One Reason to be Glad About Sexism

About the only time it'll be good for the integrity of professional chess that no-one cares about the women's events https://t.co/Np0MzYcc6n

— Andrew Pearson (@adrwtp) January 26, 2016

I don't think many people in the chess world intend to be sexist - much of the more blatant sexism is of the "benevolent" kind - the tournament livestream watcher who, writing in, addresses the commentators as "wise Peter and beautiful Sopiko", for example. But the demographics are very much male-dominated, and the culture surrounding the game reflects that - not helped by the fact that FIDE, the game's international governing body, is one of the last remaining bastions of the USSR.

Perhaps because of this culture, perhaps because of sexism in the communities from which chess players arise, perhaps because men tend to think more analytically, and perhaps simply because men tend to exhibit more variation than women in their abilities, there are vastly more strong male players than female players. Hou Yifan, the strongest female chess player in the world, is the world's 68th strongest player overall. I don't know how many male players are stronger than Humpy Koneru, the female no. 2, but a bit of extrapolation from the ratings at the lower end of the top 100 men suggests she's probably some way outside the top 200.

This means that there are a great many men who could potentially choose to identify as transwomen and compete for the women's world championship. I can definitely imagine some men doing that to become Women Grand Masters, the bar for which is set considerably lower than that which exists for Grand Masters proper, but I think it's unlikely to happen for the world championship.

Firstly, success in top chess tournaments has a lot to do with preparation. Magnus Carlsen, not a player noted for his strength in the opening, had no fewer than four grandmasters helping him on a daily basis during his last title defence - three of them "Super-GMs", members of the elite group of fifty or so of the world's very strongest players. (Only one woman - the great Judit Polgár - has ever been a super-GM). I imagine that it would be easier for someone uncontroversially accepted to be a woman to find willing aides than someone who might be seen as a huckster.

Second, and perhaps more fundamentally, people don't really care about the women's events. Judit Polgár was the undisputed greatest female player in the world for over 25 years, and never once bothered to compete for the title of Women's World Champion. Hou Yifan's dominance of the female chess world is not as total as that which Polgár had - though still very solid, even more than Magnus Carlsen's domination of the men's game - and she is a past Women's World Champion, but at the time of the most recent Championship she simply didn't bother to compete. Granted, it was because of a clash with another tournament, but the tournament she went to wasn't especially high-status either. To Kirsan Illyumzhinov and other bigwigs at the Federacion Internationale d'Echecs (FIDE), such events are an extra source of kickbacks. To everyone else, they're just yet another low-level tournament, reports of which tend to include rather more pictures than normal.

Reading the Best of 2015: part one

The Browser has a list of what it suggests are the top 100 online essays of the last year, and is conducting a survey. A handful of them are familiar, but the vast majority are not, so I'm going to attempt to read through them all - and what is more, subject the readers of this blog to my mini-reviews of each and every essay.

For the most part I'll follow the order they appear on the website. However, I'll start with Four and Twenty Bluebeards by Matthew Spellburg, which caught my eye because last month I saw Bluebeard's Castle at the Hungarian State Opera. (I didn't tremendously enjoy it, though having given some of the music a second listen I think that may be more to do with the performance than with the opera itself).

It's a magnificent tribute to Matthew Aucoin that Four and Twenty Bluebeards is still only an Honourable Mention for my "most pretentious essay of the year" award. (What is it with these musicians?) Numerous sections making points which are typically unrelated to the actual opera; musical analysis barely more complicated than that available on the opera's Wikipedia page; bold, sweeping claims made with an air of disdain for the notion of empirical support; and above all, the notion that opera is somehow a humanistic venture of the first importance:

Opera can only teach us to be who we are not, to demand a complete transformation, in which the whole of experience undergoes a great estrangement. Only once we’ve stepped into the circle of transformation—a kind of spiritual transvestitism—can we learn something. Opera says: you must believe this is the way the world is, even though it obviously isn’t like that at all. And this is why it mirrors a culture, the total sum of a society’s reinvention of the world. And this is why it is at once the most complete and most impossible of art forms.

