Is this really problem solving? I thought this stuff was done by basically just memorizing patterns. Not saying it's easy, but seems like more a combination of memorization + muscle memory.
...at least that's what they claim, so child services won't visit them and people online don't bash them for abusing the child, if they claim 2 hours it's fair to assume she trains at least double that, poor kid. You have it same with all those athlete factories in China, dozens of thousands childhoods ruined, so they find one great athlete able to compete at olympics.
I'm a bit curious about the rationale behind splitting the category by gender for rubik's cube. Is there a difference in dexterity to justify it?
Sound about as useful as splitting rubik's cube champion by weight class.
Video looks impressive, though the resources poured into that training seems excessive to me. Maybe I'm too poor and don't understand how rich people raise their kids?
It's probably more about encouraging participation in the event amongst women. There's probably a hundred male competitive cubers for every female cuber. Having it segregated means that stories like this find their way onto the front page of HN.
I get it, but if women feel discouraged in a sport they're perfectly qualified for and not disadvantaged in the least, creating a category jus tto accomodate anxiety or lack of interest is actually discrimination no?
Shouldn't the work of incentivising more women be outside of the tournament and not bend the tournament altogether?
I remember when it was called publically "positive discrimination", but I guess it's not part of the newspeak, because everyone can see it's actually a discrimination even if you slap there "positive" to make it look better.
How is tracking a women’s world record discrimination or “bending the tournament”? It’s not as if women are being prevented from competing with men. Speedcubing competitions are open, single-category.
It’s not as if women are being prevented from competing with men - I don't know a lot about this, so I automatically assumed they are all segregated. If they aren't I have no problem, everyone is free.
There are a lot of environmental factors which need generational changes to make Women compete equally with Men. Most of the really talented women are never given the chances they need or their focus is diverted to "girly" things. So we are only seeing a small subset of women. To encourage more women, we need categories like this.
In an ideal world, yes. But I think we're finding that it's practically impossible to eliminate toxicity completely, and people are irrationally bothered by "the outgroup".
"I can tolerate anything except the outgroup" talks about how people more fiercely reject a group very similar to their own, yet slightly different, more than they reject groups that are actually very different.
It leads to stupid gatekeeping like "treat the male chess players better than the female ones" and small nudges will never overcome it.
If women feel put off by chess unless they have their own tournaments, then they can have their own tournaments. It literally hurts nobody.
If you want to have a chess game against women, I'm sure you can do so. They aren't stopping you from playing them.
They're just stopping you from playing in the tournament they created because others were toxic to them in the existing ones.
and people are irrationally bothered by "the outgroup" - so is that not a problem worth solving? We just avoid it?
then they can have their own tournaments - of course, no one should actively stop them. I am more concerned that an organization managing the tournament decides to create a new category rather then putting in the effort to bring everyone to the same playing field. I mean is that not the decades long battle that made it all the way to the workplace? Should we also create female software engineering roles, and female CEO roles bc the CEO market is crowded by tech bros? If you have $1B, and you have to solve this problem, how do you split it, that's my question.
You are trying to extrapolate one single solution to all situations because they appear identical to your mind. Those situations are very different in their details.
What kind of toxicity are females experiencing when entering Rubik’s cube competitions?
I think it’s more likely that people often don’t like being in a noticeable out group, and that females experience that more negatively than males, so they skip it.
No need to blame anyone, and it doesn’t deny the attempt to help females participate.
"If women feel put off by chess unless they have their own tournaments, then they can have their own tournaments. It literally hurts nobody."
I'm not convinced that this is completely true.
The fact that there is a category reserved for women when there is no technical reason for such separation in that activity could make girls assume that women are somehow less proficient at that activity and other similar activities. That could discourage the best of them from even engaging in that activity or similar activities.
In some activities, such as power lifting, it's pretty obvious that such separation is essential as women would rarely, if ever, win at the most levels of competition in almost any age group (I don't know if this is true, for example, in the 1-3 month old category!). In these cases offering separation encourages participation.
In this particular case, who cares?! It's speedcubing and likely this girl will lose interest in the activity soon and move onto something else (or, more likely, I suspect her parents will push her into something else and drill her on that for a couple years).
you do have a point in that separate categories reduces or even prevents both groups from competing against each other. thus we'll not know if they are differently qualified. also competition drives effort, so having a larger pool of competitors pay push participants to increase their effort.
on the other hand, in this young age physical development between boys and girls can be very different. so maybe separation is necessary because of that.
It depends on what your goals are. If your goal is to get more women to do rubik cube becsuse they are underrepresbted then the discrimination is justified.
Any kind of treatment that doesn't follow the law of jungle is discrimination. We need to think which one of them are better for our societal outcomes as a whole.
