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Female progamers in SC2 - Page 5

Blogs > Ruscour
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chocopan
Profile Joined April 2010
Japan986 Posts
April 20 2012 12:14 GMT
#81

One hundred years of research has established that East Asians and Europeans average higher IQs than do Africans.


omg. Ok this is definitely 100% totally time for you to start your own blog. What u are talking here, does not belong in this thread. You've made your point, such as it is. Time to move on. K?
Dance those ultras
Zaqwe
Profile Joined March 2012
591 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-04-20 12:19:59
April 20 2012 12:18 GMT
#82
+ Show Spoiler +
On April 20 2012 21:03 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 20:57 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 20:27 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 19:39 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 17:53 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 01:11 qrs wrote:
On April 19 2012 23:00 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:32 Zanno wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:23 Ruscour wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:20 Zanno wrote:
you are aware Scarlett is a dude right

that's not even a rumor

i do not have any bias against transgenders at all but i do not think Scarlett qualifies as a victory towards female recognition in competitive starcraft

Scarlett is female. I am aware she is transgendered. There is absolutely no advantage gained in StarCraft from being male, therefore there is no reason why she couldn't be considered a success for the female SC2 scene.

EDIT: This will be the only reply I make about this issue. Please don't discuss it here, it undermines the point I'm trying to make.

Of course it undermines the point you're trying to make

There's a large body of literature out there that shows that the male brain and female brain develop differently and as a result there are certain problems that males are better equipped to deal with and certain problems that females are better equipped to deal with

Undergoing sex reassignment surgery does not magically undo two decades of the human body's growth as a male and if you are going to ignore this then I don't know what to say


Yeah well, people used to have the same machist idiotic reasoning in chess, and then came Judit Polgar (and her sisters), who has demolished everybody since she is 6, has been one of the greatest prodigy child in history of chess and has been ranked as high as world number 8, having defeated world champions or former world champions Karpov, Anand, Kasparov, Spasky, Smilsov, Topalov, Ponomariov, Khalifman and Razhimdzdhanov.
Yes, then came Judit Polgar, and then came...who? Yifan? Not yet, at any rate.

Without making speculative statements about why males thus far have the competitive edge in chess and in Starcraft, it's hard to deny that currently they do—and one proof of that is that people still feel the need to hold separate female-only events. With regard to chess, Judit Polgar is the exception that proves the rule: yes, she cracked the overall top 10 for a while—and she's the only female ever to come close to doing so. With regard to Starcraft—well, look at how the OP, even as he theorizes that there ought to be no disadvantage to being female, admits that, Scarlett aside, no girl has actually been "good enough to be considered a competitor in her own right".

And as for Scarlett, well, Scarlett is transgendered, and without getting into questions of etiquette, I don't think you can entirely ignore that fact if the discussion is about comparing female gamers to male gamers. Whatever the reason is that males have generally dominated the top of the Starcraft scene, it's certainly the case that they have—and so long as that remains an unexplained fact, I don't see how you can blithely assume that someone born male (and perhaps still biologically male? I don't know), with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that is wholly representative of people born female, with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that. The pronoun you use to refer to Scarlett is one thing; the inferences you draw from Scarlett's success are something else entirely. In my opinion, you won't be able to prove something about the legitimacy of the non-transgender female scene until a non-transgendered female has had a legitimate level of success.

Yeah fine, that's absolutely true, most of the top 100 chess players are males. In fact 99 of them are males since Judit Polgar is the only one to have ever broken into the top 100. Why? It's not science rocket. It's statistic:

Male dominate chess because chess is socially a male activity. The little boy is put to play chess and the little girl is put to dance or whatever. Go in a chessclub and you will see the junior section with basically only little boys. It's even worse in countries that actually produce most of champions: Russia, Azerbadjan, etc... You just won't see a little girl in a chess club because parents don't put them at chess.

The three Polgar sisters are exception because they had an environment that was devoted to make them great chess players. Their father was a grand master and luckily he didn't have any of these silly prejudices. And he designed their education to make them brilliant players. And without surprise, they all became elite players, regardless of their gender.

SC2 is just the same. Boys play Starcraft, Girls play the Sims. That's the way people are being raised, because boys have blue rooms and girls pink rooms, that boys are offered GI Joe and girls Barbie doll, boys are dressed with sport clothes and girl with dresses etc... It has absolutely nothing to do with the intrinseque capacity of each gender, but about stereotypical education that we all get, that generates the kind of sensibility we have, the way we think and what we can do.

Now, about chess, the Polgar family (keep in mind, they were three sisters, they all became grand master, that's a 100% success rate in the family) is enough to shut the mouth of everybody who pretend women can't compete at the highest level. They can, if they are given the environment from their youngest age, which is unfortunately incredibly rare.

There were no women composer until the mid XXth century. NOT ONE except for "wives of": Clara Schumann, Alma Mahler and Fanny Mendelssohn, period. So it was supposed to be a male activity, and women were discourage to compose. You would be told the same crap than we are being served in this thread, you know, about male qualities, the genius, creativity, whatever, backed up with the facts: 100% of male composers and the fallacious argument: there must be a good reason. Surprise, now that most (not all as we can see) of those stereotypes have disappear, we have a good 50% of women in contemporary composers.

Feminism has a long way to go.



One last thing: you can say the exact same thing and that becomes evn more obvious with skin colour. Take Fields medal laureates. Surprise! Everybody is white. That means nothing about racial differences. It just says that when you are white you are a zillion times more likely to have the environment to become a great mathematician. And yet you still have racists using these kinds of datas to prove white men are more clever.

You should watch Hjernevask (Brainwash), a Norwegian science documentary. Particularly episode one, "The Gender Equality Paradox.

What you have said is complete nonsense based on wishful thinking and an emotional desire to see everyone as equal.

Gender differences are observable immediately after birth. Female babies are more socially inclined and prefer to look at human faces, while male newborns are more mechanically inclined and will look at machines longer.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=327138

The example of the Polgar family that you used itself seems to be strong evidence that genetics is the key factor in becoming a chess grandmaster.

On April 20 2012 18:51 chocopan wrote:
I agree with more or less everything Biff just said. Yay.

Everything Biff said is wrong.

Yeah I know people desperately want to justify social order and inequalities with science. That's even a constant in science history.

So let me first tell you that most human science researcher absolutely back up my claims. And don't forget that in the XIXth century, very serious scientists were calculating that the size of the skull of "nigers" was smaller than the one of white people and that was the reason why they were less intelligent and subject to be colonized or put in slavery. Things don't change. Tomorrow we will smile at today's scientists attempts to justify sexist prejudices the same way that now we smile at yesterday's scientists trying to justify racist prejudices.

I am not saying men and women are biologically speaking exactly the same. But to claim that women can't compete with men at something like chess because of genetical disposition is just a fancy way to repeat the most obscene of sexist prejudice: that women are less intelligent. Anyway, explain me a little why they were no women scientist or philosophers until we started to question the dumb prejudices you are defending and as sonn as we did DADA!!! we started to have Marie Curie and other Hannah Arendt? Answer: because when we started to change women education / environment it appeared they were just as smart as men while everybody were certain during six thousand years they were dumb as fuck and unable to think rationally. They were no women scientist because women didn't have the possibility to be a scientist in yesterday's society.

Education and gender issues (gender =/= biological sex) are the reason we behave differently. They are not based on nature, they are a social construction.

One hundred years of research has established that East Asians and Europeans average higher IQs than do Africans. East Asians, measured in North America and in Pacific Rim countries, typically average IQs in the range of 101 to 111. Caucasoid populations in North America, Europe, and Australasia typically average IQs from 85 to 115 with an overall mean of 100. African populations living south of the Sahara, in North America, in the Caribbean, and in Britain typically have mean IQs from 70 to 90.

Discoveries using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which creates a three-dimensional image of the living brain, have shown a strong positive correlation (.44) between brain size and IQ (see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for a review). And there is more. The National Collaborative Perinatal Project on 53,000 children by Sarah Broman and her colleagues, showed that head perimeter at birth significantly predicts head perimeter at 7 years — and head perimeter at seven years predicts IQ. It also shows that Asian children average a larger head perimeter at birth than do White children who average a larger head perimeter than do Black children.

Racial differences in brain size have been established using a variety of modern methods. Using endocranial volume, for example, Beals et al. (1984, p. 307, Table 5) analyzed about 20,000 skulls from around the world. East Asians averaged 1,415 cm3 , Europeans averaged 1,362 cm3, and Africans averaged 1,268 cm3 . Using external head measures to calculate cranial capacities, Rushton (1992) analyzed a stratified random sample of 6,325 U.S. Army personnel measured in 1988 for fitting helmets and found that Asian Americans averaged 1,416 cm3, European Americans 1,380 cm3, and African Americans 1,359 cm3. Finally, a recent MRI study found that people of African and Caribbean background averaged a smaller brain volume than did those of European background (again see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for review).

Well maybe IQ is a fucking dumb measure, sweety. You know you can raise your IQ in two weeks dramatically with appropriate exercizes? For a measure that's supposed to calculate your "intelligence" that's a pretty big flaw.

And even though, you don't think environment is quite a big factor in our intelligence? And that Africans have typically a different environment than the average white guy?

And don't you think that the size of the skull has nothing to do with your intellectual potential, as proven by a zillion studies despite the stuff you throw there that seems to make no difference between correlation and causality? Because see, whales would be quite fucking clever.

You believe africans are less intelligent, and that women can't think rationally. Well, look, you are a racist and a sexist, and I'm off this discussion, because see, I have experienced many times that racists and sexist are unable to think rationally, and not very clever. Bye.

That's not very nice. I consider myself a rational thinker and base my opinions on what evidence is available. I am always prepared to change my opinions if I see new evidence.

And brain/skull size does have something to do with intelligence, as mentioned in my previous post. I am not sure why you ignored that.

It seems you are the irrational one. Your emotional attachment to equality is clouding your judgement, like a fear of death which drives people to faith in heaven.

IQ/g is best single predictor, mental or non-mental.

IQ/g usually predicts major life outcomes better than does any other single predictor in broad samples of individuals. For example, whether IQ predicts strongly (educational performance) or weakly (law-abidingness), it predicts better than does social class background. This does not mean that intelligence is the only important influence on people's life chances or that social conditions are unimportant. Rather, it means that any explanation of social and economic inequalities will need to consider the central role that general intelligence level seems to play.

Gottfredson, L. S. (2006). Social consequences of group differences in cognitive ability (Consequencias sociais das diferencas de grupo em habilidade cognitiva). In C. E. Flores-Mendoza & R. Colom (Eds.), Introducau a psicologia das diferencas individuais (pp. 433-456). Porto Allegre, Brazil: ArtMed Publishers.
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2004socialconsequences.pdf

Survey of opinions on the primacy of g and social consequences of ability testing: A comparison of expert and non-expert views

Though some commentaries give the impression of controversy regarding the importance of cognitive abilities and the validity of ability testing, the results of this survey clearly demonstrate that there are areas of resounding consensus among experts. Our results indicate that there is consensus among experts in the science of mental abilities that g is an important, non-trivial determinant (or at least predictor) of important real world outcomes for which there is no substitute, and that tests of g are valid and generally free from racial bias.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2008.03.007

Biff The Understudy
Profile Blog Joined February 2008
France8222 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-04-20 12:51:14
April 20 2012 12:31 GMT
#83
On April 20 2012 21:18 Zaqwe wrote:
+ Show Spoiler +
On April 20 2012 21:03 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 20:57 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 20:27 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 19:39 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 17:53 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 01:11 qrs wrote:
On April 19 2012 23:00 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:32 Zanno wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:23 Ruscour wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:20 Zanno wrote:
you are aware Scarlett is a dude right

that's not even a rumor

i do not have any bias against transgenders at all but i do not think Scarlett qualifies as a victory towards female recognition in competitive starcraft

Scarlett is female. I am aware she is transgendered. There is absolutely no advantage gained in StarCraft from being male, therefore there is no reason why she couldn't be considered a success for the female SC2 scene.

EDIT: This will be the only reply I make about this issue. Please don't discuss it here, it undermines the point I'm trying to make.

Of course it undermines the point you're trying to make

There's a large body of literature out there that shows that the male brain and female brain develop differently and as a result there are certain problems that males are better equipped to deal with and certain problems that females are better equipped to deal with

Undergoing sex reassignment surgery does not magically undo two decades of the human body's growth as a male and if you are going to ignore this then I don't know what to say


Yeah well, people used to have the same machist idiotic reasoning in chess, and then came Judit Polgar (and her sisters), who has demolished everybody since she is 6, has been one of the greatest prodigy child in history of chess and has been ranked as high as world number 8, having defeated world champions or former world champions Karpov, Anand, Kasparov, Spasky, Smilsov, Topalov, Ponomariov, Khalifman and Razhimdzdhanov.
Yes, then came Judit Polgar, and then came...who? Yifan? Not yet, at any rate.

Without making speculative statements about why males thus far have the competitive edge in chess and in Starcraft, it's hard to deny that currently they do—and one proof of that is that people still feel the need to hold separate female-only events. With regard to chess, Judit Polgar is the exception that proves the rule: yes, she cracked the overall top 10 for a while—and she's the only female ever to come close to doing so. With regard to Starcraft—well, look at how the OP, even as he theorizes that there ought to be no disadvantage to being female, admits that, Scarlett aside, no girl has actually been "good enough to be considered a competitor in her own right".

And as for Scarlett, well, Scarlett is transgendered, and without getting into questions of etiquette, I don't think you can entirely ignore that fact if the discussion is about comparing female gamers to male gamers. Whatever the reason is that males have generally dominated the top of the Starcraft scene, it's certainly the case that they have—and so long as that remains an unexplained fact, I don't see how you can blithely assume that someone born male (and perhaps still biologically male? I don't know), with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that is wholly representative of people born female, with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that. The pronoun you use to refer to Scarlett is one thing; the inferences you draw from Scarlett's success are something else entirely. In my opinion, you won't be able to prove something about the legitimacy of the non-transgender female scene until a non-transgendered female has had a legitimate level of success.

Yeah fine, that's absolutely true, most of the top 100 chess players are males. In fact 99 of them are males since Judit Polgar is the only one to have ever broken into the top 100. Why? It's not science rocket. It's statistic:

Male dominate chess because chess is socially a male activity. The little boy is put to play chess and the little girl is put to dance or whatever. Go in a chessclub and you will see the junior section with basically only little boys. It's even worse in countries that actually produce most of champions: Russia, Azerbadjan, etc... You just won't see a little girl in a chess club because parents don't put them at chess.

The three Polgar sisters are exception because they had an environment that was devoted to make them great chess players. Their father was a grand master and luckily he didn't have any of these silly prejudices. And he designed their education to make them brilliant players. And without surprise, they all became elite players, regardless of their gender.

SC2 is just the same. Boys play Starcraft, Girls play the Sims. That's the way people are being raised, because boys have blue rooms and girls pink rooms, that boys are offered GI Joe and girls Barbie doll, boys are dressed with sport clothes and girl with dresses etc... It has absolutely nothing to do with the intrinseque capacity of each gender, but about stereotypical education that we all get, that generates the kind of sensibility we have, the way we think and what we can do.

Now, about chess, the Polgar family (keep in mind, they were three sisters, they all became grand master, that's a 100% success rate in the family) is enough to shut the mouth of everybody who pretend women can't compete at the highest level. They can, if they are given the environment from their youngest age, which is unfortunately incredibly rare.

There were no women composer until the mid XXth century. NOT ONE except for "wives of": Clara Schumann, Alma Mahler and Fanny Mendelssohn, period. So it was supposed to be a male activity, and women were discourage to compose. You would be told the same crap than we are being served in this thread, you know, about male qualities, the genius, creativity, whatever, backed up with the facts: 100% of male composers and the fallacious argument: there must be a good reason. Surprise, now that most (not all as we can see) of those stereotypes have disappear, we have a good 50% of women in contemporary composers.

Feminism has a long way to go.



One last thing: you can say the exact same thing and that becomes evn more obvious with skin colour. Take Fields medal laureates. Surprise! Everybody is white. That means nothing about racial differences. It just says that when you are white you are a zillion times more likely to have the environment to become a great mathematician. And yet you still have racists using these kinds of datas to prove white men are more clever.

You should watch Hjernevask (Brainwash), a Norwegian science documentary. Particularly episode one, "The Gender Equality Paradox.

What you have said is complete nonsense based on wishful thinking and an emotional desire to see everyone as equal.

Gender differences are observable immediately after birth. Female babies are more socially inclined and prefer to look at human faces, while male newborns are more mechanically inclined and will look at machines longer.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=327138

The example of the Polgar family that you used itself seems to be strong evidence that genetics is the key factor in becoming a chess grandmaster.

On April 20 2012 18:51 chocopan wrote:
I agree with more or less everything Biff just said. Yay.

Everything Biff said is wrong.

Yeah I know people desperately want to justify social order and inequalities with science. That's even a constant in science history.

So let me first tell you that most human science researcher absolutely back up my claims. And don't forget that in the XIXth century, very serious scientists were calculating that the size of the skull of "nigers" was smaller than the one of white people and that was the reason why they were less intelligent and subject to be colonized or put in slavery. Things don't change. Tomorrow we will smile at today's scientists attempts to justify sexist prejudices the same way that now we smile at yesterday's scientists trying to justify racist prejudices.

I am not saying men and women are biologically speaking exactly the same. But to claim that women can't compete with men at something like chess because of genetical disposition is just a fancy way to repeat the most obscene of sexist prejudice: that women are less intelligent. Anyway, explain me a little why they were no women scientist or philosophers until we started to question the dumb prejudices you are defending and as sonn as we did DADA!!! we started to have Marie Curie and other Hannah Arendt? Answer: because when we started to change women education / environment it appeared they were just as smart as men while everybody were certain during six thousand years they were dumb as fuck and unable to think rationally. They were no women scientist because women didn't have the possibility to be a scientist in yesterday's society.

Education and gender issues (gender =/= biological sex) are the reason we behave differently. They are not based on nature, they are a social construction.

One hundred years of research has established that East Asians and Europeans average higher IQs than do Africans. East Asians, measured in North America and in Pacific Rim countries, typically average IQs in the range of 101 to 111. Caucasoid populations in North America, Europe, and Australasia typically average IQs from 85 to 115 with an overall mean of 100. African populations living south of the Sahara, in North America, in the Caribbean, and in Britain typically have mean IQs from 70 to 90.

Discoveries using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which creates a three-dimensional image of the living brain, have shown a strong positive correlation (.44) between brain size and IQ (see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for a review). And there is more. The National Collaborative Perinatal Project on 53,000 children by Sarah Broman and her colleagues, showed that head perimeter at birth significantly predicts head perimeter at 7 years — and head perimeter at seven years predicts IQ. It also shows that Asian children average a larger head perimeter at birth than do White children who average a larger head perimeter than do Black children.

Racial differences in brain size have been established using a variety of modern methods. Using endocranial volume, for example, Beals et al. (1984, p. 307, Table 5) analyzed about 20,000 skulls from around the world. East Asians averaged 1,415 cm3 , Europeans averaged 1,362 cm3, and Africans averaged 1,268 cm3 . Using external head measures to calculate cranial capacities, Rushton (1992) analyzed a stratified random sample of 6,325 U.S. Army personnel measured in 1988 for fitting helmets and found that Asian Americans averaged 1,416 cm3, European Americans 1,380 cm3, and African Americans 1,359 cm3. Finally, a recent MRI study found that people of African and Caribbean background averaged a smaller brain volume than did those of European background (again see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for review).

Well maybe IQ is a fucking dumb measure, sweety. You know you can raise your IQ in two weeks dramatically with appropriate exercizes? For a measure that's supposed to calculate your "intelligence" that's a pretty big flaw.

And even though, you don't think environment is quite a big factor in our intelligence? And that Africans have typically a different environment than the average white guy?

And don't you think that the size of the skull has nothing to do with your intellectual potential, as proven by a zillion studies despite the stuff you throw there that seems to make no difference between correlation and causality? Because see, whales would be quite fucking clever.

You believe africans are less intelligent, and that women can't think rationally. Well, look, you are a racist and a sexist, and I'm off this discussion, because see, I have experienced many times that racists and sexist are unable to think rationally, and not very clever. Bye.

That's not very nice. I consider myself a rational thinker and base my opinions on what evidence is available. I am always prepared to change my opinions if I see new evidence.

And brain/skull size does have something to do with intelligence, as mentioned in my previous post. I am not sure why you ignored that.

It seems you are the irrational one. Your emotional attachment to equality is clouding your judgement, like a fear of death which drives people to faith in heaven.

Show nested quote +
IQ/g is best single predictor, mental or non-mental.

IQ/g usually predicts major life outcomes better than does any other single predictor in broad samples of individuals. For example, whether IQ predicts strongly (educational performance) or weakly (law-abidingness), it predicts better than does social class background. This does not mean that intelligence is the only important influence on people's life chances or that social conditions are unimportant. Rather, it means that any explanation of social and economic inequalities will need to consider the central role that general intelligence level seems to play.

Gottfredson, L. S. (2006). Social consequences of group differences in cognitive ability (Consequencias sociais das diferencas de grupo em habilidade cognitiva). In C. E. Flores-Mendoza & R. Colom (Eds.), Introducau a psicologia das diferencas individuais (pp. 433-456). Porto Allegre, Brazil: ArtMed Publishers.
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2004socialconsequences.pdf

Show nested quote +
Survey of opinions on the primacy of g and social consequences of ability testing: A comparison of expert and non-expert views

Though some commentaries give the impression of controversy regarding the importance of cognitive abilities and the validity of ability testing, the results of this survey clearly demonstrate that there are areas of resounding consensus among experts. Our results indicate that there is consensus among experts in the science of mental abilities that g is an important, non-trivial determinant (or at least predictor) of important real world outcomes for which there is no substitute, and that tests of g are valid and generally free from racial bias.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2008.03.007


I'm not trying to be nice or excessively rude.

