That tracing woodgrains peice on David Gerard is out

https://awful.systems/post/1874248

That tracing woodgrains peice on David Gerard is out - awful.systems

Lemmy

Quillette, Claire Lehmann’s longform magazine focused on science and cultural critique and the home of, among other things, the best-researched article I know of on gender differences in chess

Back in 1995, when I was born, Gerard was my age

Wait hold up this motherfucker is not younger than I am. Good God.
“Gerard was the age I am now in 1995 when I was born. Alice is twice my age and stands 4 metres to the left of Gerard. She is half the height of Imhotep…”

ah yes quillette, that fine bastion of whitewashing

the best-researched article I know of on gender differences in chess

just… the absolute weirdest thing to pick? like, fucking seriously? or is there some weird-ass chess proxy-fixation among the rats that I have thus far been blessedly unaware of?

or is there some weird-ass chess proxy-fixation among the rats that I have thus far been blessedly unaware of?

Gonna take a shot in the dark and say the fixation’s from viewing chess more as an IQ showcase than as a game.

probably but it isn’t one I’ve come across (in this form), thus my surprise
also, just ito “things to pick by which to point out dirtrag as a Shining Beacon”, it’s pretty fucking out there
They’re all in for Chess as a sine qua non metric for intelligence. Better to call it g than IQ tbh. Not only does it have the lick of rigour, it has the nerd cultural cachet and the ludicrous white masculinity complex.
I assume any publication that has ever run anything by Andy Ngo is absolute trash garbage.

or is there some weird-ass chess proxy-fixation among the rats that I have thus far been blessedly unaware of?

Iirc ssc has written about it so yes

not playing it, you understand
Has anyone informed them that Elon Musk, the smartest man alive, dismissed chess as two low-dimensional and prefers to be challenged by some PC multiplayer combat game instead?

Musk is fascinating for the Rationalists ideasets, as he clearly is really inspired by Rationalism (and follows a few of them, ssc iirc). But he also so mid and bland that he draws the Rationalists ideaset down with him. If you heard him talk about space colonization (esp the argument he had with Bezos, who is more of a O’Neill Cylinder guy which iirc caused one of those weird dismissive Musk reactions (dismisses it as dumb without any good argument (if there is one at all)) which people mistake for genius), simulation theory, AI and esp AI safety (ow to see the LW reactions when Musk said ‘we are just going to make the AGI safe by building in safety’, etc.

It is like as a metal fan you hear a big celebrity is into heavy metal, but turns out all he knows is Metallica. A politician who claims he is into warhammer, but all he has is a few tactical ultramarine squads.

It is a bit of a pattern, there in something dumb, a new even more popular thing or person appears which sucks in all the attention and then draws all the ideas down by being even worse. Which causes people to look more clearly into the first thing and see how bad it is by association. For example cryptocurrencies and NFTs, the obvious uselessness and scammyness of NFTs revealed the similar qualities in the cryptocurrencies space. But also just every culture war Vox Day parasitically attaches himself too (He does this a lot, any rightwing thing that becomes a bit popular he leeches himself onto, often makes a worse related movement (the sad vs angry puppies for example) and then drags it all down by being an open sexist/white nationalist/all out horrible dumb person who thinks he is smarter than he is.

Sorry this turned into a bit of a rant.

Her lie reflected my lie.

Yarn
Not even – it’s a simplified Civilization clone for mobile. (It actually sounds like a pretty neat little game, but, uh, chess it is not!)
What Elon Musk's favorite game tells us about him

A review, of sorts, of Polytopia.

The Future, Now and Then

There are no hidden layers to Elon Musk’s thinking. He likes the gratification of impulsively pushing a button and seeing the numbers go up. He likes games that are straightforward and easy to beat. He’d rather reset every 45 minutes than execute meticulous plans that extend far into an uncertain future. He does not think ten moves ahead. He just responds with maximal aggression to the latest change of conditions. (The stock is down again. Announce robotaxis!) When this works, he gets the satisfaction of dominance. When it doesn’t, he can always just reset and try again. Elon Musk’s suit of armor is that he is extremely rich.

So it’s the gamer equivalent of one of those big-game hunting safaris where the game has been corralled and pre-tranquilised for the client’s convenience?

my honest reacton:

Judit Polgár

Sadly, I know where this goes, they will just point out she is Jewish and point to that. (I think SSC even did that).

Wishful thinking on my part to think their sexism/eugenics posting was based on ignorance instead of deliberately being massive piles of shit. Don’t let them know Iceland has the highest number of GMs/pop or else we’ll get a 10,000 page essay about how proximity to volcanoes gives + 20 IQ points.
Careful, that might cause the humanbiodiversity posters to react and draw lines on maps! (Is that still a thing? I can’t recall seeing much HBD posters anymore, likely my own bubble of course).
In that case, selling sulphur supplements for drinking water may turn out profitable
Indeed. He did a post entirely about the family being Ashkenazi Jews. You’re never going to guess the premise of the post!

Was it about how feminism is bad.

No wait sorry, I’m misrepresenting his position.

Was it about how only 30% of feminists are sane and the rest are insane?

Or at least not provably not insane.
Yes thanks, didn’t want to dreg up the full quote.

The National Socialist party of Germany, Hitler’s party focused on advancing German rights and the hone of, among other things, the best outfits I’ve seen of a political party

I read the article, not a single mention of things like the research on stereotype threat in chess. I wish rationalists would crack open a sociology book at some point in their lives. They’re so interested in social phenomena, but while Less Wrong has a tag for psychology (with 287 posts), history (245 posts), and economics (462 posts), they seem unwilling to look at sociology for explanations, with it not even having a tag on LW.
Bob Jacobs on Tracing Woodgrains

> the best-researched article I know of on gender differences in chess So I read this article and occasionally checked the sources and while it's not a bad article by any stretch, the scientific backing is not as strong as they imply. For example they write: > the sexes differ in their -preferences- for competition. As both Kasparov and Repková have intuited, men are simply -more competitive- With the words "preferences" and "more competitive" being hyperlinks to their source. This implies (especially in the context) a "nature" explanation, but the source doesn't show that. And that's another thing, it's one study. Of course you can link to the same study twice, but it feels a bit icky to do so this close together about the same claim. A link to a study implies you have evidence for your claim, and if your claim has two links a couple words apart a reader will naturally assume you have two studies, which is a much stronger reason to believe someone. I think this is therefore a bit misleading. I'm also missing some social explanations that an academic/leftwing article would surely have mentioned. Take for example "stereotype threat", the idea that stereotypes change how people perform. There is a semi-famous study about this in chess: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.440 The female players in the experiment were misled. They always played against men, but sometimes the researchers would say they were playing against women. When they believed they were playing against a woman their performance would improve *even with the exact same opponent* (e.g. they would play multiple games against the same man, and they would score better against him when they believed he was a woman). Performance was reduced by 50% when they believed the opponent was a man *and* they were reminded of the stereotype. To my academic/leftwing brain, this seems like a pretty glaring omission.

Tracing Woodgrains