I can't recommend reading this essay.


Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution by David Chapman makes similarly grand claims, although is perhaps more justified in doing so. Indeed, the claim which makes me most suspicious is his suggestion that the ideal ratio of Geeks (i.e. content creators and service providers) to MOPs (members of the public) within any subculture is about 1:6. Until this point I had been reading the article mainly as an exercise in abstract reasoning which might turn out to usefully model actual subcultures; the injection of an actual number, but as a conclusion, was very jarring and came across as unsupported and arbitrary

There were a couple of other things which made me sceptical. First, the claim that "subcultures died around about 2000". I could just as easily claim that subcultures exist, and are more common than ever - if perhaps shorter-lived on average. The internet is an incredible tool for creating subcultures, and even if it also accelerates their collapses then so long as they create positive social value - as Chapman thinks they do - I would be very surprised if they were indeed to die out. Perhaps Doge is a less iconic subculture than Prog Rock, and perhaps the role for Chapman's "fanatics" is reduced to providing publicity, but until there are concrete statistics showing a decline I will be highly sceptical of one of Chapman's key theses.

Second, suppose Chapman is right. His solutions are at best vague, and at worst impossible to practise.

“Slightly evil” defense of a subculture requires realism: letting go of eternalist hope and faith in imaginary guarantees that the New Thing will triumph.

Perhaps deliberate creation requires faith in the value of what one is doing. In this case, the option may be between delusion, which leaves subcultures vulnerable to sociopaths, and having no subculture in the first place.

With all that I've said in criticism, though, the piece is worth reading and its insights are worth adding to your mental armoury.



Charles Pierce's The Death of Evan Murray should be filed under "Taboo Tradeoffs". I don't necessarily disagree with the object-level campaign - at the very least, the cost to human lives of American Football seems to render it a poor "choice" for a national sport of choice - but one could just as easily argue that sending children to school will inevitably lead to some dying in car accidents, etc. The answer, in both cases, is that there is a good to be had in children's playing sport and in their being educated. Would it have been so difficult for Pierce to make the extra bit of argument showing that American Football could be replaced by a sport (more baseball or basketball? Soccer?) with lower human cost?

Tribalism in Action

I don't know if I've mentioned it here before, but I support Aston Villa FC. I am also very fond of my home city of Birmingham. Earlier I was reading this article about our new managerial appointment and was surprised the feel a flash of disgust at reading the word "Birmingham" - the context being "The Birmingham club are third from bottom on 22 points...".

The explanation as to why I felt this flash of disgust is obvious - with football primed in my mind, when reading the word Birmingham I thought not of the canals and parks which I spent so much time perambulating when I am back home, but of Birmingham City FC - Villa's rivals.

There isn't any greater point to this post, it's just interesting to observe that the same word can have both positive and negative connotations to the same person, dependent upon the way in which the word is primed.

England are out of the World Cup

One of the reasons I haven't posted in over two weeks is that I've been watching the World Cup. I've been trying to resist the long-standing instinct to support England, and being involved in the students' sweepstake at the church I go to in Manchester has helped a bit. I drew the USA, and so that's who I'm supporting.

Incidentally, I love the US shirts. They should really be topped off with a tricorn hat in my opinion, but they're still rather elegant.

In any case, this whole "not supporting England" is now a lot easier, with England knocked out after only two games. The comment which has been going around is that "we went into the tournament with no expectations, and we've still been disappointed." At some point recriminations will start flying about concerning precisely why England did so poorly, and my great fear is that action will be taken by the FA in an attempt to remedy it.