If you believe that African people are inferior and naturally less intelligent than white people, well, you are a racist, or I don't know what racism is about.

Racism is generally understood as either belief that different racial groups are characterized by intrinsic characteristics or abilities and that some such groups are therefore naturally superior to others (wikipedia)

... as for sexism

Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the belief that a characteristic inherent in one's sex necessarily adversely affects one's ability, even if that characteristic does not have that effect.

I think you wouldn't disagree?

Maybe you have a lot of "evidences" to back up your claim (but who doesn't?), so you are a very rationnal racist, but a racist nonetheless. There are worse things on earth than being a racist I am sure, but that's one of the criterias on which I judge that discussing with someone is useless.

Posting studies that, once again, make a correlation between factors without establishing a causal factor doesn't help. have a nice day.
The fellow who is out to burn things up is the counterpart of the fool who thinks he can save the world. The world needs neither to be burned up nor to be saved. The world is, we are. Transients, if we buck it; here to stay if we accept it. ~H.Miller
NeMeSiS3
Profile Blog Joined February 2012
Canada2972 Posts
April 20 2012 13:02 GMT
#84
you all really fucked this thread up and spammed it... It's pretty off topic, how about you stop the dick measuring competition and just stay with the topic.
FoTG fighting!
Biff The Understudy
Profile Blog Joined February 2008
France8222 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-04-20 13:18:24
April 20 2012 13:17 GMT
#85
On April 20 2012 22:02 NeMeSiS3 wrote:
you all really fucked this thread up and spammed it... It's pretty off topic, how about you stop the dick measuring competition and just stay with the topic.

For my (our?) defense, the question whether or not the absence of women at the top of Stacraft 2 competitive scene is because of an intrinseque lack of necessary qualities to compete with men, or not, had to be raised at some point.

Because according to those ideas, women have nothing to do in competitive starcraft anyway and the whole view on the gender issue in SC is solved.

You can't say we spammed anything whil you write two lines after a lot of very clear long post with well developped arguments.

I'm being sarcastic here, but not so much.
The fellow who is out to burn things up is the counterpart of the fool who thinks he can save the world. The world needs neither to be burned up nor to be saved. The world is, we are. Transients, if we buck it; here to stay if we accept it. ~H.Miller
storkfan
Profile Joined March 2012
493 Posts
April 20 2012 13:36 GMT
#86
On April 19 2012 19:22 eviltomahawk wrote:
Speaking of which, whatever happened to JongMi/(Z)maRie on oGs?

The last time I saw her was with oGs during the Blizzard Cup finals opening ceremony. I have no clue what she has been doing recently.

Otherwise, excellent blog.

she is kind of hot but i think she was more of an older generation BW and OGN game host
storkfan
Profile Joined March 2012
493 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-04-20 13:43:13
April 20 2012 13:40 GMT
#87
On April 20 2012 21:31 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 21:18 Zaqwe wrote:
+ Show Spoiler +
On April 20 2012 21:03 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 20:57 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 20:27 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 19:39 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 17:53 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 01:11 qrs wrote:
On April 19 2012 23:00 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:32 Zanno wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:23 Ruscour wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:20 Zanno wrote:
you are aware Scarlett is a dude right

that's not even a rumor

i do not have any bias against transgenders at all but i do not think Scarlett qualifies as a victory towards female recognition in competitive starcraft

Scarlett is female. I am aware she is transgendered. There is absolutely no advantage gained in StarCraft from being male, therefore there is no reason why she couldn't be considered a success for the female SC2 scene.

EDIT: This will be the only reply I make about this issue. Please don't discuss it here, it undermines the point I'm trying to make.

Of course it undermines the point you're trying to make

There's a large body of literature out there that shows that the male brain and female brain develop differently and as a result there are certain problems that males are better equipped to deal with and certain problems that females are better equipped to deal with

Undergoing sex reassignment surgery does not magically undo two decades of the human body's growth as a male and if you are going to ignore this then I don't know what to say


Yeah well, people used to have the same machist idiotic reasoning in chess, and then came Judit Polgar (and her sisters), who has demolished everybody since she is 6, has been one of the greatest prodigy child in history of chess and has been ranked as high as world number 8, having defeated world champions or former world champions Karpov, Anand, Kasparov, Spasky, Smilsov, Topalov, Ponomariov, Khalifman and Razhimdzdhanov.
Yes, then came Judit Polgar, and then came...who? Yifan? Not yet, at any rate.

Without making speculative statements about why males thus far have the competitive edge in chess and in Starcraft, it's hard to deny that currently they do—and one proof of that is that people still feel the need to hold separate female-only events. With regard to chess, Judit Polgar is the exception that proves the rule: yes, she cracked the overall top 10 for a while—and she's the only female ever to come close to doing so. With regard to Starcraft—well, look at how the OP, even as he theorizes that there ought to be no disadvantage to being female, admits that, Scarlett aside, no girl has actually been "good enough to be considered a competitor in her own right".

And as for Scarlett, well, Scarlett is transgendered, and without getting into questions of etiquette, I don't think you can entirely ignore that fact if the discussion is about comparing female gamers to male gamers. Whatever the reason is that males have generally dominated the top of the Starcraft scene, it's certainly the case that they have—and so long as that remains an unexplained fact, I don't see how you can blithely assume that someone born male (and perhaps still biologically male? I don't know), with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that is wholly representative of people born female, with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that. The pronoun you use to refer to Scarlett is one thing; the inferences you draw from Scarlett's success are something else entirely. In my opinion, you won't be able to prove something about the legitimacy of the non-transgender female scene until a non-transgendered female has had a legitimate level of success.

Yeah fine, that's absolutely true, most of the top 100 chess players are males. In fact 99 of them are males since Judit Polgar is the only one to have ever broken into the top 100. Why? It's not science rocket. It's statistic:

Male dominate chess because chess is socially a male activity. The little boy is put to play chess and the little girl is put to dance or whatever. Go in a chessclub and you will see the junior section with basically only little boys. It's even worse in countries that actually produce most of champions: Russia, Azerbadjan, etc... You just won't see a little girl in a chess club because parents don't put them at chess.

The three Polgar sisters are exception because they had an environment that was devoted to make them great chess players. Their father was a grand master and luckily he didn't have any of these silly prejudices. And he designed their education to make them brilliant players. And without surprise, they all became elite players, regardless of their gender.

SC2 is just the same. Boys play Starcraft, Girls play the Sims. That's the way people are being raised, because boys have blue rooms and girls pink rooms, that boys are offered GI Joe and girls Barbie doll, boys are dressed with sport clothes and girl with dresses etc... It has absolutely nothing to do with the intrinseque capacity of each gender, but about stereotypical education that we all get, that generates the kind of sensibility we have, the way we think and what we can do.

Now, about chess, the Polgar family (keep in mind, they were three sisters, they all became grand master, that's a 100% success rate in the family) is enough to shut the mouth of everybody who pretend women can't compete at the highest level. They can, if they are given the environment from their youngest age, which is unfortunately incredibly rare.

There were no women composer until the mid XXth century. NOT ONE except for "wives of": Clara Schumann, Alma Mahler and Fanny Mendelssohn, period. So it was supposed to be a male activity, and women were discourage to compose. You would be told the same crap than we are being served in this thread, you know, about male qualities, the genius, creativity, whatever, backed up with the facts: 100% of male composers and the fallacious argument: there must be a good reason. Surprise, now that most (not all as we can see) of those stereotypes have disappear, we have a good 50% of women in contemporary composers.

Feminism has a long way to go.



One last thing: you can say the exact same thing and that becomes evn more obvious with skin colour. Take Fields medal laureates. Surprise! Everybody is white. That means nothing about racial differences. It just says that when you are white you are a zillion times more likely to have the environment to become a great mathematician. And yet you still have racists using these kinds of datas to prove white men are more clever.

You should watch Hjernevask (Brainwash), a Norwegian science documentary. Particularly episode one, "The Gender Equality Paradox.

What you have said is complete nonsense based on wishful thinking and an emotional desire to see everyone as equal.

Gender differences are observable immediately after birth. Female babies are more socially inclined and prefer to look at human faces, while male newborns are more mechanically inclined and will look at machines longer.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=327138

The example of the Polgar family that you used itself seems to be strong evidence that genetics is the key factor in becoming a chess grandmaster.

On April 20 2012 18:51 chocopan wrote:
I agree with more or less everything Biff just said. Yay.

Everything Biff said is wrong.

Yeah I know people desperately want to justify social order and inequalities with science. That's even a constant in science history.

So let me first tell you that most human science researcher absolutely back up my claims. And don't forget that in the XIXth century, very serious scientists were calculating that the size of the skull of "nigers" was smaller than the one of white people and that was the reason why they were less intelligent and subject to be colonized or put in slavery. Things don't change. Tomorrow we will smile at today's scientists attempts to justify sexist prejudices the same way that now we smile at yesterday's scientists trying to justify racist prejudices.

I am not saying men and women are biologically speaking exactly the same. But to claim that women can't compete with men at something like chess because of genetical disposition is just a fancy way to repeat the most obscene of sexist prejudice: that women are less intelligent. Anyway, explain me a little why they were no women scientist or philosophers until we started to question the dumb prejudices you are defending and as sonn as we did DADA!!! we started to have Marie Curie and other Hannah Arendt? Answer: because when we started to change women education / environment it appeared they were just as smart as men while everybody were certain during six thousand years they were dumb as fuck and unable to think rationally. They were no women scientist because women didn't have the possibility to be a scientist in yesterday's society.

Education and gender issues (gender =/= biological sex) are the reason we behave differently. They are not based on nature, they are a social construction.

One hundred years of research has established that East Asians and Europeans average higher IQs than do Africans. East Asians, measured in North America and in Pacific Rim countries, typically average IQs in the range of 101 to 111. Caucasoid populations in North America, Europe, and Australasia typically average IQs from 85 to 115 with an overall mean of 100. African populations living south of the Sahara, in North America, in the Caribbean, and in Britain typically have mean IQs from 70 to 90.

Discoveries using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which creates a three-dimensional image of the living brain, have shown a strong positive correlation (.44) between brain size and IQ (see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for a review). And there is more. The National Collaborative Perinatal Project on 53,000 children by Sarah Broman and her colleagues, showed that head perimeter at birth significantly predicts head perimeter at 7 years — and head perimeter at seven years predicts IQ. It also shows that Asian children average a larger head perimeter at birth than do White children who average a larger head perimeter than do Black children.

Racial differences in brain size have been established using a variety of modern methods. Using endocranial volume, for example, Beals et al. (1984, p. 307, Table 5) analyzed about 20,000 skulls from around the world. East Asians averaged 1,415 cm3 , Europeans averaged 1,362 cm3, and Africans averaged 1,268 cm3 . Using external head measures to calculate cranial capacities, Rushton (1992) analyzed a stratified random sample of 6,325 U.S. Army personnel measured in 1988 for fitting helmets and found that Asian Americans averaged 1,416 cm3, European Americans 1,380 cm3, and African Americans 1,359 cm3. Finally, a recent MRI study found that people of African and Caribbean background averaged a smaller brain volume than did those of European background (again see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for review).

Well maybe IQ is a fucking dumb measure, sweety. You know you can raise your IQ in two weeks dramatically with appropriate exercizes? For a measure that's supposed to calculate your "intelligence" that's a pretty big flaw.

And even though, you don't think environment is quite a big factor in our intelligence? And that Africans have typically a different environment than the average white guy?

And don't you think that the size of the skull has nothing to do with your intellectual potential, as proven by a zillion studies despite the stuff you throw there that seems to make no difference between correlation and causality? Because see, whales would be quite fucking clever.

You believe africans are less intelligent, and that women can't think rationally. Well, look, you are a racist and a sexist, and I'm off this discussion, because see, I have experienced many times that racists and sexist are unable to think rationally, and not very clever. Bye.

That's not very nice. I consider myself a rational thinker and base my opinions on what evidence is available. I am always prepared to change my opinions if I see new evidence.

And brain/skull size does have something to do with intelligence, as mentioned in my previous post. I am not sure why you ignored that.

It seems you are the irrational one. Your emotional attachment to equality is clouding your judgement, like a fear of death which drives people to faith in heaven.

IQ/g is best single predictor, mental or non-mental.

IQ/g usually predicts major life outcomes better than does any other single predictor in broad samples of individuals. For example, whether IQ predicts strongly (educational performance) or weakly (law-abidingness), it predicts better than does social class background. This does not mean that intelligence is the only important influence on people's life chances or that social conditions are unimportant. Rather, it means that any explanation of social and economic inequalities will need to consider the central role that general intelligence level seems to play.

Gottfredson, L. S. (2006). Social consequences of group differences in cognitive ability (Consequencias sociais das diferencas de grupo em habilidade cognitiva). In C. E. Flores-Mendoza & R. Colom (Eds.), Introducau a psicologia das diferencas individuais (pp. 433-456). Porto Allegre, Brazil: ArtMed Publishers.
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2004socialconsequences.pdf

Survey of opinions on the primacy of g and social consequences of ability testing: A comparison of expert and non-expert views

Though some commentaries give the impression of controversy regarding the importance of cognitive abilities and the validity of ability testing, the results of this survey clearly demonstrate that there are areas of resounding consensus among experts. Our results indicate that there is consensus among experts in the science of mental abilities that g is an important, non-trivial determinant (or at least predictor) of important real world outcomes for which there is no substitute, and that tests of g are valid and generally free from racial bias.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2008.03.007


I'm not trying to be nice or excessively rude.

If you believe that African people are inferior and naturally less intelligent than white people, well, you are a racist, or I don't know what racism is about.

Racism is generally understood as either belief that different racial groups are characterized by intrinsic characteristics or abilities and that some such groups are therefore naturally superior to others (wikipedia)

... as for sexism

Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the belief that a characteristic inherent in one's sex necessarily adversely affects one's ability, even if that characteristic does not have that effect.

I think you wouldn't disagree?

Maybe you have a lot of "evidences" to back up your claim (but who doesn't?), so you are a very rationnal racist, but a racist nonetheless. There are worse things on earth than being a racist I am sure, but that's one of the criterias on which I judge that discussing with someone is useless.

Posting studies that, once again, make a correlation between factors without establishing a causal factor doesn't help. have a nice day.
some call it racial realism.

Also, so if you believe blacks' darker skin protecting them from sun makes them superior in high UV level situations you are racist?
Biff The Understudy
Profile Blog Joined February 2008
France8222 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-04-20 13:46:08
April 20 2012 13:45 GMT
#88
On April 20 2012 22:40 storkfan wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 21:31 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 21:18 Zaqwe wrote:
+ Show Spoiler +
On April 20 2012 21:03 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 20:57 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 20:27 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 19:39 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 17:53 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 01:11 qrs wrote:
On April 19 2012 23:00 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:32 Zanno wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:23 Ruscour wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:20 Zanno wrote:
you are aware Scarlett is a dude right

that's not even a rumor

i do not have any bias against transgenders at all but i do not think Scarlett qualifies as a victory towards female recognition in competitive starcraft

Scarlett is female. I am aware she is transgendered. There is absolutely no advantage gained in StarCraft from being male, therefore there is no reason why she couldn't be considered a success for the female SC2 scene.

EDIT: This will be the only reply I make about this issue. Please don't discuss it here, it undermines the point I'm trying to make.

Of course it undermines the point you're trying to make

There's a large body of literature out there that shows that the male brain and female brain develop differently and as a result there are certain problems that males are better equipped to deal with and certain problems that females are better equipped to deal with

Undergoing sex reassignment surgery does not magically undo two decades of the human body's growth as a male and if you are going to ignore this then I don't know what to say


Yeah well, people used to have the same machist idiotic reasoning in chess, and then came Judit Polgar (and her sisters), who has demolished everybody since she is 6, has been one of the greatest prodigy child in history of chess and has been ranked as high as world number 8, having defeated world champions or former world champions Karpov, Anand, Kasparov, Spasky, Smilsov, Topalov, Ponomariov, Khalifman and Razhimdzdhanov.
Yes, then came Judit Polgar, and then came...who? Yifan? Not yet, at any rate.

Without making speculative statements about why males thus far have the competitive edge in chess and in Starcraft, it's hard to deny that currently they do—and one proof of that is that people still feel the need to hold separate female-only events. With regard to chess, Judit Polgar is the exception that proves the rule: yes, she cracked the overall top 10 for a while—and she's the only female ever to come close to doing so. With regard to Starcraft—well, look at how the OP, even as he theorizes that there ought to be no disadvantage to being female, admits that, Scarlett aside, no girl has actually been "good enough to be considered a competitor in her own right".

And as for Scarlett, well, Scarlett is transgendered, and without getting into questions of etiquette, I don't think you can entirely ignore that fact if the discussion is about comparing female gamers to male gamers. Whatever the reason is that males have generally dominated the top of the Starcraft scene, it's certainly the case that they have—and so long as that remains an unexplained fact, I don't see how you can blithely assume that someone born male (and perhaps still biologically male? I don't know), with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that is wholly representative of people born female, with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that. The pronoun you use to refer to Scarlett is one thing; the inferences you draw from Scarlett's success are something else entirely. In my opinion, you won't be able to prove something about the legitimacy of the non-transgender female scene until a non-transgendered female has had a legitimate level of success.

Yeah fine, that's absolutely true, most of the top 100 chess players are males. In fact 99 of them are males since Judit Polgar is the only one to have ever broken into the top 100. Why? It's not science rocket. It's statistic:

Male dominate chess because chess is socially a male activity. The little boy is put to play chess and the little girl is put to dance or whatever. Go in a chessclub and you will see the junior section with basically only little boys. It's even worse in countries that actually produce most of champions: Russia, Azerbadjan, etc... You just won't see a little girl in a chess club because parents don't put them at chess.

The three Polgar sisters are exception because they had an environment that was devoted to make them great chess players. Their father was a grand master and luckily he didn't have any of these silly prejudices. And he designed their education to make them brilliant players. And without surprise, they all became elite players, regardless of their gender.

SC2 is just the same. Boys play Starcraft, Girls play the Sims. That's the way people are being raised, because boys have blue rooms and girls pink rooms, that boys are offered GI Joe and girls Barbie doll, boys are dressed with sport clothes and girl with dresses etc... It has absolutely nothing to do with the intrinseque capacity of each gender, but about stereotypical education that we all get, that generates the kind of sensibility we have, the way we think and what we can do.

Now, about chess, the Polgar family (keep in mind, they were three sisters, they all became grand master, that's a 100% success rate in the family) is enough to shut the mouth of everybody who pretend women can't compete at the highest level. They can, if they are given the environment from their youngest age, which is unfortunately incredibly rare.

There were no women composer until the mid XXth century. NOT ONE except for "wives of": Clara Schumann, Alma Mahler and Fanny Mendelssohn, period. So it was supposed to be a male activity, and women were discourage to compose. You would be told the same crap than we are being served in this thread, you know, about male qualities, the genius, creativity, whatever, backed up with the facts: 100% of male composers and the fallacious argument: there must be a good reason. Surprise, now that most (not all as we can see) of those stereotypes have disappear, we have a good 50% of women in contemporary composers.

Feminism has a long way to go.



One last thing: you can say the exact same thing and that becomes evn more obvious with skin colour. Take Fields medal laureates. Surprise! Everybody is white. That means nothing about racial differences. It just says that when you are white you are a zillion times more likely to have the environment to become a great mathematician. And yet you still have racists using these kinds of datas to prove white men are more clever.

You should watch Hjernevask (Brainwash), a Norwegian science documentary. Particularly episode one, "The Gender Equality Paradox.

What you have said is complete nonsense based on wishful thinking and an emotional desire to see everyone as equal.

Gender differences are observable immediately after birth. Female babies are more socially inclined and prefer to look at human faces, while male newborns are more mechanically inclined and will look at machines longer.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=327138

The example of the Polgar family that you used itself seems to be strong evidence that genetics is the key factor in becoming a chess grandmaster.

On April 20 2012 18:51 chocopan wrote:
I agree with more or less everything Biff just said. Yay.

Everything Biff said is wrong.

Yeah I know people desperately want to justify social order and inequalities with science. That's even a constant in science history.

So let me first tell you that most human science researcher absolutely back up my claims. And don't forget that in the XIXth century, very serious scientists were calculating that the size of the skull of "nigers" was smaller than the one of white people and that was the reason why they were less intelligent and subject to be colonized or put in slavery. Things don't change. Tomorrow we will smile at today's scientists attempts to justify sexist prejudices the same way that now we smile at yesterday's scientists trying to justify racist prejudices.

I am not saying men and women are biologically speaking exactly the same. But to claim that women can't compete with men at something like chess because of genetical disposition is just a fancy way to repeat the most obscene of sexist prejudice: that women are less intelligent. Anyway, explain me a little why they were no women scientist or philosophers until we started to question the dumb prejudices you are defending and as sonn as we did DADA!!! we started to have Marie Curie and other Hannah Arendt? Answer: because when we started to change women education / environment it appeared they were just as smart as men while everybody were certain during six thousand years they were dumb as fuck and unable to think rationally. They were no women scientist because women didn't have the possibility to be a scientist in yesterday's society.

Education and gender issues (gender =/= biological sex) are the reason we behave differently. They are not based on nature, they are a social construction.

One hundred years of research has established that East Asians and Europeans average higher IQs than do Africans. East Asians, measured in North America and in Pacific Rim countries, typically average IQs in the range of 101 to 111. Caucasoid populations in North America, Europe, and Australasia typically average IQs from 85 to 115 with an overall mean of 100. African populations living south of the Sahara, in North America, in the Caribbean, and in Britain typically have mean IQs from 70 to 90.

Discoveries using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which creates a three-dimensional image of the living brain, have shown a strong positive correlation (.44) between brain size and IQ (see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for a review). And there is more. The National Collaborative Perinatal Project on 53,000 children by Sarah Broman and her colleagues, showed that head perimeter at birth significantly predicts head perimeter at 7 years — and head perimeter at seven years predicts IQ. It also shows that Asian children average a larger head perimeter at birth than do White children who average a larger head perimeter than do Black children.

