Somewhere in the multiverse, there's a version of this meme that's exactly reversed, captioned with a tweet that says "stupid woman thinks she's smart because she's a chess grandmaster, but little does she know I graduated middle school"
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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Games are mostly just applied maths with pretty colors.
Spatially smart
I like both. I get the sentiment, but it is really sad that men and women's strengths and/or weaknesses are being used to wage a stupid war that serves no one.
In my home we compliment each other super well. My weaknesses are evened out by his strengths and my strengths even out his weaknesses. It's great. Almost like that's the whole point of having a functioning society.
stupid war that serves no one.
It's standard divide and conquer, definitely serves the people in power.
True. Social media - Lemmy included - has really proven how effectively people can be socially engineered into hating "the other" to the point where you can kid yourself into believing you're being tolerant by doing it to the group that is okay to hate.
It makes me feel sick everytime I see it and all the forms it takes.
I guess, but nothing about this really pertains to gendered strength or weaknesses. At least not in reality.
It just shows different ways of being smart and pit them against one another instead of celebrating them.
Somehow i don't see the meme as sexist until i read the comments
I think the original post/image kinda was, but the response/retweet doesn't seem like it
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There are a few comments here that are sexist as shit, misandry and misogyny both. It boggles me that intelligent people who know that sweeping generalizations are bad when it comes to race and nation lose their fucking mind when it comes to biological sex.
Wait until you learn about "generations".
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The reason chess is a segregated sport is because the male players couldn't cope emotionally with co-ed.
Not only was their the sex-pest harassment stuff, but men who lost to women would become hysterical, hostile, and aggressive.
Women just needed clam, rational, and stoic people to play with, so they had to exclude men.
May be a gross oversimplification, simply because, ignoring everything else around professional chess, the world championship is technically open for all genders...
But considering how FIDE makes women gain ELO by taking it from other women in mixed tournaments, its 2023 ruling on transgender players, and how former World Champion Garry Kasparov reacted to losing to a women, it might as well be the truth.
In Kasparov's eventual defense, he did say this after losing to Polgar:
“I was wrong about women playing chess. I gave an opinion a long time ago that I no longer believe.”
and later in his book wrote:
‘I won’t hide from the fact that I did make regrettably sexist remarks about women in chess around this time. In that 1989 Playboy interview I said men were better at chess because “women are weaker fighters” and that “probably the answer is in the genes”. The possibility of gender brain differences aside, I find it almost hard to believe I said this considering that my mother is the toughest fighter I know.’
Good on him
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Both sides are just people with interests, i never understood the smart/dumb distinctions, there's just interests, dedication and morals
Don't forget opportunity
Lots of upvotes, but that's simply not true. It is true that people can be gifted in one area and not in others, but those people can excel in those areas more than someone even more passionately interested could ever hope to.
I knew a guy named Joe Rohde. You can look him up, he ended up being a head of imagineering at Disney. When I knew him, he was a high school art teacher, and then just starting at Disney. His aptitude for art was off the charts, and his mom said that was true when he was four and able to draw 3D renderings when his peers couldn't do stick figures. Sure, he practiced and developed skills, but his ability to hold a 3D image in his mind, tweak and rotate it, and then put it on paper, is something innate. He was absolute crap at math.
I spent 40 years at a company that mostly made rocket engines for NASA and the DoD, working with literal rocket scientists. I met all sorts of very smart people. Some were the stereotypical scientist that were geniuses in a particular area but had no skills outside of it, but others were just simply brilliant at anything they turned their mind to. Many of them defied the stereotype and also has great social skills.
It might be nice to think that anyone can be truly great at anything they put their mind to, but I've seen too many people who are truly great at things to believe it. Some people are just wired differently.
Edit: and none of the above mentions gender because gender doesn't factor into it.
his ability to hold a 3D image in his mind, tweak and rotate it, and then put it on paper, is something innate.
This is coincidentally a symptom of dyslexia, so you are right to think of it as something innate, unfortunately. It's also why so many architects are dyslexic.
He was trying to explain how it is one time, and he showed me by drawing a picture of a galloping horse, but he didn't sketch it out and then fill in the detail. He started at the nose and did it in full detail, left to right, like he was uncovering the drawing by lifting a sheet. It was really amazing.
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I was once interested in time travel. My dedication was boundless and my morals were questionable. I only got smart enough to know I'm too dumb to make it work.
Good news, I figured out the secret to time travel. I'm now travelling forward in time by a second, every second! Pay $999 to learn My secret!
We've, uh, figured out how to travel through time, at the speed of regular time, with...plastic bags.
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What kind of smart am I if I'm not particularly good at academia, or math puzzles, but, like, I really wish I was smart while still holding the exact same beliefs.
The LessWrong/online-"rationalist" kind of smart
"I have a very deep understanding of everything about [field] that I could find in pop science shows and books"
Fun fact the LessWrong guy Yudkowsky who was/is an influential person in silicon valley wrote one of the most well known Harry Potter fanfics. At some point he apparently tried to get JK Rowling's permission to publish it.
Works hard kind of smart
vs
lazy, doesn’t try for more than 5 minutes, gets repeatedly told “you have so much potential if you would apply yourself” kind of smart
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the school system grades you on conformity, not wisdom and neither of these people are correct and most ivy league grads are literally just there because theyre epstein-class legacy members
theyre just two people with different interests and goals, thats it
Yeah making this into a man vs woman thing is stupid, I took the original post just as a person saying "people can have different kinds of intelligence, everything should be respected"
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It says "chess enthusiast" on the left, but shows a chessboard on the right. Sounds like these two have more in common than they see.
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Looks to me like it's saying there two types of chess enthusiast and I'm not sure it's saying one is better. If you're trying to make the woman look dumb, would you include 110/100 grades..?
Not the towers of hanoi!
you won't believe this but I bet the guy on the right could write a Python script to solve it in 4-6 business weeks
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