Women and chess

Originally posted by ChronicLeaky
I do have anecdotal evidence, which is why I [b]claimed to have observed an incidence of a phenomenon.

However, there aren't two competing hypotheses, because the hypothesis about "innate ability" hasn't defined its basic notion. Not enough is known about the cognitive processes that underlie chess (nor is it even known that high chess ability ld be asked to determine whether given submitted papers were written by men or women.[/b][/b]

[/b]I do have anecdotal evidence, which is why I ]claimed to have observed an incidence of a phenomenon.
My claim is that your 'anecdotal evidence' is not evidence at all.

However, there aren't two competing hypotheses, because the hypothesis about "innate ability" hasn't defined its basic notion.
The claim in itself does not concern itself with the exact processes through which "innate ability" differentiates (or not) both sexes. The claim is simply best expressed as the opposite of the null: "There is no innate advantage in the ability to play chess". Any possible mechanism is enough.

Thus a sufficient cause for the underrepresentation of women in mathematics would consist of a reason why women are on average less likely than men to pursue this sort of interest at a young age.
I agree. I pointed this out as the main mistake of others here. Both cultural and genetic factors can be present or simply one. If that is so, then representation cannot be used to distinguish between the two cases. Note that there's also the possibility of women having a cultural disadvantage and a biological advantage, but the former being dominant, thus leading to underrepresentation.

In mathematics and most other technical fields, this underrepresentation is becoming less true with time, which is evidence against the hypothesis that there are neurological reasons for the underrepresentation

And HERE is again your mistake (which as I said before, mirrors the one above).

A decrease in the cultural bias would also lead to a decrease in underrepresentation REGARDLESS of whether biological reasons are also present or not. So you cannot use this by itself as evidence against the hypothesis that there are neurological reasons.

Originally posted by Palynka
I do have anecdotal evidence, which is why I ]claimed to have observed an incidence of a phenomenon.
My claim is that your 'anecdotal evidence' is not evidence at all.

However, there aren't two competing hypotheses, because the hypothesis about "innate ability" hasn't defined its basic notion.
The claim in itself does not concern its by itself[/i] as evidence against the hypothesis that there are neurological reasons.[/b]

My anecdotal evidence is evidence for my claim to have observed what I did about the differences in how social pressure affects members of different genders in a particular society. My "anecdotal evidence" from female mathematicians is purely suggestive. It consists of a summer's worth of cigarette breaks with fellow quals victims who, in addition to being mathematicians, are sometimes female and always misanthropic enough to whinge about past social pressures.

I would agree with your post if I thought it were possible that both biological and social factors could possibly be at work. In this case, however, I think that for formal reasons related to the way we distinguish sexes and because of the gigantism of mathematics and howit is done, this isn't possible. Where the argument that I am about to make is anecdotal, I will use an asterisk (*). At these places, please think about whether it is anecdotal or merely weakly anecdotal, ie based on my experience with things that would surely also be experienced in the same way by someone else in similar circumstances.

The argument assumes that these biological differences, whatever they are, are only relevant when they are manifested as cognitive differences (this is supposed to be reminiscent of the Turing test) -- women could have boiling Venusian brains and men freezing Martian ones; I don't consider that a difference if their thinking, on the "software" level, is the same. I will assume that such cognitive differences coexist with social factors and argue (obviously non-rigorously) by contradiction.

1. Suppose, for reasons I stated in the previous post, that biological changes cannot be brought about as a result of social changes (on an individual scale, stuff in neuropsychiatry makes this almost certainly untrue, which I find fascinating but which is not relevant here) or any other relatively short-term changes.

2. Suppose that biological and social reasons exist to explain the underrepresentation of women in mathematics. Suppose that the social reasons were to be totally removed, ie the current trend were carried to its conclusion and broader huge social changes related to wider issues like parenting also came about.

3. If the proportion of women and men among mathematicians is now equal, then I claim that either of two things is possible, namely:

3a. There are no cognitive differences stemming from biological differences between men and women such that these cognitive differences tend to make men more effective mathematicians. In this case I'm done.

3b. There are biological differences between men and women which means that certain cognitive differences exist, on average, between men and women. However, these are, by assumption, insufficient to make men or women more effective mathematicians as measured by the proportion of mathematicians of each gender. In other words, men tend to do mathematics in a different way from women in this case, but no more or less effectively.

4. Suppose that after the social levelling, either men or women are underrepresented. Without loss of generality, suppose it is still women, so that biological differences exist between men and women, which mean that women on average possess cognitive differences from men such that a person with such "female cognition" is less likely to be a mathematician.

