The more interesting fact about Polgar is that her father trained her and her two sisters in chess as a science experiment. He wanted to prove that geniuses are made rather than born, so he intensively trained his three daughters to play chess from a very young age. All three are grandmasters, and Judit and Susan Polgar are the top two female chess players.
An important caveat here is that they had highly intelligent parents, and chess has high returns to practice and memorization. The success of this experiment does not prove that general intelligence is not highly heritable (Twin studies show that it is), or even that anyone could become a world-class chess player with sufficient training. It's not clear (and in my opinion is unlikely) that he would have had the same success if he and his wife had adopted the children of parents of below-average intelligence.
SgtRock1967 on February 7th, 2021 at 03:43 UTC »
I've never understood how anyone can have that mindset.
crunchyrats on February 7th, 2021 at 04:58 UTC »
Wow they should make a Netflix series like this
brberg on February 7th, 2021 at 05:26 UTC »
The more interesting fact about Polgar is that her father trained her and her two sisters in chess as a science experiment. He wanted to prove that geniuses are made rather than born, so he intensively trained his three daughters to play chess from a very young age. All three are grandmasters, and Judit and Susan Polgar are the top two female chess players.
An important caveat here is that they had highly intelligent parents, and chess has high returns to practice and memorization. The success of this experiment does not prove that general intelligence is not highly heritable (Twin studies show that it is), or even that anyone could become a world-class chess player with sufficient training. It's not clear (and in my opinion is unlikely) that he would have had the same success if he and his wife had adopted the children of parents of below-average intelligence.