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    ‮strfry("emanresu") The handover is when it all went wrong. They should have given it over to Taiwan instead. Would have solved all their problems and then some, without violating the actual treaty. I really don't get why they did it - the SU had fallen, so they didn't really have any need for China anymore.

    I guess it follows whatever happened to them as caused by that since then they had coming. Man, what is it with the UK and more or less openly supporting their own enemies?
    DonJon well yeah, it is an authoritarian system after all. the only reason i doubt they'd want another tiananmen is because it'd be an international PR disaster for them. Regarding mainland china: there's certainly political repression happening but i think there's a lot of mainland chinese people just being ok with the system and just really not caring about this democracy thing.

    also during the handover in 1997, HK represented nearly a fifth of china's total GDP. Now it's only a fraction of that so HK is less valuable economically to china. so that could have something to do with the way they're now handling HK. still, i doubt china will ever want to let HK be independent even if HK eventually lose its economical value
    ‮strfry("emanresu") If that does happen, then can't the PRC act with impunity? It's only with regard to Hong Kong that they have to maintain a thin veneer of legitimacy, on the mainland they can do whatever they want.

    What the West could do is realize that this kind of stuff will only ever get worse if they do nothing and then proceed to back Hong Kong. Which, obviously, it will not do but will rather proceed to eventually suffer the same fate as Africa. But they could and should do that, I think.

    EDIT: A new challenger appears! And the Federal Reserve are even closing ranks behind their country! I am feeling optimistic about the future!
    DonJon I don't believe it will be another Tiananmen, at least i hope so. honestly as much as I support hongkongers i don't see what can HK do as mainland china has most of the power. tienanmen was more than 30 years ago and is still being censored

    what beijing really dreads the most i think is for the protests and more importantly the opposition to the CPC to "invade" mainland china, if it reach a certain critical mass and they lose control
    ‮strfry("emanresu") https://twitter.com/AlexandreKrausz/status/1160947525442056193

    With the British preoccupied with Brexit, it doesn't exactly take a genius to figure out how they will react (i.e. not at all)

    So do you think they will pull a Tiananmen? Is there anywhere you can bet money?
    ‮strfry("emanresu") No, I expressed myself clumsily. I do understand the assertion that is being made ("differences in participation rates explain differences in means"), what I don't understand is by which mechanism this would work - a study has been linked which explains differences at the tails, but I can't see how this would have any bearing on the means. The "broad strokes" of the latter effect is what I'm talking about. This has not been discussed for six pages or anywhere close to it.

    An analogy: I understand how a smaller country's top ten high earners' average income would be lower than those of a bigger but equally rich country, or for that of matter a substantially bigger but poorer country. What I don't understand is how the smaller country would have a lower median income than its equally rich but bigger counterpart. This seems completely counter-intuitive and is not an effect I have ever heard of. And I would appreciate a pointer, for instance if there is a name for it, or if it's mentioned in passing in some article.

    If the point is that these types of matters are not acceptable to discuss, or for that matter if you just think that it's an unacceptable derail, then that's another thing entirely and I understand - your forum, your rules, and it does seem like the discussion, or at least my position on the matter, could be construed to be in violation of them, specifically Don't 3b. ("... discriminating ... remarks are not welcome on this board.")
    DonJon
    Posted by Screwtape
    You've been arguing with wertigon for nearly six pages of this twelve-page thread. If you have not yet perceived the broad strokes of your errors, I don't think things will suddenly become clear just by asking one more time.

    Stash this conversation in the back of your mind and think about it again in five years' time or so, and see if anything you've learned in the intervening time makes it less confusing.


    also agree with this.
    Screwtape You've been arguing with wertigon for nearly six pages of this twelve-page thread. If you have not yet perceived the broad strokes of your errors, I don't think things will suddenly become clear just by asking one more time.

    Stash this conversation in the back of your mind and think about it again in five years' time or so, and see if anything you've learned in the intervening time makes it less confusing.
    ‮strfry("emanresu") It is considered customary to at least point out the broad strokes of the error, even if one is too busy to give a more in-depth explanation.
    Kakashi I'll second that notion.
    wertigon Just... Stop. Go see a statistics professor at your local college/university and point them towards the study, if you have any more questions about it.

    Your ignorance is painfully obvious and I've got better things to do than explain every single nuance where you are wrong. 'Nuff said.
    ‮strfry("emanresu")
    Posted by wertigon
    Re-read the study carefully. Now you are just making shit up again.

    There is an established gap already, and that gap will be reflected in means. For any study to make the claim you are proposing it would have been shot dead at review and laughed out of the room, since it is statistics 101.

