Invisible pieces

Discuss anything you like about chess related matters in this forum.
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John Clarke
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Re: Invisible pieces

Post by John Clarke » Wed Dec 30, 2020 6:18 am

Hi Helen - a rather belated welcome to the Forum. Good to have another Kiwi on here, especially one who unlike me is still actively involved in competitive play. Best of luck for the Championship.
"The chess-board is the world ..... the player on the other side is hidden from us ..... he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance."
(He doesn't let you resign and start again, either.)

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Carl Hibbard
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Re: Invisible pieces

Post by Carl Hibbard » Wed Dec 30, 2020 11:27 am

Matt Bridgeman wrote:
Fri Dec 18, 2020 4:16 pm
I'm not a troll, I'm here under my own identity. Please come and speak to me one day face to face at a chess congress.
A rather childish comment and user warned.
Cheers
Carl Hibbard

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Carl Hibbard
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Re: Invisible pieces

Post by Carl Hibbard » Wed Dec 30, 2020 11:30 am

Paul McKeown wrote:
Thu Dec 24, 2020 4:08 pm
Much of "talk radio" in the US ended up as a hard right ghetto dominated by "shock jocks".
A warning here too on the language used.
Cheers
Carl Hibbard

Geoff Chandler
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Re: Invisible pieces

Post by Geoff Chandler » Wed Dec 30, 2020 12:00 pm

Hi Carl,

It's Justin's fault, he linked to an anonymous piece and as we are not allowed to be anonymous
here he broke the rules so others are thinking if Justin can get away with it then so can they.

(give him a row, anonymously.)

NickFaulks
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Re: Invisible pieces

Post by NickFaulks » Sat Jan 02, 2021 11:04 pm

Going back to where this started ( almost ), something has been niggling me.

Quoting an article in New in Chess

"Short stood his ground, framing it as a matter of biology - that men have roughly 6.5 times more grey matter and women 9.5 times more white matter".

He didn't make that up, it presumably came from this 2005 piece in Science Daily, which looks kosher.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 100142.htm

I mean, 6.5:1 might turn out to be 5.5:1 due to measurement errors, but surely not 1.2:1.

However, I cannot find any further details regarding the Irvine results ( eg the paper itself ), or any suggestions elsewhere that there is anything resembling this disparity.

I have checked that nothing is dated April 1st. Any other thoughts?


addendum : I do not claim to have any idea of what grey matter actually is, let alone its significance. I would just like to know what is going on with the science.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a QR code stamped on a human face — forever.

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Gerard Killoran
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Re: Invisible pieces

Post by Gerard Killoran » Sun Jan 03, 2021 12:47 pm

NickFaulks wrote:
Sat Jan 02, 2021 11:04 pm
Going back to where this started ( almost ), something has been niggling me.

Quoting an article in New in Chess

"Short stood his ground, framing it as a matter of biology - that men have roughly 6.5 times more grey matter and women 9.5 times more white matter".

He didn't make that up, it presumably came from this 2005 piece in Science Daily, which looks kosher.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 100142.htm

I mean, 6.5:1 might turn out to be 5.5:1 due to measurement errors, but surely not 1.2:1.

However, I cannot find any further details regarding the Irvine results ( eg the paper itself ), or any suggestions elsewhere that there is anything resembling this disparity.

I have checked that nothing is dated April 1st. Any other thoughts?


addendum : I do not claim to have any idea of what grey matter actually is, let alone its significance. I would just like to know what is going on with the science.
I think you have made the same mistake as Nigel Short - at least you admit your ignorance of what grey and white matter is (easily Googled by the way).