Why do I fear this? For the same reason I fear attempts by governments to solve many problems - I fully expect them, if anything, to aggravate the problem. In particular, I worry that they will conclude that the problem is that too many foreigners are playing in the Premier League, and implement limits on the number of foreign players a club may have on its team. In his "plan to boost English football", Greg Dyke - chairman of the FA, former Director-General of the BBC, and holder of numerous other public-sector appointments - called for a limit of two non-EU players per team in the Premier League and a ban on non-EU players in the lower leagues, and calls for a reduction in the number of EU players although of course, due to the UK being in the EU, this would be much harder to enforce.

Dyke, along with various others, argues that there are too many foreign players in the Premier league and that this stymies the development of homegrown talent. He sees this as a threat to "English football", and therefore argues that there should be limits on foreign talent. There are several gaping holes in this argument.

First, let us focus on the vagueness of the phrase "English football". What does he mean by this, and how is it threatened by large numbers of foreign footballers playing in the English leagues? Perhaps he means the quality and profitability of the leagues, but it is hard to see how having foreign players threatens this. The quality of domestic teams is greatly improved by the presence of foreign star players in English leagues.

Perhaps he means grassroots level football. There is perhaps something of an argument in his defence here. If there is no chance for young English players to get a job in football, perhaps because the positions are being filled by foreign players, they may well play less often. But is this really plausible as a major effect? Most people who regularly play football have no hope of ever being employed in the sport - if a team hasn't recruited you by the time you're 18 or so, they never will, and yet tens of thousands of people turn out each week to play in the Sunday leagues and on school and university teams and a whole host of other things. And that's just the organised football - think of the innumerable parks filled with friends having a kickabout with nothing more than four jumpers and a ball. People don't play because they hope to be spotted by a team, they play because they enjoy the sport and because it is an important institution for social interactions.

Perhaps he means the national team will be weakened - clubs have less incentive to develop homegrown talent when they can buy talented players from elsewhere. While this is pretty plausible, it is hard to see why this is an especially bad thing. Whereas the clubs and leagues are major sources of income and wealth for the country, and provide a great deal of entertainment to people around the world, and grassroots football provides a number of benefits - hedonic benefits, better health, etc - what does the national team actually do? There is a hedonic benefit when the team wins, but this is very small given how few matches the national team plays compared to the clubs. Will the average England supporter's enjoyment of the rest of the World Cup be damaged so very much by the national team's absence? Apart from that, the only effect I can think of is a (claimed - I'm sceptical given the timing and absence of a link to the actual research) increase in domestic violence immediately following matches.


In any case, even if the success of the national team is something worth attempting to increase, will this achieve it and will it be worth the cost to the overall quality of football in the leagues? It seems far from obvious that reducing the quality of the league in which most English players play will help develop a stronger team.

In fact, I believe Dyke is almost diametrically wrong: there problem is not that there are too many foreigners coming to England, but that there are not enough English players going abroad. Look at this graph of the percentages of players who play in their home country:

Thanks to dybuell on Reddit.

England is noticeable primarily for how few players it exports. (It's not that England managers are unwilling to use homegrown but foreign-playing talent - going through the team lists of the top European non-English teams, Barcelona have no-one English, Real Madrid have no-one English although they have the Welshman Gareth Bale, Bayern Munich have no-one, AC Milan have no-one, FC Porto have no-one, Inter Milan have no-one, Valencia have no-one...). This seems like a far more serious issue to me - players are missing out on valuable experience of football in other countries, and miss out on playing in either of the world's top two teams.

Links, June 2014

A proposal to reduce distracted driving, by making things less distracting rather than banning them.

Middle Ages prohibitions on people having sex.

Tom Lehrer is, in my opinion at least, the greatest musical satirist to have existed - equally competent as a bitingly sharp critic of society and as a composer of wonderful melodies. This is a fascinating article on his life  - I was vaguely aware that he'd invented a drink of sorts, I didn't realise it was the FREAKING JELLY SHOT. I knew he'd studied at Harvard, but he went there when he was FIFTEEN. And I (grade eight piano, grade seven cello) would struggle to play a Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto, if I even could; he would do so, with his hands playing in different keys!

