He wrote an article about Digimon that read like a less eloquent version of infamous Twitter gimmick DigimonOtis. He is either a deep-running troll or yet another low-talent turd who's found a conservative backwater eager to pay for their own opinions parroted back at them.

I have a similar story in that. I was a social worker working with high-school aged kids with emotional disabilities in the Anacostia neighborhood of DC, and one of my clients was borderline MR, with a lot of additional emotional issues due to having a drug addicted mother, but he was really good at chess. I'm not terrible, and we'd play at least one game at every session, and he'd beat me in under 10 minutes, every game, without fail. Legitimately really good at chess.

Amongst people who actually know the game, there is virtually no coloration between I.Q. and skill. In fact, there has been shown to be a slight negative coloration with skill at higher I.Q.s. (argument is, of course, disregarding the very flawed nature of I.Q.s in general.)

What level chess were you all playing?

There's the simple fact that at a certain point you just have to memorize a bunch of openings (to push yourself toward an 1800 or 2000 player) that makes the game kinda aggravating to me.

Then again, I play Starcraft 2 and 'actions per minute' wind up being a huge part of that game.

i'm probably around 1200 range, if i'm being generous, and having a good day. I'm not great, but i can recognize when someone else is good. Along the same lines, and i know it's not a great comparison, but i was really good at TF2 for a while, and that is similar to chess in that engy build orders and locations, as well as player positioning can determine matches 2 minutes in.

Back to the video, Milo is, surprisingly enough, gay, although he did write a recent article about become straight, because he doesn't think being gay is cool anymore. He's generally a piece of shit, and will take any position that is opposite of what he views as progressive. Basically trying to become the UK's Ann Coulter. I tend to read a lot of conservative media, because i don't really get anything out of reading a bunch of stuff i already agree with, and he is up there with the best of them for pure odiousness.

Jesus, what an asshole. And why is he mugging like he's in 90s Mentos commercial?

I don't ay much attention to the super community, it must be in bad shape if this is what their villains are like these days.

Not to mention the fact that all these Breitbart clownshoes worship Rand.

Where are you pulling these facts from, besides your own ass?

You realize Malcolm Gladwell is just as much of an idiot as Milo here.

Except for maybe "Talent is a myth.", I don't see anything here that isn't obvious:

>> A woman who has put 10,000 hours into learning chess will devastate any man who has put only 1,000 hours into it.
Obvious.

>>A brilliant woman will learn chess vastly more quickly than the average man.
Obvious

>>What's certain is that woman who put in enough practice would be "better" than almost all of the representatives of the male gender.
Obvious

>>The idea of pointing to the ends of a bell curve to make statements about the curve as a whole is fundamentally stupid.
Undeniable.

Anecdotal, yes, but I once talked for a while with a female neuroscientist who was studying these things, and she said that the more pronounced biological gender gap is what male and female brains LIKE to do, and that's a big part of the gender gap in math, hard sciences, engineering, chess, programming etc etc.

Hasley: Thanks for your interest. I also think that skill acquisition is fascinating. Regarding my source, I've read papers by K. Anders Ericsson, who has studied expertise for decades and has accumulated a number of practical tips for learning skills, if you'd like to dive into his work. For example, here's something I found interesting: people who achieve expertise at a skill almost universally _hate practice_. They suffer through the hours of practice, with eyes toward their dream.

kingarthur: You're correct that Malcolm Gladwell gave only a superficial treatment to expertise. He gave the impression that the rate of skill acquisition is fairly level between different people, which isn't the case, and to my memory he failed to mention the most important thing for skill acquisition: deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is focused practice with certain characteristics, not merely spending time at some task. I'm nevertheless grateful to Gladwell for making it more widely known that high level expertise in any domain can be acquired by most anyone -- brains are malleable.

John: These things are obvious to you but not to most other people. I think it's because it makes us uncomfortable to look closely at male and female intelligence: Milo takes it for granted that men learn chess more quickly than women, as part of his narcissistic identity; non-assholes often find it difficult to consider the hypothesis that a group of people might intrinsically be better or worse at something, since it's emotionally charged. Both fail to see the nuances involved. Centrally, the proposition that "men are better skill x than women" is a stupid idea, *even if* men produce more geniuses or *even if* the average man learns the skill faster than the average woman, since a brilliant woman who dedicated herself to deliberate practice at a skill would learn faster and become more skilled than almost all men. She would be "better than" nearly every male on the planet, including most of the people squabbling about gender differences. I agree this is not profound, but I maintain that most people have trouble grasping this fact.

