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Comment by make3

10 days ago

Ageism also just one of these shitty unproven biases, like sexism, which is self-realizing by applying pressure to people who fall out of the mold even slightly.

He's 30 something, not 90.

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make3

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epolanski  10 days ago

It's not unproven, there's ample literature and research on the fact.

Besides, the age pool of chess itself confirms it.

There's a single player in his 50s in the top 50 of chess and not a single 60+ in the top 100.

Also, even carlsen himself says he's no longer as good as he was years before and his mind isn't as strong.

bsder  10 days ago

> Ageism also just one of these shitty unproven biases

You might be right, if we were talking about anything except chess.

Chess, unlike everything else, has a clear ranking system and lots of records for people to analyze. And unfortunately, the record is very clear: chess ability decreases after a certain age.

However, the decrease is more likely due to stamina than mental decline. Chess tournaments take a long time, and stamina definitely decreases with age. However, pro athletes demonstrate that you can probably go until around your early 40s before it becomes a real issue.

Having said that, it will be interesting to see how this generation does in the blitz formats as they age. Those will be less dependent upon stamina and a better measure of mental acuity for chess.

  • renewiltord  9 days ago

    He’s got a point. If the measure works for age, then let’s run it for sex, race, and religion. Then we can make conclusions about these categories and test if we’re willing to accept them. If we’re not, but we’re willing to accept them for age, then the balance of chance is that we’re ageist and just blinding ourselves to it because we are ageist.

    I think looking at the data you’d have to conclude that women can’t play chess as well as men, that black men can’t play chess as well as white men, and that Judeo-Christian (and perhaps Hindu Brahmins) beliefs are just as indicative.

    If we deny those conclusions as bigotry of immutable characteristics, it naturally leads to the age question.

    • bsder  9 days ago

      > I think looking at the data you’d have to conclude that women can’t play chess as well as men, that black men can’t play chess as well as white men, and that Judeo-Christian (and perhaps Hindu Brahmins) beliefs are just as indicative.

      Actually, chess data suggests that all of them are as good as one another. As soon as you have enough candidates in the pipeline, magically, any specific group suddenly becomes as good as any other.

      On the women's side, the Polgar sisters are both exemplar and counterexample. Clearly, given sufficient training, women CAN be rated highly (Judit cracked 2700). The fact that the women's side hasn't exploded just like the men's side can mostly be tracked to the fact that chess isn't considered a "feminine pursuit" worth putting the time into (that finally seems to be changing slowly in recent decades).

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IMTDb  10 days ago

Regarding sexism; most tournaments in Chess (including the world championship) are fully open and are thus gender netral: anyone can participate regardless of sex/gender and will compete on equal footing.

Women only categories have been created to give women visibility because they mostly were not able to reach advanced levels in the open format.

Some women choose to compete with men (Judit Polgár being a somewhat recent example) but most go straight to the women only tournaments to have a shot.

The men vs women « bias » is not unproven, they litterally had to create entire categories of competiton to account for it.

elevation  10 days ago

If the skill you need to select for is tactical combinatorics, then Chess dominance as a function of age would seem to support the premise of ageism.

What ageism ignores is that outside of chess, prescience outperforms other measures of productivity.