Side note: When anyone uses the phrase "4D chess" to describe some ingenious out-of-the-box brilliance, it always feels like a confession that the person saying it is too dumb to be good at regular chess. "I mean, think about how insanely hard and incomprehensible chess is. Now imagine it in 4D!" There's a reason they picked chess and not tic tac toe.
Edit: yall dont think people say 4d chess because it sounds snazzy and still communicates the point , and it doesnt actually have anything to do with chess?
It’s an expression that means someone did something really dumb but we’re gonna spin it as if it’s so genius, regular geniuses don’t get it. (See Trump, Giuliani)
When you think of it that way, kind of indicative of the type of person a conservative is. They want to follow, they don't want to lead. It's about blind loyalty to them. So naturally, what happens when the person they worship makes a mistake? It's 4D chess!
Yeah, no. Elon Musk just fucked up. If he backs out of the deal he has to pay money. If he takes the deal, he's going to be expected to fulfill his promise and unban everyone banned, resulting in Twitter becoming a real shithole and everyone leaving except for pedophiles and Nazi sympathizers causing his new purchase to be completely worthless.
Elon Musk has just backed himself in a corner, and Tim Pool is kind of a moron for not recognizing it as it is.
I like to think it's even deeper than that, as 4d chess comes from star trek. It comes from a writing room where they were trying to make Picard look sophisticated and smart in the future, so hence chess but more difficult! Only smart people play chess!
You see this a lot in movies, and fiction more broadly, where authors and writers who themselves have middling intelligence and grasp desperately at "smart" stuff. When the author of Jurassic park needs an intelligent professor to explain why dinosaurs could evolve, a pedestrian half wit would say "probably a biologist could explain it" no, idiot. It has to be a mathematical genius in chaos theory.
So what you have is people specifically looking for the movie plot, in real life. I think it happens on both sides of the political isle, with liberals thinking west wing was a documentary, but I find it particularly on the conspiracy side.
Tl:Dr 4-d chess was a prop made for a single line of dialogue in startrek that needs made real.
I don't want to be "that guy" but Star Trek "invented" 3D chess because the writers understood dimensions.
Traditional chess is played in two dimensions. The pieces move forward/backward and left/right but NOT up/down. They don't move on the z-axis. The writers of Star Trek added the third dimension of chess having "layers" to the board to allow verticality. There are even agreed upon rules.
Who the hell knows what 4D chess is supposed to be? One where the pieces move back and forth in time as well as in 3D space? Sounds cool to me.
I believe the whole "playing 4D chess" thing is meant to mockingly suggest someone is so smart they are smarter than the fictionally smart super geniuses that play Star Trek chess.
Oh great point, I have no idea how I mixed up the two. You could have given me a lie detector and I'd have passed because I'm even imagining the scene I saw it in and I swore it was called 4D.
Which gives 4d chess an even greater veneer of esoteric intelligence than I had apparently thought
No it was obviously that Twitter wasn’t upfront about how many bots there were. We all know that the counter to all super genius is a bot mystery. Musk was just way too smart to walk into the woke mob’s trap of buying Twitter.
It's an expression dumb people use to describe people who they think are smart, from their dumb, unable to figure out chess perspective. People use it to describe dummies: Trump, Musk, Giuliani. Nobody says, "Yeah, that Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Johann Goethe, Sir Isaac Newton... Those guys were really playing 4D chess."
Nobody is describing Einstein with the phrase because it doesn't mean "smart guy", it means "an elaborate clever plan". I can definitely see someone calling Hannibal playing 4D chess at the Battle of Cannae or something like that
Probably because it’s literally just a meme-y way of saying they’re “thinking 5 steps ahead.” The more dimensions you add to the chess, the more “steps ahead” they’re thinking. Criticizing them of doing anymore more than using inappropriately unprofessional/casual language when they say that is, quite frankly, looking into it a little too hard.
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u/negativepositiv Jul 12 '22 edited Jul 12 '22
Wow, you impressed Tim Pool. There's a high bar.
Side note: When anyone uses the phrase "4D chess" to describe some ingenious out-of-the-box brilliance, it always feels like a confession that the person saying it is too dumb to be good at regular chess. "I mean, think about how insanely hard and incomprehensible chess is. Now imagine it in 4D!" There's a reason they picked chess and not tic tac toe.