ElGee wrote:So, I'm not trying to be a naysayer of this project. Clearly it drives discussion better than any other project for many of the same reasons that people get so angry about the results of the GOAT list. One might think peaks would drive better discussion, but it somehow doesn't. And that leaves me wondering about basic methods of communication...just what exactly are people discussing in a GOAT discussion?
To be honest the failure of the Peaks project was a gigantic red flag to me, or at least very telling.
By all objective reasoning, it should be easier to make a Peak list than a Career list given that an ideal Career list would essentially be based on inputing years into your mental equation and going from there.
Since Career lists are actually easier than Peak lists, what that tells us is that people are deciding Career stuff by cheating a bit. In many places, they don't actually know how to decide who was better, and where that happens they go by longevity. So you essentially end up with a kind of staircase where guys on the same stair, or tier, are sorted by longevity, but getting on to the stair is based on peak.
That's the basis at least. The more thoughtful of us then try to approximate a more complicated function to make decisions between guys in the same vicinity and make the staircase a bit more like a slide, but you still end up at times with two guys way far apart, never debated against each other...and yet when you look closely the comparison is not clear cut.
I think the practical takeaways of all this are:
1) We all have a lot of room to get better.
2) Getting better should mean some pretty major fluctuations in our lists along the way.
3) In designing projects, we have to determine a task that is hard but not TOO hard for participants to do, and even if they are "cheating" a bit in the project, their continued participation means they are much more likely to learn.
4) The true meaning of the rankings at the very just can't ever be the goal...if only because it should embarrass people to think like that given how much better we can get.
5) And yet, other versions of this list exist all over the internet and in real life, and despite our blunders, we're likely creating the single best one out there among any group efforts that exist.