Racial differences in brain size have been established using a variety of modern methods. Using endocranial volume, for example, Beals et al. (1984, p. 307, Table 5) analyzed about 20,000 skulls from around the world. East Asians averaged 1,415 cm3 , Europeans averaged 1,362 cm3, and Africans averaged 1,268 cm3 . Using external head measures to calculate cranial capacities, Rushton (1992) analyzed a stratified random sample of 6,325 U.S. Army personnel measured in 1988 for fitting helmets and found that Asian Americans averaged 1,416 cm3, European Americans 1,380 cm3, and African Americans 1,359 cm3. Finally, a recent MRI study found that people of African and Caribbean background averaged a smaller brain volume than did those of European background (again see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for review).

Well maybe IQ is a fucking dumb measure, sweety. You know you can raise your IQ in two weeks dramatically with appropriate exercizes? For a measure that's supposed to calculate your "intelligence" that's a pretty big flaw.

And even though, you don't think environment is quite a big factor in our intelligence? And that Africans have typically a different environment than the average white guy?

And don't you think that the size of the skull has nothing to do with your intellectual potential, as proven by a zillion studies despite the stuff you throw there that seems to make no difference between correlation and causality? Because see, whales would be quite fucking clever.

You believe africans are less intelligent, and that women can't think rationally. Well, look, you are a racist and a sexist, and I'm off this discussion, because see, I have experienced many times that racists and sexist are unable to think rationally, and not very clever. Bye.

That's not very nice. I consider myself a rational thinker and base my opinions on what evidence is available. I am always prepared to change my opinions if I see new evidence.

And brain/skull size does have something to do with intelligence, as mentioned in my previous post. I am not sure why you ignored that.

It seems you are the irrational one. Your emotional attachment to equality is clouding your judgement, like a fear of death which drives people to faith in heaven.

IQ/g is best single predictor, mental or non-mental.

IQ/g usually predicts major life outcomes better than does any other single predictor in broad samples of individuals. For example, whether IQ predicts strongly (educational performance) or weakly (law-abidingness), it predicts better than does social class background. This does not mean that intelligence is the only important influence on people's life chances or that social conditions are unimportant. Rather, it means that any explanation of social and economic inequalities will need to consider the central role that general intelligence level seems to play.

Gottfredson, L. S. (2006). Social consequences of group differences in cognitive ability (Consequencias sociais das diferencas de grupo em habilidade cognitiva). In C. E. Flores-Mendoza & R. Colom (Eds.), Introducau a psicologia das diferencas individuais (pp. 433-456). Porto Allegre, Brazil: ArtMed Publishers.
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2004socialconsequences.pdf

Survey of opinions on the primacy of g and social consequences of ability testing: A comparison of expert and non-expert views

Though some commentaries give the impression of controversy regarding the importance of cognitive abilities and the validity of ability testing, the results of this survey clearly demonstrate that there are areas of resounding consensus among experts. Our results indicate that there is consensus among experts in the science of mental abilities that g is an important, non-trivial determinant (or at least predictor) of important real world outcomes for which there is no substitute, and that tests of g are valid and generally free from racial bias.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2008.03.007


I'm not trying to be nice or excessively rude.

If you believe that African people are inferior and naturally less intelligent than white people, well, you are a racist, or I don't know what racism is about.

Racism is generally understood as either belief that different racial groups are characterized by intrinsic characteristics or abilities and that some such groups are therefore naturally superior to others (wikipedia)

... as for sexism

Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the belief that a characteristic inherent in one's sex necessarily adversely affects one's ability, even if that characteristic does not have that effect.

I think you wouldn't disagree?

Maybe you have a lot of "evidences" to back up your claim (but who doesn't?), so you are a very rationnal racist, but a racist nonetheless. There are worse things on earth than being a racist I am sure, but that's one of the criterias on which I judge that discussing with someone is useless.

Posting studies that, once again, make a correlation between factors without establishing a causal factor doesn't help. have a nice day.
some call it racial realism.

Also, so if you believe blacks' darker skin protecting them from sun makes them superior in high UV level situations you are racist?

"Racial realism", interesting. I am sure Hitler did think he was a "racial realist".

As for the color of the skin, of course it is proven that if you have more melanin, your skin is darker, and you have a better protection against the sun. It's a bit different than saying that Africans are less intelligent or more brutal or whatever, which is at most backed up by pseudo scientific datas usually misinterpreted.
The fellow who is out to burn things up is the counterpart of the fool who thinks he can save the world. The world needs neither to be burned up nor to be saved. The world is, we are. Transients, if we buck it; here to stay if we accept it. ~H.Miller
storkfan
Profile Joined March 2012
493 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-04-20 13:53:32
April 20 2012 13:52 GMT
#89
On April 20 2012 22:45 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 22:40 storkfan wrote:
On April 20 2012 21:31 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 21:18 Zaqwe wrote:
+ Show Spoiler +
On April 20 2012 21:03 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 20:57 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 20:27 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 19:39 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 17:53 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 01:11 qrs wrote:
On April 19 2012 23:00 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:32 Zanno wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:23 Ruscour wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:20 Zanno wrote:
you are aware Scarlett is a dude right

that's not even a rumor

i do not have any bias against transgenders at all but i do not think Scarlett qualifies as a victory towards female recognition in competitive starcraft

Scarlett is female. I am aware she is transgendered. There is absolutely no advantage gained in StarCraft from being male, therefore there is no reason why she couldn't be considered a success for the female SC2 scene.

EDIT: This will be the only reply I make about this issue. Please don't discuss it here, it undermines the point I'm trying to make.

Of course it undermines the point you're trying to make

There's a large body of literature out there that shows that the male brain and female brain develop differently and as a result there are certain problems that males are better equipped to deal with and certain problems that females are better equipped to deal with

Undergoing sex reassignment surgery does not magically undo two decades of the human body's growth as a male and if you are going to ignore this then I don't know what to say


Yeah well, people used to have the same machist idiotic reasoning in chess, and then came Judit Polgar (and her sisters), who has demolished everybody since she is 6, has been one of the greatest prodigy child in history of chess and has been ranked as high as world number 8, having defeated world champions or former world champions Karpov, Anand, Kasparov, Spasky, Smilsov, Topalov, Ponomariov, Khalifman and Razhimdzdhanov.
Yes, then came Judit Polgar, and then came...who? Yifan? Not yet, at any rate.

Without making speculative statements about why males thus far have the competitive edge in chess and in Starcraft, it's hard to deny that currently they do—and one proof of that is that people still feel the need to hold separate female-only events. With regard to chess, Judit Polgar is the exception that proves the rule: yes, she cracked the overall top 10 for a while—and she's the only female ever to come close to doing so. With regard to Starcraft—well, look at how the OP, even as he theorizes that there ought to be no disadvantage to being female, admits that, Scarlett aside, no girl has actually been "good enough to be considered a competitor in her own right".

And as for Scarlett, well, Scarlett is transgendered, and without getting into questions of etiquette, I don't think you can entirely ignore that fact if the discussion is about comparing female gamers to male gamers. Whatever the reason is that males have generally dominated the top of the Starcraft scene, it's certainly the case that they have—and so long as that remains an unexplained fact, I don't see how you can blithely assume that someone born male (and perhaps still biologically male? I don't know), with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that is wholly representative of people born female, with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that. The pronoun you use to refer to Scarlett is one thing; the inferences you draw from Scarlett's success are something else entirely. In my opinion, you won't be able to prove something about the legitimacy of the non-transgender female scene until a non-transgendered female has had a legitimate level of success.

Yeah fine, that's absolutely true, most of the top 100 chess players are males. In fact 99 of them are males since Judit Polgar is the only one to have ever broken into the top 100. Why? It's not science rocket. It's statistic:

Male dominate chess because chess is socially a male activity. The little boy is put to play chess and the little girl is put to dance or whatever. Go in a chessclub and you will see the junior section with basically only little boys. It's even worse in countries that actually produce most of champions: Russia, Azerbadjan, etc... You just won't see a little girl in a chess club because parents don't put them at chess.

The three Polgar sisters are exception because they had an environment that was devoted to make them great chess players. Their father was a grand master and luckily he didn't have any of these silly prejudices. And he designed their education to make them brilliant players. And without surprise, they all became elite players, regardless of their gender.

SC2 is just the same. Boys play Starcraft, Girls play the Sims. That's the way people are being raised, because boys have blue rooms and girls pink rooms, that boys are offered GI Joe and girls Barbie doll, boys are dressed with sport clothes and girl with dresses etc... It has absolutely nothing to do with the intrinseque capacity of each gender, but about stereotypical education that we all get, that generates the kind of sensibility we have, the way we think and what we can do.

Now, about chess, the Polgar family (keep in mind, they were three sisters, they all became grand master, that's a 100% success rate in the family) is enough to shut the mouth of everybody who pretend women can't compete at the highest level. They can, if they are given the environment from their youngest age, which is unfortunately incredibly rare.

There were no women composer until the mid XXth century. NOT ONE except for "wives of": Clara Schumann, Alma Mahler and Fanny Mendelssohn, period. So it was supposed to be a male activity, and women were discourage to compose. You would be told the same crap than we are being served in this thread, you know, about male qualities, the genius, creativity, whatever, backed up with the facts: 100% of male composers and the fallacious argument: there must be a good reason. Surprise, now that most (not all as we can see) of those stereotypes have disappear, we have a good 50% of women in contemporary composers.

Feminism has a long way to go.



One last thing: you can say the exact same thing and that becomes evn more obvious with skin colour. Take Fields medal laureates. Surprise! Everybody is white. That means nothing about racial differences. It just says that when you are white you are a zillion times more likely to have the environment to become a great mathematician. And yet you still have racists using these kinds of datas to prove white men are more clever.

You should watch Hjernevask (Brainwash), a Norwegian science documentary. Particularly episode one, "The Gender Equality Paradox.

What you have said is complete nonsense based on wishful thinking and an emotional desire to see everyone as equal.

Gender differences are observable immediately after birth. Female babies are more socially inclined and prefer to look at human faces, while male newborns are more mechanically inclined and will look at machines longer.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=327138

The example of the Polgar family that you used itself seems to be strong evidence that genetics is the key factor in becoming a chess grandmaster.

On April 20 2012 18:51 chocopan wrote:
I agree with more or less everything Biff just said. Yay.

Everything Biff said is wrong.

Yeah I know people desperately want to justify social order and inequalities with science. That's even a constant in science history.

So let me first tell you that most human science researcher absolutely back up my claims. And don't forget that in the XIXth century, very serious scientists were calculating that the size of the skull of "nigers" was smaller than the one of white people and that was the reason why they were less intelligent and subject to be colonized or put in slavery. Things don't change. Tomorrow we will smile at today's scientists attempts to justify sexist prejudices the same way that now we smile at yesterday's scientists trying to justify racist prejudices.

I am not saying men and women are biologically speaking exactly the same. But to claim that women can't compete with men at something like chess because of genetical disposition is just a fancy way to repeat the most obscene of sexist prejudice: that women are less intelligent. Anyway, explain me a little why they were no women scientist or philosophers until we started to question the dumb prejudices you are defending and as sonn as we did DADA!!! we started to have Marie Curie and other Hannah Arendt? Answer: because when we started to change women education / environment it appeared they were just as smart as men while everybody were certain during six thousand years they were dumb as fuck and unable to think rationally. They were no women scientist because women didn't have the possibility to be a scientist in yesterday's society.

Education and gender issues (gender =/= biological sex) are the reason we behave differently. They are not based on nature, they are a social construction.

One hundred years of research has established that East Asians and Europeans average higher IQs than do Africans. East Asians, measured in North America and in Pacific Rim countries, typically average IQs in the range of 101 to 111. Caucasoid populations in North America, Europe, and Australasia typically average IQs from 85 to 115 with an overall mean of 100. African populations living south of the Sahara, in North America, in the Caribbean, and in Britain typically have mean IQs from 70 to 90.

Discoveries using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which creates a three-dimensional image of the living brain, have shown a strong positive correlation (.44) between brain size and IQ (see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for a review). And there is more. The National Collaborative Perinatal Project on 53,000 children by Sarah Broman and her colleagues, showed that head perimeter at birth significantly predicts head perimeter at 7 years — and head perimeter at seven years predicts IQ. It also shows that Asian children average a larger head perimeter at birth than do White children who average a larger head perimeter than do Black children.

Racial differences in brain size have been established using a variety of modern methods. Using endocranial volume, for example, Beals et al. (1984, p. 307, Table 5) analyzed about 20,000 skulls from around the world. East Asians averaged 1,415 cm3 , Europeans averaged 1,362 cm3, and Africans averaged 1,268 cm3 . Using external head measures to calculate cranial capacities, Rushton (1992) analyzed a stratified random sample of 6,325 U.S. Army personnel measured in 1988 for fitting helmets and found that Asian Americans averaged 1,416 cm3, European Americans 1,380 cm3, and African Americans 1,359 cm3. Finally, a recent MRI study found that people of African and Caribbean background averaged a smaller brain volume than did those of European background (again see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for review).

Well maybe IQ is a fucking dumb measure, sweety. You know you can raise your IQ in two weeks dramatically with appropriate exercizes? For a measure that's supposed to calculate your "intelligence" that's a pretty big flaw.

And even though, you don't think environment is quite a big factor in our intelligence? And that Africans have typically a different environment than the average white guy?

And don't you think that the size of the skull has nothing to do with your intellectual potential, as proven by a zillion studies despite the stuff you throw there that seems to make no difference between correlation and causality? Because see, whales would be quite fucking clever.

You believe africans are less intelligent, and that women can't think rationally. Well, look, you are a racist and a sexist, and I'm off this discussion, because see, I have experienced many times that racists and sexist are unable to think rationally, and not very clever. Bye.

That's not very nice. I consider myself a rational thinker and base my opinions on what evidence is available. I am always prepared to change my opinions if I see new evidence.

And brain/skull size does have something to do with intelligence, as mentioned in my previous post. I am not sure why you ignored that.

It seems you are the irrational one. Your emotional attachment to equality is clouding your judgement, like a fear of death which drives people to faith in heaven.

IQ/g is best single predictor, mental or non-mental.

IQ/g usually predicts major life outcomes better than does any other single predictor in broad samples of individuals. For example, whether IQ predicts strongly (educational performance) or weakly (law-abidingness), it predicts better than does social class background. This does not mean that intelligence is the only important influence on people's life chances or that social conditions are unimportant. Rather, it means that any explanation of social and economic inequalities will need to consider the central role that general intelligence level seems to play.

Gottfredson, L. S. (2006). Social consequences of group differences in cognitive ability (Consequencias sociais das diferencas de grupo em habilidade cognitiva). In C. E. Flores-Mendoza & R. Colom (Eds.), Introducau a psicologia das diferencas individuais (pp. 433-456). Porto Allegre, Brazil: ArtMed Publishers.
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2004socialconsequences.pdf

Survey of opinions on the primacy of g and social consequences of ability testing: A comparison of expert and non-expert views

Though some commentaries give the impression of controversy regarding the importance of cognitive abilities and the validity of ability testing, the results of this survey clearly demonstrate that there are areas of resounding consensus among experts. Our results indicate that there is consensus among experts in the science of mental abilities that g is an important, non-trivial determinant (or at least predictor) of important real world outcomes for which there is no substitute, and that tests of g are valid and generally free from racial bias.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2008.03.007


I'm not trying to be nice or excessively rude.

If you believe that African people are inferior and naturally less intelligent than white people, well, you are a racist, or I don't know what racism is about.

Racism is generally understood as either belief that different racial groups are characterized by intrinsic characteristics or abilities and that some such groups are therefore naturally superior to others (wikipedia)

... as for sexism

Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the belief that a characteristic inherent in one's sex necessarily adversely affects one's ability, even if that characteristic does not have that effect.

I think you wouldn't disagree?

Maybe you have a lot of "evidences" to back up your claim (but who doesn't?), so you are a very rationnal racist, but a racist nonetheless. There are worse things on earth than being a racist I am sure, but that's one of the criterias on which I judge that discussing with someone is useless.

Posting studies that, once again, make a correlation between factors without establishing a causal factor doesn't help. have a nice day.
some call it racial realism.

Also, so if you believe blacks' darker skin protecting them from sun makes them superior in high UV level situations you are racist?

"Racial realism", interesting. I am sure Hitler did think he was a "racial realist".

As for the color of the skin, of course it is proven that if you have more melanin, your skin is darker, and you have a better protection against the sun. It's a bit different than saying that Africans are less intelligent or more brutal or whatever, which is at most backed up by pseudo scientific datas usually misinterpreted.

Skin color is related to race. So you can say the black race is superior to white race in the UV example, which would constitute an example of racism. Blacks have an intrinsic capability to better withstand such situations. So how is it not racist, how does it not meet the definition of racism?..
chocopan
Profile Joined April 2010
Japan986 Posts
April 20 2012 14:03 GMT
#90
This is a different thread. Please move your discussion there. Thank you.
Dance those ultras
Biff The Understudy
Profile Blog Joined February 2008
France8222 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-04-20 14:11:35
April 20 2012 14:06 GMT
#91
On April 20 2012 22:52 storkfan wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 22:45 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 22:40 storkfan wrote:
On April 20 2012 21:31 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 21:18 Zaqwe wrote:
+ Show Spoiler +
On April 20 2012 21:03 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 20:57 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 20:27 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 19:39 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 17:53 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 01:11 qrs wrote:
On April 19 2012 23:00 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:32 Zanno wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:23 Ruscour wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:20 Zanno wrote:
you are aware Scarlett is a dude right

that's not even a rumor

i do not have any bias against transgenders at all but i do not think Scarlett qualifies as a victory towards female recognition in competitive starcraft

Scarlett is female. I am aware she is transgendered. There is absolutely no advantage gained in StarCraft from being male, therefore there is no reason why she couldn't be considered a success for the female SC2 scene.

EDIT: This will be the only reply I make about this issue. Please don't discuss it here, it undermines the point I'm trying to make.

Of course it undermines the point you're trying to make

There's a large body of literature out there that shows that the male brain and female brain develop differently and as a result there are certain problems that males are better equipped to deal with and certain problems that females are better equipped to deal with

Undergoing sex reassignment surgery does not magically undo two decades of the human body's growth as a male and if you are going to ignore this then I don't know what to say


Yeah well, people used to have the same machist idiotic reasoning in chess, and then came Judit Polgar (and her sisters), who has demolished everybody since she is 6, has been one of the greatest prodigy child in history of chess and has been ranked as high as world number 8, having defeated world champions or former world champions Karpov, Anand, Kasparov, Spasky, Smilsov, Topalov, Ponomariov, Khalifman and Razhimdzdhanov.
Yes, then came Judit Polgar, and then came...who? Yifan? Not yet, at any rate.

Without making speculative statements about why males thus far have the competitive edge in chess and in Starcraft, it's hard to deny that currently they do—and one proof of that is that people still feel the need to hold separate female-only events. With regard to chess, Judit Polgar is the exception that proves the rule: yes, she cracked the overall top 10 for a while—and she's the only female ever to come close to doing so. With regard to Starcraft—well, look at how the OP, even as he theorizes that there ought to be no disadvantage to being female, admits that, Scarlett aside, no girl has actually been "good enough to be considered a competitor in her own right".

And as for Scarlett, well, Scarlett is transgendered, and without getting into questions of etiquette, I don't think you can entirely ignore that fact if the discussion is about comparing female gamers to male gamers. Whatever the reason is that males have generally dominated the top of the Starcraft scene, it's certainly the case that they have—and so long as that remains an unexplained fact, I don't see how you can blithely assume that someone born male (and perhaps still biologically male? I don't know), with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that is wholly representative of people born female, with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that. The pronoun you use to refer to Scarlett is one thing; the inferences you draw from Scarlett's success are something else entirely. In my opinion, you won't be able to prove something about the legitimacy of the non-transgender female scene until a non-transgendered female has had a legitimate level of success.

Yeah fine, that's absolutely true, most of the top 100 chess players are males. In fact 99 of them are males since Judit Polgar is the only one to have ever broken into the top 100. Why? It's not science rocket. It's statistic:

Male dominate chess because chess is socially a male activity. The little boy is put to play chess and the little girl is put to dance or whatever. Go in a chessclub and you will see the junior section with basically only little boys. It's even worse in countries that actually produce most of champions: Russia, Azerbadjan, etc... You just won't see a little girl in a chess club because parents don't put them at chess.

The three Polgar sisters are exception because they had an environment that was devoted to make them great chess players. Their father was a grand master and luckily he didn't have any of these silly prejudices. And he designed their education to make them brilliant players. And without surprise, they all became elite players, regardless of their gender.

SC2 is just the same. Boys play Starcraft, Girls play the Sims. That's the way people are being raised, because boys have blue rooms and girls pink rooms, that boys are offered GI Joe and girls Barbie doll, boys are dressed with sport clothes and girl with dresses etc... It has absolutely nothing to do with the intrinseque capacity of each gender, but about stereotypical education that we all get, that generates the kind of sensibility we have, the way we think and what we can do.

Now, about chess, the Polgar family (keep in mind, they were three sisters, they all became grand master, that's a 100% success rate in the family) is enough to shut the mouth of everybody who pretend women can't compete at the highest level. They can, if they are given the environment from their youngest age, which is unfortunately incredibly rare.

There were no women composer until the mid XXth century. NOT ONE except for "wives of": Clara Schumann, Alma Mahler and Fanny Mendelssohn, period. So it was supposed to be a male activity, and women were discourage to compose. You would be told the same crap than we are being served in this thread, you know, about male qualities, the genius, creativity, whatever, backed up with the facts: 100% of male composers and the fallacious argument: there must be a good reason. Surprise, now that most (not all as we can see) of those stereotypes have disappear, we have a good 50% of women in contemporary composers.

Feminism has a long way to go.



