njkayaker

The enhanced number of Jamacans is cultural.

You oddly assume that 0.001% of a population characterizes the remaining 99.999%. That doesn't make sense (it's cherry picking since it isn't random).

You oddly assume that it's all genetics rather than cultural. And the selection you are seeing might not correlate that well with overly-simple race markers. Basketball playing ability almost certainly correlates higher with the presence of basket-ball courts (and the lack of other sport equipment). Do you really think that ping-pong playing ability correlates with being Chinese?

The probability that a randomly selected individuals from difference races will show a difference in basketball-playing ability is extremely close to zero. If you have a huge population of randomly selected people, you might determine a "statistically significant" difference but the difference is going to be tiny. Does a 0.1% difference in basketball playing ability really prove "superiority"?

Igo

The law of physics suggests that getting a bike vertical, balanced on two wheels and rolling is the greatest success one could have as a cyclist. For this I'd imagine at least one leg and two arms or two legs and one arm would be the prerequisite physiology to be a successful cyclist. But I image that has been stated here already. You don't have to be anything but this to be a successful cyclist.

surgeonstone

Maybe in a way, Einstein's famous quote has something relevant to say on this topic.

NO SPECIAL GIFT!
Carl Seelig, one of Einstein’s chief biographers, once wrote to him asking whether he inherited his scientific gift from his father’s side and his musical from his mother’s. Einstein replied in all sincerity, ‘‘I have no special gift—I am only passionately curious. Thus it is not a question of heredity.’’
Banesh Hoffmann, Albert Einstein—Creator and Rebel 􏰎Penguin Books, New York, 1972􏰀, p. 7.

HardyWeinberg

Interesting series of articles on the role of genetics in tippety-top tier athletes (athletes competing at their physiological limits vs comparing skills):

https://www.sportsscientists.com/2011...and-genes.html

There is a reductionist approach where 'everything' is accounted for and the only variable left is genetics maybe I am getting more reductionist as I get older and don't have time to take every single assumption apart but it seems compelling to me.

mattm

+1

+2

****, or move to P&R..

ugh this thread is starting to make me sick! Just when you thought we were moving forward..

wphamilton

Fascinating read. I'm not sure his diversion into chess helped his theme though. Just about anyone with basic aptitude can reach the expert level in Chess, and to become really good you almost have to start at a very early age. Like gymnastics in that respect. And then you have to enjoy a high level of competition in the formative years. There are only a few exceptions, and even the great natural player Capablanca followed this pattern.

I played in an Open tournament many years ago with one of the Polgar sisters mentioned in the article and I had the opportunity to observe her briefly. I didn't get the chance to play her unfortunately - she was winning and I was treading water way down the ranks - but I could see that she was zoned. Everyone does that, but this girl was gone. It was almost scary. I think that that level of concentration is a result of training, 100%, and so it doesn't advance the author's argument. Not to take away from the Polgar sisters' natural gifts, but he missed the mark there.

HardyWeinberg

I agree with you; I think he put so much thought into skill contests (vs contests of physiological limits) that he was unwilling to edit them out to save for another blog entry later even though they detracted from the point he was trying to make. Once he gets to 10,000 hours of blogging his posts will be perfect, I am sure!

AdelaaR

According to all kinds of "experts" around here that can't be true ... because, according to them, "Inuits" as a race do not exist and so since they do not exist they can not have any specific racial attributes either.

The fact that my two and a half year old son can clearly see, even from the outside, the difference between certain races of people is apparently also completely impossible.

AdelaaR

I never said that.

If that 0.1% difference means that it can make the difference in the top 50 best basketball players ever ... then: yes.

AdelaaR

An interesting read indeed.

AdelaaR

I'm sorry but I completely disagree on this topic.
I'm someone who's very good at logic, envisioning things inside my head, thinking ahead, etc ... and I know many, many people who simply are very bad at these things.
This doesn't mean that these people are lesser people ... certainly not ... but they clearly don't have the natural talent for aforementioned things where other people do.
Training obviously will enhance these things, but natural talent in these matters does exist.

wphamilton

I did note "with basic aptitude". There are surely inheritable genetic factors influencing a person's aptitudes and just as surely other factors. For my purposes I was only considering individuals having the aptitude and desire to become an expert (or beyond) in Chess. More specifically that would generally pertain to an average or better club player, who in turn is stronger than any of his extended family and social circles.

AdelaaR

Ok.
"just about anyone with basic aptitude" sounded like "any kid on the block" to me there.
It's an amazing game, chess.
I tried to make my own chess computer program when I was 16 or so, but never got it to work right.
My algorythm for making "the best possible move" tried to look at all possible moves and all the possible moves from there and so on, which quickly becomes quite a staggering number of moves, even for computers ... whereas most chess bots of that time had vastly more computing power and used known strategies and databases of high level master's games.
That was the first time I ran into what I call the "computer analysis hardware brick wall".
I have run into it hundreds of times since then ... oh how I long for the time at hand where everyone will be able to get vast computing power in the cloud

Genetic research, btw, suffers from exactly the same problem.
The number of combinations reaches such high numbers that, for now, it's impossible to really do any groundbraking research by directly comparing genetic data.

Dudelsack 

So if you acknowledge that races exist, you are a racist. But if you believe there are no races and, therefore, no logic behind affirmative action, then you are also a racist.

Why, that's why we're called the human race.

RecceDG

Which is precisely why no chess program written since the 1980s tries to do that anymore.

