Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.

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With the recent issues of transgender people in sports, why don’t we move some sports over to a weight-class system? (midwest.social)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/showerthoughts

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Obviously this won’t work for all sports, but things like football, track, soccer, it would allow for de-gendered team, even allowing athletes with the skills but not the genetically-endowed physical attributes to have a place to play.

Note: I know very little about sports and being on a sports team, so please point out anything that doesn’t make sense.

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Chess? What percent of woman players are GMs and what percent of male players are GMs? Because it sounds like sampling bias.

[–] kava 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Women make up roughly 15% of US Chess Federation members. They make up roughly 1.5% of grandmasters.

That's an order of magnitude difference.

[–] givesomefucks 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Here's a podcast about a study

https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/mens-chess-superiority-explained-08-12-29/

Normally I'd just link studies...

But I feel like if you're this opinionated about things we figured out long ago, maybe listening would help more than reading.

Because it wouldn't have taken much for you to Google this at some point and realize we've been studying this for decades, and maybe, just maybe, science is better than your assumptions.

There are a lot of factors in play, and you seem to think it's because of...

What exactly?

Like it seems like you're just arguing women are bad at chess?

[–] kava 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I've read multiple papers on this topic. I'm a 2000 rated player and have tutored girls in chess. This is an interest of mine.

There is a very large gap in performance. The research overall implies a complex variety of factors. This includes what you mentioned, along with other inequities. It also includes the fact that women players are roughly 11 years younger on average and therefore haven't peaked yet, which will account for some.

But there is evidence that there is also an innate biological difference. Men score better on visuospatial intelligence tests when compared to women. Chess, especially at a high level, involves a lot of this type of thinking.

I'm not arguing that women are bad at chess. Humans are individuals and there are varying levels of players in both genders.

Just that if you look at the extremes (which the top chess players will be) you're going to see a higher level of males even if we fixed all of the inequities currently influencing the gender gap in chess.

We don't know if the 10x difference is 5% due to biology or 50% due to biology. But we know it's a non zero number

Essentially I used it as an example in the wider context of why we have women's leagues and men's league in sports.