I was reading through Michael Nielsen's blog post on augmenting long term memory, and while all the material on Anki is fascinating, one excerpt that really stood out to me was when he talked about how chess masters recognized larger "chunks" of the board, patterns of organization of pieces, as opposed to novices simply recognizing the position of certain singular pieces on the board.
The specific quote that prompted me to write this zettel was this:
In particular, someone with a lower IQ but able to call on more complex chunks would be able to reason about more complex situations than someone with a higher IQ but less complex internalized chunks.
- Michael Nielsen, in his blog post on augmenting long term memory.
Is that not just a very sciencey way to say "hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard?
Take, for example, somebody with an IQ that allows to them to keep 7 working chunks in their memory at any point of time. Let's take them to be a chess player, simply because the squares of a chessboard offer a suitable medium for the discussion of this question.
With years of practice, they manage to get the number of squares in each chunk of their memory from 1 to 6.
They come up against a supremely talented chess player, one with the capacity to keep almost double the number of working chunks in their memory, 12 chunks. However, due to a lackadaisical attitude, family problems, lacking discipline, or whatever the cause, our hero gifted by the heavens has only managed to get each chunk to contain 3 squares.
Our hard-working chess player, now seated at the table, can conceivably hold a total of 42 squares in her memory, while the talented one can hold 36. Assuming that the outcome of the match is purely dictated by the number of working squares held in memory, in this case, hard work does beat talent.
Of course, this is not always absolute - sometimes the gap in natural talent can be so large that no matter how many base units you manage to encode in your chunk, you fall short. It also rests on the assumption that the outcome and effort are so directly linked, that the number of chunks you can hold in your memory are fixed, and so on and so forth.
But it is an interesting thing to think about nonetheless.