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Absolutely lots of factors actually influence competitive advantage and it's arbitrary which ones we decide to use to group competitors! I think a helpful refr

by abeppu 1y ago

Absolutely lots of factors actually influence competitive advantage and it's arbitrary which ones we decide to use to group competitors! I think a helpful reframing is to note that some sports do segregate by factors other than sex, generally bodyweight. If boxing, wrestling, judo, weightlifting etc all benefit from weight classes so that we can have more fair competitions among competitors in comparable weight bands, why not have height classes for various sports? Why not have cycling races with tiers of people at different points on the vO2 max scale? I actually think it would be interesting to watch competitions for some sports that are based around who does "better than expected" by some model that predicts baselines. What if every marathoner was still trying to get the best time achievable, but we celebrated the person who most out-performed expectations? Critically, you wouldn't just stop paying attention when the first cluster of people cross the finish-line -- the winner might arrive later. I would also love to see if different styles of play would emerge in, e.g. an under-6-foot basketball height class.

rsynnott 1y ago
> What if every marathoner was still trying to get the best time achievable, but we celebrated the person who most out-performed expectations? This is basically how golf works, right?
- abeppu 1y ago
  But in high level competition people don't use handicaps right? But I think handicaps are also about your individual skill level based on your past performance relative to par on different courses right? (I'm not a golfer). I'm not saying we shouldn't celebrate deep skill. I'm imagining we should have a shared model that given some basic info (e.g. your biological sex, height, maybe some ratios about your skeletal proportions, age, hormones) gives a distribution on performance (e.g. marathon time, long jump distance, weight lighting combined score), and your normalized score is based on the quantile you get relative to that baseline. I think that behaves pretty different from a handicap based on personal past performance. I.e. a tiny old lady who throws a shotput pretty far gets a high normalized score, even if her performance is extremely consistent over time (and so on the day of competition she's not outperforming her prior record).

by abeppu 1y ago

rsynnott 1y ago

> What if every marathoner was still trying to get the best time achievable, but we celebrated the person who most out-performed expectations? This is basically how golf works, right?

abeppu 1y ago
But in high level competition people don't use handicaps right? But I think handicaps are also about your individual skill level based on your past performance relative to par on different courses right? (I'm not a golfer). I'm not saying we shouldn't celebrate deep skill. I'm imagining we should have a shared model that given some basic info (e.g. your biological sex, height, maybe some ratios about your skeletal proportions, age, hormones) gives a distribution on performance (e.g. marathon time, long jump distance, weight lighting combined score), and your normalized score is based on the quantile you get relative to that baseline. I think that behaves pretty different from a handicap based on personal past performance. I.e. a tiny old lady who throws a shotput pretty far gets a high normalized score, even if her performance is extremely consistent over time (and so on the day of competition she's not outperforming her prior record).