Nigel Short: Women's brains not chess brains

Your sexism has led you to think that statistics predict a future of males always being better chess players than females. It's transparent to me.

Raspberry_Yoghurt wrote:

trysts wrote:

Raspberry_Yoghurt wrote:

True, but that's just not the issue. Noone ever claimed "no woman will ever per part of the top 10 chess players in the world ". Obviously Short wouldnt claim that, since he himself lost to Polgar lol, and I dont think he is senile yet.

The claim is that "out of the 100 top chess players in the world, the most of them will be men". Because its about distributions, just like men and women has different distribution for body size so most men are bigger than women, but the smallest men are smaller than the biggest women.

I think if the Polgars had had 50 daughters and 50 sons, then the sons would have been best and the distribution would be the same as it is in chess normally.

The statistics of today don't predict the future. You don't even know how to read statistics.

Yes they do. That's why science likes statistics. Not perfectly, but better than just random guessing and wishful thinking.

Say if a government are interested in changing something in education, like starting a foregn language 1 year earlier or later or whatever. They want to know with as much certainty as possible if its good or bad, they are NOT gonna say "screw statistics, we do what we want, anything can happen in the future!" or "We have an experiment here conducted with a grand total of 3 pupils, so now we know everything, lets just change the entire school system for millions of people based on that, if they can do it everyone can!"

Who's planning on making any grand changes to chess?

Statistics show correlations, not cause /effect relationships.

Well they can still try, it's up to them. Even if you belong to the gender with lower distributed "chess traits", whatever the traits are, you can still be the one in the good end of the distribution anyway and then it doesn't matter for you personally. You don't compete with your gender's average ability, you compete with your own.

I think also if you want to be super good in something, you need to not care what other peope think of your chances, because you need strong mentality. If you fail because something Nigel Short said, then I don't think your psyche is strong enough anyway.

No man (or woman) is an island who's psyche is so strong that they can take on the world alone. Support systems are important for everyone, but especially if you are down a peg to begin with.

It was just an example of statistics being used to preduct the future is just daily routine because it works. Insurance company spend millions on it, they dont spent that money for fun, they do it because it works.

In the original article Nigel Short said:

"Men and women’s brains are hard-wired very differently, so why should they function in the same way? I don’t have the slightest problem in acknowledging that my wife possesses a much higher degree of emotional intelligence than I do. Likewise, she doesn’t feel embarrassed in asking me to manoeuvre the car out of our narrow garage. One is not better than the other, we just have different skills. It would be wonderful to see more girls playing chess, and at a higher level, but rather than fretting about inequality, perhaps we should just gracefully accept it as a fact."

As seen here: http://en.chessbase.com/post/vive-la-diffrence-the-full-story

He doesn't seems to talk about "averages" here, rather about gender aptitudes; although the whole article is much more nuanced thant what people claim.

On the other hand, the quote at the beginning of the telegraph article (seems a misquote actually)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/chess/11548840/Nigel-Short-Girls-just-dont-have-the-brains-to-play-chess.html started the drama.

Statistics is about deriving correlations, especially when you cannot know the cause-to-effect relationship between various factors. Correlations are enough to make predictions, not to explain what is going on.

In this thread, we had 'explanations' about how woman chess skill is related to brain parts size and so on, backed-up with "it's statistically proven".

It is like "race causes crime" explained by statistics.

I think that's just your perspective on it. Lots and lots of females play chess. I've never heard nor experienced anyone treating chess as a "boys thing".

I doubt that insurance companies use statistics to predict the future. It's more like they use your payments for their own credit line, borrowing on your payments. But if they did try to make payments higher for women drivers than men drivers for example, then they could easily go to court for sexism. Maybe the statistics can be read as you being likely to be a rapist, since statistics show that men are overwhelmingly rapists? Does that mean anything whatsoever to you? It shouldn't. It doesn't mean that you are a rapist or that men will always overwhelmingly be rapists. Just like your statistics for female chess players in comparison with male chess players only show what has already passed and don't predict a future, thank goodness. We're all free to change the statistics in chess and crime. It depends upon our individual environment, not upon whether you are female or male.

Colin - Short should talk about averages, if he doesnt i disagree with him. Just for his examples, some women have terrible emotional intelligence and some men excellent. Agree though that women have higher average for emo intelligence.

And yeah agree with correlations and causation. I think the causation is the incitement system, not the raw brain power. More "this is good" feeling for men for being top dog in something + higher risk acceptance of men than women + more tolerance for solitary work for men.

The "deep" causation is evolution which has bestowed men and women with different brains, this is a well established field called evolutionary psychology now 20-30 years old. I think the general public doesnt know about it because the angry mob would just yell "sexism go away, screw your science".

They actually charge men more for car insurances, because men smash up their cars more. I have nothing against that and I think men will always smash more cars than women, with young men smashing more cars than older men.

