or maybe he's just very good?
He's 30 something, not 90.
You might be right, if we were talking about anything except chess.
Chess, unlike everything else, has a clear ranking system and lots of records for people to analyze. And unfortunately, the record is very clear: chess ability decreases after a certain age.
However, the decrease is more likely due to stamina than mental decline. Chess tournaments take a long time, and stamina definitely decreases with age. However, pro athletes demonstrate that you can probably go until around your early 40s before it becomes a real issue.
Having said that, it will be interesting to see how this generation does in the blitz formats as they age. Those will be less dependent upon stamina and a better measure of mental acuity for chess.
I think looking at the data you’d have to conclude that women can’t play chess as well as men, that black men can’t play chess as well as white men, and that Judeo-Christian (and perhaps Hindu Brahmins) beliefs are just as indicative.
If we deny those conclusions as bigotry of immutable characteristics, it naturally leads to the age question.
Actually, chess data suggests that all of them are as good as one another. As soon as you have enough candidates in the pipeline, magically, any specific group suddenly becomes as good as any other.
On the women's side, the Polgar sisters are both exemplar and counterexample. Clearly, given sufficient training, women CAN be rated highly (Judit cracked 2700). The fact that the women's side hasn't exploded just like the men's side can mostly be tracked to the fact that chess isn't considered a "feminine pursuit" worth putting the time into (that finally seems to be changing slowly in recent decades).
> The fact that the women's side hasn't exploded just like the men's side can mostly be tracked to the fact that chess isn't considered a "feminine pursuit" worth putting the time into (that finally seems to be changing slowly in recent decades).
A defence that doesn’t pass for software engineering, amazing. This old canard. The girls just don’t like engineering. It’s not feminine enough. Damore got whacked for this.
I have heard this before, but you need to back that up with more qualifiers.
There were a lot more female plug technicians because women were trained as phone operators. There were a lot more female keypunch operators because women were trained in typing to be secretaries. However, most people would not refer to those as "programmers" like we would definitely say for someone like Margaret Hamilton.
This is a good book on the topic:
https://www.amazon.com/Programmed-Inequality-Discarded-Techn...
What ageism ignores is that outside of chess, prescience outperforms other measures of productivity.
Besides, the age pool of chess itself confirms it.
There's a single player in his 50s in the top 50 of chess and not a single 60+ in the top 100.
Also, even carlsen himself says he's no longer as good as he was years before and his mind isn't as strong.
Women only categories have been created to give women visibility because they mostly were not able to reach advanced levels in the open format.
Some women choose to compete with men (Judit Polgár being a somewhat recent example) but most go straight to the women only tournaments to have a shot.
The men vs women « bias » is not unproven, they litterally had to create entire categories of competiton to account for it.