Kenneth Campbell wrote:
> Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence
> as you can find outside an advertising agency.
> -- Raymond Chandler
I love the sting in the tail of this quotation. (Where does it come from, incidentally?) Wasn't Chandler at one point or another of his life linked to both chess and advertising as ways of earning a living?
I think, however, the collocation of advertising and chess brings up the point Miles has made in several recent posts, that "intelligence" means something different in almost every context in which it is used.
I suspect that advertising-agency intelligence could be implemented in many socially useful activities (I include casual entertainment under the heading of "socially useful," at least in many contexts), but chess is an extremely narrow and specialized intelligence, and probablty not implementable in many human activities except chess.
Perhaps it would overlap cryptanalysis. NSA back in the '50s found that math and music majors on average made the best cryptanalysts. All three are fields, like chess, in which one encounters child prodigies. And I doubt that any of these intelligences would be particularly useful in an advertising agency.
Carrol