Wanna get a million views? Make stuff up. Take a tiny tiny bit of truth and distort it wildly. Consider the tweet below, 1.4M views. Take th…

Wanna get a million views? Make stuff up. Take a tiny tiny bit of truth and distort it wildly. Consider the tweet below, 1.4M views. Take the chess thing. The paper that is linked doesn’t actually say that “among elite chess players people with lowest IQ are best.” or anything close to that. It actually concludes that “When we tested the whole sample of children, some of whom had just recently started to play chess, we found a moderately positive correlation between intelligence and chess skill” (though they found something different in a tiny, selective sample), and in any case most of the paper is about kids, not adults. [https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/bitstream/2438/642/1/Does%20Chess%20Need%20Intelligence-revision-finalINT.pdf]. And yeah Michael Jordan and LeBron and Kobe were shorter than Manute Bol but all were better than Muggsy Bogues and Spud Webb. No data given for that part here. And Robert Redford was pretty darn talented etc. No data given for acting here, either. Wild oversimplifications will get you a million views on X. But a lot of what you read here (and I don’t just mean this tweet) ain’t true. Among elite chess players, those with the lowest IQ are the best. Among NBA players, the shortest ones are the best. Among Hollywood actors, the least attractive are the most talented. Among elite academics, those with poorer early academic performance are the best. Among people …

Source: Gary Marcus (X) | 2026-05-09