One last thing: you can say the exact same thing and that becomes evn more obvious with skin colour. Take Fields medal laureates. Surprise! Everybody is white. That means nothing about racial differences. It just says that when you are white you are a zillion times more likely to have the environment to become a great mathematician. And yet you still have racists using these kinds of datas to prove white men are more clever.

You should watch Hjernevask (Brainwash), a Norwegian science documentary. Particularly episode one, "The Gender Equality Paradox.

What you have said is complete nonsense based on wishful thinking and an emotional desire to see everyone as equal.

Gender differences are observable immediately after birth. Female babies are more socially inclined and prefer to look at human faces, while male newborns are more mechanically inclined and will look at machines longer.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=327138

The example of the Polgar family that you used itself seems to be strong evidence that genetics is the key factor in becoming a chess grandmaster.

On April 20 2012 18:51 chocopan wrote:
I agree with more or less everything Biff just said. Yay.

Everything Biff said is wrong.

Yeah I know people desperately want to justify social order and inequalities with science. That's even a constant in science history.

So let me first tell you that most human science researcher absolutely back up my claims. And don't forget that in the XIXth century, very serious scientists were calculating that the size of the skull of "nigers" was smaller than the one of white people and that was the reason why they were less intelligent and subject to be colonized or put in slavery. Things don't change. Tomorrow we will smile at today's scientists attempts to justify sexist prejudices the same way that now we smile at yesterday's scientists trying to justify racist prejudices.

I am not saying men and women are biologically speaking exactly the same. But to claim that women can't compete with men at something like chess because of genetical disposition is just a fancy way to repeat the most obscene of sexist prejudice: that women are less intelligent. Anyway, explain me a little why they were no women scientist or philosophers until we started to question the dumb prejudices you are defending and as sonn as we did DADA!!! we started to have Marie Curie and other Hannah Arendt? Answer: because when we started to change women education / environment it appeared they were just as smart as men while everybody were certain during six thousand years they were dumb as fuck and unable to think rationally. They were no women scientist because women didn't have the possibility to be a scientist in yesterday's society.

Education and gender issues (gender =/= biological sex) are the reason we behave differently. They are not based on nature, they are a social construction.

One hundred years of research has established that East Asians and Europeans average higher IQs than do Africans. East Asians, measured in North America and in Pacific Rim countries, typically average IQs in the range of 101 to 111. Caucasoid populations in North America, Europe, and Australasia typically average IQs from 85 to 115 with an overall mean of 100. African populations living south of the Sahara, in North America, in the Caribbean, and in Britain typically have mean IQs from 70 to 90.

Discoveries using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which creates a three-dimensional image of the living brain, have shown a strong positive correlation (.44) between brain size and IQ (see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for a review). And there is more. The National Collaborative Perinatal Project on 53,000 children by Sarah Broman and her colleagues, showed that head perimeter at birth significantly predicts head perimeter at 7 years — and head perimeter at seven years predicts IQ. It also shows that Asian children average a larger head perimeter at birth than do White children who average a larger head perimeter than do Black children.

Racial differences in brain size have been established using a variety of modern methods. Using endocranial volume, for example, Beals et al. (1984, p. 307, Table 5) analyzed about 20,000 skulls from around the world. East Asians averaged 1,415 cm3 , Europeans averaged 1,362 cm3, and Africans averaged 1,268 cm3 . Using external head measures to calculate cranial capacities, Rushton (1992) analyzed a stratified random sample of 6,325 U.S. Army personnel measured in 1988 for fitting helmets and found that Asian Americans averaged 1,416 cm3, European Americans 1,380 cm3, and African Americans 1,359 cm3. Finally, a recent MRI study found that people of African and Caribbean background averaged a smaller brain volume than did those of European background (again see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for review).

Well maybe IQ is a fucking dumb measure, sweety. You know you can raise your IQ in two weeks dramatically with appropriate exercizes? For a measure that's supposed to calculate your "intelligence" that's a pretty big flaw.

And even though, you don't think environment is quite a big factor in our intelligence? And that Africans have typically a different environment than the average white guy?

And don't you think that the size of the skull has nothing to do with your intellectual potential, as proven by a zillion studies despite the stuff you throw there that seems to make no difference between correlation and causality? Because see, whales would be quite fucking clever.

You believe africans are less intelligent, and that women can't think rationally. Well, look, you are a racist and a sexist, and I'm off this discussion, because see, I have experienced many times that racists and sexist are unable to think rationally, and not very clever. Bye.

That's not very nice. I consider myself a rational thinker and base my opinions on what evidence is available. I am always prepared to change my opinions if I see new evidence.

And brain/skull size does have something to do with intelligence, as mentioned in my previous post. I am not sure why you ignored that.

It seems you are the irrational one. Your emotional attachment to equality is clouding your judgement, like a fear of death which drives people to faith in heaven.

IQ/g is best single predictor, mental or non-mental.

IQ/g usually predicts major life outcomes better than does any other single predictor in broad samples of individuals. For example, whether IQ predicts strongly (educational performance) or weakly (law-abidingness), it predicts better than does social class background. This does not mean that intelligence is the only important influence on people's life chances or that social conditions are unimportant. Rather, it means that any explanation of social and economic inequalities will need to consider the central role that general intelligence level seems to play.

Gottfredson, L. S. (2006). Social consequences of group differences in cognitive ability (Consequencias sociais das diferencas de grupo em habilidade cognitiva). In C. E. Flores-Mendoza & R. Colom (Eds.), Introducau a psicologia das diferencas individuais (pp. 433-456). Porto Allegre, Brazil: ArtMed Publishers.
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2004socialconsequences.pdf

Survey of opinions on the primacy of g and social consequences of ability testing: A comparison of expert and non-expert views

Though some commentaries give the impression of controversy regarding the importance of cognitive abilities and the validity of ability testing, the results of this survey clearly demonstrate that there are areas of resounding consensus among experts. Our results indicate that there is consensus among experts in the science of mental abilities that g is an important, non-trivial determinant (or at least predictor) of important real world outcomes for which there is no substitute, and that tests of g are valid and generally free from racial bias.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2008.03.007


I'm not trying to be nice or excessively rude.

If you believe that African people are inferior and naturally less intelligent than white people, well, you are a racist, or I don't know what racism is about.

Racism is generally understood as either belief that different racial groups are characterized by intrinsic characteristics or abilities and that some such groups are therefore naturally superior to others (wikipedia)

... as for sexism

Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the belief that a characteristic inherent in one's sex necessarily adversely affects one's ability, even if that characteristic does not have that effect.

I think you wouldn't disagree?

Maybe you have a lot of "evidences" to back up your claim (but who doesn't?), so you are a very rationnal racist, but a racist nonetheless. There are worse things on earth than being a racist I am sure, but that's one of the criterias on which I judge that discussing with someone is useless.

Posting studies that, once again, make a correlation between factors without establishing a causal factor doesn't help. have a nice day.
some call it racial realism.

Also, so if you believe blacks' darker skin protecting them from sun makes them superior in high UV level situations you are racist?

"Racial realism", interesting. I am sure Hitler did think he was a "racial realist".

As for the color of the skin, of course it is proven that if you have more melanin, your skin is darker, and you have a better protection against the sun. It's a bit different than saying that Africans are less intelligent or more brutal or whatever, which is at most backed up by pseudo scientific datas usually misinterpreted.

Skin color is related to race. So you can say the black race is superior to white race in the UV example, which would constitute an example of racism. Blacks have an intrinsic capability to better withstand such situations. So how is it not racist, how does it not meet the definition of racism?..

Because race is a loosy concept that has nothing to do with skin colour.

"We caution against making the naive leap to a genetic explanation for group differences in complex traits, especially for human behavioral traits such as IQ scores"

"Pure races, in the sense of genetically homogeneous populations, do not exist in the human species today, nor is there any evidence that they have ever existed in the past.-p.714"

source: The ethics of characterizing difference: guiding principles on using racial categories in human genetics

http://genomebiology.com/2008/9/7/404

While biologists sometimes use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is often used in a naive or simplistic way. Among humans, race has no taxonomic significance; all living humans belong to the same hominid subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens. Social conceptions and groupings of races vary over time, involving folk taxonomies that define essential types of individuals based on perceived traits. Scientists consider biological essentialism obsolete, and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits (wikipedia)


If you have black skin, you are better protected against the sun. If you have big ears you also may hear better. Skin colour doesn't make a race, as much as size of the ear doesn't make a race either.

There is one race, which is the human race, and each of us has billion of genes that can be combined in any way possible, including genes that determines our melanin rate and therefore our skin colour.

You want to establish an equivalence between skin colour and intelligence. Don't try to use science in order to back up your racist ideas.


On April 20 2012 23:03 chocopan wrote:
This is a different thread. Please move your discussion there. Thank you.

Sorry, saw that after posting
The fellow who is out to burn things up is the counterpart of the fool who thinks he can save the world. The world needs neither to be burned up nor to be saved. The world is, we are. Transients, if we buck it; here to stay if we accept it. ~H.Miller
storkfan
Profile Joined March 2012
493 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-04-20 14:54:48
April 20 2012 14:49 GMT
#92
On April 20 2012 23:06 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 22:52 storkfan wrote:
On April 20 2012 22:45 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 22:40 storkfan wrote:
On April 20 2012 21:31 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 21:18 Zaqwe wrote:
+ Show Spoiler +
On April 20 2012 21:03 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 20:57 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 20:27 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 19:39 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 17:53 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 01:11 qrs wrote:
On April 19 2012 23:00 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:32 Zanno wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:23 Ruscour wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:20 Zanno wrote:
you are aware Scarlett is a dude right

that's not even a rumor

i do not have any bias against transgenders at all but i do not think Scarlett qualifies as a victory towards female recognition in competitive starcraft

Scarlett is female. I am aware she is transgendered. There is absolutely no advantage gained in StarCraft from being male, therefore there is no reason why she couldn't be considered a success for the female SC2 scene.

EDIT: This will be the only reply I make about this issue. Please don't discuss it here, it undermines the point I'm trying to make.

Of course it undermines the point you're trying to make

There's a large body of literature out there that shows that the male brain and female brain develop differently and as a result there are certain problems that males are better equipped to deal with and certain problems that females are better equipped to deal with

Undergoing sex reassignment surgery does not magically undo two decades of the human body's growth as a male and if you are going to ignore this then I don't know what to say


Yeah well, people used to have the same machist idiotic reasoning in chess, and then came Judit Polgar (and her sisters), who has demolished everybody since she is 6, has been one of the greatest prodigy child in history of chess and has been ranked as high as world number 8, having defeated world champions or former world champions Karpov, Anand, Kasparov, Spasky, Smilsov, Topalov, Ponomariov, Khalifman and Razhimdzdhanov.
Yes, then came Judit Polgar, and then came...who? Yifan? Not yet, at any rate.

Without making speculative statements about why males thus far have the competitive edge in chess and in Starcraft, it's hard to deny that currently they do—and one proof of that is that people still feel the need to hold separate female-only events. With regard to chess, Judit Polgar is the exception that proves the rule: yes, she cracked the overall top 10 for a while—and she's the only female ever to come close to doing so. With regard to Starcraft—well, look at how the OP, even as he theorizes that there ought to be no disadvantage to being female, admits that, Scarlett aside, no girl has actually been "good enough to be considered a competitor in her own right".

And as for Scarlett, well, Scarlett is transgendered, and without getting into questions of etiquette, I don't think you can entirely ignore that fact if the discussion is about comparing female gamers to male gamers. Whatever the reason is that males have generally dominated the top of the Starcraft scene, it's certainly the case that they have—and so long as that remains an unexplained fact, I don't see how you can blithely assume that someone born male (and perhaps still biologically male? I don't know), with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that is wholly representative of people born female, with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that. The pronoun you use to refer to Scarlett is one thing; the inferences you draw from Scarlett's success are something else entirely. In my opinion, you won't be able to prove something about the legitimacy of the non-transgender female scene until a non-transgendered female has had a legitimate level of success.

Yeah fine, that's absolutely true, most of the top 100 chess players are males. In fact 99 of them are males since Judit Polgar is the only one to have ever broken into the top 100. Why? It's not science rocket. It's statistic:

Male dominate chess because chess is socially a male activity. The little boy is put to play chess and the little girl is put to dance or whatever. Go in a chessclub and you will see the junior section with basically only little boys. It's even worse in countries that actually produce most of champions: Russia, Azerbadjan, etc... You just won't see a little girl in a chess club because parents don't put them at chess.

The three Polgar sisters are exception because they had an environment that was devoted to make them great chess players. Their father was a grand master and luckily he didn't have any of these silly prejudices. And he designed their education to make them brilliant players. And without surprise, they all became elite players, regardless of their gender.

SC2 is just the same. Boys play Starcraft, Girls play the Sims. That's the way people are being raised, because boys have blue rooms and girls pink rooms, that boys are offered GI Joe and girls Barbie doll, boys are dressed with sport clothes and girl with dresses etc... It has absolutely nothing to do with the intrinseque capacity of each gender, but about stereotypical education that we all get, that generates the kind of sensibility we have, the way we think and what we can do.

Now, about chess, the Polgar family (keep in mind, they were three sisters, they all became grand master, that's a 100% success rate in the family) is enough to shut the mouth of everybody who pretend women can't compete at the highest level. They can, if they are given the environment from their youngest age, which is unfortunately incredibly rare.

There were no women composer until the mid XXth century. NOT ONE except for "wives of": Clara Schumann, Alma Mahler and Fanny Mendelssohn, period. So it was supposed to be a male activity, and women were discourage to compose. You would be told the same crap than we are being served in this thread, you know, about male qualities, the genius, creativity, whatever, backed up with the facts: 100% of male composers and the fallacious argument: there must be a good reason. Surprise, now that most (not all as we can see) of those stereotypes have disappear, we have a good 50% of women in contemporary composers.

Feminism has a long way to go.



One last thing: you can say the exact same thing and that becomes evn more obvious with skin colour. Take Fields medal laureates. Surprise! Everybody is white. That means nothing about racial differences. It just says that when you are white you are a zillion times more likely to have the environment to become a great mathematician. And yet you still have racists using these kinds of datas to prove white men are more clever.

You should watch Hjernevask (Brainwash), a Norwegian science documentary. Particularly episode one, "The Gender Equality Paradox.

What you have said is complete nonsense based on wishful thinking and an emotional desire to see everyone as equal.

Gender differences are observable immediately after birth. Female babies are more socially inclined and prefer to look at human faces, while male newborns are more mechanically inclined and will look at machines longer.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=327138

The example of the Polgar family that you used itself seems to be strong evidence that genetics is the key factor in becoming a chess grandmaster.

On April 20 2012 18:51 chocopan wrote:
I agree with more or less everything Biff just said. Yay.

Everything Biff said is wrong.

Yeah I know people desperately want to justify social order and inequalities with science. That's even a constant in science history.

So let me first tell you that most human science researcher absolutely back up my claims. And don't forget that in the XIXth century, very serious scientists were calculating that the size of the skull of "nigers" was smaller than the one of white people and that was the reason why they were less intelligent and subject to be colonized or put in slavery. Things don't change. Tomorrow we will smile at today's scientists attempts to justify sexist prejudices the same way that now we smile at yesterday's scientists trying to justify racist prejudices.

I am not saying men and women are biologically speaking exactly the same. But to claim that women can't compete with men at something like chess because of genetical disposition is just a fancy way to repeat the most obscene of sexist prejudice: that women are less intelligent. Anyway, explain me a little why they were no women scientist or philosophers until we started to question the dumb prejudices you are defending and as sonn as we did DADA!!! we started to have Marie Curie and other Hannah Arendt? Answer: because when we started to change women education / environment it appeared they were just as smart as men while everybody were certain during six thousand years they were dumb as fuck and unable to think rationally. They were no women scientist because women didn't have the possibility to be a scientist in yesterday's society.

Education and gender issues (gender =/= biological sex) are the reason we behave differently. They are not based on nature, they are a social construction.

One hundred years of research has established that East Asians and Europeans average higher IQs than do Africans. East Asians, measured in North America and in Pacific Rim countries, typically average IQs in the range of 101 to 111. Caucasoid populations in North America, Europe, and Australasia typically average IQs from 85 to 115 with an overall mean of 100. African populations living south of the Sahara, in North America, in the Caribbean, and in Britain typically have mean IQs from 70 to 90.

Discoveries using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which creates a three-dimensional image of the living brain, have shown a strong positive correlation (.44) between brain size and IQ (see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for a review). And there is more. The National Collaborative Perinatal Project on 53,000 children by Sarah Broman and her colleagues, showed that head perimeter at birth significantly predicts head perimeter at 7 years — and head perimeter at seven years predicts IQ. It also shows that Asian children average a larger head perimeter at birth than do White children who average a larger head perimeter than do Black children.

Racial differences in brain size have been established using a variety of modern methods. Using endocranial volume, for example, Beals et al. (1984, p. 307, Table 5) analyzed about 20,000 skulls from around the world. East Asians averaged 1,415 cm3 , Europeans averaged 1,362 cm3, and Africans averaged 1,268 cm3 . Using external head measures to calculate cranial capacities, Rushton (1992) analyzed a stratified random sample of 6,325 U.S. Army personnel measured in 1988 for fitting helmets and found that Asian Americans averaged 1,416 cm3, European Americans 1,380 cm3, and African Americans 1,359 cm3. Finally, a recent MRI study found that people of African and Caribbean background averaged a smaller brain volume than did those of European background (again see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for review).

Well maybe IQ is a fucking dumb measure, sweety. You know you can raise your IQ in two weeks dramatically with appropriate exercizes? For a measure that's supposed to calculate your "intelligence" that's a pretty big flaw.

And even though, you don't think environment is quite a big factor in our intelligence? And that Africans have typically a different environment than the average white guy?

And don't you think that the size of the skull has nothing to do with your intellectual potential, as proven by a zillion studies despite the stuff you throw there that seems to make no difference between correlation and causality? Because see, whales would be quite fucking clever.

You believe africans are less intelligent, and that women can't think rationally. Well, look, you are a racist and a sexist, and I'm off this discussion, because see, I have experienced many times that racists and sexist are unable to think rationally, and not very clever. Bye.

That's not very nice. I consider myself a rational thinker and base my opinions on what evidence is available. I am always prepared to change my opinions if I see new evidence.

And brain/skull size does have something to do with intelligence, as mentioned in my previous post. I am not sure why you ignored that.

It seems you are the irrational one. Your emotional attachment to equality is clouding your judgement, like a fear of death which drives people to faith in heaven.

IQ/g is best single predictor, mental or non-mental.

IQ/g usually predicts major life outcomes better than does any other single predictor in broad samples of individuals. For example, whether IQ predicts strongly (educational performance) or weakly (law-abidingness), it predicts better than does social class background. This does not mean that intelligence is the only important influence on people's life chances or that social conditions are unimportant. Rather, it means that any explanation of social and economic inequalities will need to consider the central role that general intelligence level seems to play.

Gottfredson, L. S. (2006). Social consequences of group differences in cognitive ability (Consequencias sociais das diferencas de grupo em habilidade cognitiva). In C. E. Flores-Mendoza & R. Colom (Eds.), Introducau a psicologia das diferencas individuais (pp. 433-456). Porto Allegre, Brazil: ArtMed Publishers.
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2004socialconsequences.pdf

Survey of opinions on the primacy of g and social consequences of ability testing: A comparison of expert and non-expert views

Though some commentaries give the impression of controversy regarding the importance of cognitive abilities and the validity of ability testing, the results of this survey clearly demonstrate that there are areas of resounding consensus among experts. Our results indicate that there is consensus among experts in the science of mental abilities that g is an important, non-trivial determinant (or at least predictor) of important real world outcomes for which there is no substitute, and that tests of g are valid and generally free from racial bias.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2008.03.007


I'm not trying to be nice or excessively rude.

If you believe that African people are inferior and naturally less intelligent than white people, well, you are a racist, or I don't know what racism is about.

Racism is generally understood as either belief that different racial groups are characterized by intrinsic characteristics or abilities and that some such groups are therefore naturally superior to others (wikipedia)

... as for sexism

Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the belief that a characteristic inherent in one's sex necessarily adversely affects one's ability, even if that characteristic does not have that effect.

I think you wouldn't disagree?

Maybe you have a lot of "evidences" to back up your claim (but who doesn't?), so you are a very rationnal racist, but a racist nonetheless. There are worse things on earth than being a racist I am sure, but that's one of the criterias on which I judge that discussing with someone is useless.

Posting studies that, once again, make a correlation between factors without establishing a causal factor doesn't help. have a nice day.
some call it racial realism.

Also, so if you believe blacks' darker skin protecting them from sun makes them superior in high UV level situations you are racist?

"Racial realism", interesting. I am sure Hitler did think he was a "racial realist".

As for the color of the skin, of course it is proven that if you have more melanin, your skin is darker, and you have a better protection against the sun. It's a bit different than saying that Africans are less intelligent or more brutal or whatever, which is at most backed up by pseudo scientific datas usually misinterpreted.

Skin color is related to race. So you can say the black race is superior to white race in the UV example, which would constitute an example of racism. Blacks have an intrinsic capability to better withstand such situations. So how is it not racist, how does it not meet the definition of racism?..

Because race is a loosy concept that has nothing to do with skin colour.

"We caution against making the naive leap to a genetic explanation for group differences in complex traits, especially for human behavioral traits such as IQ scores"

"Pure races, in the sense of genetically homogeneous populations, do not exist in the human species today, nor is there any evidence that they have ever existed in the past.-p.714"

source: The ethics of characterizing difference: guiding principles on using racial categories in human genetics

http://genomebiology.com/2008/9/7/404

While biologists sometimes use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is often used in a naive or simplistic way. Among humans, race has no taxonomic significance; all living humans belong to the same hominid subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens. Social conceptions and groupings of races vary over time, involving folk taxonomies that define essential types of individuals based on perceived traits. Scientists consider biological essentialism obsolete, and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits (wikipedia)


If you have black skin, you are better protected against the sun. If you have big ears you also may hear better. Skin colour doesn't make a race, as much as size of the ear doesn't make a race either.

