And Hollywood would transform this into a Gran Torino remake where the racist neighbor heroically protects his new lesbian friends from a violent gang of Dykes with Bikes.
This is where the party ends, I can’t stand here listening to you, and your racist friend!
I know cancellations bore you, but I feel like a hypocrite talking to you, you and your racist friend.
It was the loveliest sponge bath that I ever attended. If our marriage was broken I am sure it can be mended. But my head can’t tolerate this bobbing and pretending. Listening to this former klansmen and the madness he is spreading!
Out from the kitchen to the bedroom to the hallway. My wife apologizes, she could see it my way. I let the contents of the bottle do the thinking. Can't shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding.
So this is uncanny lol. First OU (where I attended and taught) and now the chess world (I'm a former competitive chess player, peaked at just over 2100 USCF rating in 2010). In the same week...
First, as already mentioned in a comment, Searching for Bobby Fischer was based on a true story. There were a large number of liberties taken, but overall well-done. Actually attended a chess camp where Bruce Pandolfini (Josh's coach) was one of the teachers. Looks nothing like Ben Kingsley, but does have a brief moment in the film himself.
Sad/gross to see what has happened to Kramnik. I was a fan of his chess playing style, and based my opening repertoire on his play. Brilliant mind, clearly a terrible person.
Chess players accusing others of cheating is a hobby as old as the game itself. The sheer number of psychological games that top players would use against each other at championship level tournaments is insane, and the negotiations for the World Chess Championship match would always be even more insane.
It is no accident that Bobby Fischer is the most famous chess player in America, and he was batshit crazy. I always joke that all serious chess players are insane, it is merely a question of degrees (it's more observation than joke, but still). I have yet to meet a well-adjusted competitive chess player. Competitive chess attracts a certain kind of mind, and to reach the top levels of chess you probably have to be on the spectrum. At the very least, chess is all about pattern recognition, and if you like patterns, conspiracy theories are very attractive playground.
Also, there is an element of chess that makes losses harder to deal with. In other sports, there are a variety of excuses when you lose. The refs, the weather, you weren't feeling the best, etc. At worse, the opposing player/team were just stronger/faster/luckier than you. It stings, but it ain't the end of the world. But in chess, if you lose there are no refs/teammates/weather/luck to blame. It's because at that moment, your opponent was smarter than you. And for the type of mind attracted to chess, that is ego shattering. So if you "know" for a fact that you are better/smarter than your opponent, accusing him of cheating can be quite tempting.
I played chess at the end of the long-form era. Computers were consistently beating people, and adjourning games for the evening was no longer a thing. But you could still have games that could last up to 7 hours, and 3 hour games were quite normal (2 games Friday, 3 Saturday, 2 Sunday). While Blitz was fun, it was often seen as a distraction from "serious" long-form chess. The streaming era has really flipped this on its head. And my guess is there is an incredible amount of jealousy from the older "serious" players with how the world of chess has been changing.
Also, lol at Katie for saying there is a lot of money in chess. I'm sure it has changed somewhat given streaming, but back in my day the American Chess Champion made like $50,000 a year. You had to be top 10-20 in the world to earn serious money. This is why it always annoys me when shows/movies set up chess boards wrong (which happens a stupid amount). It would be trivially easy to get a chess consultant. Just put up a sign saying "free pizza for whoever sets up the chess board" and you'd have a line out the door of hungry chess players....
I don't know how much the top players can make via competition, maybe not a lot.
But it's a pretty big industry. There are a lot of people who can make a living running chess schools, giving chess lessons, writing books about chess ... or the more modern equivalent of producing chess "content" on YouTube, making and selling various chess products, etc. etc.
Like how it's possible to be a "professional golfer" (as in: your job is golf) if you're the golf pro at a country club...
I’ve been exclusively listening to audiobooks and read-aloud articles while dealing with migraines and the quality difference between human-read and AI-read article is currently enormous. The mispronunciations, weird emphases and lack of character to the AI voices is very distracting to me. I’m sure they’re working on improving all of this, of course, but for now, my brain can’t lock in with a non-human voice, and my wandering attention causes me to avoid AI-read stuff unless I truly can’t.
Edit: Helen Lewis reading her Nuzzi takedown would’ve been 1000% better than the Atlantic AI bot.
The conspiracy part of my brain says that AI is like plastic surgery: people think it’s bad and uncanny because the good stuff is designed to be unnoticeable.
