Nigel Short appointment

[Mick Norris]

I don't even know if Nigel is right about biology.

No, he's completely wrong. He cherry-picked a single, dubious study and misquoted the findings

I know that when we went to school in the 90s, it was taught as fact that boys would emerge from puberty with better spatial reasoning and girls with better verbal. And I know that there's a strong social desirability effect when it comes to statements about gendered brains - people know what answer they're expected to give, even if it contradicts the answer they gave to a slightly different question.

Did you go to school with Nigel? And what sort of school was it?

Nigel went to Bolton School, but not in the 90s

[Chris Goodall]

I don't even know if Nigel is right about biology.

No, he's completely wrong. He cherry-picked a single, dubious study and misquoted the findings.

Boys outperform girls on "mental rotation" tasks. This is a persistent finding in cognitive science. The controversy is how much of it is biological and how much cultural. But it's not as though we chess players can wave a wand and undo the hardwiring brought about by culture, any more than we can undo the hardwiring brought about by biology. So it's tomayto, tomato.

Nigel went to Bolton School, but not in the 90s

"We" is me and Thomas Rendle, not me and Nigel Short

[Mick Norris]

I was answering Gerard not you

I really enjoyed this weekend in Gateshead and Newcastle, but fortunately I didn't meet any local chess players

[Gerard Killoran]

I don't even know if Nigel is right about biology.

No, he's completely wrong. He cherry-picked a single, dubious study and misquoted the findings.

Boys outperform girls on "mental rotation" tasks. This is a persistent finding in cognitive science. The controversy is how much of it is biological and how much cultural. But it's not as though we chess players can wave a wand and undo the hardwiring brought about by culture, any more than we can undo the hardwiring brought about by biology. So it's tomayto, tomato.

Nigel went to Bolton School, but not in the 90s

"We" is me and Thomas Rendle, not me and Nigel Short

'Boys outperform girls ' is meaingless and ignores Within-Group variation vs. Between-Group variation, and makes controversy over how much of it is biological and how much cultural a waste of time. 'Hardwiring' has meaning when used about computers but not people where it is an inappropriate metaphor.

[Chris Goodall]

'Boys outperform girls ' is meaingless and ignores Within-Group variation vs. Between-Group variation

That would be a sensible point if we were comparing a single boy to a single girl, but we aren't. Between-Group variation is precisely the issue. Otherwise you could conclude that the statement "women are underrepresented at the top level of chess relative to men" is equally meaningless, for ignoring that some women are better than other women.

[Gerard Killoran]

'Boys outperform girls ' is meaingless and ignores Within-Group variation vs. Between-Group variation

That would be a sensible point if we were comparing a single boy to a single girl, but we aren't. Between-Group variation is precisely the issue. Otherwise you could conclude that the statement "women are underrepresented at the top level of chess relative to men" is equally meaningless, for ignoring that some women are better than other women.

You're missing the point completely, possibly deliberately. Either way I'll not bother engaging any further.

[Chris Goodall]

On the contrary, I understood the point so well that, if this had been a discussion about something entirely different, I would have made the same point myself.