|
Forums:
Climbing Disciplines:
Bouldering:
Re: [jt512] Best Boulderer Ever:
Edit Log
|
|
fracture
Mar 24, 2007, 12:57 AM
Views: 3567
Registered: Jun 13, 2003
Posts: 1814
|
jt512 wrote: fracture wrote: jt512 wrote: You are confused. Somewhere along the line you missed my main point: that bouldering difficulty is different than route difficulty. Thus a bouldering difficulty scale is inherently different than a route difficulty scale. There is far more variation between individual boulder problems or individual sport routes than there is between The Typical Boulder Problem and The Typical Sport Route. You cannot prove such a claim (no matter how many examples you give), but even if it is true, then you still make the scales more homogeneous (which can be proved mathematically) by rating long traversing boulder problems by using the YDS scale rather than the V-scale. Ok. But making the scales more homogeneous is not a goal in and of itself.
In reply to: In reply to: If you were asked to identify exactly how bouldering difficulty is essentially different from climbing with a rope tied to you, what would you say? Stressed energy-production system(s) is not a good answer (it flies in the face of our empirical data: Burn Baby Burn, The Wheel of Life, power-endurance and power sport routes, etc). "Bouldering" (contrary to Curt's prescriptions) just means you were close enough to the ground that a rope wasn't necessary. Right, but the purpose of the rating scale is to measure difficulty, so the question should not be (if you want to maximize the usefulness of the scales) how do bouldering and roped climbing differ by definition, but how does their difficulty differ. Ok. So, how does the difficulty differ, then? (Again, the set of energy-production systems that may be used is not different.)
In reply to: In reply to: In reply to: Side note: center of gravity (mass) is well defined; I don't know why you call it fictional. "Fictional" because it only exists in a special metaphorical sense. No, center of mass (gravity) is well defined. In general it is the integral of the moments divided by total mass. For the special case of a two-dimensional object, it is the balance point of the object. There is nothing inherently metaphoric about it. Yes there is, and you're simply wrong (but it's okay: you're out of your field). As I mentioned: numbers are also well-defined. Numbers are also inherently metaphorical (along with many other things that you take to "exist", like thoughts, colors, algorithms, personalities, mp3 files or the empty set). Much of human cognition is fundamentally metaphorical, as well. The use of a "two-dimensional object" is an ironic example, by the way. (It's another fictional-but-useful entity.)
In reply to: In reply to: In reply to: What I keep pointing out is that although the problem never goes away completely, the more homogeneous you make the set that the scale grades, the less the problem is. And if restricting the scale-usage based on the length of a boulder problem actually did that, maybe you'd have a point. It does do it. I didn't say it made the scale completely homogeneous; I said it made it more homogeneous (and hence more useful). But I dispute that more homogeneous implies more useful. In fact, I think that is provably not the case, and I think I already showed how: the most "homogeneous" possible use of climbing rating scales would be if we had one rating system per route per climber. I assert (and we can argue if you want) that this is a completely useless configuration, since it would not succeed at any of the goals for rating systems that I listed earlier. There is at least one other, more useful configuration with lower total homogeneity than this (i.e., the status quo), therefore the implication doesn't universally obtain.
In reply to: In reply to: In particular, you (hopefully) must admit that it would be useful for those of us who are interested in power-endurance to not have to use separate rating systems (on similar climbs) based on a trivial detail like whether a rope is tied to our waist, right? That is precisely what I am arguing for long traversing bouldering problems. But you want to do it at the expense of comparison with shorter problems. Again, what this comparison means is up for debate, but it makes as much sense as comparison within the set of long traversing problems itself, which is also quite full of problematic variety. Maybe you might consider articulating your proposed changes to the status quo a little more precisely, so I know exactly what I'm arguing about. For example, on what scale would you rate a long boulder problem that contained a series of power-endurance sections separated by no-hands knee-bars? What if it's the same, but some of them are power sections? What if we add a local endurance section at the end? What if the local endurance section is only 5.10a, but the power sections are V6? What if the local endurance is 13c and the power sections are V9? What if it's enduro 13c and the power is only V4? You haven't given me enough information to answer these questions; it's very possible that I'm wasting some time by arguing against irrelevant bogeymen. On the other hand, if you find trouble answering these sorts of questions yourself, maybe you need to think about your position a little more carefully: the status quo (or a single universal rating system) both can handle these types of climbs successfully (under the criteria I gave earlier) without any trouble.
In reply to: In general, difficulty scales should be rating sets of things that have similar type of difficulty. How about things like safe rock climbs? If that's not all classifiable as "a similar type of difficulty" (for some value of "similar"), then I guess I should throw away all my training literature.
(This post was edited by fracture on Mar 24, 2007, 1:00 AM)
|
|
Edit Log:
|
Post edited by fracture
() on Mar 24, 2007, 1:00 AM
|
|
|
|
|
|