yeah, not to belabor it, but if you can do something like be a champion in go or chess, chances are you have the mental skillset to do something exponentially more lucrative.
A Chess or Go champion is probably doing the single-most lucrative activity that they are capable of.
What the person you're responding to means is that if they have the mental capacity (and also discipline) to play the game at such a high level, they could probably also excel in other professions if their goal was to make money instead of doing something they loved.
Of course we can debate whether they would achieve such success if they were doing something they didn't enjoy as much, but I think most people would argue that most chess or go champions could make more money or in other words do more "lucrative" activities if they chose to do them instead of dedicated all their time to the game.
You seem to be arguing against the idea, "A chess grandmaster is a genius and therefore can walk into Google and immediately start doing more and better work than most of their senior programmers". I don't think anyone believes this (correct me if I'm wrong).
I think a more serious idea is, "A chess grandmaster is a genius and therefore learns faster and has a higher performance ceiling and such than most people, and if they spent a couple of years learning to program, they could become an entry-level Google programmer, after which they would rise more quickly than most hires, and eventually would outperform most of Google's senior programmers."
By the way, I think most of the best chess players were extreme chess prodigies. (Just looked at Kasparov, Karpov, Shirov, Kramnik, Anand, and Carlsen's Wiki pages; all but Kramnik had the year listed, and they all became grandmasters around age 17-19, except Carlsen, who was around 14. Kramnik's page mentioned winning a gold medal for the Russian team at age 16, and that he wasn't a grandmaster when selected for the team and this was unusual.) I think this is consistent with them being highly gifted children, who choose to spend their time doing chess.
While not exactly what you wrote, people do think that someone is a genius at some subject can become a genius at another area with less work than it took for someone in either field to originally become a genius at that field, especially society groups the areas together (so sports star becoming master programmer is far less likely to be believed than chess master becoming master programmer).
Do you have a reference for that please? I'm interested in the subject.
Of course chess grandmasters aren't all-around geniuses, but many traits that are prerequisites for a successful chess player certainly are translatable into careers in other fields, and correlate with above average brainpower (good memory, discipline, long attention span, spatial intelligence etc.)
Botvinnik was an accomplished engineer, Euwe had PhD in mathematics, Anatoly Karpov is a millionaire, interestingly enough a lot of recognized chess players had careers in music (like Taimanov or Smyslov)...
Being a grandmaster surely requires an above average intellect, there is no such thing as a chess savant. While it's an urban legend that Kasparov's (arguably the greatest chess player ever) IQ was in the ballpark of 190, he did clock at 135. Such a result is not unheard of, yet still placing him in top 1% or so.
> In a recent review, Ericsson and Lehmann (1996) found that (1) measures of general basic capacities do not predict success in a domain, (2) the superior performance of experts is often very domain specific and transfer outside their narrow area of expertise is surprisingly limited and (3) systematic differences between experts and less proficient individuals nearly always reflect attributes acquired by the experts during their lengthy training.
I will say this for Chess or Go grandmasters: They have drive and dedication (and in some cases, compulsiveness). That alone would probably allow them to do better than the average person in another field if they had pursued that field from the get-go. Also, I'd caution you against relying on hand-picked anecdotes; I could just as easily pick out a bunch of Chess players who weren't good for anything else. You'd need broad-based statistics.
1. A champion Go/Chess player could retire, and jump a successful career as <Something else>. You refute 1.
2. A champion Go/Chess player could have pursued a career in <Something else> from the start and made more money. You have not refuted 2.
For an example, many physics PhDs become successful software engineers and quants, making a mid-career jump to a different field.
For example, my brilliant programmer friend that can't hold a job. Or the artist that can only paint their own inspirations. Or the savant that doesn't get along with anybody.
Generally I'd guess you're right though.
I'm not sure how you define "deranged" (AFAIK, that's not a medically defined term within the DSM-IV) but most of those brilliant people end up being a little 'off'. My father was an academic, one of the people he went to graduate school with was working in Boston while I was a child. He was absolutely groundbreaking work but he's so difficult to collaborate with (think: the mannerisms of Richard Stallman) that he's been floating around universities until his welcome is worn out. He can figure out remarkable things in higher level computational chemistry, but he can't really figure out humans. Had he decided instead during the 80s to work at Renaissance instead of pursuing academic research, he almost certainly would be worth in the low hundreds of millions.