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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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Why are Americans falling behind in “brain-y” competitions? Or, if we haven’t fallen behind, why have we always been bad at them?

League of Legends is holding their Worlds competition, and most of the North American region teams did not make it past the first stage. The performance of NA teams has been poor compared to Chinese and Korean teams. The one NA team that has done okay is mainly comprised of non-Americans. The NA region actually has more players than the Korean region, and there are serious incentives to get a high-performing team together.

I have also noticed that in the chess world, most of the top grandmasters are first or second generation Americans. Despite only comprising 25% of Americans, they make up 19 of the top 20 players (only Sam Shankland afaik is the exception). It is not as if the immigrant competitors are all from the former Soviet Union or another chess-heavy region, either, but you find Italy, the Philippines, Japan, and China represented too. (Possibly, because Hispanics are so much of 1st/2nd gen but not represented in chess world, it could be more like 5% make up 95%.)

What explains the loss of American high achievers in intellectual competitions? Google Code has similar results, as does Overwatch. Could there be an environmental cause?

What explains the loss of American high achievers in intellectual competitions?

Does video/computer games count as an intellectual competition? I think cultural differences may explain this. Competitive computer games are very popular in Asia.

Call of Duty and CounterStrike, no IMO. But MOBAs require quick, intelligent application of pattern-matching.

Who would win, a team of 20 APM guys who know what all the abilities do or a team of 200APM former starcraft players that have never played a moba before? Similarly, is a clock win in bullet chess a good measure of chess skill? Kinda right? But in both cases being quick is more effective than being smart for the majority of the bell curve.

Intelligence can be measured separately from processing speed, but they are strongly correlated - processing speed explains 80% of the variation in intelligence. So to a first approximation the faster team is smarter. Edit: added link.

the way i see it for bullet chess at least, there's a skill/intelligence floor you have to clear so that you can see valid non disaster moves. Beyond that literally just moving the pieces faster is more valuable until you get to an Elo where people are actually trying to mate. Your point is true but mechanical speed seems like a distinct quality.

processing speed explains 80% of the variation in intelligence

Citation? This is equivalent to saying the correlation between IQ and reaction time is r^2=0.8. Studies I found with trivial googling suggest this claim if false:

Is general intelligence little more than the speed of higher-order processing?

Here we show in a sample of 122 participants, who completed a battery of RT tasks at 2 laboratory sessions while an EEG was recorded, that more intelligent individuals have a higher speed of higher-order information processing that explains about 80% of the variance in general intelligence.

Note that this is "speed of higher-order information processing" which is not the same as reaction time.

Ahh, fascinating - thank you!