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I'm a big fan of Downey but this article is quite far from his best. 1. The data he fits is for distance (10k), and the conclusion ("why you can't beat the Fre
by jmmcd 3y ago
I'm a big fan of Downey but this article is quite far from his best.
1. The data he fits is for distance (10k), and the conclusion ("why you can't beat the Freeze") concerns sprinting.
2. The claim that speed is a multiplicative model is fine and I agree based on the 10k data. But the people running against the Freeze aren't uniform from the population, so the argument is missing a step about what distribution (what percentile of the background distribution) they might be from.
3. There are some interesting numbers about how the high school girl is x% faster than Downey, the boy is y% faster than the girl, etc, but they don't link to the stats later in the article.
- Aeolun 3y agoTo be fair, you don’t really need any of the numbers in the article. If the only thing you know about the freeze is that he’s 1.5 seconds slower than Ursain Bolt on the 200 meters you can conclude that he’ll win basically any race he runs.
- jefftk 3y agoI do think you need the discussion of distributions and variance: for all I know the 200m tends to be won by fractions of a second and there are millions of people just a second slower than Bolt.
- Aeolun 3y agoTo some extend. If there’s millions of people that are nearly as fast you’d have encountered them on your school or university course, but what you see there doesn’t even come close (aside from the odd one out like the article describes). Since I haven’t, I can make a reasonable assessment of the likelihood someone is nearly as fast. Of course I might be wrong (maybe people in my general area are just incredibly slow)? But I’d have some confidence in the assertion anyway.