From William M. Briggs, PhD
Marilyn “vos Savant” scored one major victory in her life. (More than most.) She correctly (copied? noodled?) the correct answer to the Monty Hall problem.
Which by itself is only of minor interest. What got her the very well deserved publicity were the scores of Experts, many “PhD” academics, many intellectuals, wrote to say she was wrong.
She was right. The Experts were wrong.
Well, we’re used to that by now. These days we’re taken aback when an Expert gets something right.
The danger of being right and of being in the public eye, though, is the temptation to become an Expert oneself. Here’s Marilyn’s column this past Sunday.
This is an Expert’s answer. At the time I write, that the top 100 ranked chess players in the world are men. There was a woman a while back who breached the century barrier, but her victory was fleeting.
Randal P. is wrong. Pool is still a physical game. Not of constant brute strength, of course, but of finesse, subtlety, and endurance. The top players are all men, I believe (maybe I misinterpreted a name here or there).
I hereby make the startling prediction: these “disparities” will always be so.
Unless, as we have also seem time and again, the way rankings are computed changes. Perhaps the number of ovaries, or some similar asininity, will somebody be given great weight in the computations.
You might laugh. But it’s only at yourself.
Back on 6 June I predicted a woman would soon be awarded a Fields medal (in mathematics) because of gender “disparities” (there are many supporting quotes at the link; update: see the comments below, too).
I was delighted to learn shortly after that prediction that not only did a woman win the heretofore prestigious award, but a—-put down your drink, child, or cigarette before reading further—a Ukrainian woman (Maryna Viazovska).
I rewarded myself both a cigar and a brandy for that pick. Doubting whether she deserved the award, and suspecting it was a political, is the necessary and direct result of the stated affirmative-action-type policies of mathematical bigwigs.
Enter The Atlantic. Some female there wrote the article “Separating Sports by Sex Doesn’t Make Sense“. Here’s the money quote:
The Atlantic’s authoress is a True Believer. And scidolator. There is no other way, save outright lying, she could have allowed herself to write “researchers [etc.]” If you need Science to tell whether there is are “sex differences” between males and females, you are lost.
Van Anders is an Expert. And, if her email is accurate, an idiot. Expert is not quite synonymous with idiot, though the gap narrows weekly. Pretending, or actually being, perplexed by the obvious is the true mark of the modern academic. Aligning that academic perplexity in the direction of political mania is what creates the Expert.
Now in years past, I always joked that if one really believed there were no sex differences in athletic ability, then teams should be composed of only the best players, with sex irrelevant. Those calls always met silence from “activists”, because in their true hearts they knew what they desired was absurd.
No longer.
They have allowed themselves to finally believe, really believe, their own propaganda. Just like the mathematicians.
Here I make another bold prediction. Sex will no longer be officially considered in school sports. But because in this scheme, the best players would always be male, what counts as “the best” will change.
Possessing, say, breasts (that haven’t been sliced off by some gender-theory quack), will count. More likely it won’t be anything anybody is willing to write down. But a coach, desirous of keeping his job, will say, “I guess that Maggie looks okay.”
I can’t wait for the press to explain how it wasn’t Maggie’s fault that she wasn’t able to tackle that running back, even though she gripped his neck and rode on his back all the way to the end zone. It was sexism.
Buy my new book and learn to argue against the regime: Everything You Believe Is Wrong.
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