I'll Take Nazi War Criminals for $200, Alex!

Tom McMahon finds (in his bottom desk drawer?) a chart of IQs of defendants at the Nuremberg trials. What strikes me as interesting are two things. One, that we did it at all: folks really believed in that stuff in those days. And two, the scores aren't really all that dazzling. Okay, nobody is exactly a box of nails but the range from a ho-hum 106 (Julius Streicher) up to a not-quite-so-ho-hum 143. And that last is Hjalmar Schacht, more precisely Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, the evil genius behind the Nazi's pre-war fiscal policy; he fell out of favor and actually ended the war in a concentration camp, having plotted to overthrow the regime (it is a moot point how far he was motivated by hostility to Hitler and how far by his own zeal to return to power). The vainglorious Herman Goering gets only a 138; the oily and manipulative Albert Speer, only 128.

Questions: how much does this matter, and how? Would these guys have been more effective if smarter? Or stupider? And, just for deviltry, how would these scores stack up against the leadership of the U. S. House of Representatives.

Poker, Chess and "IQ"

Second Tyler Cowen post today. Tyler is hubba hubba over the fact that Steve Levitt made the top tier (or maybe he didn’t) in the World Series of Poker (link). It took Tyler to the second paragraph to work in the tag “IQ”:

So how many dimensions does IQ have?

He drops it there, but even as posed, it is a backhanded recognition of a stark fact: insofar as poker takes “IQ,” takes a highly specialized form of IQ. Say what you will about calculation, bluffing, reading the table: the stark fact is that very few poker players are much good at anything else, and many are really terrible at anything else. Bill Buckley once said something picking the government from the first page of the Boston phone book. Would you want your government chosen from the roster at an international chess championship?

Tyler also says that “Some top chess players, such as Etienne Bacrot” are moving to poker. I admit I never heard of Etienne Bacrot, but I doubt that very many top chess players are moving to poker. Insofar as chess takes IQ, it takes a very different sort of IQ from poker—lots of visual imagination. I doubt that the “innate” qualities are easily transferable.

I don’t play either chess or poker, but I do spend a lot of time reading in coffee shops near university campuses, so I’ve had a chance to observe a fair amount of chess. I offer two thoughts:

• A lot of these guys look to me like they learned their skills in the joint. Which would stand to reason: low opportunity cost on their time.

• A lot of the really good ones are black. Which may or may not stand to reason but it probably violates a common perception. I’m just waiting for the first black grandmaster, so I can watch Charles Murray explain him away (link).

Fn: Wait a minute! Here he is (link)! So much for common perception. And here is an interesting post on the general topic of prejudice against blacks in chess (link).