I am increasingly wondering if my migraines and other peoples are totally different. I am unable to listen to anything with a migraine. Or look at anything. Or think about anything. Everything increases my symptoms and pain. I have to slow count to 7 repeatedly in my head until I fall asleep for at least 8 hours.
Mine occasionally get this bad, but not usually. I’ve been dealing with near-constant mild vestibular migraines. Screens bring them on almost instantly (although my tolerance is improving, thus why I’m able to leave and reply to a comment). There are definitely different types and severities. Mine interrupt my life not primarily due to the symptoms but because I can’t read, use screens, or do any other activities that involve close-up vision or motion in my visual field.
That’s awesome! I take riboflavin, magnesium, coq10, vitamin d and omega 3 every day, which keeps things manageable :) if I miss a day I can’t believe how much worse things get!
Yes! Those first three are what's in my supplement. An ear doctor wanted to put me on anti-depressants for them so I researched and found these instead.
My migraines are of the vestibular variety as well. I don't know how I dealt with them prior to podcasts/audiobooks. I can lie there very still with something wrapped around my head to block out all light and listen.
I don’t even call them migraines because I feel that word is worthless now.
But yes when I get severe “stress” headaches (often lack of sleep is also involved), light sound, basically everything is painful. I can barely function.
And sleep is pretty much the only cure.
When someone is telling me halfway through a book club they have a “migraine” and then stay for two more hours, the internal eye roll is massive.
>When someone is telling me halfway through a book club they have a “migraine” and then stay for two more hours, the internal eye roll is massive.
I feel this big time, although I do differentiate between 'having a migraine coming on' and 'having a migraine' the former makes me irritable and increasingly useless. The debilitating migraine is the final form. I don't think mine are entirely stress related (although that definitely is a factor, if I have a stressful event in my life I can guarantee a horrific migraine as soon as it's resolved) but hormones definitely play a role.
From what I’ve been told by a neurologist, a migraine is simply a headache that involves light sensitivity, and there are many types and severity levels. I’ve never had auras and I usually go about my life with them (if I didn’t I’d get nothing done) but when a severe one hits I’m pinned to the bed from vertigo and moving any part of my body is excruciating. I really thought I had two distinct types of headaches but no, they’re all the same thing, and hormones and other variables determine how I’ll experience them. It does make the word migraine not very descriptive!
Sorry for the migraine episodes, I too find podcasts helpful to distract my attention from the symptoms.
(If I may recommend Tell Me About Your Pain) podcast? Therapist who has a very calm voice about chronic pain, series to promote his book, I found it very helpful).
And yes! I abhor robot voice recitations of text. So many training videos are like this now. I can’t learn anything due to monotonous drone voice. There’s nothing to grasp onto.
I hope the migraines get better soon. I also suffer from migraines and would not wish them on my worst enemy. They can't just be horrible headaches, they have to have other non-pain symptoms that make it even worse.
I have not bee impressed with AI reading, though maybe it would work for bad science fiction, with is of course abundantly available.
As somebody who is kinda informed about this stuff, good podcast, nice work guys.
Something that wasn't discussed much is the validity (or lack thereof) of Kramnik's claims. His "evidence" is mainly that it feels unlikely that player X would win Y games in a row, but statisticians have since shown that for people who play tens of thousands of games, such winning streaks are completely within the bounds of expectation.
Another angle that wasn't mentioned is Kramnik's following in Russia. Apparently he's a social media star in Russia with a large following and they take his claims seriously. So that's one reason why the chess world as a whole can't simply write him off as a crank and completely ignore him.
Now, getting pretty deep into the weeds: Jesse's comment about how chess engines are trained on huge numbers of games: this is true for machine-learning engines like AlphaZero and Leela Chess Zero. They learn to play chess from scratch by playing millions of games against themselves.
But Stockfish is an engine that's hand-coded by humans, with a bunch of code that humans wrote to evaluate positions. It's crazy strong largely because it can run this human-written code to evaluate millions of positions per second.
Pleased I didn't have to look far to see this comment as a chess player and a machine learning professor (and, mostly, as someone who immediately flagged that remark).
Stockfish is good because it calculates positions _like a human does_, just much faster. Chess is resistant to "big data"-style machine learning for boring technical reasons that people have written about at excruciating length.
Stockfish evaluates positions the way humans THINK they evaluate positions. Like, it has concepts hand-coded into it that humans have articulated as important when evaluating positions. Doubled pawns, bishop pairs, connected rooks, etc. etc.
