Smart people play chess, right?
And only the very smartest can play chess well?
Let's try changing the rules a bit.
First, the number of players is variable. Players can come and go as the game progresses, and in a particularly lively game there can be hundreds of players active.
Second, each player starts with between one hundred and one billion pieces, depending. Pieces can be lost during the game, but they can also be won over from other players, and (given time) they can make new pieces among themselves.
Third, each piece has its own ideas of how the game is played, and may choose to ignore or defy its player, or even to ally itself, secretly, with another player.
Fourth, conditions on the board vary in dramatic and unpredictable ways, depending largely on forces beyond the players' control or knowledge.
Fifth, the full rules of the game are not known to anyone, and may be fundamentally unknowable.
Now we have a game that's more challenging than chess by many orders of magnitude. And yet, somehow, the world is full of people who are convinced that they'd be awesome at it if only they could be the players. Even more worryingly, there are people already in the position of players who are firmly convinced that they are good at it.
Hubris: it's very much a thing.
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