As this review makes clear,

'I woke one morning in 2010 to see an especially bad extrapolation of this study on the Early Show, a programme on US television network CBS. The presenter, Harry Smith, gushed as medical correspondent Jennifer Ashton declared that men have “six-and-a-half times more grey matter” than women, whereas women have “ten times as much white matter” as men. Next came the obvious quips about men’s talent at mathematics and women’s uncanny ability to multitask. Never mind that these differences would demand that women’s heads were about 50% larger, or that the Irvine team didn’t even compare brain volumes, but investigated a correlation between IQ and measures of grey or white matter.' (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00677-x)

The study you have misquoted actually claimed, 'In general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men.'

The key phrase is, 'related to intelligence'. Even taking this into account, this should set off a whole series of alarm bells.

John McKenna

Re: Invisible pieces

Post by John McKenna » Sun Jan 03, 2021 1:53 pm

... Male brains utilize nearly seven times more gray matter for activity while female brains utilize nearly ten times more white matter. What does this mean?
Gray matter areas of the brain are localized. They are information- and action-processing centers in specific splotches in a specific area of the brain. This can translate to a kind of tunnel vision when they are doing something. Once they are deeply engaged in a task or game, they may not demonstrate much sensitivity to other people or their surroundings.

White matter is the networking grid that connects the brain’s gray matter and other processing centers with one another. This profound brain-processing difference is probably one reason you may have noticed that girls tend to more quickly transition between tasks than boys do. The gray-white matter difference may explain why, in adulthood, females are great multi-taskers, while men excel in highly task-focused projects...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog ... en-genders

While waiting for the "whole series of alarm bells" start ringing why don't you pick apart the article that the quote above comes from and take the argument forward instead of leaving it dead in the water.

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Gerard Killoran
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Re: Invisible pieces

Post by Gerard Killoran » Sun Jan 03, 2021 2:52 pm

John McKenna wrote:
Sun Jan 03, 2021 1:53 pm
... Male brains utilize nearly seven times more gray matter for activity while female brains utilize nearly ten times more white matter. What does this mean?
Gray matter areas of the brain are localized. They are information- and action-processing centers in specific splotches in a specific area of the brain. This can translate to a kind of tunnel vision when they are doing something. Once they are deeply engaged in a task or game, they may not demonstrate much sensitivity to other people or their surroundings.

White matter is the networking grid that connects the brain’s gray matter and other processing centers with one another. This profound brain-processing difference is probably one reason you may have noticed that girls tend to more quickly transition between tasks than boys do. The gray-white matter difference may explain why, in adulthood, females are great multi-taskers, while men excel in highly task-focused projects...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog ... en-genders

While waiting for the "whole series of alarm bells" start ringing why don't you pick apart the article that the quote above comes from and take the argument forward instead of leaving it dead in the water.
The article you quotes replaces 'related to intelligence' with 'activity', which isn't the same thing at all. Consider it picked apart and dead in the water, if not sunk.

John McKenna

Re: Invisible pieces

Post by John McKenna » Sun Jan 03, 2021 3:31 pm

So, as usual, you've taken a selective bite at the bait. (Typical of slippery eels such as abound in these moribund waters.)

However, if you think you can dismiss the article so easily with a few strokes of the keyboard you must be in possession of a great deal of knowledge and expertise on the subject that you are keeping to yourself.

Would you care to share your knowledge by expanding on your above summary execution of the article a bit more - as to why exactly what you wrote is a such a simple and direct refutation of the article, for instance?

Edit - the article does indeed contain the word 'activity'.

Chess is an activity in which both males and females participate directly as individuals - as opposed to, say, childbirth or breast-feeding - and reasons for their relatively different performances in chess are being discussed here, so 'activity' would seem to be more relevant than 'intelligence' here - since the part the latter plays in chess has been discussed in its own right elsewhere and should not be a primary factor in answering this question. Unless, that is , it has been shown that males or females are more intelligent than the other gender in general.

NickFaulks
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Re: Invisible pieces

Post by NickFaulks » Sun Jan 03, 2021 4:43 pm

Gerard Killoran wrote:
Sun Jan 03, 2021 12:47 pm
I think you have made the same mistake as Nigel Short - at least you admit your ignorance of what grey and white matter is (easily Googled by the way).
No, I have not made a mistake, as you would realise if you had read what I wrote. It is true that I do not claim to have made myself an expert on neuroscience by spending five minutes on Google, but that is quite irrelevant.

