Thank you for writing this series Jonah. I'm don't have the time now to think deeply about this topic, so I thought I'd add to the discussion by mentioning a few related interesting anecdotes.

I doubt what made the Polgar sisters great was innate intelligence.

Another interesting anecdote is von Neumann not (initially?) appreciating the importance of higher-level programming languages:

John von Neumann, when he first heard about FORTRAN in 1954, was unimpressed and asked "why would you want more than machine language?" One of von Neumann's students at Princeton recalled that graduate students were being used to hand assemble programs into binary for their early machine. This student took time out to build an assembler, but when von Neumann found out about it he was very angry, saying that it was a waste of a valuable scientific computing instrument to use it to do clerical work. http://worrydream.com/#!/dbx

EDIT: Apparently, von Neumann's attitude toward assembly was common among programmers of that era. http://worrydream.com/quotes/#richard-hamming-the-art-of-doing-science-and-engineering-2