I feel that I deserve a higher rating

...and decrease it by 50 points every hour you spend on forums. That's important.

 ego 

Lol, I actually liked that part.

But chess isn't religion, and hard work WILL bring you results. Either you aren't working hard enough, or more likely you are applying yourself in the wrong directions.

I feel that I should be more attractive to members of the opposit sex. Why not, I am intelligent, I have a good sense of humor and I am fiercely loyal to anyone who invites me into bed with them. But it turns out I am not the only datapoint in the universe and to put it nicely, nobody cares about how I feel about something. God made you a man (I think, a rather creepy looking man judging by your profile picture) act like it. The world does not revolve around you.

So just to recap - girls learn to read and speak (and other skills?) much faster (earlier?) but already by the age of 14 they've ceased to enjoy a statistically meaningful advantage. And proceeding on into adulthood...?

Not quite. The statistics are from now,whichever age group you take.

So that's not that they go stupid when growing old, that's that the education system has changed the last ten or so years.

People arguing about statistics without even a single reference given? LAL!

Ahh, no. You earn what you earn.

It is possible that the Y-chromosome allows for more mutations that produce cognitive extremes, freaks of nature if you will, borderline autistics with incredible photographic memory, creative geniuses and other extreme mental functions... maybe... other theories state that borderline sexes (males who are extremely feminine and women who are extremely masculine) have greater cognitive ability than average people.

However this is impossible to define scientifically.

However to say that the average bloke is smarter than the average girl is taking the idea too far. Most adult men who play chess regularly would be no match for GM Natalia when she was 8yrs old.

You can't define a population by its outliers.

I pointed out earlier in the thread called "Why is this game so male dominated" that some of IQ is carried on the X chromosome. ie you get your brains from your mother. This explains the relative flattening of the curve of IQ / population for men vs women. There are more extremely high IQ men and also more extremely low IQ men than women because, in women, a good or bad X variant is usually masked by the other X chromosome, while in the man it stands naked.

When I consider those curves, generous or flat, I often find I tend to stick out

Ok enough pseudo-science waffle. I am going to mathematically anaylse (or maybe just observe) my games and I will make an announcement of the findings.

Your definition of "average" is intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Most people would be seduced by the lure of thinking that a fair comparison would be the 50th percentile man versus the 50th percentile woman, 70th versus 70th, 99th versus 99th... like for like. Obviously this is wrong and a "fairer" test is to compare the 99.9th percentile female to the typical male. Or to turn your test around, I'd be surprised to learn that any woman ever, Judit Polgar not necessarily excepted, would be a match for Fischer when he was 15.

Skill is not the amount of time you invest, how much effort you give, or what percentage of all chess knowledge you know. They generally are related to skill, but they are not it.

The only objective measure is results. You are only as good as you play. Your skill is only relative to everyone else, which is reflected in ratings. Your goodness only exists when compared to others' relative badness. A uniform increase or decrease of everyone's ratings doesn't change anything. They're still relative. If 1200 is crap and you add 1000 to everyone's rating, then 2200 will be the new crap. It's arbitrary.

The ratings measure your skill at winning chess games, not how much you know about knight endgames, not how good you are at tactics. You get exactly the rating you deserve.

If you blunder a mate where you still have all your pieces vs a lone king and end up in stalemate, it's just as "skillful" as grinding out a dead drawn position straight from opening to endgame. The result is the same: 0.5-0.5. In the eyes of the game rules they are identical. Winning a 1|0 match via time scramble is exactly as good as a mating attack as far as the game is concerned. If you want to come up with some other metric that measures something besides skill, like effort or time spent, go ahead. However, that is not what most people are interested in and it cannot replace ratings since it is measuring something else. It won't measure ability to win chess games against people.

*applauds*

try and tell that to erik.

Lets put it this way, are you smarter than your sisters? Probably not (assuming natural differences) any smarter or dumber than your brothers.

Also there are female freaks of cognitive ability... do you remember the Indian woman who could multiply 18digit numbers in a number of seconds (I forget her name)... its very hard to control such a scientific study, so it safer to remain in the realm of hypothesis. Environmental factors may be more powerful than you think. Kasparov (for example) had studied at least 100,000 positions by the age of 14yrs at Botvinik's school the old master was not averse to whipping the little boys silly or depriving them of food if they didn't complete his homework, which involved 10hr days and maybe 4hr nights studying chess games and submitting the work in the morning. Cruel punishment by any modern standards.

Fischer studied thousands of games on his own as a way to deal with loneliness and being abandoned by his mother. Carlsen had a dad who basically abandoned his life inorder to serve his childs talent, even obtaining special permits to allow the kid not to attend school, an overcontrolling father who makes his son his personal project.

So no-one can make a strong case either way... too many unknowns. However I can say that the only way to improve the skill is to work at it.

Maybe we could have everyone just start out as FM-ish and has a rating of 2200 provisional. That should fix it. No.. if anything live chess needs inflated and online chess need deflating.

I believe that on chesscube.com the starting rating is 1500! How come this site is so much lower?