It's probably too late to make this change for the 2014 World Cup, but Lindybeige's suggestion to replace the penalty shoot-out makes a lot of sense. I'd quibble with some of the details, but so far as I can tell it would a) better represent actual football, b) involve a larger proportion of the team, c) generally take less time than 30 mins of extra time plus 5-15 mins for a shootout.

A tour of British accents. It's far from complete - indeed, none of the three accents which I most regularly encounter (Estuary English, Brummy, and Mancunion) appear - but it does an excellent job of bringing out the differences between accents.

"Factors that were independently associated with increased probability of extra-marital partnerships [included]... spouse longer erect penis." Also, boys contribute more to marriage stability than girls.

Suppose Tyler was right when he wrote this post, which argues that libertarians will never achieve their goals but will always be intellectually important. That's probably bad for people in general, but possibly good for me personally, as an aspiring libertarian intellectual.

"Normal" people are strange. That has consequences for the rest of us.

As a former RPS champion, it's nice to see that I was automatically doing much of this in my normal gameplay.

Evolution, destroying all that is natural, beautiful and loving. This week: motherhood!

Poetry of Afghan women. There are some excellent lines in there, I'll quote a couple of my favourites:
When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers.
When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others.

My lover is fair as an American soldier can be.
To him I looked dark as a Talib, so he martyred me.
See also the accompanying podcast.

A fascinating attack on home ownership. There are obvious good reasons for home ownership - principal-agent problems regarding landlords, tenants and maintenance, for example - but there are serious downsides too.

Sporting governance - all the idiocy of real politics, but without the constraints of people having ever though about economics or ethics!

I read Scott Alexander's Piano Man parody by singing it while playing along on my piano. I frequently had to stop, torn somewhere between laughing and being utterly horrified.

A genuine success of government. It'll be interesting to see if this can be replicated on a wider scale: it seems silly to me to think that government can never improve things, the key question is whether it can do so on a predictable basis without spiralling out of control or large unintended consequences.

Speaking of unintended consequences, the assault on the Bin Laden compound has led to an outbreak of Polio.

Frozen and higher education? I just had to link to this...

A new arrangement of Siegmund's Horn Call.

Is there a poster version of this really pretty picture of Elsa's ice palace?

It's often remarked when looking at maps of Africa that whole national boundaries were created by lazy bureaucrats with maps, pencils and rulers whereas "real" borders - those determined by genuine links of language and culture - are far more complicated and nuanced. This analysis of actual borders shows this to be the case largely for the Americas too. I'm quite fascinated by the tendency towards horizontal borders in the more "natural" continents or Europe and Asia - perhaps it's just a chance result caused by the existence of Russia, but I don't see any a priori reason why countries should tend to have greater variety of longitude than latitude so this is an interesting thing to think about.

Another thing I need to turn into a poster.

One of the most common arguments in favour of a need to equalise incomes and wealth is that unequal distributions lead to unequal political influence. There's a crucial problem with this: they don't.

"Because he composed the music without the benefit of knowing what the title was going to be, Copland was often amused when people told him that he had captured the beauty of the Appalachians in his music".

A profile of Paul Krugman. Reading this was what led to me deciding to actually read Pop Internationalism, as opposed to merely keeping it on my Amazon wish list.

Going by the books on this list which I have actually read, I come out as four parts Ravenclaw, four parts Gryffindor, three parts Slytherin and only one part Hufflepuff. From the same author, One Direction's What Makes You Beautiful as a Goedel sentence.

Despite what this says, The King's Gambit seems (to me) to be pretty popular online. I personally play the King's Bishop's Gambit as one of my favourite openings (others of my favourite openings include the Benko, the Queen's Gambit, the Sokolsky, and the Grand Prix Attack).

