"The chess player who develops the ability to play two dozen boards at a time will benefit from learning to compress his or her analysis into less time"
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Multitasking, in vos Savant's telling, isn’t a superpower so much as a forced redesign of the mind’s workflow. The image of the simultaneous-exhibition chess player is a neat piece of cultural shorthand: public brilliance, rapid pattern recognition, and the quiet grind of holding many futures in your head at once. But the real target isn’t chess. It’s the modern prestige of speed.
Her phrasing shifts the focus from “seeing more” to “compressing analysis into less time,” which is a subtle demystification. The advantage doesn’t come from some mystical increase in intelligence; it comes from learning which parts of thinking can be streamlined, delegated to intuition, or discarded. That’s a very vos Savant move: treat genius as technique, not aura. The subtext is slightly admonishing, too. If you want to handle more, you don’t get to keep indulging every analytical impulse. You must become ruthless about relevance.
Context matters: vos Savant’s public persona has long been tied to quantified intelligence and problem-solving in digestible formats. This line fits a late-20th-century obsession with optimization, from self-help productivity to corporate “efficiency” culture, translated into an elegant metaphor. It also sneaks in an important corrective: compression isn’t the same as shallowness. Good compression preserves structure; it just cuts the wasted motion.
The intent, then, is both practical and philosophical: complexity doesn’t demand more time, it demands better thinking habits. The implicit challenge is uncomfortable: if you can’t scale your attention, maybe the problem isn’t capacity. It’s your inability to edit yourself.
Her phrasing shifts the focus from “seeing more” to “compressing analysis into less time,” which is a subtle demystification. The advantage doesn’t come from some mystical increase in intelligence; it comes from learning which parts of thinking can be streamlined, delegated to intuition, or discarded. That’s a very vos Savant move: treat genius as technique, not aura. The subtext is slightly admonishing, too. If you want to handle more, you don’t get to keep indulging every analytical impulse. You must become ruthless about relevance.
Context matters: vos Savant’s public persona has long been tied to quantified intelligence and problem-solving in digestible formats. This line fits a late-20th-century obsession with optimization, from self-help productivity to corporate “efficiency” culture, translated into an elegant metaphor. It also sneaks in an important corrective: compression isn’t the same as shallowness. Good compression preserves structure; it just cuts the wasted motion.
The intent, then, is both practical and philosophical: complexity doesn’t demand more time, it demands better thinking habits. The implicit challenge is uncomfortable: if you can’t scale your attention, maybe the problem isn’t capacity. It’s your inability to edit yourself.
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| Topic | Decision-Making |
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