Statistical Analysis on Gender Difference

*crickets*

Social scientist not very social

Pretty much. Though beauty is in the eye of the beholder, art is the product of the artificer...artifacient? artisan? partisan...well it is someone who makes a thingamagummy and it isn't a bunch of people standing around a warehous waiting for objets to show up.

Sorry, needed to refuel brain with beer.

Wut?

It is an interesting question... for example, are musicians really so great, or are they just good at catering to some particular tastes and nothing more? After all, even "great" musicians might be boring to some people depending on what they like to hear.

Somehow, even though I can't refute that notion directly, it just doesn't seem quite right. I think there is something to be said for coordinating music such that it can make statements (even with instrumentals), like how when talking we can change the tone and pitch to imply different messages or emotions even with the same words -- regarding music, surely that's something only a skilled, not an unskilled, musician could do? I feel like there must be some possible objective measure regarding things like that, even if it's not easy to determine exactly what that measure is.

so you are saying women don't have the balls to get good at chess?  http://instantrimshot.com/

@Elubas: I don't know if we can make our passions objectively verifiable? Even if we find out about the history of a musical piece, and how it was produced, and admire it, the value of it is still subjective. The value is unique to the spectator. But this doesn't de-value it for me. Why is there a desire for an objective evaluation?

Well, I think there is a distinction between, for example, liking a piece of music and appreciating the work that went into it. Even if I don't like a particular piece of music, I might still be able to say "this person really knows what they're doing."

As for a reason for the desire: because I think people who put a lot of thought into their music have something over a total beginner at music who doesn't have much of a plan of how to make a piece of music "speak" but rather just picks notes randomly (which isn't really a skill as anyone could do that). If I were to just, literally, pick random notes and put them into a song, it would probably sound distinctly uncoordinated because it would have no consistent plan behind it. In fact it would probably be easy for anyone to tell that no thought was put into it, despite the fact that musical taste is somewhat subjective.

It's like how we can know when people use engines. Theoretically, any engine move can be played by a human, and yet, games played with an engine have a tell-tale look to them, totally different from even the best of human games. And we can say, often with much confidence, that such games are proof of a cheater. Humans never "just happen" to play like an engine consistently, just as random notes don't "just happen" to make a song that anybody likes.

Like I said though things beyond extremes like that are not as simple to judge.

I agree. Now take the word "art". We attach that word to a variety of things. For many the word denotes high value, difficulty, and rarity. If someone doesn't have the familiarity or learning to understand how difficult and rare a given painting is then they may not value it as highly as someone who does. It could be said that one is not qualified to judge the value properly. But does the word necessarily include "difficulty" and "rarity"? If the painting can be reproduced almost exactly by a forger, or a machine, where it can fool the expert then maybe we are left with the subjective judgement of the value of the painting--how the painting "feels" to the spectator. The value of "Art" may be reduced to the feeling of the spectator.

Although I think some artists have more skill than others, that doesn't mean skill will always be proportional to the enjoyment of a given piece. We of course can attatch value to something for any reason at all. Perhaps a certain piece of art will have a strong sentimental effect on someone, for example if it was a gift by a person close to them, even though the person who gave and made the gift may not be a professional artist.

Sometimes a certain piece of art will perfectly elicit emotion for some particular person; perhaps they will even, by chance, assume an intention of the artist that the artist in reality never had, such as "this different shade of blue for this part of the painting was probably done to create x emotional effect." Maybe the artist instead just used that shade of blue because they felt like it. So perhaps one rough way of measuring skill is that the better the artist, the more often it turns out that they had some concrete reason behind some particular thing they did :)

Even though it's possible to be greatly affected by an "unskilled" piece of art and hardly affected by a "skilled" piece of art, if I'm searching for beauty, I'm more inclined to trust the skilled artist, although I admit that this kind of skill is tough (but not necessarily impossible) to define. A good artist carefully finds a way to have the elements of a piece work together in harmony. Perhaps that's subjective in some ways, but at least if you are putting in an effort to really organize a piece, it's more likely to have an effect on people than just pure randomness.

^ you guys are hijacking a thread so you can talk about nothing lol

The thread is three years old.

How many three year old active threads are there that haven't been hijacked at least once?

It's more interesting than the usual drivel that is posted in threads of the "women & chess" genre, anyway.

The question of intent is really interesting! As well as if the intent actually corresponds with the affect. Also, is the painter, after finishing the painting, now a spectator? Does the painter lose possession of the painting when completed? The painter ex-presses--gives away him or herself. The author vanishes, because what the painter tried to express is no longer a part of them. It is now on a canvass and we take it, interpret it, judge it. It becomes ours, the viewers.

And also, art is not like a bowl. It is not something which has an inexhaustible purpose or meaning. A bowl from 2000 B.C. still retains it's purpose/meaning today--you can still eat out of it, whereas a painting from 2000 B.C. may lose it's artistic quality. It may just be a primitive painting having lost it's value as something beautiful and instead has been re-assigned a value for longevity.

Sorry about the lack of structure to my thinking about this

Whatever. I like discussing interesting things. It never crossed my mind that chesshole would be annoyed.

lmao

If you are not able to understand what someone writes you should get outa here. besides, I am not going to open your suspicious website.

Your claims are unfounded. 

Women take chess just as seriously as men. Unfortunately, men are better suited for the purely rational side of the game. We are also less susceptible to emotional weakness.

I bet, if you lose to a woman, who has no chess title, then you will be very angry. Because you 'shouldn't' lose. The funny thing is that you are one of the people in the forums with smallest possible rationality.

A woman with a specific rating plays just as well as a man with the same rating. Don't confuse "men perform better in chess than women on average" with "all men always play chess better than all women".

Anyway, thanks for destroying my thread. If anyone's interested - if not, then tough luck - I'll do a recap of the whole thing. Around the time that I made this thread, there was yet another thread on the "women in chess" subject, onto where the discussion eventually drifted. Therein, I did more analysis of FIDE data and came to the following conclusion: over the time of several years, the gender performance gap as obtained by the method described in the first post had increased steadily. This can mean one of two things:

1) There is an inherent performance gap towards which the statistical value converges. The increase of the gap in recent years tells us that as a result of increasing gender equality, more casual (lower-rated) woman players are registering with FIDE, bringing down the average female rating - conceivably, previous male dominance in the field had resulted in most FIDE-registered players being either top-rated males or females, or then more casual male players.

2) The analysis method is crap. Granted, it was quick and dirty, and especially in the female population a more suitable distribution fit might have been more appropriate. Still, statistical errors are reduced when the number of data points is increased, so unless some sort of systematic offset is at play, then even this method should at least be indicative of the correct result.

Conclusion: There is currently some reason why men outperform women in chess on average, but we can only speculate on what that reason is. The point of this little study was mainly to show that participation rates or gender biases are not the reason. In no way does it give credence to claims such as "every man is better at chess than every woman" or "men are more intelligent than women in general", but it should (one can only hope) shut up those people who repeatedly say such silly things as "women would be as good or better in chess as men, if only there were more women players or if women were not inhibited by gender biases".