Sunday, December 06, 2009

Another Motivational Poster

4 comments:

just another blonde said...

Funny, but easily refuted:

http://susanpolgar.blogspot.com/2006/09/polgar-girls-shine-in-virginia.html

stuartresnick said...

Thanks for the link, JAB. (It's about world-class chess-player Susan Polgar.) It's a refutation of the motivational poster, though, only if Polgar is blond. The article makes no mention of her hair color.

So I searched for blond chess players, and politely declined Google's suggestion, "Did you mean 'blind chess players'?"

The top link led to a review of The Story of a Chess Player. This book, though, is merely about a chess player who wants to marry a blond woman, and thus irrelevent to our current discussion.

(This review was on the site of Jeremy Silman. Silman is a great Australian chess player who happens to have a guru. His guru is Shankarananda, my old friend, whom I met over late-night chess games at Swami Muktananda's ashram in Ganeshpuri India in the early 80s. But this sheds no light on our discussion either.)

No big deal, since I posted the motivational poster purely because it made me laugh, and not to advance stereotypes of blonds. I believe that if there's any connection between intelligence and hair-color, the corrolation is sufficiently weak that we'll always have more reliable methods of gauging IQ... in those rare cases where such judgements are necessary.

just another notblonde said...

She looks blonde enough to me, (thats her pic on the site) though it may be 'enhanced.'

I'm not blonde either, natural or bottle-blonde, just found the cheap shot annoying, even though it was funny.

Its quite an old-fashioned notion that IQ can be measured in any meaningful way, a good chess player has certain skills at chess which may not translate to much intelligence at handling other, equally important aspects of life. Who decides what is more important in life anyway?
Anyway, its the puppy that makes the poster funny, not the blonde or the cheap shot. :-)

Martin Gifford said...

I know a blonde model with a degree in philosophy!