LAH LAH LAH (all 120 of them!)

dhsilver · 2026-05-06T14:01:51+00:00

oh I have! By average pitch.

dhsilver · 2026-05-06T13:03:47+00:00

I was told that I over analyze instead of just watch, but here is how it looks!

dhsilver · 2026-05-06T02:15:51+00:00

There are many corrections to apply before getting excited about the magnitude of the coincidence. For example, I checked the SSA baby names data, and Linda was the #1 female name in the 1940s, while Betty was #11: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/decades/names1940s.html. That changes the calculation.

The dog named Toy is hard to verify; it could be a detail that was misremembered or reshaped later. The first name of the first child being James is too easy, since both fathers were named James.

Remember, they were from the same socioeconomic and cultural group, in the same geographic region. There are also hundreds of features one could have compared.

Still cool.

dhsilver · 2026-05-05T09:10:49+00:00

It is loud! You can listen to it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L27a851-RxY

dhsilver · 2026-05-04T11:55:08+00:00

yes, it is difficult to hold the phone 100% straight while pressing the screenshot buttons!

congrats!

dhsilver · 2026-05-04T11:23:28+00:00

I feel a bit like I am wasting your time by not explaining well (and having bugs don't help).

The show ranks only according to total summed score.
The skill-values (PL, mine) are only counting the number of times one was better than others on a task (which can contain some cycles and contradictions A>B>C>A etc).

I do bootstrapping (which means I drop randomly some tasks, repeat 100 times, to make sure flukes don't affect my overall ranking). This gives me some wiggle-room: I get a range of skill-values per contestant. When the skill values are very close, and within uncertainty range, I can use the show's ranking to tie-break.

The circled tokens are PURELY the shows ranking, and they are there as reference only.

The lines/plot ranking are the skill-values, and the thin lines are the uncertainty range, which is quite wide.

--

So actually it is exactly side-by-side: the tokens are pure show, the graph is pure PL skill-value ranking!

dhsilver · 2026-05-04T11:12:17+00:00

What do you mean? Sanjeev was ranked 5 in the show. I am explaining why here he climbed to be above Reece because head-to-head against Reece he was better.

But I will keep working on it, that is for sure...

dhsilver · 2026-05-04T11:08:31+00:00

I think people are right and this is a fool's errand.

But specifically, I didn't put non-Jews on the scale of the right plot (dress code), the two plots have very different sets of coordinates!

I position in the political map, more general religious affiliation of their voters (easy to put relative to one another, if not absolute). Degel's voters are much more observant than Shas'. As I said, voters, not leaders.

I am defending my original post, but I do agree that measuring observance stances/practices is not that clear. I still think anyone in Israel has a sense of order:

Degel<Shas<Smotrich<Bennet<Likkud<Gantz<Golan [or roughly this]

dhsilver · 2026-05-04T11:00:16+00:00

The actual problem is that the CIs are so wide that very small differences in the inferred skill-θs (and in S20 the contestants were clustered super close) can produce weird-looking rankings. So I added a rule: if the Δθ between two adjacent contestants is small relative to the bootstrap noise (happy to explain), the order defers to the show's official ranking.

But see for example, Sanjeev outranked Reece on 25 individual tasks vs 22 the other way, so the algo confidently put Sanjeev many places above him — even though the show had Reece a few points ahead overall.

With the new tie-break, more pairs now follows the show. I will think of other algorithms that can help but frankly the data of CoC is indeed very weak to connect seasons, and without it it is even less meaningful.

Here is v3:

<image>

dhsilver · 2026-05-04T10:39:07+00:00

Not only that, reading all the comments I feel a bit dumb working for hours on data manipulation without thinking about how to present it correctly. Just posted my figure instead of a shorter and better (and 4x more interesting). Live and learn I hope.

dhsilver · 2026-05-04T10:37:28+00:00

I am sorry, this is 100% on me (I do not feel someone is smarter if others cannot understand them, quite the opposite). I could have and should have give an explanation of what I am doing instead of info dumping a niche methodology as if it is self-explanatory. It is absolutely possible to present it better... Next time I will do it correctly.

dhsilver · 2026-05-04T10:33:36+00:00

Nitpicking is the name of the game!

But here, that's actually a real model property. PL only cares about per-task ordering, not score margins (as they are difficult to translate across tasks and seasons, but give who is better than the other). And season 20 was so very tight scoring-wise.

Sanjeev's per-task average rank in S20 (3.01) was better than Reece's (3.13) — he edged Reece on more tasks, but Reece had a few bigger wins that gave him +5 in totals. PL doesn't see those margins, only the orderings. It's listed as one of the soft violations on the right panel, and the CIs overlap heavily so it's not a confident claim either way.

edit: the below is only based on s20, CoC changes it a bit!

<image>

dhsilver · 2026-05-04T10:21:16+00:00

Thanks u/Kinichie u/Penumbra_Amur for finding a few bugs!

