[gaius]

When you can solve chess, you can solve a whole class of decision-making problems

If this were true, there would be a vast demand for grandmasters in commerce, government, the military... and there just isn’t. Poker players suffer from similar delusions about how their game can be generalised to other domains.

[raverbashing]

> Poker players suffer from similar delusions about how their game can be generalised to other domains.

Oh that's so true

Poker players in the real life would give up more often than not, whenever they didn't know enough about a situation or they didn't have enough resources for a win with a high probability.

And people can call your bluff even if you fold.

[_Tev]

Those traits seem to me like a thing most people desperately need ... Everyone being confident in their assessment of everything seems like one of major problems of today's population.

[majewsky]

I think batmansmk doesn't mean "when X is good at chess, X is automatically good at lots of other things", but "the traits that make you a good chess player (given enough training) also make you good at lots of other things (given enough training)".

[EliRivers]

I might suspect (but certainly cannot prove) that the traits that make a human good at playing chess are very different to the traits that make a machine good at playing chess, and as such I don't think we can assume that the machine skilled-chess-player will be good at lots of other things in an analagous way to the human skilled-chess-player.

[SiempreViernes]

And Gaius point stands before this argument as well, chess is seen as such a weak predictor that playing a game of chess or requesting an official ELO rating isn't used for hiring screening for instance.

I suspect that chess as a metagame is just so far developed that being "good at chess" means your general ability is really overtrained for chess.

[monktastic1]

Second world chess champion Emanuel Lasker spent a couple years studying Go and by his own report was dejected by his progress. Maybe he would have eventually reached high levels, but I've always found this story fascinating.

[taneq]

True, but I'd phrase it the other way around. The traits that make you (a human) good at general problem solving are also the traits that make you a good chess player. I do suspect, though, that there are some Chess-specific traits which boost your Chess performance but don't help much with general intelligence. (Consider, for example, the fact that Bobby Fischer wasn't considered a genius outside of his chosen field.)