A word always means what most native speakers think it means. Period.

I hope you never set foot in a courtroom...

I hope you never read anything about the science of linguistics. The realization that you are an ignorant moron might have the type of ego-shattering repercussions that I wouldn't wish on anyone.

Pebble wrestling is dumb.

Now, you could consider admitting that what I said is simply a fact---that the V-scale is and has been successfully used on long problems....

You can start by telling us in what way the V-scale and the YDS are fundamentally different.

In an important sense, all rock climbing is dumb. But it's a fun way of being dumb.

And bouldering in particular is great fun. No pro, no ropes, no bullshit. It's just you, your friends, and the challenge of ascending a gymnastically difficult section of rock. If you don't like that, you don't really like climbing rocks.

No pro, no ropes, no bullshit. It's just you, your friends, and the challenge of ascending a gymnastically difficult section of rock.

Bouldering...little rocks, little boys, all bullshit. All about ascending a 'gymnastically difficult section of rock?' More like all about having a circle jerk around a pebble.

Spoken like a true 5.4 climber.

Curt

That's all you got for a comeback? Please go eat the cookie now.

Try the "community" forum here. It's for people like you who don't actually climb, but want to tangentially associate with real climbers, for whatever reason.

So there are real climbers in the "Community" forum that I can chat with? Because you aren't a real climber?

Well, that certainly follows logically, doesn't it?

About as logically as calling me a 5.4 climber...How would you know?

And about as logical as saying I 'don't actually' climb...How would you know?

Your logic has astounded me.

The three unrepeated problems of Holloway's are Meathook, AHR, and Slapshot. It could be that not all the world's best boulderers have tried these problems but contrary to your claim, many have--and the problems are still unrepeated after 30 years. How long do most (or any) new boulder problems go unrepeated these days?

I doubt it, Cupcake. I'm willing to bet a bunch of cash that you're full of shit. How about it?

That's a matter of opinion. If I consider gymnastic type dynamic bouldering moves to constitute modern bouldering, then yes, Gill did invent it. Oh, and I normally warm-up on harder than V5.

What is your criteria for "success" here?

I'm glad you asked. A successful climbing rating system must do the following:

Facilitate determining which area(s) to go to at a crag you are unfamiliar with. (Saves massive hiking time!)

Help climbers track their progress as they improve and help them be more systematic about training.

Help you decide whether to project a given climb, or to move to something more realistic. Basically: how many tries should you give it before moving on.

Assist in determining whether your first attempt on a climb should be redpoint-mode (hangdogging) or whether you should go for a flash or onsight.

Assist in finding adequate warm up routes that won't flash-pump you and waste your day.

The V-scale and (the modern) YDS both can and have done this successfully for bouldering.

Because the YDS and the V-scale are merely ordinal scales. And all an ordinal scale has to do to be "successful" is to get the items it is applied to in more-or-less the right order. Clearly, then, any ordinal scale could be successfully applied to boulder problems. In fact, if you think about it, all ordinal scales are essentially equivalent, as they can be put into one-to-one correspondence with (a subset of) the natural numbers. (For ordinal scales that classify items into a limited number of categories [like the YDS or the V-scale] you can argue about how many catergories there ought to be or where the category boundaries should be drawn, but I don't think that those issues are salient to your arguments.)

Take two groups of climbers: one which only boulders and one which only sport climbs. If the two activities are highly similar, then a person in the sport climbing group who climbs at, say, the median level of the sport climbing group, should be able to boulder, with no additional training, at the median level of the bouldering group. Clearly, this will generally not be the case, because the sport climber will not have the high-end strength necessary to boulder at a comparable level.

But moreover, if you take the median sport climber from an enduro area, and bring them here to Austin, do you think they'll keep up on our PE and power climbs with no additional training? It's all roped, it's all YDS, and it's all sport climbing. So what you're suggesting really has nothing to do with the question of whether boulder problems and sport routes are comparable: rather, it's the issue of whether any routes are comparable at all. (Or at least, whether those which stress different energy systems are.)