There is one race, which is the human race, and each of us has billion of genes that can be combined in any way possible, including genes that determines our melanin rate and therefore our skin colour.

You want to establish an equivalence between skin colour and intelligence. Don't try to use science in order to back up your racist ideas.


Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 23:03 chocopan wrote:
This is a different thread. Please move your discussion there. Thank you.

Sorry, saw that after posting

So you deny race when it comes to skin color but it exists when it comes to racism. If you deny existance of races, racism cant even exist in the first place, making it a non argument.

Or in another way, its just twisting of definitions, linguistic tricks. The bottom line is, african people have dark skin. Europeans have light skin. So Africans are superior to Europeans in UV tolerance(whether you call them races or not). Yes , its racist but that is reality no matter how you fiddle around with your race definitions.
pedostare
Profile Blog Joined December 2011
United States31 Posts
April 20 2012 15:01 GMT
#93
No, you are a definitely racist. You are once again comparing physical traits with mental traits, and those are two entirely different cans of worms.
Zaqwe
Profile Joined March 2012
591 Posts
April 20 2012 15:04 GMT
#94
+ Show Spoiler +
On April 20 2012 23:06 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 22:52 storkfan wrote:
On April 20 2012 22:45 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 22:40 storkfan wrote:
On April 20 2012 21:31 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 21:18 Zaqwe wrote:
+ Show Spoiler +
On April 20 2012 21:03 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 20:57 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 20:27 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 19:39 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 17:53 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 01:11 qrs wrote:
On April 19 2012 23:00 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:32 Zanno wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:23 Ruscour wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:20 Zanno wrote:
you are aware Scarlett is a dude right

that's not even a rumor

i do not have any bias against transgenders at all but i do not think Scarlett qualifies as a victory towards female recognition in competitive starcraft

Scarlett is female. I am aware she is transgendered. There is absolutely no advantage gained in StarCraft from being male, therefore there is no reason why she couldn't be considered a success for the female SC2 scene.

EDIT: This will be the only reply I make about this issue. Please don't discuss it here, it undermines the point I'm trying to make.

Of course it undermines the point you're trying to make

There's a large body of literature out there that shows that the male brain and female brain develop differently and as a result there are certain problems that males are better equipped to deal with and certain problems that females are better equipped to deal with

Undergoing sex reassignment surgery does not magically undo two decades of the human body's growth as a male and if you are going to ignore this then I don't know what to say


Yeah well, people used to have the same machist idiotic reasoning in chess, and then came Judit Polgar (and her sisters), who has demolished everybody since she is 6, has been one of the greatest prodigy child in history of chess and has been ranked as high as world number 8, having defeated world champions or former world champions Karpov, Anand, Kasparov, Spasky, Smilsov, Topalov, Ponomariov, Khalifman and Razhimdzdhanov.
Yes, then came Judit Polgar, and then came...who? Yifan? Not yet, at any rate.

Without making speculative statements about why males thus far have the competitive edge in chess and in Starcraft, it's hard to deny that currently they do—and one proof of that is that people still feel the need to hold separate female-only events. With regard to chess, Judit Polgar is the exception that proves the rule: yes, she cracked the overall top 10 for a while—and she's the only female ever to come close to doing so. With regard to Starcraft—well, look at how the OP, even as he theorizes that there ought to be no disadvantage to being female, admits that, Scarlett aside, no girl has actually been "good enough to be considered a competitor in her own right".

And as for Scarlett, well, Scarlett is transgendered, and without getting into questions of etiquette, I don't think you can entirely ignore that fact if the discussion is about comparing female gamers to male gamers. Whatever the reason is that males have generally dominated the top of the Starcraft scene, it's certainly the case that they have—and so long as that remains an unexplained fact, I don't see how you can blithely assume that someone born male (and perhaps still biologically male? I don't know), with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that is wholly representative of people born female, with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that. The pronoun you use to refer to Scarlett is one thing; the inferences you draw from Scarlett's success are something else entirely. In my opinion, you won't be able to prove something about the legitimacy of the non-transgender female scene until a non-transgendered female has had a legitimate level of success.

Yeah fine, that's absolutely true, most of the top 100 chess players are males. In fact 99 of them are males since Judit Polgar is the only one to have ever broken into the top 100. Why? It's not science rocket. It's statistic:

Male dominate chess because chess is socially a male activity. The little boy is put to play chess and the little girl is put to dance or whatever. Go in a chessclub and you will see the junior section with basically only little boys. It's even worse in countries that actually produce most of champions: Russia, Azerbadjan, etc... You just won't see a little girl in a chess club because parents don't put them at chess.

The three Polgar sisters are exception because they had an environment that was devoted to make them great chess players. Their father was a grand master and luckily he didn't have any of these silly prejudices. And he designed their education to make them brilliant players. And without surprise, they all became elite players, regardless of their gender.

SC2 is just the same. Boys play Starcraft, Girls play the Sims. That's the way people are being raised, because boys have blue rooms and girls pink rooms, that boys are offered GI Joe and girls Barbie doll, boys are dressed with sport clothes and girl with dresses etc... It has absolutely nothing to do with the intrinseque capacity of each gender, but about stereotypical education that we all get, that generates the kind of sensibility we have, the way we think and what we can do.

Now, about chess, the Polgar family (keep in mind, they were three sisters, they all became grand master, that's a 100% success rate in the family) is enough to shut the mouth of everybody who pretend women can't compete at the highest level. They can, if they are given the environment from their youngest age, which is unfortunately incredibly rare.

There were no women composer until the mid XXth century. NOT ONE except for "wives of": Clara Schumann, Alma Mahler and Fanny Mendelssohn, period. So it was supposed to be a male activity, and women were discourage to compose. You would be told the same crap than we are being served in this thread, you know, about male qualities, the genius, creativity, whatever, backed up with the facts: 100% of male composers and the fallacious argument: there must be a good reason. Surprise, now that most (not all as we can see) of those stereotypes have disappear, we have a good 50% of women in contemporary composers.

Feminism has a long way to go.



One last thing: you can say the exact same thing and that becomes evn more obvious with skin colour. Take Fields medal laureates. Surprise! Everybody is white. That means nothing about racial differences. It just says that when you are white you are a zillion times more likely to have the environment to become a great mathematician. And yet you still have racists using these kinds of datas to prove white men are more clever.

You should watch Hjernevask (Brainwash), a Norwegian science documentary. Particularly episode one, "The Gender Equality Paradox.

What you have said is complete nonsense based on wishful thinking and an emotional desire to see everyone as equal.

Gender differences are observable immediately after birth. Female babies are more socially inclined and prefer to look at human faces, while male newborns are more mechanically inclined and will look at machines longer.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=327138

The example of the Polgar family that you used itself seems to be strong evidence that genetics is the key factor in becoming a chess grandmaster.

On April 20 2012 18:51 chocopan wrote:
I agree with more or less everything Biff just said. Yay.

Everything Biff said is wrong.

Yeah I know people desperately want to justify social order and inequalities with science. That's even a constant in science history.

So let me first tell you that most human science researcher absolutely back up my claims. And don't forget that in the XIXth century, very serious scientists were calculating that the size of the skull of "nigers" was smaller than the one of white people and that was the reason why they were less intelligent and subject to be colonized or put in slavery. Things don't change. Tomorrow we will smile at today's scientists attempts to justify sexist prejudices the same way that now we smile at yesterday's scientists trying to justify racist prejudices.

I am not saying men and women are biologically speaking exactly the same. But to claim that women can't compete with men at something like chess because of genetical disposition is just a fancy way to repeat the most obscene of sexist prejudice: that women are less intelligent. Anyway, explain me a little why they were no women scientist or philosophers until we started to question the dumb prejudices you are defending and as sonn as we did DADA!!! we started to have Marie Curie and other Hannah Arendt? Answer: because when we started to change women education / environment it appeared they were just as smart as men while everybody were certain during six thousand years they were dumb as fuck and unable to think rationally. They were no women scientist because women didn't have the possibility to be a scientist in yesterday's society.

Education and gender issues (gender =/= biological sex) are the reason we behave differently. They are not based on nature, they are a social construction.

One hundred years of research has established that East Asians and Europeans average higher IQs than do Africans. East Asians, measured in North America and in Pacific Rim countries, typically average IQs in the range of 101 to 111. Caucasoid populations in North America, Europe, and Australasia typically average IQs from 85 to 115 with an overall mean of 100. African populations living south of the Sahara, in North America, in the Caribbean, and in Britain typically have mean IQs from 70 to 90.

Discoveries using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which creates a three-dimensional image of the living brain, have shown a strong positive correlation (.44) between brain size and IQ (see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for a review). And there is more. The National Collaborative Perinatal Project on 53,000 children by Sarah Broman and her colleagues, showed that head perimeter at birth significantly predicts head perimeter at 7 years — and head perimeter at seven years predicts IQ. It also shows that Asian children average a larger head perimeter at birth than do White children who average a larger head perimeter than do Black children.

Racial differences in brain size have been established using a variety of modern methods. Using endocranial volume, for example, Beals et al. (1984, p. 307, Table 5) analyzed about 20,000 skulls from around the world. East Asians averaged 1,415 cm3 , Europeans averaged 1,362 cm3, and Africans averaged 1,268 cm3 . Using external head measures to calculate cranial capacities, Rushton (1992) analyzed a stratified random sample of 6,325 U.S. Army personnel measured in 1988 for fitting helmets and found that Asian Americans averaged 1,416 cm3, European Americans 1,380 cm3, and African Americans 1,359 cm3. Finally, a recent MRI study found that people of African and Caribbean background averaged a smaller brain volume than did those of European background (again see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for review).

Well maybe IQ is a fucking dumb measure, sweety. You know you can raise your IQ in two weeks dramatically with appropriate exercizes? For a measure that's supposed to calculate your "intelligence" that's a pretty big flaw.

And even though, you don't think environment is quite a big factor in our intelligence? And that Africans have typically a different environment than the average white guy?

And don't you think that the size of the skull has nothing to do with your intellectual potential, as proven by a zillion studies despite the stuff you throw there that seems to make no difference between correlation and causality? Because see, whales would be quite fucking clever.

You believe africans are less intelligent, and that women can't think rationally. Well, look, you are a racist and a sexist, and I'm off this discussion, because see, I have experienced many times that racists and sexist are unable to think rationally, and not very clever. Bye.

That's not very nice. I consider myself a rational thinker and base my opinions on what evidence is available. I am always prepared to change my opinions if I see new evidence.

And brain/skull size does have something to do with intelligence, as mentioned in my previous post. I am not sure why you ignored that.

It seems you are the irrational one. Your emotional attachment to equality is clouding your judgement, like a fear of death which drives people to faith in heaven.

IQ/g is best single predictor, mental or non-mental.

IQ/g usually predicts major life outcomes better than does any other single predictor in broad samples of individuals. For example, whether IQ predicts strongly (educational performance) or weakly (law-abidingness), it predicts better than does social class background. This does not mean that intelligence is the only important influence on people's life chances or that social conditions are unimportant. Rather, it means that any explanation of social and economic inequalities will need to consider the central role that general intelligence level seems to play.

Gottfredson, L. S. (2006). Social consequences of group differences in cognitive ability (Consequencias sociais das diferencas de grupo em habilidade cognitiva). In C. E. Flores-Mendoza & R. Colom (Eds.), Introducau a psicologia das diferencas individuais (pp. 433-456). Porto Allegre, Brazil: ArtMed Publishers.
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2004socialconsequences.pdf

Survey of opinions on the primacy of g and social consequences of ability testing: A comparison of expert and non-expert views

Though some commentaries give the impression of controversy regarding the importance of cognitive abilities and the validity of ability testing, the results of this survey clearly demonstrate that there are areas of resounding consensus among experts. Our results indicate that there is consensus among experts in the science of mental abilities that g is an important, non-trivial determinant (or at least predictor) of important real world outcomes for which there is no substitute, and that tests of g are valid and generally free from racial bias.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2008.03.007


I'm not trying to be nice or excessively rude.

If you believe that African people are inferior and naturally less intelligent than white people, well, you are a racist, or I don't know what racism is about.

Racism is generally understood as either belief that different racial groups are characterized by intrinsic characteristics or abilities and that some such groups are therefore naturally superior to others (wikipedia)

... as for sexism

Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the belief that a characteristic inherent in one's sex necessarily adversely affects one's ability, even if that characteristic does not have that effect.

I think you wouldn't disagree?

Maybe you have a lot of "evidences" to back up your claim (but who doesn't?), so you are a very rationnal racist, but a racist nonetheless. There are worse things on earth than being a racist I am sure, but that's one of the criterias on which I judge that discussing with someone is useless.

Posting studies that, once again, make a correlation between factors without establishing a causal factor doesn't help. have a nice day.
some call it racial realism.

Also, so if you believe blacks' darker skin protecting them from sun makes them superior in high UV level situations you are racist?

"Racial realism", interesting. I am sure Hitler did think he was a "racial realist".

As for the color of the skin, of course it is proven that if you have more melanin, your skin is darker, and you have a better protection against the sun. It's a bit different than saying that Africans are less intelligent or more brutal or whatever, which is at most backed up by pseudo scientific datas usually misinterpreted.

Skin color is related to race. So you can say the black race is superior to white race in the UV example, which would constitute an example of racism. Blacks have an intrinsic capability to better withstand such situations. So how is it not racist, how does it not meet the definition of racism?..

Because race is a loosy concept that has nothing to do with skin colour.

"We caution against making the naive leap to a genetic explanation for group differences in complex traits, especially for human behavioral traits such as IQ scores"

"Pure races, in the sense of genetically homogeneous populations, do not exist in the human species today, nor is there any evidence that they have ever existed in the past.-p.714"

source: The ethics of characterizing difference: guiding principles on using racial categories in human genetics

http://genomebiology.com/2008/9/7/404

While biologists sometimes use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is often used in a naive or simplistic way. Among humans, race has no taxonomic significance; all living humans belong to the same hominid subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens. Social conceptions and groupings of races vary over time, involving folk taxonomies that define essential types of individuals based on perceived traits. Scientists consider biological essentialism obsolete, and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits (wikipedia)


If you have black skin, you are better protected against the sun. If you have big ears you also may hear better. Skin colour doesn't make a race, as much as size of the ear doesn't make a race either.

There is one race, which is the human race, and each of us has billion of genes that can be combined in any way possible, including genes that determines our melanin rate and therefore our skin colour.

You want to establish an equivalence between skin colour and intelligence. Don't try to use science in order to back up your racist ideas.


Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 23:03 chocopan wrote:
This is a different thread. Please move your discussion there. Thank you.

Sorry, saw that after posting



Q: Which human populations qualify as major races?

The topology of human trees (Figs. 4, 5) is remarkably consistent regardless of which class of loci are considered, and principal component analysis of genetic data also produces predictable clustering (Fig. 6). Either method gives a good visual overview of the general relatedness of the world’s populations.

By analysis of classical markers, Nei & Roychoudhury (1993) identified five major human clades: sub-Saharan Africans, Caucasians, Greater Asians, Australopapuans and Amerindians. Evolutionary trees constructed with autosomal RFLPs,[105] microsatellites[106] and Alu insertions[107] show similar topology. Frequently, Amerindians are grouped together with Asians, indicating four major clades, and it has been suggested that this should be a minimum.[108] Obviously, additional structure exists within each of these groups, but as we’ve seen, it’s generally weak compared to the differentiation among the ones listed here. For this reason alone, the term ‘race’ applies well to these major groupings.

[image loading]

http://www.goodrumj.com/RFaqHTML.html

Racial Groupings Match Genetic Profiles, Stanford Study Finds

Without knowing how the participants had identified themselves, Risch and his team ran the results through a computer program that grouped individuals according to patterns of the 326 signposts. This analysis could have resulted in any number of different clusters, but only four clear groups turned up. And in each case the individuals within those clusters all fell within the same self-identified racial group.

"This shows that people's self-identified race/ethnicity is a nearly perfect indicator of their genetic background," Risch said.

http://med.stanford.edu/news_releases/2005/january/racial-data.htm

Biff The Understudy
Profile Blog Joined February 2008
France8222 Posts
April 20 2012 15:05 GMT
#95
On April 20 2012 23:49 storkfan wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 23:06 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 22:52 storkfan wrote:
On April 20 2012 22:45 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 22:40 storkfan wrote:
On April 20 2012 21:31 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 21:18 Zaqwe wrote:
+ Show Spoiler +
On April 20 2012 21:03 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 20:57 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 20:27 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 19:39 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 17:53 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 01:11 qrs wrote:
On April 19 2012 23:00 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:32 Zanno wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:23 Ruscour wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:20 Zanno wrote:
you are aware Scarlett is a dude right

that's not even a rumor

i do not have any bias against transgenders at all but i do not think Scarlett qualifies as a victory towards female recognition in competitive starcraft

Scarlett is female. I am aware she is transgendered. There is absolutely no advantage gained in StarCraft from being male, therefore there is no reason why she couldn't be considered a success for the female SC2 scene.

EDIT: This will be the only reply I make about this issue. Please don't discuss it here, it undermines the point I'm trying to make.

Of course it undermines the point you're trying to make

There's a large body of literature out there that shows that the male brain and female brain develop differently and as a result there are certain problems that males are better equipped to deal with and certain problems that females are better equipped to deal with

Undergoing sex reassignment surgery does not magically undo two decades of the human body's growth as a male and if you are going to ignore this then I don't know what to say


Yeah well, people used to have the same machist idiotic reasoning in chess, and then came Judit Polgar (and her sisters), who has demolished everybody since she is 6, has been one of the greatest prodigy child in history of chess and has been ranked as high as world number 8, having defeated world champions or former world champions Karpov, Anand, Kasparov, Spasky, Smilsov, Topalov, Ponomariov, Khalifman and Razhimdzdhanov.
Yes, then came Judit Polgar, and then came...who? Yifan? Not yet, at any rate.

Without making speculative statements about why males thus far have the competitive edge in chess and in Starcraft, it's hard to deny that currently they do—and one proof of that is that people still feel the need to hold separate female-only events. With regard to chess, Judit Polgar is the exception that proves the rule: yes, she cracked the overall top 10 for a while—and she's the only female ever to come close to doing so. With regard to Starcraft—well, look at how the OP, even as he theorizes that there ought to be no disadvantage to being female, admits that, Scarlett aside, no girl has actually been "good enough to be considered a competitor in her own right".

And as for Scarlett, well, Scarlett is transgendered, and without getting into questions of etiquette, I don't think you can entirely ignore that fact if the discussion is about comparing female gamers to male gamers. Whatever the reason is that males have generally dominated the top of the Starcraft scene, it's certainly the case that they have—and so long as that remains an unexplained fact, I don't see how you can blithely assume that someone born male (and perhaps still biologically male? I don't know), with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that is wholly representative of people born female, with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that. The pronoun you use to refer to Scarlett is one thing; the inferences you draw from Scarlett's success are something else entirely. In my opinion, you won't be able to prove something about the legitimacy of the non-transgender female scene until a non-transgendered female has had a legitimate level of success.

Yeah fine, that's absolutely true, most of the top 100 chess players are males. In fact 99 of them are males since Judit Polgar is the only one to have ever broken into the top 100. Why? It's not science rocket. It's statistic:

Male dominate chess because chess is socially a male activity. The little boy is put to play chess and the little girl is put to dance or whatever. Go in a chessclub and you will see the junior section with basically only little boys. It's even worse in countries that actually produce most of champions: Russia, Azerbadjan, etc... You just won't see a little girl in a chess club because parents don't put them at chess.

The three Polgar sisters are exception because they had an environment that was devoted to make them great chess players. Their father was a grand master and luckily he didn't have any of these silly prejudices. And he designed their education to make them brilliant players. And without surprise, they all became elite players, regardless of their gender.

SC2 is just the same. Boys play Starcraft, Girls play the Sims. That's the way people are being raised, because boys have blue rooms and girls pink rooms, that boys are offered GI Joe and girls Barbie doll, boys are dressed with sport clothes and girl with dresses etc... It has absolutely nothing to do with the intrinseque capacity of each gender, but about stereotypical education that we all get, that generates the kind of sensibility we have, the way we think and what we can do.

Now, about chess, the Polgar family (keep in mind, they were three sisters, they all became grand master, that's a 100% success rate in the family) is enough to shut the mouth of everybody who pretend women can't compete at the highest level. They can, if they are given the environment from their youngest age, which is unfortunately incredibly rare.

There were no women composer until the mid XXth century. NOT ONE except for "wives of": Clara Schumann, Alma Mahler and Fanny Mendelssohn, period. So it was supposed to be a male activity, and women were discourage to compose. You would be told the same crap than we are being served in this thread, you know, about male qualities, the genius, creativity, whatever, backed up with the facts: 100% of male composers and the fallacious argument: there must be a good reason. Surprise, now that most (not all as we can see) of those stereotypes have disappear, we have a good 50% of women in contemporary composers.

Feminism has a long way to go.



One last thing: you can say the exact same thing and that becomes evn more obvious with skin colour. Take Fields medal laureates. Surprise! Everybody is white. That means nothing about racial differences. It just says that when you are white you are a zillion times more likely to have the environment to become a great mathematician. And yet you still have racists using these kinds of datas to prove white men are more clever.

You should watch Hjernevask (Brainwash), a Norwegian science documentary. Particularly episode one, "The Gender Equality Paradox.

What you have said is complete nonsense based on wishful thinking and an emotional desire to see everyone as equal.

Gender differences are observable immediately after birth. Female babies are more socially inclined and prefer to look at human faces, while male newborns are more mechanically inclined and will look at machines longer.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=327138

The example of the Polgar family that you used itself seems to be strong evidence that genetics is the key factor in becoming a chess grandmaster.

On April 20 2012 18:51 chocopan wrote:
I agree with more or less everything Biff just said. Yay.

Everything Biff said is wrong.

