[bsder]

> Ageism also just one of these shitty unproven biases

You might be right, if we were talking about anything except chess.

Chess, unlike everything else, has a clear ranking system and lots of records for people to analyze. And unfortunately, the record is very clear: chess ability decreases after a certain age.

However, the decrease is more likely due to stamina than mental decline. Chess tournaments take a long time, and stamina definitely decreases with age. However, pro athletes demonstrate that you can probably go until around your early 40s before it becomes a real issue.

Having said that, it will be interesting to see how this generation does in the blitz formats as they age. Those will be less dependent upon stamina and a better measure of mental acuity for chess.

[renewiltord]

He’s got a point. If the measure works for age, then let’s run it for sex, race, and religion. Then we can make conclusions about these categories and test if we’re willing to accept them. If we’re not, but we’re willing to accept them for age, then the balance of chance is that we’re ageist and just blinding ourselves to it because we are ageist.

I think looking at the data you’d have to conclude that women can’t play chess as well as men, that black men can’t play chess as well as white men, and that Judeo-Christian (and perhaps Hindu Brahmins) beliefs are just as indicative.

If we deny those conclusions as bigotry of immutable characteristics, it naturally leads to the age question.

[bsder]

> I think looking at the data you’d have to conclude that women can’t play chess as well as men, that black men can’t play chess as well as white men, and that Judeo-Christian (and perhaps Hindu Brahmins) beliefs are just as indicative.

Actually, chess data suggests that all of them are as good as one another. As soon as you have enough candidates in the pipeline, magically, any specific group suddenly becomes as good as any other.

On the women's side, the Polgar sisters are both exemplar and counterexample. Clearly, given sufficient training, women CAN be rated highly (Judit cracked 2700). The fact that the women's side hasn't exploded just like the men's side can mostly be tracked to the fact that chess isn't considered a "feminine pursuit" worth putting the time into (that finally seems to be changing slowly in recent decades).

[renewiltord]

In the history of the sport one woman made the Top 100 of the sport and this is supposedly evidence. And how many black? Count them out. They form at least a sixth of the world population. Now how many old? And perhaps then we find out that we can invent reasons for the defence of the old: traveling is hard, they have more responsibilities with children, they are more senior in primary career.

> The fact that the women's side hasn't exploded just like the men's side can mostly be tracked to the fact that chess isn't considered a "feminine pursuit" worth putting the time into (that finally seems to be changing slowly in recent decades).

A defence that doesn’t pass for software engineering, amazing. This old canard. The girls just don’t like engineering. It’s not feminine enough. Damore got whacked for this.

[thrance]

The first generation of programmers counted more women than men. Chess would have more women than men if it was taught to more girls than boys. Simple as.

[bsder]

> The first generation of programmers counted more women than men.

I have heard this before, but you need to back that up with more qualifiers.

There were a lot more female plug technicians because women were trained as phone operators. There were a lot more female keypunch operators because women were trained in typing to be secretaries. However, most people would not refer to those as "programmers" like we would definitely say for someone like Margaret Hamilton.

[slater]

No true scotsman?

This is a good book on the topic:

https://www.amazon.com/Programmed-Inequality-Discarded-Techn...