I am pretty sure you have plenty of experience doing mathematics and watching mathematics and things close to it done in person and in print. You are aware of the enormous differences in thinking style from mathematician to mathematician.

Often in print one sees phrases like "mere diagram-chasing". I find that activity more fun than crosswords. Some mathematicians also have freakish mental arithmetic abilities; others can't do arithmetic. Some reason very heuristically and translate things into formal language when they write; others tend to think quite formally. Some have lots of collaborators; some work in relative isolation. The nicest proofs of Brouwer's fixed-point theorem are non-constructive; Brouwer decided at some point that logic itself should be altered so that only constructions count as existence proofs. A mathematician I know is like a very insightful geometer who uses to his advantage the fact that he has trouble visualising things that most people don't have problems with; others note improvements in their visual intuition from geometrising (*). In other words, there are huge individual variations in the cognitive styles which can be used to do mathematics. Some are, for a given task, more efficient than others. They are intimately related to the total cognitive style of the person. Someone who does mathematics uses an enormous part of xyr mental toolkit when doing so, in the sense that changing a mathematician's mathematical habits entails a noticeable change in personality.

Our hypothetical "female cognition" would have to be inferior to the worst useful cognitive style in a significant proportion of mathematical contexts in order to maintain the underrepresentation. Such differences in cognition would be highly significant. Mathematical ineptitude would be so related to the other parts of the woman's mind (in the same way that useful mathematical cognition is intimately related to the rest of a mathematician's cognition) that "female mathematician" would be an oxymoron; i.e. non-male mathematicians would have cognitive styles distinguishing them from other females as much as females would differ cognitively from males. This is a contradiction which is inevitable unless we suppose that the social forces were HELPING women, and not hindering them, which I do not buy.

Note that this argument does not require the remaining (non-social) underrepresentation of women to be small. If, for example, you respond that there could be tiny cognitive differences leading to a tiny underrepresentation of women, I would respond that tiny cognitive differences are insufficient to keep a group out of mathematics entirely, because the range of cognitive styles amenable to use in mathematics is too large. (For example, whatever cognitive processes that are used to solve simple ODEs are for some reason wired to the cognitive processes that make me want to cry; this is a pretty big deficiency but has not prevented me, say, passing quals (*).)

Thus I can't accept that, given the accepted (gross anatomical) distinction between males and females, there are biological differences between males and females (ie all males have some characteristic that all females lack) resulting in general cognitive differences between males and females (ie most people with the biological characteristic have the cognitive one and most without it don't) sufficient to explain whatever part of the "gender gap" in mathematics that is not socially explained.

In fact, I suspect that 3b. is the best reflection of reality. I guess that I haven't addressed non-cognitive biological differences, and I think these play a huge role in the existence of the social causes.

EDIT I don't know anything at all about chess besides the rules, but I suspect that most parts of this argument are weaker for chess.

Phew! I just finished reading this whole thread(ish thing). Took me a full
40 minutes and none the wiser for it. For the record, in my opinion
busygirl and caissad4 has added more substance to this thread than all
the other posters added together. I base this on empirical evidence and
such as and therefore and so I believe that there's nothing to suggest
that women suck in chess. (Keep reading dimwit.)

If it's been proven by fact that a person of a given gender can suck at
chess when another person of that same gender will excel at the same,
and it's also a fact that this is true for both genders, what does that tell
us when posing the original question? Was that too much for you, dear
reader? I'll try again, simpler:

If we have both females with and females without a talent for chess, and
the same is true for men, what does that tell us when posing the original
question?

Absolutely nothing (!) but the fact that we will gain nor lose anything by
asking the question. Women appear to have been given the same
random talent for chess that men have. All else are unnecessary
speculation. Unnecessary since if we speculate that the answer is a no,
we also imply that women are not as intelligent as men (depending on
whether or not we believe that chess require intelligence, which is also a
matter of debate I suppose), and if we speculate that the answer is
yes we confirm something that should be assumed true until evidence
prove otherwise which is totally superfluous if anyone asks me.

🙄

Can you see why this thread was a complete waste of my time (with the
exception of busygirls perfectly formulated posts), and how stupid I am
for not realising it would be, having read the original question? I'm mad
at you people! I'm mad at me for trawling through this garbage against
my excellent judgement! But most of all I'm angry at you for
reading this post that I made excessively longer than it would have
needed to be had I chosen not to keep writing after the first paragraph;
hard to follow just to get back at you for doing this to me by keeping
this thread alive for so long with so much unsubstantiated and
unsubstantial nonsense (apologies to the two aces mentioned earlier, of
course).

😠

Having said that. Why can't we all just hug a little? I always find hugging
comforting when upset.

