Okay, here's the situation. First of all, as I said in an earlier e-mail, Ragozin is almost certainly ahead in the study through Monday, though it's hard to tell what the real score is because Janis is missing data for some off-the-turfers, and different people appear to come up with different scores. I personally have no clue what the score is, I thought I'd be able to read it on my board.

Janis has decided the study involves too much work by him, and has proposed an alternative that would have TG doing most of it. That might be doable, though of course it would put me in a no-win situation-- if we lose we lose, if we win we did the study ourselves. But it turns out there is another problem.

Those high-character boys over on the other site have been positioning themselves so they are in a no-lose situation. First, Len knocks the study publicly, and does not respond to public requests for suggestions, giving him the ability to laugh off bad results. Then he goes over scoring with Janis in private. Eric comes up with the "right" way to do a study, publicly-- before privately making Janis promise NOT to score it the way he has suggested. And he does not respond when I offer to do it his way.

Okay Len, here it is-- you are either on the bus or off the bus. We will continue the study, but if we do you are a full participant-- you send us a file daily with your ratings and rankings (no more of me paying for your sheets), we send you one, we both post them and the scores daily. You are evidently ahead, so you should have some incentive to do this. If I don't have an affirmative to that by the time I'm back in the office Monday, it's over, unless and until I can figure out a satisfactory way of doing this where I am not in a no-win situation, and you are not in a no-lose situation.

One more point, on the accuracy of the study itself-- the test of its relevance is not how we do against each other, but whether the horses that win come up high in the rankings for either side. Eric is absolutely right about this one-- one side having a winner seventh when the other has him eighth is meaningless. But it will be easy to do a study at the end to determine this-- if 30% of the winners ranked in the top three for the winning side, it's meaningless, if 80% do it's meaningful.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 08/03/2006 07:24PM by TGJB.