Yeah I know people desperately want to justify social order and inequalities with science. That's even a constant in science history.

So let me first tell you that most human science researcher absolutely back up my claims. And don't forget that in the XIXth century, very serious scientists were calculating that the size of the skull of "nigers" was smaller than the one of white people and that was the reason why they were less intelligent and subject to be colonized or put in slavery. Things don't change. Tomorrow we will smile at today's scientists attempts to justify sexist prejudices the same way that now we smile at yesterday's scientists trying to justify racist prejudices.

I am not saying men and women are biologically speaking exactly the same. But to claim that women can't compete with men at something like chess because of genetical disposition is just a fancy way to repeat the most obscene of sexist prejudice: that women are less intelligent. Anyway, explain me a little why they were no women scientist or philosophers until we started to question the dumb prejudices you are defending and as sonn as we did DADA!!! we started to have Marie Curie and other Hannah Arendt? Answer: because when we started to change women education / environment it appeared they were just as smart as men while everybody were certain during six thousand years they were dumb as fuck and unable to think rationally. They were no women scientist because women didn't have the possibility to be a scientist in yesterday's society.

Education and gender issues (gender =/= biological sex) are the reason we behave differently. They are not based on nature, they are a social construction.

One hundred years of research has established that East Asians and Europeans average higher IQs than do Africans. East Asians, measured in North America and in Pacific Rim countries, typically average IQs in the range of 101 to 111. Caucasoid populations in North America, Europe, and Australasia typically average IQs from 85 to 115 with an overall mean of 100. African populations living south of the Sahara, in North America, in the Caribbean, and in Britain typically have mean IQs from 70 to 90.

Discoveries using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which creates a three-dimensional image of the living brain, have shown a strong positive correlation (.44) between brain size and IQ (see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for a review). And there is more. The National Collaborative Perinatal Project on 53,000 children by Sarah Broman and her colleagues, showed that head perimeter at birth significantly predicts head perimeter at 7 years — and head perimeter at seven years predicts IQ. It also shows that Asian children average a larger head perimeter at birth than do White children who average a larger head perimeter than do Black children.

Racial differences in brain size have been established using a variety of modern methods. Using endocranial volume, for example, Beals et al. (1984, p. 307, Table 5) analyzed about 20,000 skulls from around the world. East Asians averaged 1,415 cm3 , Europeans averaged 1,362 cm3, and Africans averaged 1,268 cm3 . Using external head measures to calculate cranial capacities, Rushton (1992) analyzed a stratified random sample of 6,325 U.S. Army personnel measured in 1988 for fitting helmets and found that Asian Americans averaged 1,416 cm3, European Americans 1,380 cm3, and African Americans 1,359 cm3. Finally, a recent MRI study found that people of African and Caribbean background averaged a smaller brain volume than did those of European background (again see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for review).

Well maybe IQ is a fucking dumb measure, sweety. You know you can raise your IQ in two weeks dramatically with appropriate exercizes? For a measure that's supposed to calculate your "intelligence" that's a pretty big flaw.

And even though, you don't think environment is quite a big factor in our intelligence? And that Africans have typically a different environment than the average white guy?

And don't you think that the size of the skull has nothing to do with your intellectual potential, as proven by a zillion studies despite the stuff you throw there that seems to make no difference between correlation and causality? Because see, whales would be quite fucking clever.

You believe africans are less intelligent, and that women can't think rationally. Well, look, you are a racist and a sexist, and I'm off this discussion, because see, I have experienced many times that racists and sexist are unable to think rationally, and not very clever. Bye.

That's not very nice. I consider myself a rational thinker and base my opinions on what evidence is available. I am always prepared to change my opinions if I see new evidence.

And brain/skull size does have something to do with intelligence, as mentioned in my previous post. I am not sure why you ignored that.

It seems you are the irrational one. Your emotional attachment to equality is clouding your judgement, like a fear of death which drives people to faith in heaven.

IQ/g is best single predictor, mental or non-mental.

IQ/g usually predicts major life outcomes better than does any other single predictor in broad samples of individuals. For example, whether IQ predicts strongly (educational performance) or weakly (law-abidingness), it predicts better than does social class background. This does not mean that intelligence is the only important influence on people's life chances or that social conditions are unimportant. Rather, it means that any explanation of social and economic inequalities will need to consider the central role that general intelligence level seems to play.

Gottfredson, L. S. (2006). Social consequences of group differences in cognitive ability (Consequencias sociais das diferencas de grupo em habilidade cognitiva). In C. E. Flores-Mendoza & R. Colom (Eds.), Introducau a psicologia das diferencas individuais (pp. 433-456). Porto Allegre, Brazil: ArtMed Publishers.
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2004socialconsequences.pdf

Survey of opinions on the primacy of g and social consequences of ability testing: A comparison of expert and non-expert views

Though some commentaries give the impression of controversy regarding the importance of cognitive abilities and the validity of ability testing, the results of this survey clearly demonstrate that there are areas of resounding consensus among experts. Our results indicate that there is consensus among experts in the science of mental abilities that g is an important, non-trivial determinant (or at least predictor) of important real world outcomes for which there is no substitute, and that tests of g are valid and generally free from racial bias.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2008.03.007


I'm not trying to be nice or excessively rude.

If you believe that African people are inferior and naturally less intelligent than white people, well, you are a racist, or I don't know what racism is about.

Racism is generally understood as either belief that different racial groups are characterized by intrinsic characteristics or abilities and that some such groups are therefore naturally superior to others (wikipedia)

... as for sexism

Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the belief that a characteristic inherent in one's sex necessarily adversely affects one's ability, even if that characteristic does not have that effect.

I think you wouldn't disagree?

Maybe you have a lot of "evidences" to back up your claim (but who doesn't?), so you are a very rationnal racist, but a racist nonetheless. There are worse things on earth than being a racist I am sure, but that's one of the criterias on which I judge that discussing with someone is useless.

Posting studies that, once again, make a correlation between factors without establishing a causal factor doesn't help. have a nice day.
some call it racial realism.

Also, so if you believe blacks' darker skin protecting them from sun makes them superior in high UV level situations you are racist?

"Racial realism", interesting. I am sure Hitler did think he was a "racial realist".

As for the color of the skin, of course it is proven that if you have more melanin, your skin is darker, and you have a better protection against the sun. It's a bit different than saying that Africans are less intelligent or more brutal or whatever, which is at most backed up by pseudo scientific datas usually misinterpreted.

Skin color is related to race. So you can say the black race is superior to white race in the UV example, which would constitute an example of racism. Blacks have an intrinsic capability to better withstand such situations. So how is it not racist, how does it not meet the definition of racism?..

Because race is a loosy concept that has nothing to do with skin colour.

"We caution against making the naive leap to a genetic explanation for group differences in complex traits, especially for human behavioral traits such as IQ scores"

"Pure races, in the sense of genetically homogeneous populations, do not exist in the human species today, nor is there any evidence that they have ever existed in the past.-p.714"

source: The ethics of characterizing difference: guiding principles on using racial categories in human genetics

http://genomebiology.com/2008/9/7/404

While biologists sometimes use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is often used in a naive or simplistic way. Among humans, race has no taxonomic significance; all living humans belong to the same hominid subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens. Social conceptions and groupings of races vary over time, involving folk taxonomies that define essential types of individuals based on perceived traits. Scientists consider biological essentialism obsolete, and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits (wikipedia)


If you have black skin, you are better protected against the sun. If you have big ears you also may hear better. Skin colour doesn't make a race, as much as size of the ear doesn't make a race either.

There is one race, which is the human race, and each of us has billion of genes that can be combined in any way possible, including genes that determines our melanin rate and therefore our skin colour.

You want to establish an equivalence between skin colour and intelligence. Don't try to use science in order to back up your racist ideas.


On April 20 2012 23:03 chocopan wrote:
This is a different thread. Please move your discussion there. Thank you.

Sorry, saw that after posting

So you deny race when it comes to skin color but it exists when it comes to racism. If you deny existance of races, racism cant even exist in the first place, making it a non argument.

Or in another way, its just twisting of definitions, linguistic tricks. The bottom line is, african people have dark skin. Europeans have light skin. So Africans are superior to Europeans in UV tolerance(whether you call them races or not). Yes , its racist but that is reality no matter how you fiddle around with your race definitions.

You don't get it, I give up.
The fellow who is out to burn things up is the counterpart of the fool who thinks he can save the world. The world needs neither to be burned up nor to be saved. The world is, we are. Transients, if we buck it; here to stay if we accept it. ~H.Miller
Biff The Understudy
Profile Blog Joined February 2008
France8222 Posts
April 20 2012 15:07 GMT
#96
On April 21 2012 00:04 Zaqwe wrote:
+ Show Spoiler +
On April 20 2012 23:06 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 22:52 storkfan wrote:
On April 20 2012 22:45 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 22:40 storkfan wrote:
On April 20 2012 21:31 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 21:18 Zaqwe wrote:
+ Show Spoiler +
On April 20 2012 21:03 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 20:57 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 20:27 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 19:39 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 17:53 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 01:11 qrs wrote:
On April 19 2012 23:00 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:32 Zanno wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:23 Ruscour wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:20 Zanno wrote:
you are aware Scarlett is a dude right

that's not even a rumor

i do not have any bias against transgenders at all but i do not think Scarlett qualifies as a victory towards female recognition in competitive starcraft

Scarlett is female. I am aware she is transgendered. There is absolutely no advantage gained in StarCraft from being male, therefore there is no reason why she couldn't be considered a success for the female SC2 scene.

EDIT: This will be the only reply I make about this issue. Please don't discuss it here, it undermines the point I'm trying to make.

Of course it undermines the point you're trying to make

There's a large body of literature out there that shows that the male brain and female brain develop differently and as a result there are certain problems that males are better equipped to deal with and certain problems that females are better equipped to deal with

Undergoing sex reassignment surgery does not magically undo two decades of the human body's growth as a male and if you are going to ignore this then I don't know what to say


Yeah well, people used to have the same machist idiotic reasoning in chess, and then came Judit Polgar (and her sisters), who has demolished everybody since she is 6, has been one of the greatest prodigy child in history of chess and has been ranked as high as world number 8, having defeated world champions or former world champions Karpov, Anand, Kasparov, Spasky, Smilsov, Topalov, Ponomariov, Khalifman and Razhimdzdhanov.
Yes, then came Judit Polgar, and then came...who? Yifan? Not yet, at any rate.

Without making speculative statements about why males thus far have the competitive edge in chess and in Starcraft, it's hard to deny that currently they do—and one proof of that is that people still feel the need to hold separate female-only events. With regard to chess, Judit Polgar is the exception that proves the rule: yes, she cracked the overall top 10 for a while—and she's the only female ever to come close to doing so. With regard to Starcraft—well, look at how the OP, even as he theorizes that there ought to be no disadvantage to being female, admits that, Scarlett aside, no girl has actually been "good enough to be considered a competitor in her own right".

And as for Scarlett, well, Scarlett is transgendered, and without getting into questions of etiquette, I don't think you can entirely ignore that fact if the discussion is about comparing female gamers to male gamers. Whatever the reason is that males have generally dominated the top of the Starcraft scene, it's certainly the case that they have—and so long as that remains an unexplained fact, I don't see how you can blithely assume that someone born male (and perhaps still biologically male? I don't know), with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that is wholly representative of people born female, with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that. The pronoun you use to refer to Scarlett is one thing; the inferences you draw from Scarlett's success are something else entirely. In my opinion, you won't be able to prove something about the legitimacy of the non-transgender female scene until a non-transgendered female has had a legitimate level of success.

Yeah fine, that's absolutely true, most of the top 100 chess players are males. In fact 99 of them are males since Judit Polgar is the only one to have ever broken into the top 100. Why? It's not science rocket. It's statistic:

Male dominate chess because chess is socially a male activity. The little boy is put to play chess and the little girl is put to dance or whatever. Go in a chessclub and you will see the junior section with basically only little boys. It's even worse in countries that actually produce most of champions: Russia, Azerbadjan, etc... You just won't see a little girl in a chess club because parents don't put them at chess.

The three Polgar sisters are exception because they had an environment that was devoted to make them great chess players. Their father was a grand master and luckily he didn't have any of these silly prejudices. And he designed their education to make them brilliant players. And without surprise, they all became elite players, regardless of their gender.

SC2 is just the same. Boys play Starcraft, Girls play the Sims. That's the way people are being raised, because boys have blue rooms and girls pink rooms, that boys are offered GI Joe and girls Barbie doll, boys are dressed with sport clothes and girl with dresses etc... It has absolutely nothing to do with the intrinseque capacity of each gender, but about stereotypical education that we all get, that generates the kind of sensibility we have, the way we think and what we can do.

Now, about chess, the Polgar family (keep in mind, they were three sisters, they all became grand master, that's a 100% success rate in the family) is enough to shut the mouth of everybody who pretend women can't compete at the highest level. They can, if they are given the environment from their youngest age, which is unfortunately incredibly rare.

There were no women composer until the mid XXth century. NOT ONE except for "wives of": Clara Schumann, Alma Mahler and Fanny Mendelssohn, period. So it was supposed to be a male activity, and women were discourage to compose. You would be told the same crap than we are being served in this thread, you know, about male qualities, the genius, creativity, whatever, backed up with the facts: 100% of male composers and the fallacious argument: there must be a good reason. Surprise, now that most (not all as we can see) of those stereotypes have disappear, we have a good 50% of women in contemporary composers.

Feminism has a long way to go.



One last thing: you can say the exact same thing and that becomes evn more obvious with skin colour. Take Fields medal laureates. Surprise! Everybody is white. That means nothing about racial differences. It just says that when you are white you are a zillion times more likely to have the environment to become a great mathematician. And yet you still have racists using these kinds of datas to prove white men are more clever.

You should watch Hjernevask (Brainwash), a Norwegian science documentary. Particularly episode one, "The Gender Equality Paradox.

What you have said is complete nonsense based on wishful thinking and an emotional desire to see everyone as equal.

Gender differences are observable immediately after birth. Female babies are more socially inclined and prefer to look at human faces, while male newborns are more mechanically inclined and will look at machines longer.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=327138

The example of the Polgar family that you used itself seems to be strong evidence that genetics is the key factor in becoming a chess grandmaster.

On April 20 2012 18:51 chocopan wrote:
I agree with more or less everything Biff just said. Yay.

Everything Biff said is wrong.

Yeah I know people desperately want to justify social order and inequalities with science. That's even a constant in science history.

So let me first tell you that most human science researcher absolutely back up my claims. And don't forget that in the XIXth century, very serious scientists were calculating that the size of the skull of "nigers" was smaller than the one of white people and that was the reason why they were less intelligent and subject to be colonized or put in slavery. Things don't change. Tomorrow we will smile at today's scientists attempts to justify sexist prejudices the same way that now we smile at yesterday's scientists trying to justify racist prejudices.

I am not saying men and women are biologically speaking exactly the same. But to claim that women can't compete with men at something like chess because of genetical disposition is just a fancy way to repeat the most obscene of sexist prejudice: that women are less intelligent. Anyway, explain me a little why they were no women scientist or philosophers until we started to question the dumb prejudices you are defending and as sonn as we did DADA!!! we started to have Marie Curie and other Hannah Arendt? Answer: because when we started to change women education / environment it appeared they were just as smart as men while everybody were certain during six thousand years they were dumb as fuck and unable to think rationally. They were no women scientist because women didn't have the possibility to be a scientist in yesterday's society.

Education and gender issues (gender =/= biological sex) are the reason we behave differently. They are not based on nature, they are a social construction.

One hundred years of research has established that East Asians and Europeans average higher IQs than do Africans. East Asians, measured in North America and in Pacific Rim countries, typically average IQs in the range of 101 to 111. Caucasoid populations in North America, Europe, and Australasia typically average IQs from 85 to 115 with an overall mean of 100. African populations living south of the Sahara, in North America, in the Caribbean, and in Britain typically have mean IQs from 70 to 90.

Discoveries using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which creates a three-dimensional image of the living brain, have shown a strong positive correlation (.44) between brain size and IQ (see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for a review). And there is more. The National Collaborative Perinatal Project on 53,000 children by Sarah Broman and her colleagues, showed that head perimeter at birth significantly predicts head perimeter at 7 years — and head perimeter at seven years predicts IQ. It also shows that Asian children average a larger head perimeter at birth than do White children who average a larger head perimeter than do Black children.

Racial differences in brain size have been established using a variety of modern methods. Using endocranial volume, for example, Beals et al. (1984, p. 307, Table 5) analyzed about 20,000 skulls from around the world. East Asians averaged 1,415 cm3 , Europeans averaged 1,362 cm3, and Africans averaged 1,268 cm3 . Using external head measures to calculate cranial capacities, Rushton (1992) analyzed a stratified random sample of 6,325 U.S. Army personnel measured in 1988 for fitting helmets and found that Asian Americans averaged 1,416 cm3, European Americans 1,380 cm3, and African Americans 1,359 cm3. Finally, a recent MRI study found that people of African and Caribbean background averaged a smaller brain volume than did those of European background (again see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for review).

Well maybe IQ is a fucking dumb measure, sweety. You know you can raise your IQ in two weeks dramatically with appropriate exercizes? For a measure that's supposed to calculate your "intelligence" that's a pretty big flaw.

And even though, you don't think environment is quite a big factor in our intelligence? And that Africans have typically a different environment than the average white guy?

And don't you think that the size of the skull has nothing to do with your intellectual potential, as proven by a zillion studies despite the stuff you throw there that seems to make no difference between correlation and causality? Because see, whales would be quite fucking clever.

You believe africans are less intelligent, and that women can't think rationally. Well, look, you are a racist and a sexist, and I'm off this discussion, because see, I have experienced many times that racists and sexist are unable to think rationally, and not very clever. Bye.

That's not very nice. I consider myself a rational thinker and base my opinions on what evidence is available. I am always prepared to change my opinions if I see new evidence.

And brain/skull size does have something to do with intelligence, as mentioned in my previous post. I am not sure why you ignored that.

It seems you are the irrational one. Your emotional attachment to equality is clouding your judgement, like a fear of death which drives people to faith in heaven.

IQ/g is best single predictor, mental or non-mental.

IQ/g usually predicts major life outcomes better than does any other single predictor in broad samples of individuals. For example, whether IQ predicts strongly (educational performance) or weakly (law-abidingness), it predicts better than does social class background. This does not mean that intelligence is the only important influence on people's life chances or that social conditions are unimportant. Rather, it means that any explanation of social and economic inequalities will need to consider the central role that general intelligence level seems to play.

Gottfredson, L. S. (2006). Social consequences of group differences in cognitive ability (Consequencias sociais das diferencas de grupo em habilidade cognitiva). In C. E. Flores-Mendoza & R. Colom (Eds.), Introducau a psicologia das diferencas individuais (pp. 433-456). Porto Allegre, Brazil: ArtMed Publishers.
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2004socialconsequences.pdf

Survey of opinions on the primacy of g and social consequences of ability testing: A comparison of expert and non-expert views

Though some commentaries give the impression of controversy regarding the importance of cognitive abilities and the validity of ability testing, the results of this survey clearly demonstrate that there are areas of resounding consensus among experts. Our results indicate that there is consensus among experts in the science of mental abilities that g is an important, non-trivial determinant (or at least predictor) of important real world outcomes for which there is no substitute, and that tests of g are valid and generally free from racial bias.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2008.03.007


I'm not trying to be nice or excessively rude.

If you believe that African people are inferior and naturally less intelligent than white people, well, you are a racist, or I don't know what racism is about.

Racism is generally understood as either belief that different racial groups are characterized by intrinsic characteristics or abilities and that some such groups are therefore naturally superior to others (wikipedia)

... as for sexism

Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the belief that a characteristic inherent in one's sex necessarily adversely affects one's ability, even if that characteristic does not have that effect.

I think you wouldn't disagree?

Maybe you have a lot of "evidences" to back up your claim (but who doesn't?), so you are a very rationnal racist, but a racist nonetheless. There are worse things on earth than being a racist I am sure, but that's one of the criterias on which I judge that discussing with someone is useless.

Posting studies that, once again, make a correlation between factors without establishing a causal factor doesn't help. have a nice day.
some call it racial realism.

Also, so if you believe blacks' darker skin protecting them from sun makes them superior in high UV level situations you are racist?

"Racial realism", interesting. I am sure Hitler did think he was a "racial realist".

As for the color of the skin, of course it is proven that if you have more melanin, your skin is darker, and you have a better protection against the sun. It's a bit different than saying that Africans are less intelligent or more brutal or whatever, which is at most backed up by pseudo scientific datas usually misinterpreted.

Skin color is related to race. So you can say the black race is superior to white race in the UV example, which would constitute an example of racism. Blacks have an intrinsic capability to better withstand such situations. So how is it not racist, how does it not meet the definition of racism?..

Because race is a loosy concept that has nothing to do with skin colour.

"We caution against making the naive leap to a genetic explanation for group differences in complex traits, especially for human behavioral traits such as IQ scores"

"Pure races, in the sense of genetically homogeneous populations, do not exist in the human species today, nor is there any evidence that they have ever existed in the past.-p.714"

source: The ethics of characterizing difference: guiding principles on using racial categories in human genetics

http://genomebiology.com/2008/9/7/404

While biologists sometimes use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is often used in a naive or simplistic way. Among humans, race has no taxonomic significance; all living humans belong to the same hominid subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens. Social conceptions and groupings of races vary over time, involving folk taxonomies that define essential types of individuals based on perceived traits. Scientists consider biological essentialism obsolete, and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits (wikipedia)


If you have black skin, you are better protected against the sun. If you have big ears you also may hear better. Skin colour doesn't make a race, as much as size of the ear doesn't make a race either.

There is one race, which is the human race, and each of us has billion of genes that can be combined in any way possible, including genes that determines our melanin rate and therefore our skin colour.

You want to establish an equivalence between skin colour and intelligence. Don't try to use science in order to back up your racist ideas.


Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 23:03 chocopan wrote:
This is a different thread. Please move your discussion there. Thank you.

Sorry, saw that after posting



Show nested quote +
Q: Which human populations qualify as major races?

The topology of human trees (Figs. 4, 5) is remarkably consistent regardless of which class of loci are considered, and principal component analysis of genetic data also produces predictable clustering (Fig. 6). Either method gives a good visual overview of the general relatedness of the world’s populations.

By analysis of classical markers, Nei & Roychoudhury (1993) identified five major human clades: sub-Saharan Africans, Caucasians, Greater Asians, Australopapuans and Amerindians. Evolutionary trees constructed with autosomal RFLPs,[105] microsatellites[106] and Alu insertions[107] show similar topology. Frequently, Amerindians are grouped together with Asians, indicating four major clades, and it has been suggested that this should be a minimum.[108] Obviously, additional structure exists within each of these groups, but as we’ve seen, it’s generally weak compared to the differentiation among the ones listed here. For this reason alone, the term ‘race’ applies well to these major groupings.

[image loading]

http://www.goodrumj.com/RFaqHTML.html

Show nested quote +
Racial Groupings Match Genetic Profiles, Stanford Study Finds

Without knowing how the participants had identified themselves, Risch and his team ran the results through a computer program that grouped individuals according to patterns of the 326 signposts. This analysis could have resulted in any number of different clusters, but only four clear groups turned up. And in each case the individuals within those clusters all fell within the same self-identified racial group.

"This shows that people's self-identified race/ethnicity is a nearly perfect indicator of their genetic background," Risch said.

http://med.stanford.edu/news_releases/2005/january/racial-data.htm


Shit I am from 6 different races. I wonder what IQ I am supposed to have. Hahaha

While biologists sometimes use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is often used in a naive or simplistic way.

Already quoted but I guess you didn't read.
The fellow who is out to burn things up is the counterpart of the fool who thinks he can save the world. The world needs neither to be burned up nor to be saved. The world is, we are. Transients, if we buck it; here to stay if we accept it. ~H.Miller
storkfan
Profile Joined March 2012
493 Posts
April 20 2012 15:17 GMT
#97
On April 20 2012 23:06 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 22:52 storkfan wrote:
On April 20 2012 22:45 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 22:40 storkfan wrote:
On April 20 2012 21:31 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 21:18 Zaqwe wrote:
+ Show Spoiler +
On April 20 2012 21:03 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 20:57 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 20:27 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 19:39 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 17:53 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 01:11 qrs wrote:
On April 19 2012 23:00 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:32 Zanno wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:23 Ruscour wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:20 Zanno wrote:
you are aware Scarlett is a dude right

that's not even a rumor

i do not have any bias against transgenders at all but i do not think Scarlett qualifies as a victory towards female recognition in competitive starcraft

Scarlett is female. I am aware she is transgendered. There is absolutely no advantage gained in StarCraft from being male, therefore there is no reason why she couldn't be considered a success for the female SC2 scene.

EDIT: This will be the only reply I make about this issue. Please don't discuss it here, it undermines the point I'm trying to make.

Of course it undermines the point you're trying to make

There's a large body of literature out there that shows that the male brain and female brain develop differently and as a result there are certain problems that males are better equipped to deal with and certain problems that females are better equipped to deal with

Undergoing sex reassignment surgery does not magically undo two decades of the human body's growth as a male and if you are going to ignore this then I don't know what to say


Yeah well, people used to have the same machist idiotic reasoning in chess, and then came Judit Polgar (and her sisters), who has demolished everybody since she is 6, has been one of the greatest prodigy child in history of chess and has been ranked as high as world number 8, having defeated world champions or former world champions Karpov, Anand, Kasparov, Spasky, Smilsov, Topalov, Ponomariov, Khalifman and Razhimdzdhanov.
Yes, then came Judit Polgar, and then came...who? Yifan? Not yet, at any rate.

Without making speculative statements about why males thus far have the competitive edge in chess and in Starcraft, it's hard to deny that currently they do—and one proof of that is that people still feel the need to hold separate female-only events. With regard to chess, Judit Polgar is the exception that proves the rule: yes, she cracked the overall top 10 for a while—and she's the only female ever to come close to doing so. With regard to Starcraft—well, look at how the OP, even as he theorizes that there ought to be no disadvantage to being female, admits that, Scarlett aside, no girl has actually been "good enough to be considered a competitor in her own right".

And as for Scarlett, well, Scarlett is transgendered, and without getting into questions of etiquette, I don't think you can entirely ignore that fact if the discussion is about comparing female gamers to male gamers. Whatever the reason is that males have generally dominated the top of the Starcraft scene, it's certainly the case that they have—and so long as that remains an unexplained fact, I don't see how you can blithely assume that someone born male (and perhaps still biologically male? I don't know), with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that is wholly representative of people born female, with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that. The pronoun you use to refer to Scarlett is one thing; the inferences you draw from Scarlett's success are something else entirely. In my opinion, you won't be able to prove something about the legitimacy of the non-transgender female scene until a non-transgendered female has had a legitimate level of success.

Yeah fine, that's absolutely true, most of the top 100 chess players are males. In fact 99 of them are males since Judit Polgar is the only one to have ever broken into the top 100. Why? It's not science rocket. It's statistic:

Male dominate chess because chess is socially a male activity. The little boy is put to play chess and the little girl is put to dance or whatever. Go in a chessclub and you will see the junior section with basically only little boys. It's even worse in countries that actually produce most of champions: Russia, Azerbadjan, etc... You just won't see a little girl in a chess club because parents don't put them at chess.

The three Polgar sisters are exception because they had an environment that was devoted to make them great chess players. Their father was a grand master and luckily he didn't have any of these silly prejudices. And he designed their education to make them brilliant players. And without surprise, they all became elite players, regardless of their gender.

SC2 is just the same. Boys play Starcraft, Girls play the Sims. That's the way people are being raised, because boys have blue rooms and girls pink rooms, that boys are offered GI Joe and girls Barbie doll, boys are dressed with sport clothes and girl with dresses etc... It has absolutely nothing to do with the intrinseque capacity of each gender, but about stereotypical education that we all get, that generates the kind of sensibility we have, the way we think and what we can do.

Now, about chess, the Polgar family (keep in mind, they were three sisters, they all became grand master, that's a 100% success rate in the family) is enough to shut the mouth of everybody who pretend women can't compete at the highest level. They can, if they are given the environment from their youngest age, which is unfortunately incredibly rare.

There were no women composer until the mid XXth century. NOT ONE except for "wives of": Clara Schumann, Alma Mahler and Fanny Mendelssohn, period. So it was supposed to be a male activity, and women were discourage to compose. You would be told the same crap than we are being served in this thread, you know, about male qualities, the genius, creativity, whatever, backed up with the facts: 100% of male composers and the fallacious argument: there must be a good reason. Surprise, now that most (not all as we can see) of those stereotypes have disappear, we have a good 50% of women in contemporary composers.

Feminism has a long way to go.



One last thing: you can say the exact same thing and that becomes evn more obvious with skin colour. Take Fields medal laureates. Surprise! Everybody is white. That means nothing about racial differences. It just says that when you are white you are a zillion times more likely to have the environment to become a great mathematician. And yet you still have racists using these kinds of datas to prove white men are more clever.

You should watch Hjernevask (Brainwash), a Norwegian science documentary. Particularly episode one, "The Gender Equality Paradox.

What you have said is complete nonsense based on wishful thinking and an emotional desire to see everyone as equal.

Gender differences are observable immediately after birth. Female babies are more socially inclined and prefer to look at human faces, while male newborns are more mechanically inclined and will look at machines longer.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=327138

The example of the Polgar family that you used itself seems to be strong evidence that genetics is the key factor in becoming a chess grandmaster.

On April 20 2012 18:51 chocopan wrote:
I agree with more or less everything Biff just said. Yay.

Everything Biff said is wrong.

Yeah I know people desperately want to justify social order and inequalities with science. That's even a constant in science history.

So let me first tell you that most human science researcher absolutely back up my claims. And don't forget that in the XIXth century, very serious scientists were calculating that the size of the skull of "nigers" was smaller than the one of white people and that was the reason why they were less intelligent and subject to be colonized or put in slavery. Things don't change. Tomorrow we will smile at today's scientists attempts to justify sexist prejudices the same way that now we smile at yesterday's scientists trying to justify racist prejudices.

I am not saying men and women are biologically speaking exactly the same. But to claim that women can't compete with men at something like chess because of genetical disposition is just a fancy way to repeat the most obscene of sexist prejudice: that women are less intelligent. Anyway, explain me a little why they were no women scientist or philosophers until we started to question the dumb prejudices you are defending and as sonn as we did DADA!!! we started to have Marie Curie and other Hannah Arendt? Answer: because when we started to change women education / environment it appeared they were just as smart as men while everybody were certain during six thousand years they were dumb as fuck and unable to think rationally. They were no women scientist because women didn't have the possibility to be a scientist in yesterday's society.

Education and gender issues (gender =/= biological sex) are the reason we behave differently. They are not based on nature, they are a social construction.

One hundred years of research has established that East Asians and Europeans average higher IQs than do Africans. East Asians, measured in North America and in Pacific Rim countries, typically average IQs in the range of 101 to 111. Caucasoid populations in North America, Europe, and Australasia typically average IQs from 85 to 115 with an overall mean of 100. African populations living south of the Sahara, in North America, in the Caribbean, and in Britain typically have mean IQs from 70 to 90.

Discoveries using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which creates a three-dimensional image of the living brain, have shown a strong positive correlation (.44) between brain size and IQ (see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for a review). And there is more. The National Collaborative Perinatal Project on 53,000 children by Sarah Broman and her colleagues, showed that head perimeter at birth significantly predicts head perimeter at 7 years — and head perimeter at seven years predicts IQ. It also shows that Asian children average a larger head perimeter at birth than do White children who average a larger head perimeter than do Black children.

Racial differences in brain size have been established using a variety of modern methods. Using endocranial volume, for example, Beals et al. (1984, p. 307, Table 5) analyzed about 20,000 skulls from around the world. East Asians averaged 1,415 cm3 , Europeans averaged 1,362 cm3, and Africans averaged 1,268 cm3 . Using external head measures to calculate cranial capacities, Rushton (1992) analyzed a stratified random sample of 6,325 U.S. Army personnel measured in 1988 for fitting helmets and found that Asian Americans averaged 1,416 cm3, European Americans 1,380 cm3, and African Americans 1,359 cm3. Finally, a recent MRI study found that people of African and Caribbean background averaged a smaller brain volume than did those of European background (again see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for review).

Well maybe IQ is a fucking dumb measure, sweety. You know you can raise your IQ in two weeks dramatically with appropriate exercizes? For a measure that's supposed to calculate your "intelligence" that's a pretty big flaw.

And even though, you don't think environment is quite a big factor in our intelligence? And that Africans have typically a different environment than the average white guy?

And don't you think that the size of the skull has nothing to do with your intellectual potential, as proven by a zillion studies despite the stuff you throw there that seems to make no difference between correlation and causality? Because see, whales would be quite fucking clever.

You believe africans are less intelligent, and that women can't think rationally. Well, look, you are a racist and a sexist, and I'm off this discussion, because see, I have experienced many times that racists and sexist are unable to think rationally, and not very clever. Bye.

That's not very nice. I consider myself a rational thinker and base my opinions on what evidence is available. I am always prepared to change my opinions if I see new evidence.

And brain/skull size does have something to do with intelligence, as mentioned in my previous post. I am not sure why you ignored that.

It seems you are the irrational one. Your emotional attachment to equality is clouding your judgement, like a fear of death which drives people to faith in heaven.

IQ/g is best single predictor, mental or non-mental.

IQ/g usually predicts major life outcomes better than does any other single predictor in broad samples of individuals. For example, whether IQ predicts strongly (educational performance) or weakly (law-abidingness), it predicts better than does social class background. This does not mean that intelligence is the only important influence on people's life chances or that social conditions are unimportant. Rather, it means that any explanation of social and economic inequalities will need to consider the central role that general intelligence level seems to play.

Gottfredson, L. S. (2006). Social consequences of group differences in cognitive ability (Consequencias sociais das diferencas de grupo em habilidade cognitiva). In C. E. Flores-Mendoza & R. Colom (Eds.), Introducau a psicologia das diferencas individuais (pp. 433-456). Porto Allegre, Brazil: ArtMed Publishers.
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2004socialconsequences.pdf

Survey of opinions on the primacy of g and social consequences of ability testing: A comparison of expert and non-expert views

Though some commentaries give the impression of controversy regarding the importance of cognitive abilities and the validity of ability testing, the results of this survey clearly demonstrate that there are areas of resounding consensus among experts. Our results indicate that there is consensus among experts in the science of mental abilities that g is an important, non-trivial determinant (or at least predictor) of important real world outcomes for which there is no substitute, and that tests of g are valid and generally free from racial bias.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2008.03.007


I'm not trying to be nice or excessively rude.

If you believe that African people are inferior and naturally less intelligent than white people, well, you are a racist, or I don't know what racism is about.

Racism is generally understood as either belief that different racial groups are characterized by intrinsic characteristics or abilities and that some such groups are therefore naturally superior to others (wikipedia)

... as for sexism

Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the belief that a characteristic inherent in one's sex necessarily adversely affects one's ability, even if that characteristic does not have that effect.

I think you wouldn't disagree?

Maybe you have a lot of "evidences" to back up your claim (but who doesn't?), so you are a very rationnal racist, but a racist nonetheless. There are worse things on earth than being a racist I am sure, but that's one of the criterias on which I judge that discussing with someone is useless.

Posting studies that, once again, make a correlation between factors without establishing a causal factor doesn't help. have a nice day.
some call it racial realism.

Also, so if you believe blacks' darker skin protecting them from sun makes them superior in high UV level situations you are racist?

"Racial realism", interesting. I am sure Hitler did think he was a "racial realist".

As for the color of the skin, of course it is proven that if you have more melanin, your skin is darker, and you have a better protection against the sun. It's a bit different than saying that Africans are less intelligent or more brutal or whatever, which is at most backed up by pseudo scientific datas usually misinterpreted.

Skin color is related to race. So you can say the black race is superior to white race in the UV example, which would constitute an example of racism. Blacks have an intrinsic capability to better withstand such situations. So how is it not racist, how does it not meet the definition of racism?..

Because race is a loosy concept that has nothing to do with skin colour.

"We caution against making the naive leap to a genetic explanation for group differences in complex traits, especially for human behavioral traits such as IQ scores"

"Pure races, in the sense of genetically homogeneous populations, do not exist in the human species today, nor is there any evidence that they have ever existed in the past.-p.714"

source: The ethics of characterizing difference: guiding principles on using racial categories in human genetics

http://genomebiology.com/2008/9/7/404

While biologists sometimes use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is often used in a naive or simplistic way. Among humans, race has no taxonomic significance; all living humans belong to the same hominid subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens. Social conceptions and groupings of races vary over time, involving folk taxonomies that define essential types of individuals based on perceived traits. Scientists consider biological essentialism obsolete, and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits (wikipedia)


If you have black skin, you are better protected against the sun. If you have big ears you also may hear better. Skin colour doesn't make a race, as much as size of the ear doesn't make a race either.


There is one race, which is the human race, and each of us has billion of genes that can be combined in any way possible, including genes that determines our melanin rate and therefore our skin colour.

You want to establish an equivalence between skin colour and intelligence. Don't try to use science in order to back up your racist ideas.


Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 23:03 chocopan wrote:
This is a different thread. Please move your discussion there. Thank you.

Sorry, saw that after posting

Here you claim that i am using inductive reasoning, aka dark skin -> african race. Im not doing this. My argument is PURELY deductive, no induction used.

It is african race -> dark skin; european race -> light skin; dark skin superior to white skin -> african race superior to european race

Again, replace "race" for ethnicity or native or whatever you prefer if you dont like it, it doesnt change the validity of the argument.
qrs
Profile Blog Joined December 2007
United States3637 Posts
April 20 2012 16:16 GMT
#98
On April 20 2012 17:53 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 01:11 qrs wrote:
On April 19 2012 23:00 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:32 Zanno wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:23 Ruscour wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:20 Zanno wrote:
you are aware Scarlett is a dude right

that's not even a rumor

i do not have any bias against transgenders at all but i do not think Scarlett qualifies as a victory towards female recognition in competitive starcraft

Scarlett is female. I am aware she is transgendered. There is absolutely no advantage gained in StarCraft from being male, therefore there is no reason why she couldn't be considered a success for the female SC2 scene.

EDIT: This will be the only reply I make about this issue. Please don't discuss it here, it undermines the point I'm trying to make.

Of course it undermines the point you're trying to make

There's a large body of literature out there that shows that the male brain and female brain develop differently and as a result there are certain problems that males are better equipped to deal with and certain problems that females are better equipped to deal with

Undergoing sex reassignment surgery does not magically undo two decades of the human body's growth as a male and if you are going to ignore this then I don't know what to say


Yeah well, people used to have the same machist idiotic reasoning in chess, and then came Judit Polgar (and her sisters), who has demolished everybody since she is 6, has been one of the greatest prodigy child in history of chess and has been ranked as high as world number 8, having defeated world champions or former world champions Karpov, Anand, Kasparov, Spasky, Smilsov, Topalov, Ponomariov, Khalifman and Razhimdzdhanov.
Yes, then came Judit Polgar, and then came...who? Yifan? Not yet, at any rate.

Without making speculative statements about why males thus far have the competitive edge in chess and in Starcraft, it's hard to deny that currently they do—and one proof of that is that people still feel the need to hold separate female-only events. With regard to chess, Judit Polgar is the exception that proves the rule: yes, she cracked the overall top 10 for a while—and she's the only female ever to come close to doing so. With regard to Starcraft—well, look at how the OP, even as he theorizes that there ought to be no disadvantage to being female, admits that, Scarlett aside, no girl has actually been "good enough to be considered a competitor in her own right".

And as for Scarlett, well, Scarlett is transgendered, and without getting into questions of etiquette, I don't think you can entirely ignore that fact if the discussion is about comparing female gamers to male gamers. Whatever the reason is that males have generally dominated the top of the Starcraft scene, it's certainly the case that they have—and so long as that remains an unexplained fact, I don't see how you can blithely assume that someone born male (and perhaps still biologically male? I don't know), with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that is wholly representative of people born female, with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that. The pronoun you use to refer to Scarlett is one thing; the inferences you draw from Scarlett's success are something else entirely. In my opinion, you won't be able to prove something about the legitimacy of the non-transgender female scene until a non-transgendered female has had a legitimate level of success.

Yeah fine, that's absolutely true, most of the top 100 chess players are males. In fact 99 of them are males since Judit Polgar is the only one to have ever broken into the top 100. Why? It's not science rocket. It's statistic:

Male dominate chess because chess is socially a male activity. The little boy is put to play chess and the little girl is put to dance or whatever. Go in a chessclub and you will see the junior section with basically only little boys. It's even worse in countries that actually produce most of champions: Russia, Azerbadjan, etc... You just won't see a little girl in a chess club because parents don't put them at chess.

The three Polgar sisters are exception because they had an environment that was devoted to make them great chess players. Their father was a grand master and luckily he didn't have any of these silly prejudices. And he designed their education to make them brilliant players. And without surprise, they all became elite players, regardless of their gender.

SC2 is just the same. Boys play Starcraft, Girls play the Sims. That's the way people are being raised, because boys have blue rooms and girls pink rooms, that boys are offered GI Joe and girls Barbie doll, boys are dressed with sport clothes and girl with dresses etc... It has absolutely nothing to do with the intrinseque capacity of each gender, but about stereotypical education that we all get, that generates the kind of sensibility we have, the way we think and what we can do.

Now, about chess, the Polgar family (keep in mind, they were three sisters, they all became grand master, that's a 100% success rate in the family) is enough to shut the mouth of everybody who pretend women can't compete at the highest level. They can, if they are given the environment from their youngest age, which is unfortunately incredibly rare.

There were no women composer until the mid XXth century. NOT ONE except for "wives of": Clara Schumann, Alma Mahler and Fanny Mendelssohn, period. So it was supposed to be a male activity, and women were discourage to compose. You would be told the same crap than we are being served in this thread, you know, about male qualities, the genius, creativity, whatever, backed up with the facts: 100% of male composers and the fallacious argument: there must be a good reason. Surprise, now that most (not all as we can see) of those stereotypes have disappear, we have a good 50% of women in contemporary composers.

Feminism has a long way to go.

One last thing: you can say the exact same thing and that becomes evn more obvious with skin colour. Take Fields medal laureates. Surprise! Everybody is white. That means nothing about racial differences. It just says that when you are white you are a zillion times more likely to have the environment to become a great mathematician. And yet you still have racists using these kinds of datas to prove white men are more clever.
You make fair points, Biff, but I think that the inferences you're making are quite speculative. The Polgar sisters were a very intriguing experiment, but does it prove that the huge gap between women and men among top chess players is entirely due to culture? I'm not convinced. It's true that it's incredibly rare for a woman to be given an environment like the Polgars' from their youngest age, but isn't it equally rare for men? (Laszlo Polgar wanted to adopt three boys and repeat his experiment with them, you know, but it never happened.)

