it is of the training they receive.
But then again, are you as skilled in the field of pedagogy and psychology as the Polgár parents? They were both renowned as brilliant reformers of their fields before the experiment even began.
You can't just say that just because you couldn't redo the experiment that it was faulty.
I sure can't teach my kid to play the piano as the next Mozart (even though I'm fairly decent), but under the wings of a brilliant teacher with a very carefully calculated and structured studying plan, he obviously has tons of more chances of doing so.
It's just obvious; I could even say common sense.
hhnngg1 írta:
I have a daughter who's like 5 now.
I can say with 100% certainty now that the Polgar experiment and results was over 90% genetics, and likely closer to 99% genetics regarding their chess gifts seen at an early age.
I didn't plan on making my daughter a prodigy, but it was rapidly apparent despite encouraging chess and exposing her to it as early as age 2, that there was NO chance of some accelerated learning curve simply due to teaching. From age 2-5, they don't even have the attention span to do it, and the concept of my daughter even seeing 1-move tactics reliably at age 5.5 is so for off her genetic potential that it's ludicrous - she can't even understand how a N moves, despite me showing it to her hundreds of times - her brain simply can't grasp it yet.
It's true that without Laszlo Polgar's early didactic training of his daughters, they very well would never have been discovered to have real chess talent, but for sure, talent is reasons #1-1000 as to why they are so strong.
Take 1000 kids, subject them to Laszlo Polgar's youth training system, and just about zero of them will be as good as the Polgar systems. You'll be lucky even if you have a handful that are even in their domain. Not too dissimilar to those rare Youtube musical prodigies who at age 5 can play with high virtuosity - their prodigy ability is FAR more a feature of their amazing talent than it is of the training they receive.
What everyone seems to forget was that the experiment of Polgár was not targeted towards chess and chess only.
All of the girls have multiple degrees and speak multiple languages.
That's not a matter of natural talent, now, is it?
But if we can agree (and I hope we can) that László's experiment and study plan was more than effective in learning foreign languages (something that's still very rare today), then how is it not responsible for their successes in chess?
r4chess2 wrote:
Many world champions started playing chess as teens and pre-teens (Capablance started at age 3 or 4), but I don't know a single one that started playing chess at 20 something.
Neither do I.
The closest I know is Tchigorin, who took up chess late, at the beginning of his 20's I think. And that was very long ago.
power_2_the_people wrote:
There has never existed any notion that one can make a chess champion out of any kid there is. The idea that Lazlo would have wanted to prove that genetic potential is nothing is an oversimplification. In real life nobody thinks that genetic potential is nothing .
http://sportsscientists.com/2013/12/eero-mantyranta-finlands-champion-1937-2013-obituary/
Put your glasses on
hhnngg1 wrote:
Take 1000 kids, subject them to Laszlo Polgar's youth training system, and just about zero of them will be as good as the Polgar systems. You'll be lucky even if you have a handful that are even in their domain. Not too dissimilar to those rare Youtube musical prodigies who at age 5 can play with high virtuosity - their prodigy ability is FAR more a feature of their amazing talent than it is of the training they receive.
You say this with unjustified certainty. Nobody has in fact taken 1,000 random kids as you say. What the results of this would be remain unknown.
There is one example where three girls were taken, and they are all in the top 10 of female chess players ever, incl no 1, Judith.
I don't doubt that they had 2 brilliant parents, giving them a genetic advantage. But it is very hard indeed to believe that had they not had the early and intensive chess training they would have been just as good at specificly chess. If genes explains it then you would be better off taking world chamion male and female chess players and having them breed.
Agassi was born in Las Vegas, Nevada, to Emmanuel "Mike" Aghassian and Elizabeth "Betty" Agassi (née Dudley).His father is an Iranian of Armenian and Assyrianethnicity who represented Iran in boxing at the 1948 and 1952 Olympic Games before emigrating to the United States. Andre Agassi's mother, Betty, is a breast cancer survivor. His father was renowned for his domineering nature, reportedly taking a hammer to matches and banging on the fences in disgust when Andre lost a point. He sometimes screamed at officials and was ejected more than once. Andre was sent to Nick Bollettieri's Tennis Academy in Florida. Bollettieri called his father and said: "Take your check back. He's here for free," claiming that Agassi had more natural talent than anyone else he had seen.