But I would guess that the machine-learning engines (AlphaZero, Leela Chess Zero) evaluate positions in a way that's much closer to how human brains actually evaluate positions.
Fun fact, when doing shallow searches, Leela Chess Zero will often "overlook" basic tactics in a way that's similar to humans.
big chess nerd here, have followed this closely. really great summary katie, accurate reporting. danya was a huge loss. he was really one of the most articulate and well adjusted of the chess commentariate, and an amazing player. thank you
1. We don't know it was suicide. An accidental overdose of prescription meds has exactly as much evidence.
2. This wasn't "as soon as someone accuses him of cheating". It was an extended campaign over months, that included chess.com seeming to unfairly single him out and negatively affect his life and livelihood by making him use a buggy anti cheating program, and was instigated by his childhood hero.
The Tenacious Unicorn Ranch would make an amazing movie as long it didn’t whitewash the craziness like most media coverage did. It’s the closest thing to a real life It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia that I can think of.
There's something about these two being just over the millennial age bracket that they don't get some key memes from the last 15 years. It's embarrassing
One day, over fifty years ago, I was visiting the late Elisabeth Targ at her house. Her mother, Joan Fischer Targ, was Bobby Fischer's sister. (Joan was married to Russell Targ, but that's a whole different story.) Anyway, Bobby was visiting and was sitting at a desk in an office at Elisabeth's house. We walked past the open door, and Elisabeth whispered, "That's my uncle, Bobby." I had been instructed that we weren't supposed to bother him. So I snuck a glance and got a glimpse.
I can understand how mobs of people piling on you in a cancelation campaign, or being slandered and vilified in a highly public manner, losing your job, or generally being ostracized could drive someone to suicide.
But that's not what it sounds like happened here. A single marginalized individual, with limited and rapidly declining credibility, made accusations that apparently were not broadly accepted or even taken seriously.
And yet one person said it nearly drove them to suicide, and for another it did. I guess in the latter case he did actually commit an infraction (though not cheating) that was exposed, but that doesn't seem like a huge deal to me.
What am I missing? Are these people just that myopically obsessed with online chess that they have no life outside of it?
You're underestimating how credible Kramnik is, particularly among Russian speakers (of which Danya was one), but also among top players and including chess.com. Naroditsky was required to play with an anti cheating software that he was told would be rolled out to everyone, but never was, that was extremely buggy. He was also given different rules regarding twitch chat than other players (or at least the rules were not administered equally).
As far as the infraction that was exposed, it was a case of technically cheating, but not in any real way. He had already won the game, and called up an engine in another browser to analyse an earlier part of the game. It had zero impact on the outcome, and it wasn't in a competition. In sports terms, it's like a soccer player jumping to grab a ball with their hands that's going out, so they don't have to chase it down for the throw-in during a pick up game.
Weird trivia tidbit… Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is named after an 18th-century, chess playing “robot” that was actually just a human player hiding under the table and moving pieces on the board by magnet…
Cheating at chess has a long precedent in Western culture.
If anyone made a movie inspired by BARPod, it would be about two lesbians bonding with their racist neighbor, full stop.
And Hollywood would transform this into a Gran Torino remake where the racist neighbor heroically protects his new lesbian friends from a violent gang of Dykes with Bikes.
I need to verify my age to see your comment. Is your comment that crazy?
Use of what some would oconsider a slur, I guess, but in context a "reclaimed" one.
This is where the party ends, I can’t stand here listening to you, and your racist friend!
I know cancellations bore you, but I feel like a hypocrite talking to you, you and your racist friend.
It was the loveliest sponge bath that I ever attended. If our marriage was broken I am sure it can be mended. But my head can’t tolerate this bobbing and pretending. Listening to this former klansmen and the madness he is spreading!
Out from the kitchen to the bedroom to the hallway. My wife apologizes, she could see it my way. I let the contents of the bottle do the thinking. Can't shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding.
...and that's how They Might Be Giants drove Katie to drink herself sober.
So this is uncanny lol. First OU (where I attended and taught) and now the chess world (I'm a former competitive chess player, peaked at just over 2100 USCF rating in 2010). In the same week...
First, as already mentioned in a comment, Searching for Bobby Fischer was based on a true story. There were a large number of liberties taken, but overall well-done. Actually attended a chess camp where Bruce Pandolfini (Josh's coach) was one of the teachers. Looks nothing like Ben Kingsley, but does have a brief moment in the film himself.