I was surprised, too, and looked it up. WCA officially doesn't differentiate. The human World Record is 3.51 currently held by a Yiheng Wang (male). So there is quite a gap to the new record by Lian Yunzh. But if she continues like that, I think we will find out soon whether there are any biologic reasons for the gap or if it is just because there are many more males into that kind of thing.
> or if it is just because there are many more males into that kind of thing.
Women "trail behind" men in things like speedcubing, e-sports and so on, and I've always felt that it's simply because they've got better things to do with their time.
I mean, chess makes the same supposition, that women need a separate league.
There are arguments that it promotes equality, that it’s more fair… but I think the reality is closer to “it would be embarrassing for a man to be beaten by a woman”.
If you look at chest rankings the more reasonable explanation is that almost no women chess player would even come close to the top currently. Of the top 500 only 8 are women.
> There are arguments that it promotes equality, that it’s more fair… but I think the reality is closer to “it would be embarrassing for a man to be beaten by a woman”.
The reality is simply that women would not stand a chance, with unbelievably few exceptions (and even they wouldn't have much of a chance). Do you also think that we have women's sports because it would be embarrassing for men to be beaten by a woman?
Not women in theory, women in practice. The chess-playing women alive right now would not stand a chance based on their performance and ability.
As with football, basketball, and other pursuits, in chess there are 13 year old boys who will beat the top women. Although in chess they're fractionally harder to find.
I would be interested to see a leaderboard comparison between male and female cubers. As far as I know, there should be no real biological advantage either way
I read that the reason so many fields appear to be male-dominated is just that men have wider variance on almost anything you can measure, so outliers on any metric are more likely to be men.
Ultra-endurance definitely seems to have one of the thinnest sex differentials in sports.
Still, when I ask Google to provide a list of top 10 ultra endurance runners in terms of absolute performance across sexes, it lists not a single woman and elaborates: "While female athletes like Courtney Dauwalter have occasionally won mid-tier ultramarathons outright over the entire field, in highly competitive, top-tier international events, the absolute raw times and physical performance indexes lean heavily toward the elite male field."
> a) objective scoring b) no gender split rankings b) women in the top 10, consistently?
Why are changing the criteria?
Here are a list of race results you can look through.[0]
Look at the longest distance & time races such as the multi day one and females are "in the top 10, consistently", in overall results.
And thats with currently only about 20% of ultra endurance runners are female -- but growing. Apparently the science has female biology as superior for the longer distances (>195 miles) and studies[1] show that they are faster in amateur pace per mile at the greater distances
It's for the same reason we split any contest by gender: so women can win it.
Chess has a whole separate WxM category so while if they're really good at chess they can become a real GM, but there's also an easier category called WGM (Woman Grandmaster). Same for IM, FM, and CM - they have easier equivalents called WIM, WFM, and WCM.
So happy to see that she is still 100% kid, but with superpowers that surprise her, first, I might add, because she is just fast like that.
As a (past) cuber myself, but generaly into
almost any competitive hand eye cordination thing, it would be fun to introduce her to the full varity of targeting, thrown or shot , and similar sports, and more practical things like useing hand tools, very, very precisely.
The down side is that bieng better can often be a liability and also teaching her to recognise the ones who get viscious passive/agressive and will then seek to undermine, cheat, trick, trap, and betray, because thats what THEY are good at.
When the differences are in the one tens and one hundreds of a second, isn't the initial configuration a huge factor? How do they prepare the start for a competition like this? Can't just be a random scramble, right?
of course she is Asian, poor kid, Asian parents do this to their kids, so they excel in one field/discipline after hundreds of hours training and lost childhood, it's completely meaningless victory for her future life, but at least parent's ego was stroked and they have now bragging rights, sad...
for anyone who thinks about calling me a racist - lived in China for years, my wife is Chinese and I have mixed kids, so I am bit familiar with Chinese/East Asian parenting (and trying to stop ideas like these ocassionally)
This is an amazing endeavour for a child but I am sceptical about the transfer of this dexterity to real life achievements and eventually happiness. My son was obsesssed with LEGO, making his own sets and uploading them to public repos, at that age and now at 11 yo all he wants to be a soccer player with no interest in any intellectual activity.
Soccer is not just physical - it's also team work, strategy, diet, tenacity, etc. A lot of those skills can be learned from almost any activity, including building lego sets online.
The best soccer players are incredibly intelligent and fast thinking.
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[ 0.90 ms ] story [ 72.2 ms ] threadWhich is a good thing, because going downhill is fun and easy!
Average of 3 is under 4.5 seconds.
Next up: something something China slave labor, Wang Wang.
Sound about as useful as splitting rubik's cube champion by weight class.
Video looks impressive, though the resources poured into that training seems excessive to me. Maybe I'm too poor and don't understand how rich people raise their kids?
Shouldn't the work of incentivising more women be outside of the tournament and not bend the tournament altogether?