Why, in the same sense that a 10-move 5.12a sport route (and I've seen the like at every crag I've ever climbed at) and a 10-bolt 5.12a sport route are, of course. (And what exactly that sense is is certainly up for discussion.)

I doubt it, Cupcake. I'm willing to bet a bunch of cash that you're full of shit. How about it?


...


That's a matter of opinion. If I consider gymnastic type dynamic bouldering moves to constitute modern bouldering, then yes, Gill did invent it. Oh, and I normally warm-up on harder than V5.

Curt

You've managed to use a whole lot of words to simply say that the rating should tell you how hard the route is.

Right, because they are both ordinal scales. You could just as easily MCAT scores, (which just happen to be the integers from 1 to 15 -- ring a bell?).

It's very difficult to discuss subjects with you when you insist on clouding the central issue with trivial side issues.

It has everything to do with whether boulder problems and sport routes are difficult in the same way. On average, they are not, despite all the exceptions, outliers, and borderline cases you can and will state.

Your argument that since the YDS already applies to many different types of difficulty on routes justifies its extension to boulder problems is essentially arguing that two wrongs make a right. Since boulder problems are a more homogeneous set than boulder problems plus routes, giving boulder problems and routes separate rating scales improves the information relative to crating them on the same artificially one-dimensional scale. It's hard to see how that can be worse than extending the problems of the YDS to boulder problems.

Exactly. In what sense is that? It is very difficult to justify the same rating system for such disparate routes, let alone extending it to boulder problems.

I hope you never read anything about the science of linguistics. The realization that you are an ignorant moron might have the type of ego-shattering repercussions that I wouldn't wish on anyone.

You probably cannot justify it based on any precise conception of what "climbing difficulty" means: rock climbing is likely too complex of an activity for that. But it is justifiable: by its real-world utility, which I think is readily apparent.

Now, Curt has been arguing that the V-scale should not be applied to long boulder problems. And it is starting to sound like you are arguing that the YDS shouldn't be applied to short sport routes. Is that correct?

I am a power-endurance specialist. I like to do somewhere around 12 or 15 moves before the "business" is over. So in a sense I'm in the middle, since there are both roped and unroped climbs that fit the bill. I see it all as one unified game, with differences in the details (and in the optimal protection system).

You could say, yes you're right, and those are all more "wrongs" that don't justify another one. But again, the justification is from the utility. If you split the YDS into a myriad of systems (YDS-power-slopers, YDS-power-endurance-to-dyno, YDS-local-endurance-crimping, YDS-gaston-sloper-power-endurance), you'd lose every advantage to having a unified (information-lossy) scale in the first place. We might as well just give up on all the useful aspects of grades and limit ourselves to the descriptions in plain English.

I have studied linguistics, thank you very much. And I am certainly not an ignorant moron. And I hold my ground, as well. Walking into a courtroom believing that a word ALWAYS has a certain meaning would lead to an ego-shattering by the opposing counsel that would have very dire consequences.

I'm not arguing any should or should nots. But if you want to maximize the meaningfulness and usefulness of the ratings, then you keep the sets being rated as homogeneous as possible. This would be accomplished by rating short powerful routes/problems with the V-scale, and longer routes/problems with the YDS scale.

If you think about it, without additional information about the route, the rating says very little. When we look at a route, we do refine the rating based on the characteristics of the route. There's no way I'd even get on a 5.12a off-width crack, or lead a runout 5.12a slab. But if I looked at a long, gently overhanging 5.12a crimp ladder, I'd try to onsight on it. The rating itself doesn't mean that much; in fact, it can be completely overshadowed by the character of the route.

Now, how to formulate that in a way that let's us rest in complete satisfaction that the grades have some "meaning" is difficult. (But fortunately, we can all keep using these systems regardless of exactly how we want to answer this particular issue because it is an observable fact that, in practice, these systems actually do do some useful work.)