tim3003 wrote:
Argentum wrote:
Abd therein lies your problem, as many others do not. They are not synonyms
To go away from motorsport as an example: Jesse Owens' World Record for 100m was 10.2 seconds - a time now regularly achieved by many US college sprinters. Would you consider that each of those is better than Owens? Or would you think that, just possibly, training facilities, equipment, computer analysis, nutrition, types of track run on, etc, etc, might have some bearing on results? And that is a sport that, though individual, has changed much less than F1 has over the years
Or, away from sport altogether, The Osmonds have sold more records than Stevie Wonder, so you could say they are more successful. But I'm confident not many would say they are better
Just using the above to demonstrate that, for many, "best" and "most successful" are not the same thing. As you state, you consider that they are but that belief, ironically, is just an opinion.
I don't know how you come to the conclusion that I rate Owens as less than say Bolt. My method explicitly ignores the evolutionary changes in the sport. Of course, putting a middle-aged Fangio in a Merc next to Hamilton today would leave him slaughtered. I didn't say that makes him less great than Hamilton..
As for the music comparison. When you're dealing with art, no-one with any knowledge would say sales outweighs artistic merit. I don't think you can compare art with sport. In sport it's winning that counts; in art merit is earned over time.
To be fair, I did not come to the conclusion that you rate Owens less than Bolt. I asked a question. I asked it because you said:
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Well to my mind 'most successful' still = 'best' I'm afraid
A lot of athletes now have results that exceed Owens's best, so it seems a legitimate question to ask
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My method explicitly ignores the evolutionary changes in the sport
Your method does no such thing. It arbitrarily gives WDC twice the points of a second place? why? What if someone else thinks the ratio should be 3:1? Or 7:2? Or any other figure? What if someone says that earlier championships should be weighted because cars then broke down more often? You then multiply those results by the win percentage as if that would make an imprecise figure more precise.
If that sounds like I am being aggresively dismissive of your method, I apologise - your method is as good as anyone else's, but it is my contention that "best", whatever that is, cannot be empirically proven with stats. The fact that your two methods come up with two different answers would seem to demonstrate this. They are all useful tools, but they all contain assumptions of which attributes should be included, and the weightings that each of those attributes should be given. And every single one of those is governed by opinion
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Of course, putting a middle-aged Fangio in a Merc next to Hamilton today would leave him slaughtered
I don't doubt that for a second. However, If you were to put Hamilton alongside Fangio in a Mercedes W196, surrounded by fuel tanks, with no seatbelts, a leather or cork helmet and, at best, a straw bale between the cars and trees, then the answer may be a little less clear cut.
I put this just to illustrate that trying to compare across eras is not a simple task
Of course, there must be a best ever driver. So, to save everyone the effort of compiling a myriad of stats, I'll tell you now that it's Jim Clark
Mind you, that's just my opinion...
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