Or the helpless look of Aja Huang... like "I have no idea how to decipher that neural network, that's part of why you are here".

If it really was about money, I don't think he would have spent so much of his life dedicated to Go ...

yeah, not to belabor it, but if you can do something like be a champion in go or chess, chances are you have the mental skillset to do something exponentially more lucrative.

This is not true. Scientific studies have shown that skills in abstract strategy games are so specific to the game that they do not transfer to other tasks. The urban legend about Chess grandmasters all being geniuses is false, in other words. They're actually worse at most jobs than people who've been doing those jobs for awhile, because they lack the experience, and they aren't more predisposed to having a genius intellect that would let them overcome that.

A Chess or Go champion is probably doing the single-most lucrative activity that they are capable of.

What scientific studies are you referring to?

Of course chess grandmasters aren't all-around geniuses, but many traits that are prerequisites for a successful chess player certainly are translatable into careers in other fields, and correlate with above average brainpower (good memory, discipline, long attention span, spatial intelligence etc.)

Botvinnik was an accomplished engineer, Euwe had PhD in mathematics, Anatoly Karpov is a millionaire, interestingly enough a lot of recognized chess players had careers in music (like Taimanov or Smyslov)...

Being a grandmaster surely requires an above average intellect, there is no such thing as a chess savant. While it's an urban legend that Kasparov's (arguably the greatest chess player ever) IQ was in the ballpark of 190, he did clock at 135. Such a result is not unheard of, yet still placing him in top 1% or so.

There's a whole body of research out there, but I just scratched the surface of it. Here's the first result that's coming up from a random Google search. https://psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.html The references should be worth exploring, and I bet there's more recent research that expands on it as well. Here's a quote from the paper:

> In a recent review, Ericsson and Lehmann (1996) found that (1) measures of general basic capacities do not predict success in a domain, (2) the superior performance of experts is often very domain specific and transfer outside their narrow area of expertise is surprisingly limited and (3) systematic differences between experts and less proficient individuals nearly always reflect attributes acquired by the experts during their lengthy training.

I will say this for Chess or Go grandmasters: They have drive and dedication (and in some cases, compulsiveness). That alone would probably allow them to do better than the average person in another field if they had pursued that field from the get-go. Also, I'd caution you against relying on hand-picked anecdotes; I could just as easily pick out a bunch of Chess players who weren't good for anything else. You'd need broad-based statistics.

You seem to be confusing two different claims:

1. A champion Go/Chess player could retire, and jump a successful career as <Something else>. You refute 1.

2. A champion Go/Chess player could have pursued a career in <Something else> from the start and made more money. You have not refuted 2.

For an example, many physics PhDs become successful software engineers and quants, making a mid-career jump to a different field.

Thanks for the link. Well, of course I just quoted a few examples without pretending it's legitimate piece of statistics, however, there hasn't been all that many world chess champions so far (and Botvinnik, Smyslov, Euwe, Karpov, belong in that category), and thus a few PhDs or successful intellectual careers is already enough to show that something clearly sets this bunch apart from the general public. You're less likely to find a plumber or a shelf-stacker in that bus (no disrespect for people in these professions). Whatever causes that is another matter. I agree with you that drive and dedication - and not necessarily some innate talents - could be the crucial factor in this.

I'm not sure you're disagreeing with the person you're responding to. Just because the skills involved are very specific doesn't imply that the people with those skills only are capable of obtaining said skill.

What the person you're responding to means is that if they have the mental capacity (and also discipline) to play the game at such a high level, they could probably also excel in other professions if their goal was to make money instead of doing something they loved.

Of course we can debate whether they would achieve such success if they were doing something they didn't enjoy as much, but I think most people would argue that most chess or go champions could make more money or in other words do more "lucrative" activities if they chose to do them instead of dedicated all their time to the game.

You are relying too much on the concept of a generalized mental capacity, which many researchers (maybe even most) would say does not exist. You seem to be assuming that grandmasters are just amazingly smart and they happen to apply those smarts to one particular skill, but what's closer to the truth is that they happen to be particularly amazing at that one skill, in a way that doesn't really correlate strongly with having amazingly high skill in other areas.

If you took the people who would have grown up to be chess grandmasters, intercepted them just before they started spending significant amounts of time studying chess, and had them instead spend all that time studying programming or physics or something, how do you think they would rank up?

You seem to be arguing against the idea, "A chess grandmaster is a genius and therefore can walk into Google and immediately start doing more and better work than most of their senior programmers". I don't think anyone believes this (correct me if I'm wrong).

I think a more serious idea is, "A chess grandmaster is a genius and therefore learns faster and has a higher performance ceiling and such than most people, and if they spent a couple of years learning to program, they could become an entry-level Google programmer, after which they would rise more quickly than most hires, and eventually would outperform most of Google's senior programmers."