Sad/gross to see what has happened to Kramnik. I was a fan of his chess playing style, and based my opening repertoire on his play. Brilliant mind, clearly a terrible person.
Chess players accusing others of cheating is a hobby as old as the game itself. The sheer number of psychological games that top players would use against each other at championship level tournaments is insane, and the negotiations for the World Chess Championship match would always be even more insane.
It is no accident that Bobby Fischer is the most famous chess player in America, and he was batshit crazy. I always joke that all serious chess players are insane, it is merely a question of degrees (it's more observation than joke, but still). I have yet to meet a well-adjusted competitive chess player. Competitive chess attracts a certain kind of mind, and to reach the top levels of chess you probably have to be on the spectrum. At the very least, chess is all about pattern recognition, and if you like patterns, conspiracy theories are very attractive playground.
Also, there is an element of chess that makes losses harder to deal with. In other sports, there are a variety of excuses when you lose. The refs, the weather, you weren't feeling the best, etc. At worse, the opposing player/team were just stronger/faster/luckier than you. It stings, but it ain't the end of the world. But in chess, if you lose there are no refs/teammates/weather/luck to blame. It's because at that moment, your opponent was smarter than you. And for the type of mind attracted to chess, that is ego shattering. So if you "know" for a fact that you are better/smarter than your opponent, accusing him of cheating can be quite tempting.
I played chess at the end of the long-form era. Computers were consistently beating people, and adjourning games for the evening was no longer a thing. But you could still have games that could last up to 7 hours, and 3 hour games were quite normal (2 games Friday, 3 Saturday, 2 Sunday). While Blitz was fun, it was often seen as a distraction from "serious" long-form chess. The streaming era has really flipped this on its head. And my guess is there is an incredible amount of jealousy from the older "serious" players with how the world of chess has been changing.
Also, lol at Katie for saying there is a lot of money in chess. I'm sure it has changed somewhat given streaming, but back in my day the American Chess Champion made like $50,000 a year. You had to be top 10-20 in the world to earn serious money. This is why it always annoys me when shows/movies set up chess boards wrong (which happens a stupid amount). It would be trivially easy to get a chess consultant. Just put up a sign saying "free pizza for whoever sets up the chess board" and you'd have a line out the door of hungry chess players....
There is a lot of money in chess.
I don't know how much the top players can make via competition, maybe not a lot.
But it's a pretty big industry. There are a lot of people who can make a living running chess schools, giving chess lessons, writing books about chess ... or the more modern equivalent of producing chess "content" on YouTube, making and selling various chess products, etc. etc.
Like how it's possible to be a "professional golfer" (as in: your job is golf) if you're the golf pro at a country club...
The AI made a hockey commentator a black woman 😂 😂 😂.
Washington's Governor was a competitive chess player, if that tells you anything
I’ve been exclusively listening to audiobooks and read-aloud articles while dealing with migraines and the quality difference between human-read and AI-read article is currently enormous. The mispronunciations, weird emphases and lack of character to the AI voices is very distracting to me. I’m sure they’re working on improving all of this, of course, but for now, my brain can’t lock in with a non-human voice, and my wandering attention causes me to avoid AI-read stuff unless I truly can’t.
Edit: Helen Lewis reading her Nuzzi takedown would’ve been 1000% better than the Atlantic AI bot.
The conspiracy part of my brain says that AI is like plastic surgery: people think it’s bad and uncanny because the good stuff is designed to be unnoticeable.
Could be!
I am increasingly wondering if my migraines and other peoples are totally different. I am unable to listen to anything with a migraine. Or look at anything. Or think about anything. Everything increases my symptoms and pain. I have to slow count to 7 repeatedly in my head until I fall asleep for at least 8 hours.
As someone who's had three kinds of migraines, there are different kinds.
Mine occasionally get this bad, but not usually. I’ve been dealing with near-constant mild vestibular migraines. Screens bring them on almost instantly (although my tolerance is improving, thus why I’m able to leave and reply to a comment). There are definitely different types and severities. Mine interrupt my life not primarily due to the symptoms but because I can’t read, use screens, or do any other activities that involve close-up vision or motion in my visual field.
This legit stopped my vestibular migraines after about 3 weeks of use
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0D11HPBG5
That’s awesome! I take riboflavin, magnesium, coq10, vitamin d and omega 3 every day, which keeps things manageable :) if I miss a day I can’t believe how much worse things get!
