Women and chess

Originally posted by Eladar
Your comparison with Judith Polgar is equivalent to me saying that I played against a woman in the WNBA and she schooled me. From that butt whooping I draw the conclusion that she should be playing the the NBA.

Many people make this fallacy. If you are going to compare the very best women, then you need to compare them to their male counterparts.

Well no, not really.
Reread what I wrote and you'll find that I mentioned her "As an aside"; that means as a separate and not necessarily relevant piece of information which I only mentioned "as an aside" because I'm fairly sure she and her sisters were mentioned earlier.

If you are going to accuse somebody of drawing fallacious conclusions, better to read what they say carefully. Otherwise you could possibly make a whole new fallacy all of your very own! 😛

Sorry, I didn't know that "as an aside" meant, "this sounds like I'm making a comment about the topic of the thread, but I'm really not".

Originally posted by Eladar
Sorry, I didn't know that "as an aside" meant, "this sounds like I'm making a comment about the topic of the thread, but I'm really not".

Fair enough- no harm done!🙂

Originally posted by AThousandYoung
That Eladar cannot compete with the very best chess players. Your point?

My point? A was answering Eladars posting.

My answer was: "You're a man, Eladar (I think), and you will most probably never win a Chess World Championchip. What conclusion can we have from the above?" in total.

It's not enough to be a man to win the Chess World Championchip. You have to be good at it too. But if you are good enough, then it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman.

A wise man said once: "There is more difference between man and man, and woman and woman, then there is between man and woman, and woman and man."

Fabian,

You are making a different point than the question of the thread. The question was if men have an advantage over women when it comes to chess.

You are correct that people can overcome disadvantages and people can be lazy and not develop a natural advanatage. Yet that does not negate the fact that one group has a natural advantage in certain areas.

Social pressures aside, I think it's quite possible men have in inate natural advantage over women as far as chess goes.

The differences between men and women's brains that have been mentioned are a result of natural selection, (if you believe the science). Men who didn't have good spacial awareness, ability to recognise patterns, (in tracking animals) and the killer instinct died out because they failed as hunters in the cave-men days. These abilities seem to me to be quite important in playing chess so maybe the average man is better equiped to play chess than the average woman.

You may well be right- I never meant to rule it out completely as a possibility. I just felt that the writer had chosen 'evidence' to back up their case without looking at the wider aspects of how we, as people, are affected by the nature and attitudes of the societies we live in. Or anything else that didn't agree with the already established viewpoint. Or even a cohrent arguement!
It could well be that there are biological forces purely or predominantly at work keeping women out of our Chess Clubs, my point is that there is no conclusive evidence to prove such a theory.
Personally I think the atmosphere of leering and other types of intimidation which I've seen women subjected to at chess events- a Boy's Club atmosphere if you like- that is more likely to be a provable cause for femine absence. I think a lot of the hostility, which often appears to be unconscious (few whom I've pulled up for it accepted that their behaviour was out of order until asked how they would have reacted/felt had the girl or woman on the receiving end been his daughter) is in large part down to the fear of embarassment if you get beaten by a girl! (For the record, I am so manly I was polite and congratulated the 9 year old girl who beat me recently, even though at the time I wanted to throttle her!)

Most everything we do is affected by the social conditions we find ourselves living in.
It is undeniable that in Stalin's Soviet Union chess was treated in a much more positive way than most of us are used to and it flourished among both genders... but still more amongst men than women. On the negative side, he was a mass-murdering despot who had anybody who disagreed with him 'dealt with' and he had about as much to do with the Communist Ideals thought out by Marx as George Bush has to do with Chaos Theory and he often treated some of the greatest Soviet masters harshly if they lost a match- but on the whole chess flourished under his heel.

But still more among men than women. If I knew why I wouldn't be rambling on here, would I?

However, this doesn't really prove that men are more apt to play chess than women or even just to play it well. To be certain we would have to carry out an experiment on a large scale over a long period of time in a society where everyone was treated the same, with the same chances and opportunities. Only by taking out all the possible other variables could it be clearly proven one way or the other.

Which leaves me in a quandry as I'd love to live in a fair world but I do find this topic fascinating, largely because it seems so insoluble!🙄

So, there is my solution. If you want to know the real reason why men appear to be, in general, stronger at chess than women just go out and change the world into a just, fair and equitable society for all.
I don't think I'm asking too much. I'd do it myself but I've got work in a couple of hours....

