Epistemic Scoundrels Mega-Thread

[Alexop]

3 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Nope.

It's called a handicap. Golf works this way.

I could play a game of golf against Tiger Woods and it would be a fair game. It just requires the right handicap.

Maybe it sounds good on paper but it might not work in real life for most sports.

[Nemra]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

This is an empirical question which just needs to be carefully measured with experimental games.

You can set a soccer game of all natural women vs all trans women and calculate the average difference. You could play 100 such games and get a very accurate handicap.

That might work. I don't know.

But it's unlikely that people would be open to experimentation.

Edited June 1 by Nemra

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

In this case, for every trans women on a team the team must score 2 extra goals to win. Something like that.

Have you ever competed in a sport?

[Leo Gura]

Just now, Carl-Richard said:

Have you ever competed in a sport?

Is golf a competitive sport?

[Carl-Richard]

35 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Is golf a competitive sport?

Sure. But to what you said about handicaps in golf: handicaps are generally not part of professional golf, and it's at elite levels that the spirit of competition becomes clear (and that's mostly where the trans sports debate is happening).
 

Quote

Competition is a rivalry where two or more parties strive for a common goal which cannot be shared [...]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition

I generally think handicaps and the like goes too much against the spirit of competition to be applied to most elite sports. If you're a sprinter, you deep down want to sprint the fastest. If you're a jumper, you want to jump the highest. If you are a golfer, you want to score the highest. And you know this is if you win against someone with a handicap. It doesn't feel like you "won won".

Imagine in weightlifting, the winner is not the one who lifts the most weight but the one who beats their own PR. This is of course an extreme example of tailoring the rules to the specific competitor or context (which is really what a handicap is), but here you clearly see that it no longer becomes a competition but an exercise.

Edited June 1 by Carl-Richard

[Leo Gura]

@Carl-Richard Boxing and MMA has weightclasses.

Why doesn't a featherweight champion feel inferior to a heavyweight champion? Did Conor McGregor ever "win win"? No! He only ever won thanks to the handicap of his weightclass.

This whole idea that sports competiton has ever been fair is a scam.

All elite sports athletes are genetic freaks. That's the only reason they win.

Why do girls love to sleep with athletes? Because an athlete is proof of genetic superiority. Sports selects genetic superiors.

Edited June 1 by Leo Gura

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

Boxing and MMA has weightclasses.

Why doesn't a featherweight champion feel inferior to a heavyweight champion.

It's not fully analogous to handicaps, because the goal is shared within the competition (winning the most rounds). Handicaps make the goal different within the competition ("one goal for me, one goal for thee"), which is against the spirit of competition.

 

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

This whole idea that sports competiton has ever been fair is a scam.

All elite sports atheletes are genetic freaks. That the only reason they win.

I don't think fairness is whether somebody has an "equal chance" of winning. I think it's again when the game is within the spirit of competition. You actually want to feel that you won the competition because you are intrinsically better and had a higher chance of winning, not because you rolled the dice.

People who are mad that trans women get to play women's sports are not really mad about the fact that the competitors have a different chance of winning. They are mad that they are not following the rules. If people agree on the rules (and there is a common goal in the competition), people are generally happy. If a lightweight dude and a heavyweight dude decide to fight each other and they agree that this is the competition, there is no protest (only retrospective coping).

And then you get hilarious setups like this that don't actually feel that wrong (until maybe the end):

 

Edited June 1 by Carl-Richard

[Nemra]

Instead of categorizing by men, women, trans men, or trans women, why not categorize it by individual physical limits and abilities? In this case, men, women, trans men, and trans women in the same category could compete with each other as long as they are at the same level of genetic freakiness.

[Carl-Richard]

3 minutes ago, Nemra said:

Instead of categorizing by men, women, trans men, or trans women, why not categorize it by individual physical limits and abilities? In this case, men, women, trans men, and trans women in the same category could compete with each other as long as they are at the same level of genetic freakiness.

Would it be fun to compete against yourself? You're exactly in the same category of everything.

[Nemra]

5 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

Would it be fun to compete against yourself? You're exactly in the same category of everything.

Do you want to compete with someone who you will always or never be able to win?

If you compete with someone that isn't genetically superior or inferior to you, you wouldn't actually know who will win. It'll be more fun.

Edited June 1 by Nemra

[Nemra]

Briefly, I was suggesting that everyone, regardless of gender, can compete with each other as long as they don't genetically overpower each other. So that instead of separating them by gender, separate all people by their genetic limitations.

Edited June 1 by Nemra

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, Nemra said:

Do you want to compete with someone who you will always or never be able to win?

If you compete with someone that isn't genetically superior or inferior to you, you wouldn't actually know who will win. It'll be more fun.

What the hell did you just say?

[yetineti]

5 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Nope.

It's called a handicap. Golf works this way.

I could play a game of golf against Tiger Woods and it would be a fair game. It just requires the right handicap.

The more dire the physical consequences, the harder it is to find the right handicap.

The more team based it is as well.

If height and weight play a role it is harder.

Linear games are easiest to handicap.

Golf is surprisingly linear and simple to handicap compared to most things.

Edited June 2 by yetineti

[Carl-Richard]

11 minutes ago, yetineti said:

Golf is surprisingly linear and simple to handicap compared to most things.

Yet it's not a thing in professional golf.

[Alexop]

So cool to see Leo taking intellectual risks. Even if he can be wrong because it is something that was never done before, he still takes the risk. 

This is something that I very rarely experience in real life. People just playing it safely especially with people they just met. It is always me who takes the risk to push the conversation to the next level with some teasy jokes or some deep ideas in order to create some connection. North Europeans became some nations of boring pussies. 

Edited June 2 by Alexop

[Nemra]

7 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

What the hell did you just say?

??

[Carl-Richard]

9 hours ago, Nemra said:

??

I didn't understand what you said.

[Leo Gura]

If you want to make sports truly fair you gotta give everyone handicaps based on hormone levels and physical size.

How it is fair to play basketball against Shaq? It's a cruel joke.

Edited June 2 by Leo Gura

[yetineti]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

If you want to make sports truly fair you gotta give everyone handicaps based on hormone levels and physical size.

Yes, modern sports are already unfair and focus too much on physicality.

But also, before puberty, sports are more fair.

Someone should craft a new sport that combines the hits of football, sprints of basketball, the grace of golf, etc.

A meta sport with more defined, diverse roles, teams, goal, etc.

 

 

Edited June 2 by yetineti

[Vynce]

2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

If you want to make sports truly fair you gotta give everyone handicaps based on hormone levels and physical size.

How it is fair to play basketball against Shaq? It's a cruel joke.

Don’t forget to adjust handicaps based on: „support of parents, teachers, friends, availability of fitness resources, IQ, trauma, neurodivergence, genes that code for motivation and discipline and more factors, yet to be found significant..“