Why most girls drop out of chess by the age of twelve

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osdeving8

When you see what changes in a man's psyche when he does hormone treatment to become a transsexual woman: inhibiting testosterone and increasing progesterone and estrogen (which every man has in lesser quantity) we realize that psychological (or 'psychosocial' - cultural costumes!) are real and reveal that stereotypes are a consequence of the biological.

For those who do not know what changes occur, they are mostly emotional in nature. The man who has his decreased testosterone will be more emotionally sensitive and this will affect his decision making, affect how this man solves problems (or runs away from them! Which is, in a way, a kind of 'solution'). Someone would say just that: 'that man became a woman, incredible!'

Soon, around 12 years old there is a considerable increase in hormones in a girl and this will differentiate her from the boy. Children are essentially the same, the psychosocial practices that a girl or boy possess are essentially via imitation. But when hormones start to define the individual at the biological level, this is no longer just a matter of culture.

Thus, it is understandable that the girl loses some of her interest in chess as a teenager. However, Judith Polgar showed that it is possible to play well even as a woman. We can not forget that the power of adaptation that the human being has is very high, so it is possible (desirable?) To transcend our nature! Some philosophical strands advocate just that: we human beings must transcend our nature. (for women, this means fighting their emotional tendencies and playing chess on a rough and logical level without any poetic interpretations: draw, win or lost, no frills!)

osdeving8
playedby_mikeskinner escreveu:
osdeving8 wrote:

When you see what changes in a man's psyche when he does hormone treatment to become a transsexual woman: inhibiting testosterone and increasing progesterone and estrogen (which every man has in lesser quantity) we realize that psychological (or 'psychosocial' - cultural costumes!) are real and reveal that stereotypes are a consequence of the biological.

For those who do not know what changes occur, they are mostly emotional in nature. The man who has his decreased testosterone will be more emotionally sensitive and this will affect his decision making, affect how this man solves problems (or runs away from them! Which is, in a way, a kind of 'solution'). Someone would say just that: 'that man became a woman, incredible!'

Soon, around 12 years old there is a considerable increase in hormones in a girl and this will differentiate her from the boy. Children are essentially the same, the psychosocial practices that a girl or boy possess are essentially via imitation. But when hormones start to define the individual at the biological level, this is no longer just a matter of culture.

Thus, it is understandable that the girl loses some of her interest in chess as a teenager. However, Judith Polgar showed that it is possible to play well even as a woman. We can not forget that the power of adaptation that the human being has is very high, so it is possible (desirable?) To transcend our nature! Some philosophical strands advocate just that: we human beings must transcend our nature. (for women, this means fighting their emotional tendencies and playing chess on a rough and logical level without any poetic interpretations: draw, win or lost, no frills!)

 

thanks for the clarification doctor.

doctor no, I think I'm philosopher. I think we should to transcend our nature.
And one of the things I'm sure about in this life is that we have nature: sometimes I want to punch my opponent. Thankfully, Man transcends much of his nature lol

nimzomalaysian
RubenHogenhout wrote:

I never heart about this difference in distribution. But in your graphs it is showing precisely the opposite.

The orange of the women is showing a bigger difference in distribution then the blue of  the man.

Thus I suppose you must have drew them vise versa.

The point is, given the population of men and women is roughly equal, there are much more men on the extremes on the IQ scale (look at the y axis), whereas the women are more clustered around the center. This means men on average have a good chance of being extremely intelligent, which explains why most of the great scientists, philosophers, mathematicians, chess players are men. This also means they have a good chance of being dumwits.

my137thaccount

Why are these topics always so popular? I don't understand why people on here care about female participation in chess, especially men. Perhaps they are looking for a new girlfriend? Maybe philosophising about gender differences won't help so much with that.