By the way, I think most of the best chess players were extreme chess prodigies. (Just looked at Kasparov, Karpov, Shirov, Kramnik, Anand, and Carlsen's Wiki pages; all but Kramnik had the year listed, and they all became grandmasters around age 17-19, except Carlsen, who was around 14. Kramnik's page mentioned winning a gold medal for the Russian team at age 16, and that he wasn't a grandmaster when selected for the team and this was unusual.) I think this is consistent with them being highly gifted children, who choose to spend their time doing chess.

>I don't think anyone believes this (correct me if I'm wrong).

While not exactly what you wrote, people do think that someone is a genius at some subject can become a genius at another area with less work than it took for someone in either field to originally become a genius at that field, especially society groups the areas together (so sports star becoming master programmer is far less likely to be believed than chess master becoming master programmer).

But what about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)?

> Scientific studies have shown that skills in abstract strategy games are so specific to the game that they do not transfer to other tasks

Do you have a reference for that please? I'm interested in the subject.

Though being able to compel yourself to do great things seems like a completely different skill set from being able to do great things on someone else's dime or on a team.

For example, my brilliant programmer friend that can't hold a job. Or the artist that can only paint their own inspirations. Or the savant that doesn't get along with anybody.

I dunno, Bobby Fischer was kinda deranged, for instance, and that often hurts outcomes in otherwise "lucrative" positions. Incidentally, he is credited with raising chess player compensation through his demands.

Generally I'd guess you're right though.

Maybe not a leadership position but I've worked on the engineering side of quant work and am familiar enough with fairly advanced Go / Chess players (e.g. national youth champions for age brackets for the US) to know that most of them could make enough to retire off one years salary during the boom years of algorithmic trading (~2003-2007ish).

I'm not sure how you define "deranged" (AFAIK, that's not a medically defined term within the DSM-IV) but most of those brilliant people end up being a little 'off'. My father was an academic, one of the people he went to graduate school with was working in Boston while I was a child. He was absolutely groundbreaking work but he's so difficult to collaborate with (think: the mannerisms of Richard Stallman) that he's been floating around universities until his welcome is worn out. He can figure out remarkable things in higher level computational chemistry, but he can't really figure out humans. Had he decided instead during the 80s to work at Renaissance instead of pursuing academic research, he almost certainly would be worth in the low hundreds of millions.

Well, mental issues did break his chess career just the same.

With the number of tournaments he has won (many of which have a winner's purse of <$100 000) I suspect he is already a millionaire.

Those are the big tournaments -- do the little tournaments stack up, or is it a year of practice leading up to an annual big win?

I can not find it using google, but there was a Go champion who had stop playing go during one year to earn money playing mah jong.

False dichotomy? It is quite possible to enjoy an activity and gain money at the same time.

The best (like absolute best) football|basketball|baseball players in the world make approximately what per game?

Well, defensive end Olivier Vernon just signed a deal with the New York Giants which will pay him an average annual salary of around 17 million dollars. And there was a huge signing bonus as well.[1]

NFL seasons are 16 regular season games, plus 4 pre-season games. And then there are the playoffs, which a given team might or might not make or advance in.

All told, given that the signing bonus is amortized over all the games he plays, the annual salary, etc., I think it would be fair to say that Vernon will make around a million dollars a game.

Aside: Vernon isn't necessarily "the best" DE in the NFL, but due to market forces and the way things work with the salary cap, free agency rules, etc., the contract he just signed is one of the largest for a defensive player in the league. QB's tend to make even more, but I can't recall a really high profile QB who has signed a big deal recently.

[1]: http://www.spotrac.com/nfl/new-york-giants/olivier-vernon/

Osweiler QB from the Broncos just signed a huge deal with the Texans...$18mil/year but I haven't heard how much of that is guaranteed so I'm sure.

A really big issue with NFL contracts is this "guaranteed money" thing...I believe the NFL is the only major US sports league who give player contracts without it, so you have to take those salary numbers with a grain of salt.

34 guaranteed over first two years

Football is kind of an oddcase since it the most popular sport in the richest country, and it runs very few games per year.

Best is around 10x that, but at the cost of their body and long term health. Nobody is playing professional football|basketball|baseball in there 50's, and even just 40 is pushing it. Where pro go players can 60+.

Gordie Howe played in the NHL until he was 53.[1]

Not really refuting your statement, which is essentially true, but it's worth your time to read the wikipedia page.

He played on a professional hockey team with his two adult sons at one point(!). He played in the NHL in five different decades.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordie_Howe

Yep, it's interesting to see a few edge cases out there. There are a tiny number of people that came close to 50 in baseball:basketball:football.

  Julio Franco played baseball till 49.
  George Blanda played football till 48
  Nat Hickey played baseball till 45.

Interestingly, the world champions seem rather young.

If as many people who pay to watch (NFL|NBA|MLB) paid to watch Go, you'd likely see similar payouts.

I would like to see AlphaGo play 21 against Steph Curry.