At any rate, I'm not trying to assert anything about why men currently dominate the upper levels of chess and of Starcraft. You'll notice that my post that you responded to mentioned "biological and cultural things". In my opinion, all we can definitely say is that the difference exists. When I see someone say, "This is the reason for the difference", I mentally translate that into, "This is what I want to be the reason for the difference." It's hard to prove these statements one way or the other.
'As per the American Heart Association, the beat of the Bee Gees song "Stayin' Alive" provides an ideal rhythm in terms of beats per minute to use for hands-only CPR. One can also hum Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust".' —Wikipedia
khaydarin9
Profile Blog Joined July 2009
Australia423 Posts
April 20 2012 16:18 GMT
#99
On April 21 2012 00:17 storkfan wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 23:06 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 22:52 storkfan wrote:
On April 20 2012 22:45 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 22:40 storkfan wrote:
On April 20 2012 21:31 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 21:18 Zaqwe wrote:
+ Show Spoiler +
On April 20 2012 21:03 Biff The Understudy wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 20:57 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 20:27 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 19:39 Zaqwe wrote:
On April 20 2012 17:53 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 01:11 qrs wrote:
On April 19 2012 23:00 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:32 Zanno wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:23 Ruscour wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:20 Zanno wrote:
you are aware Scarlett is a dude right

that's not even a rumor

i do not have any bias against transgenders at all but i do not think Scarlett qualifies as a victory towards female recognition in competitive starcraft

Scarlett is female. I am aware she is transgendered. There is absolutely no advantage gained in StarCraft from being male, therefore there is no reason why she couldn't be considered a success for the female SC2 scene.

EDIT: This will be the only reply I make about this issue. Please don't discuss it here, it undermines the point I'm trying to make.

Of course it undermines the point you're trying to make

There's a large body of literature out there that shows that the male brain and female brain develop differently and as a result there are certain problems that males are better equipped to deal with and certain problems that females are better equipped to deal with

Undergoing sex reassignment surgery does not magically undo two decades of the human body's growth as a male and if you are going to ignore this then I don't know what to say


Yeah well, people used to have the same machist idiotic reasoning in chess, and then came Judit Polgar (and her sisters), who has demolished everybody since she is 6, has been one of the greatest prodigy child in history of chess and has been ranked as high as world number 8, having defeated world champions or former world champions Karpov, Anand, Kasparov, Spasky, Smilsov, Topalov, Ponomariov, Khalifman and Razhimdzdhanov.
Yes, then came Judit Polgar, and then came...who? Yifan? Not yet, at any rate.

Without making speculative statements about why males thus far have the competitive edge in chess and in Starcraft, it's hard to deny that currently they do—and one proof of that is that people still feel the need to hold separate female-only events. With regard to chess, Judit Polgar is the exception that proves the rule: yes, she cracked the overall top 10 for a while—and she's the only female ever to come close to doing so. With regard to Starcraft—well, look at how the OP, even as he theorizes that there ought to be no disadvantage to being female, admits that, Scarlett aside, no girl has actually been "good enough to be considered a competitor in her own right".

And as for Scarlett, well, Scarlett is transgendered, and without getting into questions of etiquette, I don't think you can entirely ignore that fact if the discussion is about comparing female gamers to male gamers. Whatever the reason is that males have generally dominated the top of the Starcraft scene, it's certainly the case that they have—and so long as that remains an unexplained fact, I don't see how you can blithely assume that someone born male (and perhaps still biologically male? I don't know), with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that is wholly representative of people born female, with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that. The pronoun you use to refer to Scarlett is one thing; the inferences you draw from Scarlett's success are something else entirely. In my opinion, you won't be able to prove something about the legitimacy of the non-transgender female scene until a non-transgendered female has had a legitimate level of success.

Yeah fine, that's absolutely true, most of the top 100 chess players are males. In fact 99 of them are males since Judit Polgar is the only one to have ever broken into the top 100. Why? It's not science rocket. It's statistic:

Male dominate chess because chess is socially a male activity. The little boy is put to play chess and the little girl is put to dance or whatever. Go in a chessclub and you will see the junior section with basically only little boys. It's even worse in countries that actually produce most of champions: Russia, Azerbadjan, etc... You just won't see a little girl in a chess club because parents don't put them at chess.

The three Polgar sisters are exception because they had an environment that was devoted to make them great chess players. Their father was a grand master and luckily he didn't have any of these silly prejudices. And he designed their education to make them brilliant players. And without surprise, they all became elite players, regardless of their gender.

SC2 is just the same. Boys play Starcraft, Girls play the Sims. That's the way people are being raised, because boys have blue rooms and girls pink rooms, that boys are offered GI Joe and girls Barbie doll, boys are dressed with sport clothes and girl with dresses etc... It has absolutely nothing to do with the intrinseque capacity of each gender, but about stereotypical education that we all get, that generates the kind of sensibility we have, the way we think and what we can do.

Now, about chess, the Polgar family (keep in mind, they were three sisters, they all became grand master, that's a 100% success rate in the family) is enough to shut the mouth of everybody who pretend women can't compete at the highest level. They can, if they are given the environment from their youngest age, which is unfortunately incredibly rare.

There were no women composer until the mid XXth century. NOT ONE except for "wives of": Clara Schumann, Alma Mahler and Fanny Mendelssohn, period. So it was supposed to be a male activity, and women were discourage to compose. You would be told the same crap than we are being served in this thread, you know, about male qualities, the genius, creativity, whatever, backed up with the facts: 100% of male composers and the fallacious argument: there must be a good reason. Surprise, now that most (not all as we can see) of those stereotypes have disappear, we have a good 50% of women in contemporary composers.

Feminism has a long way to go.



One last thing: you can say the exact same thing and that becomes evn more obvious with skin colour. Take Fields medal laureates. Surprise! Everybody is white. That means nothing about racial differences. It just says that when you are white you are a zillion times more likely to have the environment to become a great mathematician. And yet you still have racists using these kinds of datas to prove white men are more clever.

You should watch Hjernevask (Brainwash), a Norwegian science documentary. Particularly episode one, "The Gender Equality Paradox.

What you have said is complete nonsense based on wishful thinking and an emotional desire to see everyone as equal.

Gender differences are observable immediately after birth. Female babies are more socially inclined and prefer to look at human faces, while male newborns are more mechanically inclined and will look at machines longer.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=327138

The example of the Polgar family that you used itself seems to be strong evidence that genetics is the key factor in becoming a chess grandmaster.

On April 20 2012 18:51 chocopan wrote:
I agree with more or less everything Biff just said. Yay.

Everything Biff said is wrong.

Yeah I know people desperately want to justify social order and inequalities with science. That's even a constant in science history.

So let me first tell you that most human science researcher absolutely back up my claims. And don't forget that in the XIXth century, very serious scientists were calculating that the size of the skull of "nigers" was smaller than the one of white people and that was the reason why they were less intelligent and subject to be colonized or put in slavery. Things don't change. Tomorrow we will smile at today's scientists attempts to justify sexist prejudices the same way that now we smile at yesterday's scientists trying to justify racist prejudices.

I am not saying men and women are biologically speaking exactly the same. But to claim that women can't compete with men at something like chess because of genetical disposition is just a fancy way to repeat the most obscene of sexist prejudice: that women are less intelligent. Anyway, explain me a little why they were no women scientist or philosophers until we started to question the dumb prejudices you are defending and as sonn as we did DADA!!! we started to have Marie Curie and other Hannah Arendt? Answer: because when we started to change women education / environment it appeared they were just as smart as men while everybody were certain during six thousand years they were dumb as fuck and unable to think rationally. They were no women scientist because women didn't have the possibility to be a scientist in yesterday's society.

Education and gender issues (gender =/= biological sex) are the reason we behave differently. They are not based on nature, they are a social construction.

One hundred years of research has established that East Asians and Europeans average higher IQs than do Africans. East Asians, measured in North America and in Pacific Rim countries, typically average IQs in the range of 101 to 111. Caucasoid populations in North America, Europe, and Australasia typically average IQs from 85 to 115 with an overall mean of 100. African populations living south of the Sahara, in North America, in the Caribbean, and in Britain typically have mean IQs from 70 to 90.

Discoveries using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which creates a three-dimensional image of the living brain, have shown a strong positive correlation (.44) between brain size and IQ (see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for a review). And there is more. The National Collaborative Perinatal Project on 53,000 children by Sarah Broman and her colleagues, showed that head perimeter at birth significantly predicts head perimeter at 7 years — and head perimeter at seven years predicts IQ. It also shows that Asian children average a larger head perimeter at birth than do White children who average a larger head perimeter than do Black children.

Racial differences in brain size have been established using a variety of modern methods. Using endocranial volume, for example, Beals et al. (1984, p. 307, Table 5) analyzed about 20,000 skulls from around the world. East Asians averaged 1,415 cm3 , Europeans averaged 1,362 cm3, and Africans averaged 1,268 cm3 . Using external head measures to calculate cranial capacities, Rushton (1992) analyzed a stratified random sample of 6,325 U.S. Army personnel measured in 1988 for fitting helmets and found that Asian Americans averaged 1,416 cm3, European Americans 1,380 cm3, and African Americans 1,359 cm3. Finally, a recent MRI study found that people of African and Caribbean background averaged a smaller brain volume than did those of European background (again see Rushton & Ankney, 1996, for review).

Well maybe IQ is a fucking dumb measure, sweety. You know you can raise your IQ in two weeks dramatically with appropriate exercizes? For a measure that's supposed to calculate your "intelligence" that's a pretty big flaw.

And even though, you don't think environment is quite a big factor in our intelligence? And that Africans have typically a different environment than the average white guy?

And don't you think that the size of the skull has nothing to do with your intellectual potential, as proven by a zillion studies despite the stuff you throw there that seems to make no difference between correlation and causality? Because see, whales would be quite fucking clever.

You believe africans are less intelligent, and that women can't think rationally. Well, look, you are a racist and a sexist, and I'm off this discussion, because see, I have experienced many times that racists and sexist are unable to think rationally, and not very clever. Bye.

That's not very nice. I consider myself a rational thinker and base my opinions on what evidence is available. I am always prepared to change my opinions if I see new evidence.

And brain/skull size does have something to do with intelligence, as mentioned in my previous post. I am not sure why you ignored that.

It seems you are the irrational one. Your emotional attachment to equality is clouding your judgement, like a fear of death which drives people to faith in heaven.

IQ/g is best single predictor, mental or non-mental.

IQ/g usually predicts major life outcomes better than does any other single predictor in broad samples of individuals. For example, whether IQ predicts strongly (educational performance) or weakly (law-abidingness), it predicts better than does social class background. This does not mean that intelligence is the only important influence on people's life chances or that social conditions are unimportant. Rather, it means that any explanation of social and economic inequalities will need to consider the central role that general intelligence level seems to play.

Gottfredson, L. S. (2006). Social consequences of group differences in cognitive ability (Consequencias sociais das diferencas de grupo em habilidade cognitiva). In C. E. Flores-Mendoza & R. Colom (Eds.), Introducau a psicologia das diferencas individuais (pp. 433-456). Porto Allegre, Brazil: ArtMed Publishers.
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2004socialconsequences.pdf

Survey of opinions on the primacy of g and social consequences of ability testing: A comparison of expert and non-expert views

Though some commentaries give the impression of controversy regarding the importance of cognitive abilities and the validity of ability testing, the results of this survey clearly demonstrate that there are areas of resounding consensus among experts. Our results indicate that there is consensus among experts in the science of mental abilities that g is an important, non-trivial determinant (or at least predictor) of important real world outcomes for which there is no substitute, and that tests of g are valid and generally free from racial bias.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2008.03.007


I'm not trying to be nice or excessively rude.

If you believe that African people are inferior and naturally less intelligent than white people, well, you are a racist, or I don't know what racism is about.

Racism is generally understood as either belief that different racial groups are characterized by intrinsic characteristics or abilities and that some such groups are therefore naturally superior to others (wikipedia)

... as for sexism

Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the belief that a characteristic inherent in one's sex necessarily adversely affects one's ability, even if that characteristic does not have that effect.

I think you wouldn't disagree?

Maybe you have a lot of "evidences" to back up your claim (but who doesn't?), so you are a very rationnal racist, but a racist nonetheless. There are worse things on earth than being a racist I am sure, but that's one of the criterias on which I judge that discussing with someone is useless.

Posting studies that, once again, make a correlation between factors without establishing a causal factor doesn't help. have a nice day.
some call it racial realism.

Also, so if you believe blacks' darker skin protecting them from sun makes them superior in high UV level situations you are racist?

"Racial realism", interesting. I am sure Hitler did think he was a "racial realist".

As for the color of the skin, of course it is proven that if you have more melanin, your skin is darker, and you have a better protection against the sun. It's a bit different than saying that Africans are less intelligent or more brutal or whatever, which is at most backed up by pseudo scientific datas usually misinterpreted.

Skin color is related to race. So you can say the black race is superior to white race in the UV example, which would constitute an example of racism. Blacks have an intrinsic capability to better withstand such situations. So how is it not racist, how does it not meet the definition of racism?..

Because race is a loosy concept that has nothing to do with skin colour.

"We caution against making the naive leap to a genetic explanation for group differences in complex traits, especially for human behavioral traits such as IQ scores"

"Pure races, in the sense of genetically homogeneous populations, do not exist in the human species today, nor is there any evidence that they have ever existed in the past.-p.714"

source: The ethics of characterizing difference: guiding principles on using racial categories in human genetics

http://genomebiology.com/2008/9/7/404

While biologists sometimes use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is often used in a naive or simplistic way. Among humans, race has no taxonomic significance; all living humans belong to the same hominid subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens. Social conceptions and groupings of races vary over time, involving folk taxonomies that define essential types of individuals based on perceived traits. Scientists consider biological essentialism obsolete, and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits (wikipedia)


If you have black skin, you are better protected against the sun. If you have big ears you also may hear better. Skin colour doesn't make a race, as much as size of the ear doesn't make a race either.


There is one race, which is the human race, and each of us has billion of genes that can be combined in any way possible, including genes that determines our melanin rate and therefore our skin colour.

You want to establish an equivalence between skin colour and intelligence. Don't try to use science in order to back up your racist ideas.


On April 20 2012 23:03 chocopan wrote:
This is a different thread. Please move your discussion there. Thank you.

Sorry, saw that after posting

Here you claim that i am using inductive reasoning, aka dark skin -> african race. Im not doing this. My argument is PURELY deductive, no induction used.

It is african race -> dark skin; european race -> light skin; dark skin superior to white skin -> african race superior to european race

Again, replace "race" for ethnicity or native or whatever you prefer if you dont like it, it doesnt change the validity of the argument.


At risk of derailing this thread further: the point is, that both the concepts of "race" and "superior" are arbitrary cultural constructions that have no natural value. So you could get away with saying that with people with dark skin are more resistant to melanoma, but when you start applying cultural values to that statement in the form of race and judgement, you are making a racist comment.
Be safe, Woo Jung Ho <3
Biff The Understudy
Profile Blog Joined February 2008
France8222 Posts
April 20 2012 17:01 GMT
#100
On April 21 2012 01:16 qrs wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 20 2012 17:53 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 20 2012 01:11 qrs wrote:
On April 19 2012 23:00 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:32 Zanno wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:23 Ruscour wrote:
On April 19 2012 19:20 Zanno wrote:
you are aware Scarlett is a dude right

that's not even a rumor

i do not have any bias against transgenders at all but i do not think Scarlett qualifies as a victory towards female recognition in competitive starcraft

Scarlett is female. I am aware she is transgendered. There is absolutely no advantage gained in StarCraft from being male, therefore there is no reason why she couldn't be considered a success for the female SC2 scene.

EDIT: This will be the only reply I make about this issue. Please don't discuss it here, it undermines the point I'm trying to make.

Of course it undermines the point you're trying to make

There's a large body of literature out there that shows that the male brain and female brain develop differently and as a result there are certain problems that males are better equipped to deal with and certain problems that females are better equipped to deal with

Undergoing sex reassignment surgery does not magically undo two decades of the human body's growth as a male and if you are going to ignore this then I don't know what to say


Yeah well, people used to have the same machist idiotic reasoning in chess, and then came Judit Polgar (and her sisters), who has demolished everybody since she is 6, has been one of the greatest prodigy child in history of chess and has been ranked as high as world number 8, having defeated world champions or former world champions Karpov, Anand, Kasparov, Spasky, Smilsov, Topalov, Ponomariov, Khalifman and Razhimdzdhanov.
Yes, then came Judit Polgar, and then came...who? Yifan? Not yet, at any rate.

Without making speculative statements about why males thus far have the competitive edge in chess and in Starcraft, it's hard to deny that currently they do—and one proof of that is that people still feel the need to hold separate female-only events. With regard to chess, Judit Polgar is the exception that proves the rule: yes, she cracked the overall top 10 for a while—and she's the only female ever to come close to doing so. With regard to Starcraft—well, look at how the OP, even as he theorizes that there ought to be no disadvantage to being female, admits that, Scarlett aside, no girl has actually been "good enough to be considered a competitor in her own right".

And as for Scarlett, well, Scarlett is transgendered, and without getting into questions of etiquette, I don't think you can entirely ignore that fact if the discussion is about comparing female gamers to male gamers. Whatever the reason is that males have generally dominated the top of the Starcraft scene, it's certainly the case that they have—and so long as that remains an unexplained fact, I don't see how you can blithely assume that someone born male (and perhaps still biologically male? I don't know), with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that is wholly representative of people born female, with all of the biological and cultural things that go along with that. The pronoun you use to refer to Scarlett is one thing; the inferences you draw from Scarlett's success are something else entirely. In my opinion, you won't be able to prove something about the legitimacy of the non-transgender female scene until a non-transgendered female has had a legitimate level of success.

Yeah fine, that's absolutely true, most of the top 100 chess players are males. In fact 99 of them are males since Judit Polgar is the only one to have ever broken into the top 100. Why? It's not science rocket. It's statistic:

Male dominate chess because chess is socially a male activity. The little boy is put to play chess and the little girl is put to dance or whatever. Go in a chessclub and you will see the junior section with basically only little boys. It's even worse in countries that actually produce most of champions: Russia, Azerbadjan, etc... You just won't see a little girl in a chess club because parents don't put them at chess.

The three Polgar sisters are exception because they had an environment that was devoted to make them great chess players. Their father was a grand master and luckily he didn't have any of these silly prejudices. And he designed their education to make them brilliant players. And without surprise, they all became elite players, regardless of their gender.

SC2 is just the same. Boys play Starcraft, Girls play the Sims. That's the way people are being raised, because boys have blue rooms and girls pink rooms, that boys are offered GI Joe and girls Barbie doll, boys are dressed with sport clothes and girl with dresses etc... It has absolutely nothing to do with the intrinseque capacity of each gender, but about stereotypical education that we all get, that generates the kind of sensibility we have, the way we think and what we can do.

Now, about chess, the Polgar family (keep in mind, they were three sisters, they all became grand master, that's a 100% success rate in the family) is enough to shut the mouth of everybody who pretend women can't compete at the highest level. They can, if they are given the environment from their youngest age, which is unfortunately incredibly rare.

There were no women composer until the mid XXth century. NOT ONE except for "wives of": Clara Schumann, Alma Mahler and Fanny Mendelssohn, period. So it was supposed to be a male activity, and women were discourage to compose. You would be told the same crap than we are being served in this thread, you know, about male qualities, the genius, creativity, whatever, backed up with the facts: 100% of male composers and the fallacious argument: there must be a good reason. Surprise, now that most (not all as we can see) of those stereotypes have disappear, we have a good 50% of women in contemporary composers.

Feminism has a long way to go.

One last thing: you can say the exact same thing and that becomes evn more obvious with skin colour. Take Fields medal laureates. Surprise! Everybody is white. That means nothing about racial differences. It just says that when you are white you are a zillion times more likely to have the environment to become a great mathematician. And yet you still have racists using these kinds of datas to prove white men are more clever.
You make fair points, Biff, but I think that the inferences you're making are quite speculative. The Polgar sisters were a very intriguing experiment, but does it prove that the huge gap between women and men among top chess players is entirely due to culture? I'm not convinced. It's true that it's incredibly rare for a woman to be given an environment like the Polgars' from their youngest age, but isn't it equally rare for men? (Laszlo Polgar wanted to adopt three boys and repeat his experiment with them, you know, but it never happened.)

At any rate, I'm not trying to assert anything about why men currently dominate the upper levels of chess and of Starcraft. You'll notice that my post that you responded to mentioned "biological and cultural things". In my opinion, all we can definitely say is that the difference exists. When I see someone say, "This is the reason for the difference", I mentally translate that into, "This is what I want to be the reason for the difference." It's hard to prove these statements one way or the other.

For the Polgar sister, my answer is no, it is not rare for young boys to be given an environment to become a star chess player. It is even fairly common, and absolutely exceptionnal for a girl. People such as Kasparov or Karpov were put at chess like any young boys in Soviet Union, proved to be very promising and got redirected to Bovinnik school for young chess talent. Had they been girls, they wouldn't have even started chess in the first time, and had they shown any talent, they wouldn't have been encouraged to develop it to its greatest potential. You needed very special parents for the Polgar sister to happen.

I have to say however that I agree with you for most of what you said.

If you look at the discussion I just had on racism, you will also see sceintific evidence given to prove one and the other claim. Science (different field of science) used with the same scientific rigor can prove one view, or its opposite.

The premise of this discussion are not scientific, they are philosphical. From this philosophical and ideologic point of view, you build up a scientific research, or a certain type of reasoning. People often mistake science for the absolute truth, without remembering that science has little to do with the truth at all, and that scientific disagree with each other, and that science becomes often obsolete.

For me women and men have equal intellectual capacities; for me black men are in nothing inferior to white men, and certainly not less intelligent, for me people were not born the way they are, that our choices, our education and our life determines what and who we are rather than our "race" whatever that mean, or our biological sex. See, it's something much more deeply rooted than what I just believe. My whole being screams and bleed at the idea that women are intelectually inferior to men. I find the idea obscene.


Push it a little bit further, in political area, and it gives you a good definition of right wing and left wing. For a right winger, social order is always right, and inequalities are just the reflect of people intrinseque qualities. If you deserve to be rich you will be, if you are poor, you were born stupid or lazy. For a leftist, social conditionning, experience and education makes us what we are, which means that the game is rigged from the beginning, and needs to be compensated by a certain social justice. That also explain you why generally - but not always - the furthest you go to the right the more racist and sexist you will find people.
The fellow who is out to burn things up is the counterpart of the fool who thinks he can save the world. The world needs neither to be burned up nor to be saved. The world is, we are. Transients, if we buck it; here to stay if we accept it. ~H.Miller
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