Yes! Those first three are what's in my supplement. An ear doctor wanted to put me on anti-depressants for them so I researched and found these instead.
Good call!
My migraines are of the vestibular variety as well. I don't know how I dealt with them prior to podcasts/audiobooks. I can lie there very still with something wrapped around my head to block out all light and listen.
I also avoid that AI voice.
Try this
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0D11HPBG5
I don’t even call them migraines because I feel that word is worthless now.
But yes when I get severe “stress” headaches (often lack of sleep is also involved), light sound, basically everything is painful. I can barely function.
And sleep is pretty much the only cure.
When someone is telling me halfway through a book club they have a “migraine” and then stay for two more hours, the internal eye roll is massive.
>When someone is telling me halfway through a book club they have a “migraine” and then stay for two more hours, the internal eye roll is massive.
I feel this big time, although I do differentiate between 'having a migraine coming on' and 'having a migraine' the former makes me irritable and increasingly useless. The debilitating migraine is the final form. I don't think mine are entirely stress related (although that definitely is a factor, if I have a stressful event in my life I can guarantee a horrific migraine as soon as it's resolved) but hormones definitely play a role.
From what I’ve been told by a neurologist, a migraine is simply a headache that involves light sensitivity, and there are many types and severity levels. I’ve never had auras and I usually go about my life with them (if I didn’t I’d get nothing done) but when a severe one hits I’m pinned to the bed from vertigo and moving any part of my body is excruciating. I really thought I had two distinct types of headaches but no, they’re all the same thing, and hormones and other variables determine how I’ll experience them. It does make the word migraine not very descriptive!
Sorry to hear you're a fellow migraine sufferer. You have my sympathy/empathy.
My migraines almost never have light or noise sensitivity. I was doubtful they were "real" migraines, but I've had 2 neurologists assure me they were.
I do get the auras sometimes, often with distorted vision and/or numbness.
Helen has a charming and also wonderfully snarky voice as needed.
Sorry for the migraine episodes, I too find podcasts helpful to distract my attention from the symptoms.
(If I may recommend Tell Me About Your Pain) podcast? Therapist who has a very calm voice about chronic pain, series to promote his book, I found it very helpful).
And yes! I abhor robot voice recitations of text. So many training videos are like this now. I can’t learn anything due to monotonous drone voice. There’s nothing to grasp onto.
“Nothing to grasp onto”—yes! There’s something eerily frictionless about the AI voice.
I hope the migraines get better soon. I also suffer from migraines and would not wish them on my worst enemy. They can't just be horrible headaches, they have to have other non-pain symptoms that make it even worse.
I have not bee impressed with AI reading, though maybe it would work for bad science fiction, with is of course abundantly available.
“…a blunder is a chess term for a mistake.” See Katie, AI can never match this level of nuance. Your job is safe.
As somebody who is kinda informed about this stuff, good podcast, nice work guys.
Something that wasn't discussed much is the validity (or lack thereof) of Kramnik's claims. His "evidence" is mainly that it feels unlikely that player X would win Y games in a row, but statisticians have since shown that for people who play tens of thousands of games, such winning streaks are completely within the bounds of expectation.
Another angle that wasn't mentioned is Kramnik's following in Russia. Apparently he's a social media star in Russia with a large following and they take his claims seriously. So that's one reason why the chess world as a whole can't simply write him off as a crank and completely ignore him.
Now, getting pretty deep into the weeds: Jesse's comment about how chess engines are trained on huge numbers of games: this is true for machine-learning engines like AlphaZero and Leela Chess Zero. They learn to play chess from scratch by playing millions of games against themselves.
But Stockfish is an engine that's hand-coded by humans, with a bunch of code that humans wrote to evaluate positions. It's crazy strong largely because it can run this human-written code to evaluate millions of positions per second.
Pleased I didn't have to look far to see this comment as a chess player and a machine learning professor (and, mostly, as someone who immediately flagged that remark).
Stockfish is good because it calculates positions _like a human does_, just much faster. Chess is resistant to "big data"-style machine learning for boring technical reasons that people have written about at excruciating length.
"Chess is resistant to "big data"-style machine learning for boring technical reasons that people have written about at excruciating length."
I am not a machine learning professor, but I implement and tweak machine learning / LLM systems for corportions, so to quote an excellent movie...
"Would you like to know more?"
I would like to know more.
To be a pervert for nuance here...
