Astral Codex Ten

Garry Kasparov

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Garry Kasparov

Article

Garry Kasparov is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 25, 2023 and August 04, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “For example, Garry Kasparov, former chess champion, took an IQ test”; “On Garry Kasparov’s anti-Putin campaign: Kasparov was not just agitating for his point of view”. It most often appears alongside AI, Albert Einstein, Alexander Alexandrov.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: July 25, 2023
  • Last seen: August 04, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

We're Not Platonists, We've Just Learned The Bitter Lesson
July 25, 2023 · Original source
Some people are athletes or body-builders, and they’re really into increasing all facets of strength as much as possible, and these people will have more of all facets of strength than people who don’t have this interest. A more general answer might be that arm muscles are similar enough to leg muscles, and linked enough by being in the same body, that overall we expect their performance to be pretty correlated. 2: Do The Assumptions That Make “Intelligence” A Coherent Concept Hold? All human intellectual abilities are correlated. This is the famous g, closely related to IQ. People who are good at math are more likely to be good at writing, and vice versa. Just to give an example, SAT verbal scores are correlated 0.72 with SAT math scores. These links don’t always hold. Some people are brilliant writers, but can’t do math to save their lives. Some people are idiot savants who have low intelligence in most areas but very high skill in one. But that’s what it means to have a correlation of 0.72 instead of 1.00. It can be surprising both how much everything is correlated and how little everything is correlated. For example, Garry Kasparov, former chess champion, took an IQ test and got 135. You can think of this two different ways: "Wow, someone who’s literally the best chess player on earth only has a pretty high (as opposed to fantastically high) IQ, probably lower than some professors at the local university. It’s amazing how poorly-correlated intellectual abilities can be.”
Inline links: 0.72, 135
More Memorable Passages From "The Man Without A Face"
August 04, 2023 · Original source
On Garry Kasparov’s anti-Putin campaign:
Kasparov was not just agitating for his point of view; he was also attempting to gather and spread information, turning himself inyo a one-man substitute for the hijacked news media. He grilled local sympathizers about the situation in their region, then passed this information on. His chess player’s memory was invaluable: according to one of his assistants, he had never kept a phone book, because he could not help remembering every phone number he heard. Now he was constantly aggregating and averaging in his mind. He kept a running tally of the percentage of local taxes each region was allowed to keep, the problems opposition activists faced, and details of speech and behavior he found telling. Now that local and national media existed only to spread the government’s message, information had to be gathered in this piecemeal manner.
In Rostov, where Kasparov spoke in front of the public library - he had been scheduled to speak in the library itself, but it had been shut down, under the pretense of a burst pipe - a young man approached his assistant, gave her his business card, and said he wanted to participate as a local organizer. When I asked his name, he said “That’s impossible, I’ll get fired immediately.” As I later learned from Kasparov’s assistant, the man was an instructor at a state college.