After suffering from sciatica caused by two bulging discs in his back, a spondylolisthesis (vertebral displacement) and a bone spur that interferes with the nerve, Agassi retired from professional tennis on September 3, 2006, after losing in the third round of the US Open.
If it were to be only for genetics the perfect example would have been Björn Borg.
Had Rumstan Kamsky been taking a hammer to matches, nowadays we wouldn't get those funny quotes by Short to fire the chess forums.
joyntjezebel wrote:
hhnngg1 wrote:
Take 1000 kids, subject them to Laszlo Polgar's youth training system, and just about zero of them will be as good as the Polgar systems. You'll be lucky even if you have a handful that are even in their domain. Not too dissimilar to those rare Youtube musical prodigies who at age 5 can play with high virtuosity - their prodigy ability is FAR more a feature of their amazing talent than it is of the training they receive.
You say this with unjustified certainty. Nobody has in fact taken 1,000 random kids as you say. What the results of this would be remain unknown.
There is one example where three girls were taken, and they are all in the top 10 of female chess players ever, incl no 1, Judith.
I don't doubt that they had 2 brilliant parents, giving them a genetic advantage. But it is very hard indeed to believe that had they not had the early and intensive chess training they would have been just as good at specificly chess. If genes explains it then you would be better off taking world chamion male and female chess players and having them breed.
Genes pretty much explains it all. Sure, they DO need good teaching and training to express it, but without the talent, they're not the Polgar's - they're just average people.
3 sisters, all with very similar chess playing capability.
NO other similar young children have done this, meaning Laszlo Polgar's methods have been unsuccessful in being replicated by anyone else.
If your kid can play blindfold chess accurately and at a good level at age 6, I think you can say without question that it's much more a matter of talent than training.
If you actually try and train the typical 4-5 year old, not only will they fail to comprehend chess, they won't have the attention span to even pay attention to your teaching for more than 10 minutes.
I'd place all my bets that the Polgar girls would have been outstanding chess players with any serious chess coach, not just Laszlo's methodlogy.
Furthermore, this experiment HAS been repeated, ad nauseum, just not in chess. Hardcore Asian parents have long subjected their children to intensive academic (especially math) preparation, starting at age 2, many with almost a single-minded purpose. It's true that because of this method, Chinese children test far higher than the 'average' American child, but no educator would go so far as to say that these early prep methods are causing China to have an enormous number of math prodigies that eventually become world-class mathematicians at the world class level. If anything, it's staggering how normal the # of math geniuses are that come out of China despite the huge parental emphasis on math at an early age, many parents of which do in fact push their kids as hard if not harder than Polgar did, just in math, not chess.
hhnngg1 írta:
joyntjezebel wrote:
hhnngg1 wrote:
Take 1000 kids, subject them to Laszlo Polgar's youth training system, and just about zero of them will be as good as the Polgar systems. You'll be lucky even if you have a handful that are even in their domain. Not too dissimilar to those rare Youtube musical prodigies who at age 5 can play with high virtuosity - their prodigy ability is FAR more a feature of their amazing talent than it is of the training they receive.
You say this with unjustified certainty. Nobody has in fact taken 1,000 random kids as you say. What the results of this would be remain unknown.
There is one example where three girls were taken, and they are all in the top 10 of female chess players ever, incl no 1, Judith.
I don't doubt that they had 2 brilliant parents, giving them a genetic advantage. But it is very hard indeed to believe that had they not had the early and intensive chess training they would have been just as good at specificly chess. If genes explains it then you would be better off taking world chamion male and female chess players and having them breed.
Genes pretty much explains it all.
3 sisters, all with very similar chess playing capability.
NO other similar young children have done this, meaning Laszlo Polgar's methods have been unsuccessful in being replicated by anyone else.
If your kid can play blindfold chess accurately and at a good level at age 6, I think you can say without question that it's much more a matter of talent than training.
If you actually try and train the typical 4-5 year old, not only will they fail to comprehend chess, they won't have the attention span to even pay attention to your teaching for more than 10 minutes.
I'd place all my bets that the Polgar girls would have been outstanding chess players with any serious chess coach, not just Laszlo's methodlogy.
You're so ignorant that it hurts.
Please, at least do your research. Polgár's books are available in lots of languages.
Please do at least read one of them, and try to understand his point of view and methods before discarding them while it's so obvious you have no idea what even happened and what his study plan looked like.
