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Comment by Johanx64 | Hacker News Reader

I don't find it at all compelling. Frankly the whole argument is sexist, unnecessarily so.

What's ultimately underrepresented are people with small hands, PERIOD.

As if it's fine that men with small hands can't compete (very common too btw), but oh-boy, since it's especially affects women, now it's a super big wrong that has to be corrected.

No, it's wrong on a more fundamental level - there's no good reason to exclude small handed people at all from reaching the highest level, regardless of sex or anything in between.

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No one has made the claim that it would be fine if only men with small hands were negatively affected. The focus is on women in this instance for one reason: the data gathered and referred to in the comment you so disingenuously took offense to shows that women are disproportionately affected by this issue. Are men with small hands also affected? Yes, but that is not an identity half of the people on this planet identify with. I'd hazard to guess there are not a great deal of people who feel defined by the size of their hands (or discriminated against systematically).

Fortunately breaking down this barrier benefits everyone, regardless of sex. Feminism benefits all.

I have sympathy for the feminist movement, and the GPs post was needlessly hostile, but in their defense I'd like to phrase the argument a different way:

If we imagine a world where men and women hand-sizes were statistically equal, ought we be interested that some people have smaller hands and are under-represented in Piano competitions? If so, shouldn't a study that looks purely at hand-span as the variable, without regarding gender or ethnicity, ought to be equally useful as as impetus for change in both contexts?

If you scroll down on this page, you can find some data showing the correlation between hand size and national/international acclaim: http://smallpianokeyboards.org/hand-span-data-recent-austral....

Thanks, I missed this. This image is particularly salient on both the hand span and gender arguments: http://smallpianokeyboards.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Ri...

Edit: Though interesting to note that there's been some effort at balance in terms of national acclaim, but if smaller handed competitors had access to scaled keyboards, it's possible that their would be better international recognition of female players.... or it could expose a gender bias.

I'm not going to downvote here, but please don't take a comment on gender differences to be inherently sexist, or assume that a comment has to be written in a way that is defensible to any argument that can be thrown at it (like men with smaller hands).

Saying that women, on average, have smaller hands than men is as sound as saying women, on average, have a higher likelihood of getting pregnant during sex than men.

It's one thing to point out how women have especially hard time competing due to hand sizes. Which is true and a fair argument to make in favor of among other things (such as sizes accessable for children, etc)

But saying that it's the most compelling argument is where it arguably becomes full on sexist.

Truth of the matter is most concert pianists and serious competitors have absolutely gigantic hands that most people do not posses. With very few and rare exceptions.

And that the current piano size is way too large for most people, esp. if they actually would like to excel at it. Or at a minimum a very large portion of the population, incl. geographic areas where people tend to be shorter on average.

> Truth of the matter is most concert pianists and serious competitors have absolutely gigantic hands

Is that true? I wouldn't have thought so, at all, and a few minutes googling "do most concert pianists have huge hands" digs up a lot of sentences like "Plenty of world-class pianists have small hands, including Alicia de Larroccha and Vladimir Ashkenazy, and yet they seem to be able to cope with the most physically demanding works in the repertoire." And sites talking about how it's a misconception that classical pianists have or need huge hands.

Jazz pianist with huge hands here :-) Huge hands often goes with height, and I have never noticed classical pianists are unusually tall. I can't think of any who are. Maybe people are thinking of Rachmaninov (6 foot 6). One would expect classical pianists to look like towering basketball players if, as you say, they mostly have absolutely gigantic hands. But I'd say there are many more under 6 feet tall than over it.

Yes. It is true.

If I got a penny for every time Larroccha gets mentioned in the discussions about small hands and alt sized keyboards I would be a millionaire.

First of all, nobody, ever in their right mind would bring up Larroccha when talking about greats. Frankly the only times Larroccha would get brought up... is when talking about pianists with small hands. Severely limited repertoire.

Secondly, isn't that curious that they don't mention what the actual reach of Ashkenazy was? Well, it turns out that he doesn't have small hands, merely on the smaller side when taking the absolutely gigantic hands of every other concert pianist as a reference point.

I've heard by some people that Horowitz had small hands too (compared to whom, a 7ft tall giant who can reach a 15th?)

I'm not an expert in the matter, just am talking about your specific claim

> most concert pianists and serious competitors have absolutely gigantic hands

which I still doubt, unless you have data supporting that. Depends on what you mean "absolutely gigantic" and how you define "serious competitors" etc.

Also, almost every sentence in your reply uses exaggeration, so it does seem you allow that to yourself but insist others speak accurately. Maybe this is just a case of that, not to be taken literally. It seems so. And nobody apart from you mentioned limiting that matter to "great" pianists - a straw man.

Look, the very link OP has posted even has an image which shows that the handspan of the "internationally acclaimed pianists", it is wholly concentrated in above average handsizes. Which only a fairly small portion of the population has.

http://smallpianokeyboards.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Ri...

Never "small". If we are talking about "greats" it's even more so. You can't be with a small hand span.

Not sure what kind of more evidence you need.

There's data on the correlation between hand size and national/international acclaim here: http://smallpianokeyboards.org/hand-span-data-recent-austral....

From this, it seems clear that internationally acclaimed pianists typically have quite large hands.

> As if it's fine that men with small hands can't compete (very common too btw), but oh-boy, since it's especially affects women, now it's a super big wrong that has to be corrected.

The site points out that adult men are affected. It also points out that it makes it more technically difficult for children learning: forcing them to learn unergonomic things that will not be necessary as their body grows.

But yes, it disproportionately affects women, which is an additional reason to be concerned.

The website is smallpianokeyboards.org, not letsonlyletwomenusesmallpianokeyboards.org, and there’s nothing sexist about mentioning that women are more frequently affected by this. Pointing out the intersectionality helps create a larger coalition of people who can help fix the problem, and doesn’t in any way prevent men from also benefiting from the solution. Piano players, women, men, and people with small hands can all be on the same side whether they are part of just one of those groups or all four.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that only women are disadvantaged, though I wrote much too hastily.

What the data shows is that between two groups with very different hand size distributions, the one with (on average) larger hands has a tremendously easier time playing. So, while some people will argue hand span is a secondary factor, in fact there is a critical need for smaller keyboards.

Women on average have smaller hands than men. And yes, there's also variance, so it affects men with small hands too. If it were corrected, men with small hands would be able to compete, and even more women would be able to compete. It would disproportionately help women, and it would also help men with smaller hands.

With words like sexist, it can be hard to distinguish between two different types of statements:

- the observation that a specific group is hurt by something

- the claim that individual bias against that group causes the hurt, or that the inverse group is to blame for the hurt

And to make things harder, sometimes people cause trouble by saying things that are deliberately ambiguous between those two, or sometimes saying one thing and sometimes saying the other. That's frustrating when it happens.

But in the opposite direction, it's also easy misinterpret someone as though they're saying the second thing, when they're really trying to say the first thing. And when someone gets misinterpreted like that, that's frustrating too. I think a pretty good compromise is to try to assume people are saying the first thing as much as possible.

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