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Comment by pvaldes | Hacker News Reader

Somebody has the huge talent to learn multiple languages and interact with millions on a privileged position, but choose instead to earn the title of "king of scrabble". I'm unsure about if this history is comedy or drama.

My suggestion to this person would be to be much more ambitious with this life. He has the skills.

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As far as I understand, he's not actually learning the languages he play in, he is "just" memorising words from the dictionary.

Probably would make it way easier if he decided he wanted to learn one of those languages, but just knowing words doesn't make you proficient in comprehension and be able to create sentences.

It's not even really learning the words, just how they are spelled. It's basically just pattern recognition.

Would you say the same about other silly things people pursue? We just had the article about the 18 year old chess champion. Surely dedicating your life to chess is about as silly as dedicating your life to scrabble. But we celebrate the chess master, and don't wonder aloud why he didn't pursue more ambitions things...

>interact with millions on a privileged position

What does this mean? Does learning multiple languages automatically make you famous? 43% of the world's population is bilingual.

Who are you to tell someone how to live their life? Winning a Scrabble championship isn’t hurting anyone.

Not that I agree or disagree, but they probably think it’s waste of intellect. Like how good will hunting portrays being a janitor a waste of his talents.

Nobody has a right to another’s intellect. It’s totally unreasonable to criticize someone’s life choices like this.

It is not really learning the language, think of it has having such a good memory he can keep and process (to formulate strategies over the board) hundreds of thousands of strings, he might or not keep metadata on the strings but what matters is knowing they can be played.

Being a scrabble champion is not mutually exclusive to real-world impact. If a Scrabble expert lived a day in our shoes as software developers, I bet they'd think we're a net drain on society too.

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