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PaperclipPerfector  21d ago (text post)   26710 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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Men outperform women in short distance events. And endurance events. And ultra-endurance events. That women dominate the Montane Spine is a flat-out lie. Or that they dominate swimming the English Channel. Or the Trans-Am bike race.

They also seem to forget that the women would have been pregnant a large portion of the time.

Also performance enhancing drugs have made many of the female pro athletes barely female.

I believe men are innately vastly more competitive than women. A man who trains for 50 000 hours will probably beat a woman who's trained for 5 000, even if she has a biological advantage.

The fact that women show up in the top ranks of ultra-endurance competitions at all, where as for the vast majority of other competitive events the top ranked woman will often be ranked like #203 or somewhere thereabouts, I think is strong evidence they have a real biological advantage.

For these ultra-distance events (unlike, say, a local 5K), you're already selecting among the most competitive. No one's doing the Montane Spine (particularly the Winter Spine) without a lot of motivation.

Debiting men and crediting women for greater male competitiveness aside, how far can we take such an argument? Should the US women's national soccer team being sometimes competitive with regional 14-15 boys teams (but likely not so for say, the basketball equivalents) be taken as evidence that, given greater male competitiveness, patriarchal oppression, societal conditioning, stereotype threat, internalized misogyny, having to spend so much of their lives performing emotional labor, and other modifications to the dragon, women have a real biological advantage in soccer?

If the gap between the best women and the best men in soccer is smaller than the gap between the best women and best at basketball, that is evidence for the biological advantage men have over women in soccer is smaller than it is for at least one other sport. To see if women have an actual biological advantage and not just a smaller disadvantage, it'd have to be compared to competitions where you knew there was no phsyical biological gender differences, just mental biological differences.

Chess, soccer, and boxing are three very different competitions and the men’s division handily outclasses the women’s in all of them.

If it that competitiveness is innate, then it is a biological phenomenon and a biological advantage for men. Otherwise it could not be innate. So what you're arguing doesn't point to a biological advantage for women, it says the opposite.

Yes, I was talking about muscle biology advantage. The neurological biology advantage in my model would still be with men

Speaking anecdotally as a moderately serious running hobbyist that runs with pretty strong athletes in a club, I would say that there is no meaningful difference in training between men and women above some (fairly low) level of running. By the time you get to even low-level college running, the women are generally pretty serious. I'm sure there are noticeable filters in terms of how many people are interested in going into these things in the first place, but among elite athletes, the training regimens are just not dramatically different. Everyone that doesn't get injured from it is running 100+ mile weeks with some mixture of VO2max intervals, lactic threshold work, and long runs. Women aren't just casually competing at a surprisingly high level, the women at that level are putting in the same rigorous training that the men are.

From my experience in professional and semiprofessional basketball I'd say the differences are pretty big.

My amateur/semi-professional team where no-one had any illusions of truly going pro (I hope) took our exercise much more seriously than literally professional female basketball teams. It was ridiculous. The same thing seemed to be true for soccer, but I have less intimate personal experience there.

On the other hand, the women I've known that have engaged in high level solo sports like swimming, running and tennis seemed to have taken things very seriously, sometimes too seriously.

100+ mile weeks

Woot? That is something like 22 km per day or every day a half marathon. :-o

I did mean men are more competitive on average, I know there are lots of very competitive women out there. And I'd assume a lot of the athletic and most competitive women would go into fields they're at minimum roughly equal biologically to men in, like long distance running or gymnastics. But I expect at the very highest levels of competition, like Olympic-tier athletics, the best men are putting in more hours/more intensity than the best women. But I do know there are vast numbers of women who put in more hours and intensity than I do at anything.

I think its crazy to think at the olympic tier men and women are not putting in the same hours training. They are going to have same coaches and if a coach sees an edge they can push at this level they will force their athletes to do it. Possibly some of the prevalence of drugs is even due to pressure from coaches.

I might be way off base, it's just the general impression I get. Even Olympic athletes have lives and don't spend all their time training. I think the most elite men cut out more non-training time than the most elite women do though.

What evidence would convince you that you are wrong?

It's not a very strongly held belief of mine. A combination of experts and highly upvoted/liked posts in ultramarathon communities agreeing women are just worse would probably be most convincing.

And where women are competitive, it’s almost never against men, but against other women.

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