Of course I'm not such a shining example myself, as by making this comment I'm contributing to this discussion too happy.png

ABergmann

I would like to introduce NN Talebs critique of IQ measurement and it's missing real world validity: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39

There is little more to say about IQ from a mathematical point of view. Despite this,@nimzomalaysian,  the following sentence really demonstrates a misconception concerning distributions and statistical science: “This means men on average have a good chance of being extremely intelligent,…” A good chance -à extremely intelligent?! Rather the probability of being extremely intelligent is very very very small, for both men and women. Even if the graphs show the “real” (but useless-in-real-world-scenarios) measurement for gender differences in IQ, it is nearly impossible to predict participants’ gender from a given datapoint. So at the bottom line there is no additional information in the data at all.

In addition, I hardly doubt your argument about scientists, philosophers and so on. Rather it is a combination of anecdotal evidence and survivorship bias: women weren't allowed to participate in higher education (and even schools) for a long time. So of course, many discoveries, treatises and inventions were made by men. Secondly, not all great scientist, philosophers and so on display exceptional IQ. Their scores vary too – you can’t draw conclusions from some well known men that discovered something and because of their discoveries were subject to IQ measurements. Sorry for my bad English at this point, I hope you understand my point.

GenevieveVK

are you guys okay  ????

Ghost_Horse0
ABergmann wrote:

I would like to introduce NN Talebs critique of IQ measurement and it's missing real world validity: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39

There is little more to say about IQ from a mathematical point of view. Despite this,@nimzomalaysian,  the following sentence really demonstrates a misconception concerning distributions and statistical science: “This means men on average have a good chance of being extremely intelligent,…” A good chance -à extremely intelligent?! Rather the probability of being extremely intelligent is very very very small, for both men and women.

What he was probably trying to say was that if that graph is somewhat representative of the real data (it's pretty obviously exaggerated for visual effect) then it's more likely for the male population to produce extreme outliers than it is for the female population. You're right that individual men have a very small chance of being super intelligent (or GMs), but in a population of, say, 1 billion males, there may be more individuals with a rarity of 1/ 100 million than in a population of 1 billion females.

If true, then when a country puts money into chess, and teaches it to all the school age children, you're more likely to get a male GM than a female GM... if the IQ graph (and others e.g. mental illness graph which is a similar shape IIRC) is true for chess playing as well.

Ghost_Horse0
ABergmann wrote:

I would like to introduce NN Talebs critique of IQ measurement and it's missing real world validity: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39

 

That's a pretty hand wavy blog post. Not much there of substance. Most of the "arguments" are an appeal to emotion, which should be a big warning flag. When he does get into some data it's so poorly organized you can't tell what he's trying to say... I wonder if even he knows. Honestly it looks like the writer knows just enough math to throw in some buzz words like "correlation" and hopes that's sufficient to impress whoever it is that reads his blog.

Even proponents of IQ will tell you it only loosely correlates with things like job success, classroom success, quality of life and other such measures... so I'm not even sure what he's trying to argue against or what the premise is. Maybe this:

"the story behind the effectiveness of Average National IQ is, statistically, a fraud"

 

But that doesn't mean anything. Effectiveness in what regard? Wait, he capitalized "Average National IQ." Maybe it's a company?

See what I mean when I'm suggesting this is written by and for people who don't know much... this quote is from the first sentence.

(If he wanted to prove the statistics were bad, the post would be full of nothing but math and studies, with no prose in the way of arguments until a few sentences at the end for conclusions)

 

Wait maybe this is what he wants it to be about, also from the intro:

"The psychologists who engaged me on this piece  . . . made the mistake of [presenting] papers [that] do not seem to grasp what noise/signal really means."

 

Ok, good, so address those papers... but of course he doesn't do that. He just says they're dumb and moves on.

RubenHogenhout
nimzomalaysian schreef:
RubenHogenhout wrote:

I never heart about this difference in distribution. But in your graphs it is showing precisely the opposite.

The orange of the women is showing a bigger difference in distribution then the blue of  the man.

Thus I suppose you must have drew them vise versa.

