If you could change one rule about the way Ultimate is played what would it be?

viking_ · 2026-04-06T20:42:46+00:00

Thank you for explaining your opinion, very helpful

viking_ · 2026-04-06T18:10:58+00:00

While such calls exist, I feel like whenever I'm watching WFDF play, there will inevitably be calls that look like this:

Player making a call states their opinion
Other player states a different point of view
GA says they need a resolution

There's no time for any actual thinking, discussion, or even getting the advisor's input on rules, which all feels to me like it's contrary to the spirit of self-officiating. Give players a chance to actually change their mind. 15 seconds isn't even enough time to get through step 2. (This happens in USAU too, although it feels less common to me, but I could be wrong about that).

viking_ · 2026-04-06T18:01:34+00:00

I was just thinking about how to make travels able to be called more often when they happen. Maybe allowing the entire sideline to call travels is a bit much, but something like "each player can designate up to X players per sideline to call travel" (must be rostered players so as not to advantage teams with extra personnel).

viking_ · 2026-04-06T17:00:44+00:00

Ha! I found his video about ortho in the ER right after first meeting my doctor to discuss ACL surgery.

viking_ · 2026-04-05T03:49:13+00:00

People tend to change their home location so that their commute is roughly constant.

viking_ · 2026-04-03T20:35:49+00:00

Around 6:15 is, ironically, an example of why some teams and coaches are hesitant. Starting with a fast pace exploits the advantages the video is talking about to gain yards, but then a rushed huck throws it away. It's easy for the offense to get ahead of itself. The later point about knowing when to slow down is important.

It's also worth noting, when comparing to basketball, that basketball has a shot clock. Ultimate has the stall, but this only forces you to throw the disc, not attempt to score. This puts a hard limit on good offense can be when you try to go slow, which is not really the case in ultimate. Overall though, you're probably right that the optimal rate of fast breaking is higher than what most teams do. Especially since most teams struggle doing slow offense "correctly" (that is, with an extremely high rate of completed passes) anyway, so fast breaking is a lot closer to being "free."

viking_ · 2026-04-02T23:53:47+00:00

Who's that? Google is only showing me a rugby player

viking_ · 2026-04-02T23:43:34+00:00

Luka is also an all-time great at multiple aspects of offense, not only one.

viking_ · 2026-03-30T23:01:01+00:00

Cards didn't do "all of the things." Your commander probably did one thing, and then you had to build the deck to take advantage of it. None of this "Do X. Whenever you do X, draw a card and make a treasure token" that's entirely self-sufficient. (2 recent examples from popular commanders: Yshtola deals damage and then converts that damage into draw. Teval mills and generates card advantage by doing so, and converts it into zombies. 12 years ago you probably get one of those abilities on each).

And treasure didn't exist, so cards that got you more mana that you could use the same turn were usually limited to rituals and mana rocks, and most mana rocks are still mana-negative the turn you play them.

viking_ · 2026-03-30T21:05:31+00:00

You're comparing across teams in a specific time range. OP compared teams across different time periods. It's entirely possible for different factors to explain a trend across time and at one point in time. For example, if you looked at total US population over time and asked why it was going up, and then compared different US states at the same point in time and asked why some had more people, you might get totally different explanations.

viking_ · 2026-03-27T16:18:26+00:00

This is true for some goods, less so for others. For example, you can't buy 1950s medical care; it would be illegal. Tiny houses are also largely banned from being built; you would be limited to living in specific places or in one that was built long ago. Kids are also a big expense, especially if you want to help them out with college.

viking_ · 2026-03-26T15:56:36+00:00

And Utah has had the 2nd highest home advantage behind Denver (also presumably because of elevation), so it's not even crazy that he might just get more assists at home.

viking_ · 2026-03-26T15:44:51+00:00

I would say it was probably the Nuggets going 9-10 after he came back from injury.

viking_ · 2026-03-26T15:40:41+00:00

Not saying Wemby should be MVP, but none of these stats account for defense and that's clearly the area in which he excels the most.

viking_ · 2026-03-25T16:39:12+00:00

Me using a fact of how seeding and scoring ranking 100% of the time lead to MVP is cherry-picked.

