Quote:
Originally Posted by Jackontheturn
A lot of people are critical of women's chess because given that there's no difference between men and women in intelligence, celebrating someone for being the best woman player is patronizing and therefore sexist.
agreed that this is not entirely accurate and people tend to underestimate the positive influence of testosterone is all competitive things
it's well established scientifically that testosterone plays a major positive role in giving competitive edges to things involving risk taking
this is why a lot of things that should be equal in competition between the sexes from video games to race car driving is not
men account for 62% of all driving and yet only cause 58% of all accidents
this is significant because men are significantly bigger risk takers in driving and receive far more speeding tickets and traffic violations in general than women do - yet they are still less likely than a woman who drives much more conservatively to get into an accident - we do a lot more stupid and risky stuff but at the end of the day crash the car less often
while men are more likely to get into fatal accidents, that is largely due to the fact that 80% of alll alcohol related driving fatalities are caused by men
men are far less conservative in their actions - this is scientifically correlated to testosterone
if we go to the edge cases of the top talent add skill and good decision making to the increased tolerance of risk then we're naturally going to get at the top levels mostly men at things such as race car driving, esports, & chess
point being you take two people where everything is cognitively and physically identical, but one has a higher level of testosterone, that person is going to have an edge in nearly everything because when their opponent sees 4 possible moves in their next turn, the person with more testosterone would see 5
it's also physical as well - if you take 10 college sprinters and measure their testosterone levels, you can use that to predict in which order they'll finish with uncanny accuracy