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> 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 basicall

• 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).