Some People Just Want to Win, While Others Truly Care About a World Larger Than Themselves

@Stefan Zweig Died Yesterday: Yesterday I watched the documentary The Thinking Game about DeepMind. The founder of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, was a chess prodigy; by age 8, he was already ranked second in the world for his age group, and he originally thought he would become a professional player. But at the age of 12, he participated in an international tournament. His opponent was a former Danish champion in his thirties. The match lasted for ten hours, and it should have been a draw, but the opponent kept pushing for a win, dragging it out for several hours. Demis was too exhausted, made a misjudgment, and resigned. The opponent was extremely smug and mocked him for making the wrong move. Demis said he felt very uncomfortable at that moment—with so many brilliant minds present, if they connected, maybe they could cure cancer (yet here they were, obsessing over a single win or loss). At that moment, he knew this was not what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. At 17, he went to Cambridge University (he passed the entrance exam at 16, but Cambridge said he was too young and made him wait until 17), and then came DeepMind, and AlphaFold, which solved the protein folding problem. In 2024, Demis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. At the end of the documentary, Alpha guides Demis in a chess game. When he was a child, someone interviewed him and asked why he liked chess, and Demis said: 'It's a good thinking game.' That's right, the interesting part is 'thinking' and 'game', not winning or losing.

@LyingCatHillCat: It reminds me of the exact same feeling when I just started college. There were clearly many smart people around, yet many spent a massive amount of time grinding practice problems, cozying up to teaching assistants to get exam questions, and obsessively competing for GPA. There were even underhanded tactics, fearing others might get higher scores. The entire atmosphere revolved around the worship and comparison of GPAs, and later this crowd shifted to comparing top-tier journal publications and salary packages. A defining trait of such people is that they only talk about metrics (journal names, salary figures) and never about actual problems, the work itself, or its value. Years later, the classmates who went on to achieve great things were actually the ones with average undergraduate grades. Time will tell.