For her, it's all downhill from here.

Which is a good thing, because going downhill is fun and easy!

It is a joke

or, something is very cool when someone unexpected excels at something :)

There's something wrong with symphony writing when an eight year old can do it.

...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.

Poor little soul.

"affirmative action" has been in use since the early 60s, are you that old?

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.

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.

That feels unnecessary judgemental. If you enjoy a thing, I think that's a great way to spent your time.

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.

There's a big gap between the top 2 solvers (Yiheng Wang and Xuanyi Geng) and everyone right now. Yunzhi Lian is 4th in the world.

The Chess world championship has an Open section and a Women's section. The Open section is open to every gender.

But it's a fair assumption considering how Kasparov treated Polgar.

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?

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

How about chess?

This was not from the top of my head but:

* 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.

Ultra-endurance sports/running. First read discussions about it here but can't remember the thread

https://www.fitnessfirst.com.au/get-there/new-study-finds-wo...

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're just as open to women as to men, but they still 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.

There is a min cap on how few moves the cube shall be possible to complete in.

she started at earlier age, parents at that age can easily brainwash a kid, the kid will "enjoy" whatever they will tell him to enjoy, now after years of abuse, sorry, I mean training, she doesn't even most likely know there is any alternative to life like this

I can assure you Chinese parents can very easily force 6yo to do anything 2 hours a day (she spends most likely more hours a day than they claim), what is she gonna do, what's her other alternative at this age?