I HAD posted an essay in chess.com that went on like this:
On ratings:
Elo ratings reflect relative and not absolute chess strength.
Chess players are naturally arranged in populations partitioned by geopolitical regions and time periods that have infrequent contacts with one another. Within such a population, players get to play each other more frequently, thus forming a quasi-equilibrium group wherein individual ratings would tend to equilibrate quickly; but not with outside groups.
With caveats and in the proper context, FIDE/Elo ratings are simply fallible descriptors and predictors of an active player’s near-past and near-future performances against other rated players, and only within the same quasi-equilibrium group.
As corollaries: the best way to evaluate a player’s strength is to analyze his games and not his ratings; one cannot use ratings to accurately compare the quality of play of players from the past and present, or even the same player a decade ago and today; and care should be taken in the use of ratings as a criterion in choosing which players to seed into the upper levels of the World Championship cycle. All the above often entail comparisons between players from different quasi-equilibrium groups separated by space and/or time.
Regarding inflation deniers, they imply that Elo ratings reflect absolute and not relative chess strength. Professor Elo himself would condemn their view. If the top 20 players were to suffer a serious brain injury and begin playing like patzers, but play no one else for the next decade, they would more or less retain their 2700s ratings, although they would be playing terrible patzerish chess.
Note again:
If the top 20 players were to suffer a serious brain injury and begin playing like patzers, but play no one else for the next decade, they would more or less retain their 2700s ratings, although they would be playing terrible patzerish chess.
A guy from Europe who probably overrates Elo ratings immediately replied:
This is called a “straw man argument”, which is a set of unrealistic premises set out to try to support an argument. It is obviously unrealistic from beginning to end, with the key point being “if the top 20 only played each other for the next decade” to try to show how the Elo system is fallible. They haven’t, and they won’t.
He tries to debunk my ‘thought experiment’ above by saying it’s unrealistic. He ‘debunks’ my thought experiment using only a single criterion – that it can’t be done in reality. Apparently he thinks that any ‘thought experiment’ that cannot be done in reality is a strawman argument.
He obviously doesn’t not know what a strawman argument is.
I responded in the following manner.
Allow me to say it’s not a strawman argument at all. It’s a valid thought experiment that delves on the issue. With your reasoning … you’d end up also calling most of Einstein’s hypothetical thought experiments as “strawman arguments” since they are quite unrealistic in the sense they don’t happen in reality. Strawman arguments simply veer off the topic entirely, and that’s not the case here.
I’m not wrong in saying that Einstein’s arguments are NOT strawman arguments. If I may say so, saying that an argument isn’t realistic makes it a strawman argument is wrong.
I then defined what a strawman argument is.
What’s a strawman argument anyway? Perhaps we have a difference in defining it.
Take two debaters discussing a subject, topic, or issue. Debater 1 takes up a position. Debater 2 sets up another off tangent or different subject or topic or issue. And then refutes it. Then he claims to also have refuted Debater 1’s position.
Debater 2 would have made a strawman argument. He would have completely veered off debating the subject or topic or issue at hand.
The above is a compact and clear way of defining what a strawman argument is. (To be continued)/PN