Random link:

According a CBS news post, men pay on average $15,000 more for auto insurance in their lifetime compared to women. This is when men and women are assessed at a similar age and income level

http://www.forbes.com/sites/moneywisewomen/2013/01/08/what-really-goes-into-determining-your-insurance-rates/

It's like I'm not making myself clear to you. They don't make the premiums unequal at the time, eventually the premiums became unequal. And it could change to equal on average again. Do you see? The statistics don't say what will be, but what has been. Your sexist interpretation of statistics leads you to think that men will always be better than women at chess, when the statistics don't show this or prove this. Your sexism leads you to look for biological reasons of why women are not as high-rated as men in the world of professional chess. Even though the world has proof that a woman can be one of the very best chess players ever. 

So you think the brain is the only organ that is shielded from the genes (Y chromosome) and testoterone/estrogene levels? Is there a magic invisible barrier around the brain so the Y chromosome and the sexual hormomes cant get to it or how does that work?

Polgar is already covered.

As far as the future being like the present, yes it seems very reasonable to me to assume so. Most people assume that the sun will rise tomorrow because it did in the past.

For the sexism stuff you have to be more specific. People can mean a million hings with these ism-words. I dont think women and men are identically mentally, so if it means that then obviouslu i am a sexist. If it has some sort of normative content, like men or women are better or cooler than the other gender or one of the genders should be barred to do chess or waterskiing or whatever, then I am not at all a sexist.

Raspberry_Yoghurt wrote:

Masamune314 wrote:

Raspberry_Yoghurt wrote:

trysts wrote:

Raspberry_Yoghurt wrote:

True, but that's just not the issue. Noone ever claimed "no woman will ever per part of the top 10 chess players in the world ". Obviously Short wouldnt claim that, since he himself lost to Polgar lol, and I dont think he is senile yet.

The claim is that "out of the 100 top chess players in the world, the most of them will be men". Because its about distributions, just like men and women has different distribution for body size so most men are bigger than women, but the smallest men are smaller than the biggest women.

I think if the Polgars had had 50 daughters and 50 sons, then the sons would have been best and the distribution would be the same as it is in chess normally.

The statistics of today don't predict the future. You don't even know how to read statistics.

Yes they do. That's why science likes statistics. Not perfectly, but better than just random guessing and wishful thinking.

Say if a government are interested in changing something in education, like starting a foregn language 1 year earlier or later or whatever. They want to know with as much certainty as possible if its good or bad, they are NOT gonna say "screw statistics, we do what we want, anything can happen in the future!" or "We have an experiment here conducted with a grand total of 3 pupils, so now we know everything, lets just change the entire school system for millions of people based on that, if they can do it everyone can!"

Who's planning on making any grand changes to chess?

It was just an example of statistics being used to preduct the future is just daily routine because it works. Insurance company spend millions on it, they dont spent that money for fun, they do it because it works.

Yes, because they are dealing in averages.

You don't seem to understand what Judit Polgar accomplished. Her rise up to the top of chess informed the world that there is no longer a discussion about females not being "hardwired" or "equipped" to be the very best chess players in the world if they so choose.

Yours and Nigel's sexism is a story of two men with a prejudice against women's abilities, disparaging a female's ability to be as good as males at playing a board game. It's laughable. Neither of us are good at chess based upon our ratings, plain_yogurt, so I can't imagine what your purpose is in arguing for some innate ability that males have which females don't when it concerns this game? I'm just on the side of reason. You must have some other motive. I'll call it sexism--prejudice against women or what women are capable of.

Evolutionary psychology being 20-30 years old doesn't mean much. Also, we got here because we we were hunters/gatherers does not mean that will not change in the future and human brains will adapt accordingly.

I say we err on the side of caution and have everyone shoot for the moon. As far as I know we have only one life anyway, so why put shackles of lowered expectations on any individual? Why put it on a whole sex for that matter? From an indivdual perspective, I couldn't care less what statistics says about my brain or why my brain is the way it is. I'm going to move forward. I never understood people who say "be realistic" in your expectations. But, that's just me. Selling anyone short (hehe) or selling a class of people short in anything based on averages is sad. And, if Nigel Short's wife took up the way of the sword, she might find her sense of distance improved so no problems with the car/garage issue. If course, that's only if she were interested in that type of thing. :)

When one considers the strong response to Nigel's remarks among men, and since the use of statistics has been discussed, it would be interesting to see what traits are most prominent among this subset of individuals who are so adament about women's brains not being hardwired for chess.  

For example, what percentage of women would consider these men desirable sex partners? Do these men bear a resentment toward women in general because they had domineering mothers? Absent mothers who never displayed any love or affection for them?

Are these men athletic, or were they always the last selected for dodgeball teams in gym class? I think a major university should do some research on this subject.