P.S.: The girls actually received lessons from international masters and grandmasters, that was also the part of Polgár's study plan.
r4chess2 wrote:
I don't know what this post is trying to prove, and I don't think it proved it. Passion is important. Judit was committed to the game of chess, whereas Susan seemed more interested in the politics of the game and that interest possibly went all the way back to childhood. On the learning end of it: most of the knowledge we use as adults was learned when we were children; as adults we might expand on that knowledge (I would hope so) but the foundation is there from childhood. Many world champions started playing chess as teens and pre-teens (Capablance started at age 3 or 4), but I don't know a single one that started playing chess at 20 something. Maybe the wrong question was asked. What about this: if you take away Judits learning experience, in her chess education, as a child do you think she would have gone as far?
She almost certainly wouldn't have gone as far, but she would still be a total monster with minimal training.
Put it this way - there are plenty of kids today who's parents dream of them being a prodigy in music, chess, academics, etc. Some of them even push their kids pretty hard early on to get there. I can almost guarantee you that I was pushed similarly hard as Polgar to become a violin virtuoso starting at age 4, and I had excellent training in NYC that put me on the early track to Juilliard later on.
Here's the truth though: The VAST majority of kids going this route fail. Like 99%. The 1% who 'make it' and don't quite invariably are the most talented. You don't stick with an activity for 10+ years as a kid and devote hours per day to it unless you are a standout talent - even psycho aggressive parents cannot force you to undertake that much training. (Mine tried, trust me.)
Also, the correlations between language and chess learning are probably a stretch as well. Sure, there's absolutely benefit from learning chess patterns at an early age, but there is no neuroscientist who will say that chess will develop in kids' brain like language acquisition, which has it's own dedicated center. Just by speaking around kids, they pick up language, and very quickly and naturally. I play chess all the time with my daughter, 'play' chess games with her as often as possible, and teach her as much as her limited attention span provides, and trust me - her learning curve in chess is NOTHING like that of language, even with a motivated teacher like myself providing her training.
When I read of the Polgar sisters playing blindfold at age 6-7, accurately and well, it's abundantly clear that they are special talents with innate born special gifts. Just because they got good training as well doesn't mean those gifts aren't world-class special.
hhnngg1 írta:
Furthermore, this experiment HAS been repeated, ad nauseum, just not in chess. Hardcore Asian parents have long subjected their children to intensive academic (especially math) preparation, starting at age 2, many with almost a single-minded purpose. It's true that because of this method, Chinese children test far higher than the 'average' American child, but no educator would go so far as to say that these early prep methods are causing China to have an enormous number of math prodigies that eventually become world-class mathematicians at the world class level. If anything, it's staggering how normal the # of math geniuses are that come out of China despite the huge parental emphasis on math at an early age, many parents of which do in fact push their kids as hard if not harder than Polgar did, just in math, not chess.
Then I'd like to see those experiments being repeated.
Are there any paper? Any document? Any journal that record the successes?
Who are these 'prodigies of math'? Who are these parents; when did these experiments take place?
For some reason, there still exists the stereotype in americans, that "hardcore asian parents" are pushing their children, and so and so.
I don't know it's the internet fault for creating memes about how asians are always succesful, or whatever, but it's stupid as all hell.
I've met hundreds of (actually mostly chinese) asian people in my life, and surprise, surprise, they were all people just like everyone else.
On the other hand, we have an actual experiment that was well documented and was carried by professional pedagogists, an experiment explained and presented in books you can actually find in most libraries in who-knows-how-many language.
Sure, I'll take your word over a well documented experiment, any day.
If the Polgar's experiment is so accurate then, then it should be eminently repeatable across not just chess, but other domains. That is, if it's mainly nuture, not nature, people should be able to create other Polgars, if not Lebrons and Serena Williams and Stephen Hawkings.
If there's one thing that you absolutely do NOT need an experiment to discover, is that starting kids early, while affording them the possibility to become Lebron or Serena or Magnus, does not even remotely guarantee them to be in that category of excellence. If they don't have the talent, nothing you do will even get them close, even with lifelong training with the best teachers.
And do you think training kids with a GM will enable any typical kid to play blindfold chess at age 6? Seriously?!
One might argue that Serena did better than Venus because Serena brings more power, but I've watched them play for many years and Serena is more accurate.