Louis Blair wrote in message usenet.com...
Jeremy Spinrad wrote:
(much snipped)
I don't think blindfold chess drove Morphy crazy.
However, consider the view of the people at the time.
Blindfold chess was considered awesome but a potential risk.
Morphy, after astonishing the world, disappears except for a few
where-are-they-now columns, and the next thing they hear he is
apparently insane at quite a young age.

Hardly "the next thing they hear". Upon his return from England in 1858 he
made many many public appearances - appearances that were described in detail
by people who certainly did not give the impression that they thought Morphy
was having mental trouble. The reports of mental trouble were more than a
decade later.

Jeremy Spinrad wrote:
People could not know that later we would find that some masters could
play far more than 8 games blindfold with no apparent harm, and could
quite rationally believe that Morphy was driven insane by blindfold chess.

If Jeremy Spinrad wants to hypothesize that a sufficiently poorly informed
individual might have "rationally" jumped to such a conclusion, I suppose
that we could allow that, but it strikes me as a bit of a stretch on the
meaning of "rational".

*Perhaps* (this is only my hypothesis) Jeremy Spinrad was only contending that
it would have been a 'quite rational belief' for people then to accept the
authority of some (though not all) medical 'experts' who may have come to
that conclusion about Paul Morphy.

*If* that's what Jeremy Spinrad was contending, then my problem with it is
that, according to the same standard of evidence, it also would have been
'quite rational' for people in the 19th century to believe the fashionable
psuedo-scientific racist theories--which were nonsense--that were being
propagated by many 'scientific experts' of that time.

Surely part of "rational" includes making some sort of proper effort
to obtain relevant information.

By that evidently rather high standard, however, many voters in modern
democracies may not be regarded as necessarily making 'rational' decisions.

The "escalating slowly" process (extended over more than a decade) that
Jeremy Spinrad has himself hypothesized does not square very well with the
notion of a mental problem caused by the strain of a blindfold demonstration.
People IN MORPHY'S TIME expressed skepticism about the strain theory and
their writings seem far more rational to me than those of the strain theory
advocates.

If those are the relevant facts, then I should agree more with
Louis Blair than with Jeremy Spinrad about what they probably mean.

--Nick