The point is, given the population of men and women is roughly equal, there are much more men on the extremes on the IQ scale (look at the y axis), whereas the women are more clustered around the center. This means men on average have a good chance of being extremely intelligent, which explains why most of the great scientists, philosophers, mathematicians, chess players are men. This also means they have a good chance of being dumwits.

I read it and understand what was ment I doubt if this is true at all.

ABergmann

@Ghost_Horse0. Well, you are right. This was not the best source to support my argument. Indeed he is writing for a non-mathematical audience in this blogpost. Unfortunately his paper (critique) on IQ measurement is not open source yet, at least I was not able to find it. Alternatively you can check this, if you want to have a deeper look into his work about randomness and probability, from which he derives his position about IQ measurement (and unfortunately most of psychological research): http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/SilentRisk.pdf

thequeen1212
You can't significantly measure the psychological differences between men and women. I know men who are very empathetic and women who are very systematic. It differs for every person. I agree with your argument that most girls who play chess drop out by high school ish, but don't most boys drop out by high school as well? This isn't because of some pressure. For them, it's mostly because chess is nerdy thing to do and no one wants to seem like a nerd.
andrexxx

@playedby_mikeskinner Dry your eyes, mate.

Titled_Patzer

Drop out by age 12 ?

When did they start ? The thread Title is pointless. Boys drop out at a similar %.

The "debate" is very old revolving around the differences between male/female.

Regarding chess, analytical as compared to emotional thinking is the usual debate.

This discussion of IQ differences as having meaning is ignorant nonsense. IQ has Nothing to do with chess playing skill.

JustOneUSer
One thing I think people always miss is, well, averages.

The average female often less systematic then the average male- I think that's been covered enough- but there are of course plenty of men who can't think systematically and plenty of women who can think very systematically. To say "women can't think systematically" isn't true, simple as. To say "on average, women are often less systematic then men" seems to be correct. There are differences between genders, but differences between people as well- yes your gender likely dictates a lot of your thinking, but so does your other genes, and your upbringing. A boy who spends his days watching TV and doing artwork or whatever as a kid is likely to be less systematically thinking then a physicist's doctor who started playing chess, doing maths problems and doing crosswords at age 5.

We are not made 100% by "nature" (our genes, gender, etc) nor are we made 100% by our "nurture" (our upbringing)- we are made of a bit of both.
JustOneUSer
*physicist's "daughter", I meant, not "doctor".
JustOneUSer
And "most" girls drop out of chess age twelve? Not buying that unless I see the statistic, most people I know didn't even start playing 'til after twelve. (And someone mentioned earlier how many boys as well seem to drop out about age 12)
DrSpudnik
GenevieveVK wrote:

are you guys okay  ????

If you need to ask...

Laskersnephew

It's amazing how every dweeby incel with a pair of (tiny) testicles thinks they are qualified to lecture of evolutionary biology and how girlz is dum! One reason why many girls drop out of chess is because chess has far too many people like the OP

Laskersnephew

" At IQ levels of 145+, there are 8 men for every 1 woman. "

Wrong, of course, but so revealing. Pseudo-scientific misogyny is the last refuge of the sexually unsuccessful

bong711
nimzomalaysian wrote:

Firstly, it simply isn't true to say there's no difference whatsoever between the aptitudes of men and women. And it is without a question true that there are some biological differences between men and women, we know that from our anatomy. We also know it from the studies that we've done on young children before they've had the opportunity to be socialized, for example the sorts of toys that they go for.

Some of the reasons why girls drop out of chess clubs is because they keep losing and one of the reasons they keep losing is because chess as a game plays to some of the male intellectual virtues, as Simon Baron Cohen puts it, men are good at systematizing and women are good at empathizing. It's very trendy these days to say that everything is socially determined but that's not what the science says and it's not either what common sense says because if it were true, these days there would be a lot more representation of women in sciences, in astrophysics, in philosophy, in mathematics and in chess. But there isn't.

What time era are you talking about? It's 21st Century and there are more female intellectuals than you think. Male GMs aren't that intellectual to be valid basis for comparison.

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