It was realized that chess breaks down into three phases: phase 1, the opening game, is limited in the number of moves because all (or most) of the pieces are still on the board and so there are a limited number of legal moves. phase 3, the end game, is when most of the pieces are gone and so there are a limited number of possible arrangements.

Accordingly, modern chess programs select from a an opening "book"; a database of possible openings ranked for strength, and play from the book until the situation has sufficiently diverged from the book. Then it plays computational, but is constantly comparing the layout to a closing "book"; a database of known positions and the moves needed to get from that position to victory (similar to the chess problems in the newspaper). Once it gets to a known "book" layout, it stops playing computationally and switches to following a script.

And the good ones add to the "book" after every game.

I am simplifying somewhat, but basically, playing computer chess is no longer as much about deep-search algorithms and much more about pattern recognition. The challenge is not the branching calculations, but rather very large scale high speed database searches.

Computational genetics works the same way. Given that a single trait may be governed by one to thousands of genes, it is madness to try deep searches. Instead, you do statistical analysis and large-scale pattern matching. Sequence thousands of genomes with the trait you have identified and look for common patterns.

Soooo then... given that you seem to have the challenges with computer chess and computational genetics wrong, might you not be mistaken about the genetic influence of "race" as well?

Oi, facepalm.

OK, look - "race" as a genetic construct is a fallacy. Does not exist.

"Race" as a social and political construct is VERY real, especially (but not limited to) the USA.

Just because all the reasons used to justify racial oppression and social-economic discrimination turn out to be utterly without basis in fact does not stop discrimination and oppression from happening.

DG

rebel1916

I said nothing if the kind. I just said this fount of ignorance has nothing to do with road bikes, and there are several more appropriate places on the forum for it.

wphamilton

Whoa there, he's right that the combinatorial explosion is where the challenge is. Pattern recognition is more interesting, but that's not where the programs surpassed humans. Brute force mini-max was the strength of Deep Blue, along with (as you said) the opening database and an endgame database beyond anything previously known.

Well everyone knows how to optimize a mini-max algorithm now so the real work is as you say. But Adelaar didn't get it wrong either.

I'm going to agree with the rest of it, but let's be fair about it!

abstractform20

*currently in dispute

abstractform20

how do you objectively measure the 50 best basketball players ever?

and larry byrd is top 10 fyi.

Wesley36

ROFL. On the one side we have people who trust the authority of rigourous research, empirical evidence, systematic inquiry and peer-review; on the other side, the authority of a two and a half year old. Who cares what serious inquiry says, what does your toddler think? Dunning-Kruger effect FTW!

I have no doubt that your son would clearly see this. I also have no doubt that if you suggested the earth was flat, your son would clearly see that too. Or if you told him the sun was Ra riding a chariot through the sky. For that matter, I am sure he can also clearly see, even from the outside, that Santa Claus is real. I am sure that your son also sees you as a paragon of intellect and physical prowess - guess what, pretty much every two and a half year old thinks their parents are more or less omnipotent.

Don't get me wrong, two and a half year olds are awesome, fun, often surprisingly logical (but lacking in experience and details). But capable of understanding and evaluating scientific data? Not so much.

AdelaaR

Dude ... seriously ... relax.
I say how I was trying, as a 16 year old boy, to come up with a chess computer on my own, without any help at all ... and I even describe how it was impossible and how it is done by others ... and from that you deduct that I am "wrong".
Then I describe how genetic research suffers from the same problem of lacking in computer power to do any actual deep analysis ... which is correct ... and then you describe exactly the same thing but add to it how they try and make up for that and conclude again from that that I am "wrong".
Wow man ... I advise you to do some self reflecting here.

AdelaaR

Some numbers:

The genetic similarity between men and women is about 99.7% ... yet there is a clear (about 15%) difference in athletic abilities.
The genetic similarity between humans and chimpansees is 98.7% ... the difference is quite obvious.

I just dug up these numbers and apparently there still is some debate over them so please correct them if they're wrong, but these numbers clearly show that it doesn't take much difference in genetic material to acount for huge differences as a result.

AdelaaR

I dug up some history and did some basic math.
Apparenly the last time a non coloured man ran the olympic 100m final was in 1980 in Moscow.
Americans weren't invited at that meeting, btw, so go figure.
Since that time, there have been eight olympic games with eight 100m finals.
Watch 'em here:
1984: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SfU0x65naQ
1988: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTM_mvA4kas
1992: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyGDo8wPPy4
1996: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqijESw6xHg
2000: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezcdSVzGwz4
2004: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNgKo4bc6oI
2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-urnlaJpOA
2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O7K-8G2nwU

That's a total of 64 athletes ... all of which were of African descent, as the evidence clearly shows.
Now ... about 1 in 5 people in the world are "black" ... so that means the pure mathematical probability of this happening is:

1 in 5 to the power of 64!

or:

1 in 542101086242752217003726400434970855712890625

That's a number with 45 digits!
Nobody on this forum can even pronounce that number without looking up how to pronounce it and even then it'll be mighty hard.
I called it "staggering" before ... but it's actually more than that ... it's "mindboglingly big" as the late Douglas Adams would have said it.

Is there anyone here bold enough to claim that such a probability can possibly be caused only by "nurture" or "culture"?
Isn't it quite obvious that there has to be more at work here than meets the eye?

Busta Quad

AdelaaR

Blame history ... or the olympic committee