    That study is riddled with mathematical and grammatical errors. So whatever review process they have appears to mostly be a rubber-stamp one, or else they'd have been told to fix them before publishing. Psychology does have infamously lax review standards, after all.
    (this doesn't necessarily mean all psych studies are wrong, nor that all sloppy studies are wrong, but it means you can't blindly trust the review process.)

    But it does indeed make that claim:
    Even if two groups have the same average (mean) and variability (s.d.), the highest performing individuals are more likely to come from the larger group.
    This is their explanation. Nothing about means being different, it expressly only deals with the differences at the tails.
    In the end too, they mention nothing about different means:
    Given a distribution with known mean μ and s.d. δ, this final formula defines the expectation of the kth highest value within a sample of size n, valid provided n is large and k is relatively small. As such, it affords us a method for estimating the expected rating of a range of top players from the German chess data for each gender; indeed, we use the formula to calculate the expected ratings of the top 100 male and female players using the mean and s.d. of the population (the German chess data), in turn allowing us to determine the expected difference in rating between those players.

    If they'd have used different male and female means, they'd have said so, right? Then it'd have said "populations" or some such. It seems you make a claim vastly different from the article's. Which I'd be fine to discuss, but you can't claim it has anything to do with the results of the so-called study.

    Can you point to anywhere in the study where they suggest the means should be different?
    The only rebuttal article - and this is a quite controversial opinion mind you, so for it to only have a single rebuttal piece is in itself a testament of strength - attacks the method for predicting too high numbers. This does not matter however, as it predicts both pools as equally wrong and the purpose is not to predict skill, but skill gap. The model may need some calibration for sure, but is otherwise fine.

    So, nope. Just another case of illiteracy. We are done now. :)

    That there's not any rebuttal articles doesn't mean too much. If the study is poorly done, it remains this whether it has one or a hundred rebuttal articles, and if the study is well done, it remains this whether it has one or a hundred rebuttal articles too.

    It levies another more striking criticism, my main gripe, that of the model not fitting well. If participation rates alone explained it, then the woman with female rank k should have an expected total rank of k*(n/nf). And with statistical methods, you can apparently calculate a confidence interval. Regardless, it's apparent that that model doesn't fit all too well:


    For instance, if you had 50 men and 50 women, then the fifth best woman should have the tenth best overall ranking provided their scores were drawn from the same distribution. If you had 50 men and 10 women, the second best woman should have about the same ranking as the tenth best man. And if they don't, then the scores aren't drawn from the same distribution, which was my claim all along.
    CaptainJistuce You're missing the most important detail, though. Women are genetically inferior to men, and thus inherently worse at chess.
    </sarcasm>
    wertigon Re-read the study carefully. Now you are just making shit up again.

    There is an established gap already, and that gap will be reflected in means. For any study to make the claim you are proposing it would have been shot dead at review and laughed out of the room, since it is statistics 101.

    The only rebuttal article - and this is a quite controversial opinion mind you, so for it to only have a single rebuttal piece is in itself a testament of strength - attacks the method for predicting too high numbers. This does not matter however, as it predicts both pools as equally wrong and the purpose is not to predict skill, but skill gap. The model may need some calibration for sure, but is otherwise fine.

    So, nope. Just another case of illiteracy. We are done now. :)
    ‮strfry("emanresu") No, I am not saying that they have the same means. To be clear here, I am saying they have different means and that women are less competent than men.

    The study is saying men and women have the same means and are equally competent. The study aims to prove this by creating a model where they have the same means but still have differences at the top.

    You can't just claim that men and women are equally competent, however, and then come up with a model where men have an average score a standard deviation above women and call it a day, unless of course you want to argue that women are as competent as men but still get lower scores.
    wertigon This does not make sense.



    As per your own observations - females and males both have a bell curve distribution (ish). Both with a clearly distinguished differing mean.

    We have established there is a difference. Now you are telling me they have the same mean? My head hurts, but whatever.
    ‮strfry("emanresu") Primaries are coming up. Republican ones won't be very interesting to follow, but what about the Democrats'?

    Specifically, will they go for Harris or Sanders?

    Obviously, Biden would be electable like nothing else. He'd win the general against Trump with near absolute certainty. But the damage done to the party would be far too great. After having alienated the socially moderate fiscally liberate wing (Sanders), they'd proceed to alienate the socially liberal fiscally moderate wing (Clinton), leaving them without any base. This kills the party.

    Consider that in ten years or so the Democrats'll have it all locked down. TX was just a few percent from going blue, and as they saying goes, once you go blue, you never go back. They wouldn't want to risk this just to get a president in when they know they can just wait a few years and have that whole thing locked down.