Stockfish evaluates positions the way humans THINK they evaluate positions. Like, it has concepts hand-coded into it that humans have articulated as important when evaluating positions. Doubled pawns, bishop pairs, connected rooks, etc. etc.
But I would guess that the machine-learning engines (AlphaZero, Leela Chess Zero) evaluate positions in a way that's much closer to how human brains actually evaluate positions.
Fun fact, when doing shallow searches, Leela Chess Zero will often "overlook" basic tactics in a way that's similar to humans.
Searching for Bobby Fischer wasn't about a fictional chess player, Josh Waitzkin was a real-life chess prodigy.
The chessmaster 3000 software featured his lessons prominently!
big chess nerd here, have followed this closely. really great summary katie, accurate reporting. danya was a huge loss. he was really one of the most articulate and well adjusted of the chess commentariate, and an amazing player. thank you
Well adjusted? He kills himself as soon as someone accuses him of cheating. No he wasn't well.
In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.
Yeah but the king can only move one space and has to be protected at all times.
1. We don't know it was suicide. An accidental overdose of prescription meds has exactly as much evidence.
2. This wasn't "as soon as someone accuses him of cheating". It was an extended campaign over months, that included chess.com seeming to unfairly single him out and negatively affect his life and livelihood by making him use a buggy anti cheating program, and was instigated by his childhood hero.
The Tenacious Unicorn Ranch would make an amazing movie as long it didn’t whitewash the craziness like most media coverage did. It’s the closest thing to a real life It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia that I can think of.
EDIT: Computer generated news isn't new, anyone remember this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ananova
Accusing Jesse of having a parasocial relationship with her is the sickest Katie burn in a while.
Remember: killing yourself only ensures your friends hurt more than your enemies.
Well it also ensures you feel no more pain.
It really ensures quite a few things.
The mourinho part 😭
this & 'a blunder is a chess term for a kind of mistake' - highlights of the episode
lol I paused and came here to explain the majestic Mourinho meme. Lots of history there. Also unbelievably fitting to the situation.
There's something about these two being just over the millennial age bracket that they don't get some key memes from the last 15 years. It's embarrassing
I think it might be more a soccer thing than an age thing, though. Most Americans have never even heard of the special one
One day, over fifty years ago, I was visiting the late Elisabeth Targ at her house. Her mother, Joan Fischer Targ, was Bobby Fischer's sister. (Joan was married to Russell Targ, but that's a whole different story.) Anyway, Bobby was visiting and was sitting at a desk in an office at Elisabeth's house. We walked past the open door, and Elisabeth whispered, "That's my uncle, Bobby." I had been instructed that we weren't supposed to bother him. So I snuck a glance and got a glimpse.
And that's my Bobby Fischer story.
Jesse really was a bit out of it this time. Get some sleep!
Barpod movie has to be a coffeehouse going out of business
I can understand how mobs of people piling on you in a cancelation campaign, or being slandered and vilified in a highly public manner, losing your job, or generally being ostracized could drive someone to suicide.
But that's not what it sounds like happened here. A single marginalized individual, with limited and rapidly declining credibility, made accusations that apparently were not broadly accepted or even taken seriously.
And yet one person said it nearly drove them to suicide, and for another it did. I guess in the latter case he did actually commit an infraction (though not cheating) that was exposed, but that doesn't seem like a huge deal to me.
What am I missing? Are these people just that myopically obsessed with online chess that they have no life outside of it?
You're underestimating how credible Kramnik is, particularly among Russian speakers (of which Danya was one), but also among top players and including chess.com. Naroditsky was required to play with an anti cheating software that he was told would be rolled out to everyone, but never was, that was extremely buggy. He was also given different rules regarding twitch chat than other players (or at least the rules were not administered equally).
As far as the infraction that was exposed, it was a case of technically cheating, but not in any real way. He had already won the game, and called up an engine in another browser to analyse an earlier part of the game. It had zero impact on the outcome, and it wasn't in a competition. In sports terms, it's like a soccer player jumping to grab a ball with their hands that's going out, so they don't have to chase it down for the throw-in during a pick up game.
The Luzhin Defense does come to mind
As with everything Nabokov wrote, that is an amazing novel.
My favorite!
Weird trivia tidbit… Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is named after an 18th-century, chess playing “robot” that was actually just a human player hiding under the table and moving pieces on the board by magnet…
Cheating at chess has a long precedent in Western culture.
In all cultures; The west has nothing to do with it.