Pakistanis would rather turn down free money than fill in an anonymous form acknowledging gratitude to the Americans giving it to them. At first I assumed this was a failure of US soft power caused by the War on Terror, although thinking over it I wonder if it has more to do with cultural factors - I'm reminded of responses to the Ultimatum Game where people would turn down generous offers for fear of acquiring costly obligations.

Andrew Cuomo might not be so terrible compared to many other Democrats - what with cutting spending and promoting civil rights he could even be one of the small-l libertarians (stereotyped as right-wing on economic policy, left-wing on social policy) thought to make up around 20% of the US population. My key worries is that he could end up running against someone like Rand Paul, in which case I daresay most self-described libertarians would flock to the Paul banner and do a lot of damage to those of us who are trying to reclaim the whole "compassion for the poor" thing from the left.

Very hi-res picture, very pretty.

Harry Potter, as Ayn Rand might have written it.

Sweden, utopian model of income equality, turns out to have high wealth inequality. I'd be interested to see the level of social mobility alongside these.

Drowning less often than previously

One of the key tricks to learn as a kayaker is Rolling - that is, self-righting after you capsize. It generally relies on two things: first, something of a base against which to push, and second, a strong hip-flick. The hip-flick is not too difficult to get the hang of, and will allow you to self-right using a nearby rock/side-of-the-pool/someone else's kayak. However, the base component relies upon one of these being available - which generally isn't the case - or on the ability to create base of your own with the paddle. This is not an easy thing to get the knack of: in order to pull it off while upside down you have to (after not panicking, which is of course the first danger) bring your paddle to your side, lean forward, sweep it outwards, and using your whole torso pull it against the water - all while performing a slow yet powerful hip-flick. I'm probably making it sound harder than it actually is; the point is that it takes a lot of practice to get the hang of. By "practice" I mean repeatedly and deliberately capsizing yourself, while going through the motions, with someone else on hand to dead-man-save you once you need to come up for air.

I've been practising in this way each Tuesday evening for the last few months, and eventually, last night, I performed my first unassisted roll. It was amazing how clean the whole thing felt - just one motion through the water, and before I knew it I was upright. I only managed it twice, in about thirty attempts over the course of the evening; that said, there were a couple of times where I was very close to getting up and only tipped again at the last second.

Hopefully over the next few weeks I'll turn it into a knack and be able to self-right automatically and reliably. After I finished practising for the evening, I spent a while watching over another guy who was better at it than I but still not 100% reliable with his rolls. "Dead-man-saving" someone - that is, righting someone in a kayak when you're not - is actually pretty easy, you just have to get your centre of mass on top of their kayak in order to provide downward force for the roll.

HMHB, and Trying not to drown

On Tuesday evenings, I go kayaking with Manchester University Canoe Club (MUCC). Today we had the drill where you fill all the kayaks with water, and then the challenge is to get them all empty of water and get people into them, without touching the sides of the pool. Let's just say that if ever I'm in a group of people stranded in a fairly shallow sea with all the lifeboats currently underwater, I'll drown myself immediately in order to be spared going through the experience again. The group eventually got one kayak sorted before time ran out; I spent most if not all of the time trying to keep out of the way, and that was probably for the best.

That aside, I've had a fairly good few days. Last Thursday, I saw Half Man Half Biscuit live; it was incredible. I don't tend to swear Prior to then, I had never intentionally sworn (as in, realising the word I was using was a swearword rather than just an insult - ah, the joys of being nine years old) excepting when quoting others, and, having read about the singing along that is a mainstay of their concerts due to the devotion of their fanbase, I was uncertain as to what I would do in songs like "Vatican Broadside", "National Shite Day" and "Fuckin' 'Ell, It's Fred Titmus"; in the event, I just went along with it, swore more in one evening than I intend to in the entire rest of my life (any other HMHB concerts I may go to notwithstanding), and had a great time  doing so. There's a video of "For What is Chatteris?" (first song of the encore) here, although it's not the best quality and the person taking the video had the misfortune to be near the back; by virtue of being there early, I was lucky enough to be in the middle of the front row of the audience.