The point is that if a university study had concluded that men's brains contain 6.5 times as much woojumflip as women's ( devoted to whatever purpose ), then I would think this was probably significant and worthy of further investigation. I would expect the group which had come up with this finding to build on it, and others to try to reproduce it. If there were an argument that woojumflip is entirely irrelevant to the brain's activity so the differential is meaningless, then I would expect someone to say that.

So far as I can tell none of these things has happened, instead the study seems to have sunk without a trace until it was wheeled out ( validly or not, that isn't my point ) for this issue. I find this surprising, that's all.
Last edited by NickFaulks on Sun Jan 03, 2021 4:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a QR code stamped on a human face — forever.

John McKenna

Re: Invisible pieces

Post by John McKenna » Sun Jan 03, 2021 4:49 pm

And does it not surprise you, Nick, that the article I linked to, above, contains (at the start of my quote from it) -

Male brains utilize...

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Gerard Killoran
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Re: Invisible pieces

Post by Gerard Killoran » Sun Jan 03, 2021 11:18 pm

If I'm being asked to take seriously the remarks about 'activity', then I'll pass.

I'll make a final point.

One reason why such studies are not replicated to see if they stand up, is that serious scientists have better things to do. It's why they don't bother with homeopathy, for example.

It's interesting however, that the group of people determined to find innate intelligence differences between the sexes are in the same right-wing camp as the people who want to do the same for races.

The lead author of the report misquoted by Nigel Short is Richard Haier.

See here https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15734366/

Here he is defending Charles Murray and his racist book 'The Bell Curve', which among other terrible things, purported to show that Black people were less intelligent than White people.

https://twitter.com/rjhaier/status/1154876050616156160

John McKenna

Re: Invisible pieces

Post by John McKenna » Mon Jan 04, 2021 3:52 pm

"If I'm being asked to take seriously the remarks about 'activity', then I'll pass."

Ducking the question.

I thought you might have been educated by Jesuits. Obviously not. I do admire your newspaper finds, though. Keep up the good work, if poss, but drop the dead donkey if you can.

Matt Bridgeman
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Re: Invisible pieces

Post by Matt Bridgeman » Mon Jan 04, 2021 4:07 pm

An informative Guardian interview with Gina Rippon from Feb 2019; https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... ina-rippon

John McKenna

Re: Invisible pieces

Post by John McKenna » Mon Jan 04, 2021 6:43 pm

Thanks, Matt.

Informative about the author and the journalist, to a degree, but it looks like a plug for her book from around the date that it was published - in 2019, Feb.

It does not appear to be directly comparable to the older (2014 Feb.) article I linked to, further above, since it seems to be based on extracts from her book that address the "gendered brain" (or lack of it) mainly in general.

In order to make a comparison of my link (to 2014) with yours (to 2019) one would have to have access to the rest of her book to garner more specific technical details of what has been happening in the field of "cognitive neuroimaging".

A couple of quick observations about the article you link to -

"... For example, once any differences in brain size were accounted for, 'well-known' sex differences in key structures disappeared... "

I suppose the book may explain the above touch of legerdemain ("sleight of hand") as applied to 'size'.

It goes on -

"Which is when the penny dropped: perhaps it was time to abandon the age-old search for the differences between brains from men and brains from women."

Perhaps not entirely, though, because it continues -

"Are there any significant differences based on sex alone? The answer, she says, is no. To suggest otherwise is 'neurofoolishness'."

Then further on in the article "neurofoolishness" rears its ugly head, again, with a slip of the tongue?

"... Brains reflect the lives they have lived, not just the sex of their owners...

"Not just"? Not appreciably at all would be more in keeping with the thrust of the argument in the book.