    Also consider that Trump isn't doing much to prevent this or really anything which risks their electoral prospects in the long term (e.g. citizenship question on census, deportations). And with the coming recession, they've got him right where they'd want him to be. With Trump in the White House, it's trivial to blame the recession on his trade war, and then pull a repeat of 2008.

    It follows then that who they're picking to run for President will not really factor in electability, since they'd rather outright throw this one and make their move in 2024 when they've got a perfect storm. This rules out Biden, unless their decision-makers have an extraordinarily low time preference.

    The opposite of Biden, who'd be quite unelectable, but do a very good job of bringing young people back into the fold, is of course Sanders. With him, they can both have their demographic cake and eat it. Someone prone to wild speculation could even theorize they cut such a deal with him way back in 2016 so that he wouldn't stir up such a ruckus conceding, which a lot of people found quite odd.

    So I'd guess they'll go with Sanders. The flip side is of course if the decision-makers would prefer rushing to force their loyalist through. And I'm not sure if the Zeitgeist is such. There was a lot of internal hype over Clinton back in 2016 because she was the obvious successor to Obama, which there doesn't seem to be for Harris. On the other hand, it's possible they'd want to double down and go with the candidate the most dissimilar to Trump they can find. Which Sanders obviously isn't - just look at the large numbers of people who are bullish on Sanders and Trump but bearish on Romney and Clinton.
    ‮strfry("emanresu")
    Posted by wertigon
    The hypothesis is that the skill difference between the k:th persons of the two pools correlate to their respective pool size, yes?

    No, only for the upper echelons. The paper doesn't put forth that hypothesis at all. Its claim is that, if you have 1000 men and 100 women, the top 10 men will have a higher average score than the top 10 women, because the top 10 men represent the 99th percentile but the top 10 women only the 90th.

    Suppose we have a total population size (Z) of 1000 individuals. In this pool size, we have 900 people from one group (X), and 100 people from a different group (Y).

    For a simplistic model, if a correlation exists between skill difference and pool size, and it is linear, the model could be something like: Dn = c1 * n + c2

    Where c1 and c2 are calculated from the ratio between X and Y.

    How's that work then? You become less skilled by being in a smaller group?

    That makes no sense. If you give a country with 10 million people some test, and each region has 1 million people, then those regions should have a lower average score by virtue of having a smaller population than the country as a whole. This is not mathematically possible.

    Another example: in the PISA rankings, Singapore and Finland both score highly despite being rather small countries.

    If no difference exist, X and Y should have the same mean. But since they do, X and Y should have different means, especially compared to Z. This is why I think you made a mistake in your model calculations.

    You can't just do that though. The study uses the same mean for them. If they didn't do that then the model wouldn't be consistent with their claims, see above.

    Either way a correlation has been proven. Perhaps a ML method could shed further light upon this. But, yes. I think we have reached the end for now.

    How'd ML help? It'd just be a roundabout way of doing regression.
    wertigon You still do not understand the methodology. The model *should* come up with different means. There is a difference in skill, because there is a difference in "pool size".

    Here, let me simplify the math for you. The advanced math you see is to deal with statistics and smoothen the curves. That is why it's there.

    The hypothesis is that the skill difference between the k:th persons of the two pools correlate to their respective pool size, yes?

    Suppose we have a total population size (Z) of 1000 individuals. In this pool size, we have 900 people from one group (X), and 100 people from a different group (Y).

    For a simplistic model, if a correlation exists between skill difference and pool size, and it is linear, the model could be something like: Dn = c1 * n + c2

    Where c1 and c2 are calculated from the ratio between X and Y.

    If no difference exist, X and Y should have the same mean. But since they do, X and Y should have different means, especially compared to Z. This is why I think you made a mistake in your model calculations.

    Either way a correlation has been proven. Perhaps a ML method could shed further light upon this. But, yes. I think we have reached the end for now.
    ‮strfry("emanresu") The study doesn't do that either though. c1 and c2 are poorly explained magic constants, m and s are stated as taken for the whole population. If I'd change the model to have different means for men and women, it just seems like a convoluted way to restate my original statement (women are worse at chess than men) - it would be patently absurd to claim that the difference in skills is accounted for by... a difference in skills, and that this proves men are not more skilled than women.

    Just to be clear: the claim the study makes is that differences in means for the two populations do not explain the skill gap, but rather that the skill gap is solely (or to 96%, anyway) explained by the fact that you've got more men playing chess than you've got women, which means you'd get more extreme scorers and so on and so forth, but that this only holds on the tails.
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      This does not actually go there and I regret nothing.