Yes he did, but taken literally the statement is tautological. Did Zvi really mean it that way?
Take any population of kids whom you would intuitively agree to describe as “sufficiently talented”. Not “sufficiently talented” for something, but just “sufficiently talented” in a broad sense—say, the student population of some sort of magnet school. Now compare the median person in that population to Gukesh Dommaraju.
What does the latter tells us about the former, in terms of whether members of the former set are adults’ peers at intellectual work?
I agree that one person isn’t very much evidence, but in general, the fact that there are many talented young chess players all up and down the distribution of chess ability, does seem like good evidence that children can become the intellectual peers of adults if they are put into a position to spend lots of time doing so.
For example, if you took the student population of a magnet school and put it up against the population of some random Google department, and gave them all three months to prepare for a chess tournament, I wouldn’t consider the magnet school to be underdogs.
It’s tautological it the number of such minors is allowed to be zero, so by the maxim of relevance he probably meant to suggest it is not negligible—but not necessarily also that it is close to 50%, especially not 50% among the general population rather than just 50% among the children of the kind of people he is talking to and/or about.
(and “not negligible” is not a terribly high bar: if one kid in a million is like that, you only need 20 bits of evidence to know a particular kid is one of them)
Yes he did, but taken literally the statement is tautological. Did Zvi really mean it that way?
Take any population of kids whom you would intuitively agree to describe as “sufficiently talented”. Not “sufficiently talented” for something, but just “sufficiently talented” in a broad sense—say, the student population of some sort of magnet school. Now compare the median person in that population to Gukesh Dommaraju.
What does the latter tells us about the former, in terms of whether members of the former set are adults’ peers at intellectual work?
I agree that one person isn’t very much evidence, but in general, the fact that there are many talented young chess players all up and down the distribution of chess ability, does seem like good evidence that children can become the intellectual peers of adults if they are put into a position to spend lots of time doing so.
For example, if you took the student population of a magnet school and put it up against the population of some random Google department, and gave them all three months to prepare for a chess tournament, I wouldn’t consider the magnet school to be underdogs.
It’s tautological it the number of such minors is allowed to be zero, so by the maxim of relevance he probably meant to suggest it is not negligible—but not necessarily also that it is close to 50%, especially not 50% among the general population rather than just 50% among the children of the kind of people he is talking to and/or about.
(and “not negligible” is not a terribly high bar: if one kid in a million is like that, you only need 20 bits of evidence to know a particular kid is one of them)