From Black Swans(p.74):
“People tend to fool themselves with their self-narrative of ‘national identity’, which, in a breakthrough paper in Science by sixty-five authors was shown to be a total fiction. (‘National traits’ might be great for movies, they might be help a lot war, but they are Platonic notions that carry no empirical validity…) Empirically, sex, social class and profession seem to be better predictors of someone’s behaviour than nationality (a male from Sweden resembles a male from Togo more than a female from Sweden; a philosopher from Peru resembles a philosopher from Scotland more than a janitor from Peru, and so on.)
Even if you just checkmated your new friend in India or took your Russian opponent’s rook, new chess Web sites like Chess.com are encouraging niche social networking. CNET News.com’s Kara Tsuboi sat down with the site’s founder to find out what has attracted more than 100,000 members in less than a year.