Around 1:10 she makes the statement that young girls who play chess start dropping out around the age of 12. This isn't the age of onset of puberty for women, this is the age for men.

FFN: Well, i think you can believe that men are better at chess, even intrinsically better at chess (all I really know is that I hate it), and it's still going to be obvious that " a woman who has put 10,000 hours into learning chess will devastate any man who has put only 1,000 hours into it."

In the real world of experience and culture, I'm prepared to accept the possibility that gender plays some kind of role in the aggregate, though you could probably make a similar case for eating a good breakfast, and theres a whole bunch of possible explanations for this other than being "hard wired". But come on, putting in ten times as much preparation is going to trump gender as a factor.

The "10,000 hours" thing is comprehensively debunked self-help horseshit.

People are not blank slates, we work differently, just because Tumblr self-diagnosers like to toss around the word "neurodiversity" doesn't mean that it isn't a real thing. Different people work differently, and these differences can make them better suited toward the development of some skills than others. How much you practice is a big factor but it isn't the only factor.

And finally, Malcolm Gladwell is shit.

FFN: Well, i think you can believe that men are better at chess, even intrinsically better at chess (all I really know is that I hate it), and it's still going to be obvious that " a woman who has put 10,000 hours into learning chess will devastate any man who has put only 1,000 hours into it."

In the real world of experience and culture, I'm prepared to accept the possibility that gender plays some kind of role in the aggregate, though you could probably make a similar case for eating a good breakfast, and theres a whole bunch of possible explanations for this other than being "hard wired". But come on, putting in ten times as much preparation is going to trump gender as a factor.

>>The "10,000 hours" thing is comprehensively debunked self-help horseshit.
>>How much you practice is a big factor but it isn't the only factor.

Nobody is saying it's the only factor. We're saying it's a bigger factor than gender, that's all.

Oscar: Good point. When I picture an acned 12 year old boy drooling at my body from across the table as I'm considering a chess move, the infrequency of women in chess suddenly becomes a default expectation, not anything surprising.

Old_Zircon: I think you didn't read my previous comment. I like Malcolm Gladwell, but not for the reasons that you think I like him. I think additionally you underestimate the r^2 value of deliberate practice in determining skill.

John: You're right, if there is a gender difference in learning rate for chess, it would be nowhere near a 10:1 ratio. I chose that number because even Milo might accept it. He then must accept that it's feasible for the average woman to be better than the average man at chess, under certain conditions, which is a step closer to reality. Why focus on the average man and the average woman?

It's known that when we separate population groups, we tend to think of archetypes instead of clouds. That is, we naturally think of the "average" man and the "average" woman. These become the champions of our schematic representations of the populations, and it's easy to compare them: who's smarter, who's more empathetic, who's better at chess or language. Strengths or weaknesses of that mythical champion become the strengths or weaknesses of the group as a whole. A man or woman who doesn't match up with the male or female archetype is regarded as an exception, while the schematic model of one champion versus the other is retained. Nobel laureate economist Daniel Kahneman talks about this tendency of our minds in his book Thinking Fast and Slow.

If we want to see reality more clearly, we have to abandon these champions and see population subgroups as the overlapping clouds that they are. Otherwise, we'll continue to go up in arms whenever someone describes average characteristics of a subgroup, which feel like descriptions of our champions, instead of boring descriptions of the middle parts of our clouds.

You might be smarter than me and already naturally think in clouds, but for most of us, we have champions, and negative comparisons on the average woman or the average black man feels threatening, especially since there might be some truth to it. My goal was to provide some ways of thinking about these issues that are less threatening. If it isn't obvious, I'm writing for myself as much as for anyone else, since it pains me to think of the average man beating the average woman at chess. Seeing overlapping clouds with bright women far ahead of average men makes it less painful, and it helps me to abandon champions and think about these issues more clearly.

correction, WAS openly gay. He's pretending to be straight now: http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/04/14/im-sooo-bored-of-being- gay/