I'm generally skeptical of causal narratives like this, but Naroditsky talked openly and at length about the ongoing physical and mental health effects of Kramnik's nonsense. So in this particular case, I'm comfortable blaming Kramnik either way.

A big percentage of the top grandmasters skip high school and almost none of them have went to college. They are “smart” in that they have the potential intelligence to learn that stuff, as demonstrated by them having learned chess, but they have basically no knowledge of statistics, mathematics, plenty of other general knowledge topics.

From that point of view, you should really consider them to be as knowledgeable about these things as high school dropouts. It was hilarious following the whole cheating thing and seeing them try to interpret these statistical results and coming to really stupid conclusions.

You could say it’s difficult to see them this way due to the cultural and historical perspectives on chess but this is the reality of top grandmasters at this time.

I would call chess players smart in the abstract sense. Playing chess requires both good "compute power", working memory, and long-term memorization.

But to become grandmaster you have to dedicate a lot of your life to chess. It's not that these people couldn't know general knowledge or do higher math, they are simply not exposed to it. They are not smart in the sense of a universal genius, because that would require immersing yourself in all the things - the opposite of what a chess grandmaster does

> The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman.

> The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.