🙂

Do you think that women can make as good chess players as men?

Can't believe I actually kept reading after that question. I'm stupid! Stupid! 😠

The post that was quoted here has been removed

I can't honestly give my opinion of her reputation, since I hadn't heard of her or her work until recently. She's a professor at the university where I'm spending the semester (I'm but a PhD student, though). We've never met, and the only contact we've had was me looking something up in one of her papers, which was of high quality as far as I can judge these things.

Sorry, I was being very literal with my coincidences 🙂.

The post that was quoted here has been removed

Yup, I'm at HU. I only arrived here recently and my chess isn't much better than my Hebrew, which has four words, so to be honest I have not looked.

Originally posted by ChronicLeaky
My anecdotal evidence is evidence for my claim to have observed what I did about the differences in how social pressure affects members of different genders in a particular society. My "anecdotal evidence" from female mathematicians is purely suggestive. It consists of a summer's worth of cigarette breaks with fellow quals victims who, in addition to but I suspect that most parts of this argument are weaker for chess.

Cliff notes? 😉

As a mathematician, I would expect(*) you to understand the value of brevity.

I already claimed (and explained why) mere comparison of proportions cannot lead us to conclude either way. Your argument is just a particular case of mine, and actually corroborates mine. I'm not claiming that there is evidence for the existence of biological differences and that's all your argument addresses.

Sorry, but if you thought that was a rebuttal of my comment to you, then you wasted your time (and mine for reading and replying to it).

Originally posted by ChronicLeaky
my chess isn't much better than my Hebrew

Mathematicians cannot play chess. They are too leaky.

The post that was quoted here has been removed

I remember that story as well. The angle that the British press seemed to take was that even though she had been a child prodigy she was a failure once she had her PhD. I'm glad she has achieved some sort of success in her chosen field. When I first moved to Oxford I used to occasionally see her cycling around town on a tandem with her father.

A few years ago I interviewed a someone for a job and noticed that he had claimed on his CV that he an O level in maths. I asked him about that as we was about fifteen years younger than me and O levels finished a few years after I left school. It turned out he had obtained his O level at the age of six, and he produced a newspaper cutting to prove it! He then got an A level at the age of nine and graduated from Oxford when he was sixteen or so. I offered him the job at £2K more than we were paying any other graduates but in the end he decided to stay at University to do his second PhD.

Originally posted by gothcharles
I guess they can but there does seem to be a lack of female chess players esp. on RHP. in fact I've never met a girl who has had the remotest interest in chess although I am playing a good female opponent atm!

A lack of female players here, you say. Hmmm.
What does that say about the player with the most tournament wins on RHP being female ?
Or that she has over 5000 wins ?
Sometimes statistics are only statistics.

Originally posted by caissad4
A lack of female players here, you say. Hmmm.
What does that say about the player with the most tournament wins on RHP being female ?
Or that she has over 5000 wins ?
Sometimes statistics are only statistics.

That she plays alot of games against a handful of other females? 😉

Originally posted by Palynka
Cliff notes? 😉

As a mathematician, I would expect(*) you to understand the value of brevity.

I already claimed (and explained why) mere comparison of proportions cannot lead us to conclude either way. Your argument is just a particular case of mine, and actually corroborates mine. I'm not claiming that there is evidence for the existence of biological tal of my comment to you, then you wasted your time (and mine for reading and replying to it).

I apologize; I missed the crucial word "represenatation" in your previous post. I have all along started with the underrepresentation as the phenomenon to be explained, and argued about, not whether cognitive differences exist, but whether cognitive differences exist that explain underrepresentation.

You said: "Both cultural and genetic factors can be present or simply one. If that is so, then representation cannot be used to distinguish between the two cases."

My argument claims that the first sentence is false. Whether it does so convincingly isn't really important. What's important is that we are talking at cross-purposes. I am considering the question "Are biological factors responsible for the observed underrepresentation of women in mathematics?". You would like me to not use "representation" as evidence. What question are you trying to answer?

I've made the mistake of replacing questions like "are men better than women at chess?" with "why are there more male than female chess players?". Is this the same mistake you identified, and I misinterpreted you?

(I mean that when earlier I said "there aren't two competing hypotheses", I meant that there aren't two competing hypotheses (of the types addressed) to explain the underrepresentation of women in fields like mathematics. I'm not even sure anymore what I sought to conclude from women being underrepresented.)

Originally posted by Jigtie

Do you think that women can make as good chess players as men?

Can't believe I actually kept reading after that question. I'm stupid! Stupid! 😠

Psah - men. *rolls eyes*

😀