Posted on 11/17/2018 4:43:08 AM PST by reaganaut1
...
Since the World Scrabble Championship began in 1991, all winners have been male. The North American Scrabble Championship has had one female winner (in 1987) since its founding in 1978. All eight finalists in this year’s French World Scrabble Championships were men.
Competitive Scrabble constitutes a natural experiment for testing the feminist worldview. According to feminist dogma, males and females are identical in their aptitudes and interests. If men dominate certain data-based, abstract fields like engineering, physics and math, that imbalance must, by definition, be the result of sexism—whether a patriarchal culture that discourages girls from math or implicit bias in the hiring process.
But there are no cultural expectations that discourage females from memorizing dictionaries—a typical strategy of competitive Scrabble players, often in a foreign language that the player doesn’t speak. Girls are as free as boys to lap up vocabulary. Nor are there misogynist gatekeepers to keep females out of Scrabble play; the game, usually first learned at home, is open to all. According to Hasbro , 83% of recreational Scrabble players 25 to 54 are female.
Championship Scrabble, however, rewards typically male obsessions: strategy, math, a passion for competition, and a drive to memorize facts. Mr. Richards’s mother told the Guardian in 2015 that he “related everything to numbers” when he was growing up. Feminists will need to employ circular logic to conjure forth a discriminatory barrier in Scrabble: Males’ excellence at a certain activity itself keeps females out. But that leaves unanswered the question of how males came to excel at Scrabble—or any other abstract, competitive activity—in the first place.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
I’ve never had a wreck, knock on wood, but my car is in the shop for the holidays and I’ve had to argue with the insurance company for two weeks because Mr. b ran into parking posts. Big bright yellow parking posts! Parking posts weren’t moving and they certainly didn’t jump out in the road in front of him. All because he made a midnight run (in MY vehicle rather than his) for burgers which he knows he shouldn’t have because they send his blood sugar up. That’s one expensive burger that the budget didn’t need.
The ‘women bashing’ seems to be worse on the weekends. Beginning Friday evening there is a weekend crescendo of unhappiness and bashing. I suspect a combination of no date and possibly alcohol contribute to the problem.
Hahaha...you don’t know me...I make the driving decisions....decisively. .. ..but I agree a lot of women drive stupidly...and there’s men who do also...especially older ones.
Alcohol and former bad relationships play a part here, no doubt. I forgot that “lesbian” is another common insult when you refuse to play ball with constant women-hating. It may also be ghey but we have some “incels” here if I have the term right.
Bwhahahahaaha! I had to ask my fifteen year old daughter, who is much hipper than I, what an incel is. She basically said “internet warrior with no knowledge of the intimacies of women... you see them a lot of 4Chan...”
She is a trip.
She’s very cool!
Not to butt in on the argument...but this thread is about competitive activities. Not getting safely to the hair dresser and back.
I'll give you rallye driver Michèlle Mouton. (Biggest female name in motorsports ever. And even she managed only one second championship place in her career.) Name one other world class female driver.
In the history of Formula 1 racing (close to 100 years) all female drivers (yes, all 5 of them...) put together managed to gather a total of 0.5 (zero-point-five) career championship points. Zero-point-five.
r1- I do not believe the process is unfair. In the world of chess, for a time, chess was somewhat of a ‘national sport’ in Russia. They groomed and tutored promising females assiduously - Russia would have taken great national pride in producing a female champion. Russian male chess champions dominated the game for 50 years from the late 40’s to the early 90’s.
When Ronaldus Magnus caused the collapse of the iron curtain, many emigrated to the US, and parked themselves in NYC. Subsequently, area schools began to win championships:
https://tinyurl.com/ycmcg5xo
and
https://tinyurl.com/y8v9w73y
and
https://tinyurl.com/y9ck4bs7
What remains interesting however, is the point of the thread (imo) - WHY is the female brain so far, incapable of such a summit?
To miss m and Mermaid - this is in no way a bash at women. In truth I find your comments interesting and informative on the various subjects we prattle on about here on FR.
In fact I believe these 3 sisters could beat anyone on FR in a game of chess, BLINDFOLDED!
“My Brilliant Brain” is about the Polgar sisters, Susan in particular (@47 min.). Natgeo had her in an fMRI to actually look into the area of her brain she used to process chess problems (it was the ‘facial recognition’ area).
Fascinating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wzs33wvr9E
Hi Mermaid Girl, To clairify my statements, I never said women were bad drivers. Rather I stated that women are constantly looking for other drivers to make decisions and assert themselves. Then when the coast is clear of any possible conflict the woman driver will proceed to continue driving. Post Script. I am terrible at charades, scrabble, and Wheel of Fortune.
Off topic, but I’d like to share my recent discovery of a female prodigy, Alma Deutscher:
She’s completely captivating to me:
https://www.almadeutscher.com/
Musical genius on the level of Mozart, in our time!
Lol nailed it.
Just because there are fewer cars on the sidewalk.
If women wear low cut outfits then the men would be distracted. You can tell in Scrabble when the guy spells out BREASTS for 100 points....
I recall seeing somewhere that men have longer “tails” on the bell curve. That is, men go out more standard deviations than women. Hence, the smartest men are far better than the smartest women. It works the other way too: the most serious mental cases are men. Perhaps I saw this in book “The Bell Curve”, but don’t have time now to source it fully.
It’s worth noting that the smartest individuals in a nation tend to push it forward. The future success of a nation is largely determined by the outliers, which are almost always men. At the risk of sidetracking this thread, DJT is extremely smart.
As a retired race car driver I can tell you that my experience racing made me a much more sedate highway driver. Why? Driving a race car in competition is SO far beyond what can be done on highways with street cars, that the highway stuff is just boring. I lost all interest in it.
When I was young, before I began racing in serious organized competition I thought I was driving fast on the highway. I wasn’t.
You can drive stupid on the highway, but it bears no comparison to racing.
Like I said, better is subjective - so maybe safety is an important criteria to you in judging it, but not to all.
The reason also matters - So to drive Grandma to the nursing home, then yeah, maybe Mom is better. But to get to the airport on time, I’d put Dad behind the wheel.
To be fair, Judit Polgár - considered to be the greatest female player of all time reached the ELO ranking of #8 overall, far and above Hou Yifan’s #90ish rankings. Judit even took games off of some of the best male players, like Magnus Carlsen (current best in the world), Garry Kasparov (disputably considered the best of all time). Though she is currently retired, and the coach of the Hungarian’s Mens team.
Either way though, showing the diamond in the rough doesn’t dispute the fact women do generally - far worse than men on average in things like this.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.