For many yrs it has been & remains an article of faith(one repeated on this Bd) that lower level clming races are the least formful. The belief has not been shaken despite the fact that approx 2 yrs ago Steve Klein of DRF did a broad based & statistically valid study which proved that just the opposite is true. To my way of thinking, one aspect of Alydar's defense of the use of weight to split hairs among closely matched horses is essentially the same thing. The fact that an opinion has been repeated many times over many yrs & is believed by many people does not make it true.
It compounds the felony,as it were, to simply assert, without offering any proof at all, that weight has been used "profitably" during this undefined period. Simply assuming the validity of what has long been held as traditionally correct avoids the question through "a priori" reasoning, such as when religious scholars argue that a particular text cld not possibly be false because God would not allow His church to use an imperfect text over many centuries. It's also why the original formulation of Darwin's theory cld not pass scientific muster because who is fittest is determined by looking at who survived.
The results so far of one part of the research I have continued off & on since 1st raising the weight Q are mixedd: The good news is that it appears possible to quantify the precise impact of weight, which seems to have already been done for race cars. The bad news is that to do so is going to require that we find, hire & pay a top notch physicist who is willing to spend the necessary time. My initial thought was that Alydar & I cld split the cost at 1st, with whoever turns out to be wrong responsible to pick up the entire tab when the study is complete. However, you might have noticed that I have a tendency to consider bets very carefully, which triggered the trip to my racing library which should have made at
the outset.
I was interested to learn that weight handicaping may have originated in Roman chariot races, which makes me wonder why the subject was not discussed in the great scene where the owner uses Massala's arrogance to goad him into overlaid odds on Ben Hur. More to the pt, it appears to me that the idea that a certain amt of wght can be translated into a different no. of lenghts at different distances probably originated with a British Racing Official by the name of Admiral John Francis Rous, who in 1850 produced a scale of wghts which was adopted by the British Jockey Club in 1878. That, which has been adjusted over the yrs, is the precursor of the scale of wghts used in the US. In other words, it is the scale of wghts, and not any statistical survey or study of physics, which provides the conceptual framework for what to me now falls in the category of opinion. However, in Chap 15 of his groundbreaking work, "Winning At The Races-Computer Discoveries in Handicapping", Quirin reports the results of a no. of sound statistical studies(one including 30k pps) of the impact, or rather for the most part the lack of impact, of wght, a dependent variable. Without going into all the details(which I trust you will do or yourself because I have this crazy idea that you're capable of thinking for yourselves), I now consider it beyond argument that there is a lot more than my opinion which supports the argument that it does not make sense to use small wght differences as if wght was an independent variable to split hairs between evenly matched horses.