This morning somebody posted a tweet about how the game of chess became popular in 15th century Spain when the role of the queen changed. Apparently, before then the queen was not able to move like a rook and a bishop. Old school gamers hated the change and called it "madwoman's chess". Ha ha very funny. On my mind is the fate of women in Hollywood and exactly who did what to Goldie Hawn and the rest of the female cast of Laugh In. Speaking of which, and as an aside, I have always believed that the Smothers Brothers were not actually brothers but the first wink-wink gay couple in show business. Of course my gaydar is worse than horrible, as I suppose everyone's properly should be.
But on the subject of chess and intelligence and women, I am convinced that women simply don't enjoy competition and explosions and other such boy boy fascinations. That is not cultural, but evolutionary as proper for child-rearing and nesting. It is only natural. And for those who are upset by such matters, I suppose they can take comfort in the mating rituals of spiders. To clarify a bit upon what is 'only natural' in my manner of speaking, hurricanes are only natural as are unruly mobs. Such things are what I call 'a force of nature' which is something not to ever considered lightly, but after some consideration can be avoided or evaded altogether. One puts up an umbrella in a rainstorm or one gets soaked. One stands back away from bar brawls or one gets smacked. Larger forces of nature require more thought to get around, but in general they are mostly predictable and humans have figured out ways to get around what is only natural. So I am not suggesting that what is only natural is destiny cast in stone, any more than mountains are cast in stone. Well, they are, and it takes thoughtful and strenuous effort to climb one, and more than a few nukes to turn one to a molehill. Male and female can, with great personal determination overcome what is only natural, or wait for a Manhattan Project of effort to pulverize their nature.
When we talk about intelligence and chess, I found the following debunking of the popular notion among the chatting classes about 10,000 hours of practice.
But a new Princeton study tears that theory down. In a meta-analysis of 88 studies on deliberate practice, the researchers found that practice accounted for just a 12% difference in performance in various domains.
What's really surprising is how much it depends on the domain:
In games, practice made for a 26% difference
In music, it was a 21% difference
In sports, an 18% difference
In education, a 4% difference
In professions, just a 1% difference
The best explanation of the domain dependency is probably found inFrans Johansson's book "The Click Moment."
In it, Johansson argues that deliberate practice is only a predictor of success in fields that have super stable structures. For example, in tennis, chess, and classical music, the rules never change, so you can study up to become the best.
But in less stable fields, like entrepreneurship and rock and roll, rules can go out the window:
This, rather than debunk, shores up the idea to my way of thinking. What's more telling is how rule-bound certain endeavors are. A 26% difference is a gigantic amount. An 18% difference is huge. Should it therefore come as any surprise that in the more stochastic areas of endeavor that practice means nothing? In education, it isn't about learning so much as it is about moving students through a process that guarantees nothing. (Unless its sports, where there are objective rules. You can either throw the baseball 80 mph or you can't.. In history you can get an A by writing that Washington was great, or by writing Washington was not great.) One doesn't need much imagination to understand how legions of professionals all schlep to different drummers and end up with wildly differing results. Otherwise, 'business' would be solved. Business is never solved. It's always subjective and you do what your boss tells you or you get fired, whether or not your boss knows what he's talking about. No amount of practice makes you a better Vice President of Corporate Affairs. You get the gig how you get it.
So does the presence or absence of women in chess at the grandmaster level mean anything? I say It means less than we think. Viz Kasparov, the fetish with associating chess with intelligence is an error. In the end, it is a rule-bound game in which computers can simulate 10,000 human hours of practice in a matter of minutes with a brain that's not even wired anything close to human hardware. The question of mastery over a domain of effort which is not directly on the path of human evolution is always socially engineered. It requires an application of what I call the thermodynamics of information theory. A great deal of continuous of energy and effort is necessary to sustain an economy of belief and effort in something that is not only natural.
Without mass media megawatts broadcasting propaganda about what women can or cannot do, everyone would eventually revert to what is more natural.
When I speak in favor of the natural, I do so with regard to Dyson's Utopia, with consideration for the unnatural and often dysfunctional aspects of urban living. With a generation of youth appreciating life through the artificial user interfaces of smartphones and social media, we might have some clue as to understanding how unnatural city life can be. Except that so many of us are deeply invested in its information and financial economy. But now that nose piercings are OK, we don't see oceans of grey flannel suits at which to instinctually rebel. I, for one, see all tattoos as herd mentality, no matter how individualistic they each may be. The motivation to get inked is a tribal rite. Rather like the rite of young men to don a uniform after the assassination of Prince Ferdinand. Romantic, foolish, groupthink. In Dyson's Utopia, you don't get in a car and drive to the shopping mall. You disintermediate the supply chain economy because you can grow all the chemicals you need in your own village. Power structures are decentralized. You easily keep track of your Dunbar group without the help of Facebook. You don't spend hours listening to NPR on your commute to work. Your mind is more your own, and thus you can mind your own business. Dyson's Utopia is the small town perfected; it is the opposite of Manhattan. It's how people are better off living, and it is what I believe thoughtful people of means are doing now.
Now I am persuaded that in a class of educated people who are always curious and seeking to expand their minds. I am one of those people. So I am subject to that great temptation to assume such an economy of mind works equally well for all people, or that those of us who get it, should create and sustain such an economy of mind. This is a seduction of the modern world. I greatly appreciate the modern world, and I for one, am happy to have all peasants learn the lessons of kings. So a story like this one, that takes the question about women chess players quite seriously is indeed compelling. One can become very well informed about the gender meta knowledge about chess.
So it was jarring to witness her, now six, marching into her first tournament surrounded by boys. Indeed, it wasn’t until I saw her blonde head bobbing in a sea of close-cropped hair that all those percentages began to mean something. The chess teachers and chess clubs I spoke with all report that, while the number of girls who start playing chess is increasing, and the percentage of females who are members of the US Chess Federation is at an all-time high, girls still tend to drop out at a furious pace.
But in the end, is chess really that important? No it is not. It is a rule-bound game we can use to measure ourselves against each other, and in the end it doesn't solve any of the world's actual problems. People have been playing chess for centuries and the best that can be said, despite the value of chess playing in and of itself, is that chess is a bad metaphor for too many real world situations. In chess, ruthlessness is a very highly valued quality. In life, ruthlessness tends not to be equally applicable. Nevertheless metaphors will persist as will the gender metagame.
If I must pay attention to all of this, then I do it through the evolving understanding of economics, which is imprecise, as are the governing standards generated by economic study. I would do well to read Marx and Adam Smith, but I don't have the patience nor do I feel the need to present a more correct version of what I perceive, informed as it might become by further study and practice. So this is a rant. But with it comes this note. For over 5 centuries, a female character has been the undisputed dominating figure in the game of chess. And yet that fact does not make actual women play better or want to play better than men. So I think the question of gender representation in our mass media propaganda will be of little use. Mass media propaganda is a profession in which practice makes little difference. You simply do what your boss says to win. So no matter how many backflips Wonder Woman does, I'm convinced that the Bechdel Test is doing us no good. It is just another fixed ruleset that allows us to play games, none of which solve real world problems.
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