Perhaps there are more than one or two contributors to this discussion who like nothing more than winding others up- I know I enjoy it every now and again! The hardest part of writing this post has been resisting the mischevious urge. The same urge that keeps making me blunder away pieces, so I hope I haven't offended anybody.

Let me know when the world has been sortd out, if you don't mind?

Wow, and I thought I used too many words!😛😛

Originally posted by Eladar
Fabian,

You are making a different point than the question of the thread. The question was if men have an advantage over women when it comes to chess.

You are correct that people can overcome disadvantages and people can be lazy and not develop a natural advanatage. Yet that does not negate the fact that one group has a natural advantage in certain areas.

No, I don't go off-topic, I give another aspect of the original question.

If you read my first posting of this thread, you see that the question asked is not as easy as the author of the thread imply. There are more to it than just gender, and gender alone. So by discuss if men or women are better in chess, the line of discussion becomes very one-dimensional. I bring more deep into it.

You can chose to ignore this, or you can respond to it. By saying that I'm off-topic, without understanding my arguments, is in fact off-topic itself.

Originally posted by Eladar
Sorry, I didn't know that "as an aside" meant, "this sounds like I'm making a comment about the topic of the thread, but I'm really not".

Oh dear.
It must be either that I was up too late last night or got up too early this morning and am grumpier than I'd realised but that "Sorry" doesn't read as being totally genuine in light of the tone of the rest of the sentence! I never even noticed the attempt at sarcasm last night!

The bulk of what I'd posted was about the importance of having a balanced and informed opinion. If you'd never heard the phrase "as an aside" before it seems quite clear that instead of what you say you thought it meant, you really have interpreted it as;

"what a good excuse to ignore a couple of hundred words of a reasonably well argued point which doesn't appear to support what I think and to latch onto a light-hearted remark stuck on at the end so that I can distract away from something I'm not sure how to argue and have a go at somebody I've never met or spoken to before- and as a bonus if he complains I can make some sort of sarcastic remark about not understanding the language I'm writing in!"

If english isn't your first language then, as I said before, no harm done- but you might want to practice your sarcasm at home before trying it out in public as I had thought I was dealing with an adult. You sound like a child making excuses- if you re-read what you wrote you'll find that you appear to be implying that it is somehow my fault that you were in ignorance and so wilfully misinterpreted what I'd written. If I am responsible for your interpretation skills, manners or apparent inability to say sorry without tagging on"but it's your fault anyway" then please let me apologise. And give me an explanation of how that happened so that I can use similar skills to help out.

Likewise I apologise if my difficult morning has clouded my judgement and you're not really trying to be sarcastic.

Why can't people just be nice?:'(

Originally posted by Busygirl
Wow, and I thought I used too many words!😛😛

It's just as well this has to be typed rather than just said or there'd be a few more! 😉

I've always thought that it's not the number of words that matters but whether they make sense.
And saying something I agree with doesn't hurt either... 🙂

Originally posted by FabianFnas
Perhaps this is a culture thing. In my (sub-)culture we believe in equality of the sexes.

Ah, Fabian, the Swedish ethnocentric. What exactly do you think my "culture" believes in? Come on, say what you're thinking. Tells us your "thoughts" about the hairy Mediterranean machos.

Aren't you supposed to be a scientist? Stick with scientific evidence.
Do you think that the differences between male and female brain are a "cultural phenomenon"?
If not, how can you presume to use "culture" to assert that there is no difference between the biological ability of sexes to play chess?

Originally posted by KazetNagorra
[b]Where's the evidence?

I don't have any, but judging from experience chess players tend to be more intelligent than the average Joe the Plumber.

And do you really think that IQ is the only determinant? If not, then why is the standard deviation of the distribution of these other determinants dominated by the one of IQ?

It's probabl ...[text shortened]... On your latter point: it doesn't have to, but that seems to comply with empirical evidence.[/b]

On your latter point: it doesn't have to, but that seems to comply with empirical evidence.

And where is that "empirical evidence"? You do know about the statistical significance of interpretations of anecdotal evidence, don't you?