Log24

From "Kubrick," by Michael Herr, Vanity Fair , August 1999—

"He disliked the usual references to his having been a 'chess hustler' in his Greenwich Village days, as though this impugned the gravity and beauty of the exercise, the suggestion that his game wasn’t pour le sport  or, more correctly, pour l’art . To win the game was important, to win the money was irresistible, but it was nothing compared with his game, with the searching, endless action of working on his game. But of course he was hustling, he was always hustling; as he grew older and moved beyond still photography, chess became movies, and movies became chess by other means. I doubt that he ever thought of chess as just a game, or even as a game at all. I do imagine that a lot of people sitting across the board from him got melted, fried, and fragmented when Stanley let that cool ray come streaming down out of his eyes— talk about penetrating looks and piercing intelligence; here they’d sat down to a nice game of chess, and all of a sudden he was doing the thinking for both of them."

From Part II of an interview with Peter Woit by Gerald Alper
in Smashpipe  published March 1, 2016:

"For just a moment, he allows himself to become self reflective: 'I was always a smart kid. A very smart kid. I suppose if I ever took a standardized test I would do very well, especially, in the area of abstract reasoning.'

Peter Woit says this as matter-of-factly as if he said, 'When I was a kid my father drove a Chevrolet.' He says it as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, if asked to describe how he became the person he is, might have said 'I was always a tall kid. A very tall kid. In school, short kids bored me.'

I felt I had to say, 'but there must be a few million people in the United States who would also score very high in abstract thinking in the standardized tests and none of them have your interests.'

'The people around here all do. And there are thousands of us all around the world.'

'But there are 7 billion people in the world.'

Peter Woit had to concede the mathematical point, but I don't think he appreciated the psychological distinction I was alluding to. There is an astonishing divide between the culture of science and the culture of humanities that C.P. Snow famously alluded to. There is even a greater divide between the culture of pure mathematics and the culture of the earthbound evolutionarily programmed biological world into which we are born.

There is a celebrated quip by Dick Cavett that encapsulates this. Reflecting on his famous interview of the then reigning world chess champion, Bobby Fischer, he observed:

'Throughout the interview I could feel the force of his IQ.'

Paraphrasing this I could say that throughout the interview, which was at times exhilarating, at times daunting, I could feel the force of his two hundred QMIQ (quantum mechanics IQ). Norman Mailer once commented that the immediacy of television— the fact that most influential people in the world can be brought into your living room— creates the illusion that you have thereby been included in their inner power circle, and to that extent vicariously empowered. But you are no closer to the corridors of power then you were before. Analogously, you can sit just a few feet away from a world-class expert, close enough to reach out and touch them, but you are no closer to their accumulated wisdom— unless you are willing to go home and put in ten thousand hours of hard work trying to raise the level of your understanding."