"I can tolerate anything except the outgroup" talks about how people more fiercely reject a group very similar to their own, yet slightly different, more than they reject groups that are actually very different.
It leads to stupid gatekeeping like "treat the male chess players better than the female ones" and small nudges will never overcome it.
If women feel put off by chess unless they have their own tournaments, then they can have their own tournaments. It literally hurts nobody.
If you want to have a chess game against women, I'm sure you can do so. They aren't stopping you from playing them.
They're just stopping you from playing in the tournament they created because others were toxic to them in the existing ones.
then they can have their own tournaments - of course, no one should actively stop them. I am more concerned that an organization managing the tournament decides to create a new category rather then putting in the effort to bring everyone to the same playing field. I mean is that not the decades long battle that made it all the way to the workplace? Should we also create female software engineering roles, and female CEO roles bc the CEO market is crowded by tech bros? If you have $1B, and you have to solve this problem, how do you split it, that's my question.
I think it’s more likely that people often don’t like being in a noticeable out group, and that females experience that more negatively than males, so they skip it.
No need to blame anyone, and it doesn’t deny the attempt to help females participate.
I'm not convinced that this is completely true.
The fact that there is a category reserved for women when there is no technical reason for such separation in that activity could make girls assume that women are somehow less proficient at that activity and other similar activities. That could discourage the best of them from even engaging in that activity or similar activities.
In some activities, such as power lifting, it's pretty obvious that such separation is essential as women would rarely, if ever, win at the most levels of competition in almost any age group (I don't know if this is true, for example, in the 1-3 month old category!). In these cases offering separation encourages participation.
In this particular case, who cares?! It's speedcubing and likely this girl will lose interest in the activity soon and move onto something else (or, more likely, I suspect her parents will push her into something else and drill her on that for a couple years).
on the other hand, in this young age physical development between boys and girls can be very different. so maybe separation is necessary because of that.
Any kind of treatment that doesn't follow the law of jungle is discrimination. We need to think which one of them are better for our societal outcomes as a whole.
Women "trail behind" men in things like speedcubing, e-sports and so on, and I've always felt that it's simply because they've got better things to do with their time.
Feeling is no substitute for thinking, no matter how much applause this sort of statement will get you from the fairer sex.
Specially in contest competitions.
There are arguments that it promotes equality, that it’s more fair… but I think the reality is closer to “it would be embarrassing for a man to be beaten by a woman”.
But it's a fair assumption considering how Kasparov treated Polgar.
The reality is simply that women would not stand a chance, with unbelievably few exceptions (and even they wouldn't have much of a chance). Do you also think that we have women's sports because it would be embarrassing for men to be beaten by a woman?
As with football, basketball, and other pursuits, in chess there are 13 year old boys who will beat the top women. Although in chess they're fractionally harder to find.
* Equestrian endurance racing: https://www.fei.org/endurance/rankings
* Long-distance sled-dog racing: https://iditarod.com/race/2023/
* NHRA drag racing: https://www.nhra.com/news/2023/final-2023-camping-world-drag...
* Crossword solving: https://crosswordtournament.com/2018/index.htm
* Dog agility: https://www.agilitynow.eu/results/agility-world-championship...
I read that the reason so many fields appear to be male-dominated is just that men have wider variance on almost anything you can measure, so outliers on any metric are more likely to be men.
Still, when I ask Google to provide a list of top 10 ultra endurance runners in terms of absolute performance across sexes, it lists not a single woman and elaborates: "While female athletes like Courtney Dauwalter have occasionally won mid-tier ultramarathons outright over the entire field, in highly competitive, top-tier international events, the absolute raw times and physical performance indexes lean heavily toward the elite male field."
Why are changing the criteria?
Here are a list of race results you can look through.[0]
Look at the longest distance & time races such as the multi day one and females are "in the top 10, consistently", in overall results.
And thats with currently only about 20% of ultra endurance runners are female -- but growing. Apparently the science has female biology as superior for the longer distances (>195 miles) and studies[1] show that they are faster in amateur pace per mile at the greater distances
[0] https://ultrarunning.com/calendar/race-results
[1] https://runrepeat.com/state-of-ultra-running
Chess has a whole separate WxM category so while if they're really good at chess they can become a real GM, but there's also an easier category called WGM (Woman Grandmaster). Same for IM, FM, and CM - they have easier equivalents called WIM, WFM, and WCM.
of course she is Asian, poor kid, Asian parents do this to their kids, so they excel in one field/discipline after hundreds of hours training and lost childhood, it's completely meaningless victory for her future life, but at least parent's ego was stroked and they have now bragging rights, sad...
for anyone who thinks about calling me a racist - lived in China for years, my wife is Chinese and I have mixed kids, so I am bit familiar with Chinese/East Asian parenting (and trying to stop ideas like these ocassionally)
The best soccer players are incredibly intelligent and fast thinking.