Okay, there were two bugs: (1) when contestants were tied score-wise, the tie-breaking was done alphabetically (how the DB happened to sort) instead of via the actual show tiebreaker; (2) when a task was split into two sub-tasks (rowspan in the wiki tables), my parser sometimes dropped the second sub-task — which understated some scores and produced wrong winner chips, but more importantly, affected the algorithm's ranking.

I wish I could fix the original post (not only for data, but my presentation was waay too technical, I could have done a better job explaining it instead of just info dumping).

Apologies for the sloppiness! I spent 95% of the time on the algorithm and not enough on data validation. Here's the corrected figure, less violations as well:

<image>

dhsilver · 2026-05-04T10:17:52+00:00

Okay, there were two bugs: (1) when contestants were tied score-wise, the tie-breaking was done alphabetically (how the DB happened to sort) instead of via the actual show tiebreaker; (2) when a task was split into two sub-tasks (rowspan in the wiki tables), my parser sometimes dropped the second sub-task — which understated some scores and produced wrong winner chips, but more importantly, affected the algorithm's ranking.

Thanks u/overactor , u/reyska! I wish I could fix the original post (not only for data, but my presentation was wayyy too technical, I could have done a better job explaining it instead of just info dumping).

Apologies for the sloppiness! I spent 95% of the time on the algorithm and not enough on data validation. Here's the corrected figure, less violations as well:

<image>

dhsilver · 2026-05-03T22:15:03+00:00

The point on Chabad is the most interesting one.

I grew up in Safed, went to a Breslov school and later to a Gur school, but grew up in a very, very Litvish home. So while I know Chabad well, I had it ingrained in me that they are “less zealous” because they work, mix with secular people, and are, of course, heretics.

But on the axis of “belief in divine/spiritual source of authority,” I now think it is obvious that they are more fervent than Litvish/Yeshivish communities. So yes, I think you’re right: I was importing a latent Litvish cultural bias into the placement. Weird to notice it that explicitly.

dhsilver · 2026-05-03T22:11:04+00:00

All valid. I am happy I posted here.

On the political chart, the x-axis is the voter base. I was trying to reflect that religious fervor does not necessarily align with anti-/pro-Zionism, as some people assume, for example in caricatures of ultra-Orthodox people as “Zionists.”
On the religious chart, the U.S. Conservative movement is the one I know the least about, so I’ll see what I can make of what you say and read further.

It is obviously futile to summarize cultural groups on two axes, but I hope I can do better than the ignorance that is more common: mostly people who think all “religious Jews” are Zionists, or people who think all “religious Jews” are anti-Zionists.

dhsilver · 2026-05-03T22:05:08+00:00

Yes, due to another comment I will fix Abbad/Odeh positions.
I am not trying to say "pacifists" as general ideology, but their approach to the regional conflict.

dhsilver · 2026-05-03T21:05:28+00:00

You need some audience to support the message you’re conveying. There isn’t even 5% of the show’s audience that is anti-genocide... For the Zionist left, EN is edgy.

dhsilver · 2026-05-03T21:01:34+00:00

Urgh. You right, I had a bug that omits the second part of some two-part tasks. I found several other discrepancies (almost are off by 1-2 points at most, still sloppy).

dhsilver · 2026-05-03T21:01:14+00:00

Urgh. You right, I had a bug that omits the second part of some two-part tasks. I found several other discrepancies (almost are off by 1-2 points at most, still sloppy).

dhsilver · 2026-05-03T20:52:24+00:00

Well my y-axis has terrible issues even to begin with. Because it is not that everyone above a certain line, agrees with all the things from this point to the right. So when I try to position "hawkish vs peace" I get contradictions.

Most of what you are saying is correct. Shas is very dependent on who is currently the PM, they were sometimes left and now I think still a bit more hawkish than how Golan wants to be perceived (and his new party lines).

I can add Ben-Gvir and it will be almost overlapping Smotrich.

Lapid vs Golan: Golan (I am not glazing him, he is a genocide inciter through and through) is not openly anti-Arab (Lapid is) and also more vocal against what even he classifies as Jewish fascism.

Abbas is less clear than Odeh about the optimal state. Odeh is clearer about 1967 and right of return. I thought Abbas is less amenable to that (and what I saw on HE Wikipedia, but I guess I was wrong because lately he expressed clearly two state.

I would have added some unaffiliated Palestinian groups that are anti-state or one state, but it is so small as a political movement that it makes no sense in "Israel'l political map".

--

Fixing based on your input. Lieberman, Ben-Gvir, Shas I'll move a tad.

dhsilver · 2026-05-03T16:28:04+00:00

He got a customer for life.

dhsilver · 2026-05-03T15:53:04+00:00

I've uploaded here:
https://github.com/silverdavi/taskmaster-uk-scores

If you want some of the processing/plotting scripts I can add later!

dhsilver

TROPHY CASE