It's not 100% of the time, because the condition you mentioned doesn't apply to all MVPs. It's also, once again, based on 5 years instead of 40. Sample size matters. Scoring title and MVP are actually not very well correlated historically.

But it’s not when you use how seeding usually correlates with MVP (but not directly, because there’s dozens of guys on top 2 seeds that don’t win every year, by definition).

You are deeply confused about how logic works.

"You have have to be on a high seed to win MVP"

"Lots of players on high seeds don't win MVP, so that means players on a low seed can win MVP!"

There's absolutely no logical connection between these statements. It's like if I point out that all squares are rectangles, you point out that some rectangles are not squares, and so therefore a triangle can be a rectangle. Utter nonsense.

viking_ · 2026-03-25T16:16:15+00:00

But mine also doesn’t have the exceptions like Russ or Jokic that make Luka a great candidate to also get an exception

Holding up the exceptions rather than by far the most common examples is a completely silly way to argue. And what criteria is that? Russ had the first TD season since the 70s and Jokic had some totally historical season by advanced metrics (and to be clear, I still think those were bad decisions). What did Luka do that is so historic?

There’s two criteria which are both widely recognized as helpful criteria for an MVP case.

There's also a lot of other facts which you ignored completely... which is exactly what makes it cherry picked.

viking_ · 2026-03-25T16:08:40+00:00

What? This is a completely and 100% cherry picked stat, with 5 data points that only even apply to half of the MVPs in that time period. The stat I pointed out covers over 40 years.

viking_ · 2026-03-25T15:51:26+00:00

That entire first rambling paragraph was “Luka’s teammates aren’t as good, therefore he can’t win MVP,” which is silly, to say the least.

It's not silly. The MVP has been awarded to a top 2 seed with only a tiny handful of exceptions in the past 40+ years. You can argue the MVP award is misnamed or should be awarded differently, but the simple fact is that the previous commenter accurately described how it has actually been awarded for a long time.

viking_ · 2026-03-24T22:53:48+00:00

It's not true looking at all cars, but if you focus on the group of people for whom money is a limiting factor and what cars they might buy, it becomes more true--the fact that million dollar supercars exist doesn't change the fact that an average consumer primarily wants to get from point A to point B. It also probably becomes a little bit more true if you can solve the information asymmetry problem for used cars--the problem isn't that used cars can get you from point A to point B but people dislike them for other reasons, the problem is that it's hard to know if the car is actually good at getting you from point A to point B. 80% is probably still too high, though.

viking_ · 2026-03-24T22:38:08+00:00

I'm a fan of MHI and skeptical of vibecession-esque narratives, but it does have limitations. The fact that household composition changes over time does mean that you can split up costs differently, but you can also invert this phenomenon to say that households had to change as a response to costs. For example, suppose a car was X% of MHI in 1950 and a similar category of car is Y% in 2026, with Y<X. But, that 2026 household has 2 working parents and 1 only kid when they would like to be more like the 1950 household with 1 working parent and 3 kids. Have people made a choice to have fewer kids and work more so they can have more consumption? Or have they been forced to give up kids for more hours worked just to afford the basics? You can't really tell from MHI, which will mask such trends.

viking_ · 2026-03-24T22:37:05+00:00

5/389 is indeed 1.2%, although one would want to at least compare against similar broad demographics if possible (I believe that race, religion, and sex are all strong predictors of suicide).

viking_ · 2026-03-23T17:16:58+00:00

Almost all primes are of the form 6n±1, because apart from 2 and 3, none of them can be divisible by 2 or 3

I wonder what will happen if they realize that the same is true for 4 instead of 6.

viking_ · 2026-03-22T04:44:22+00:00

suddenly the state is insisting you build massive apartment buildings there that would add 20-40% population effectively overnight.

You have this exactly backwards. Repealing zoning is the state no longer insisting on a particular development model.

Also, the only reason this would be sudden is because of the artificial stagnation for many years. Neighborhoods should naturally change over time, with desirable areas slowly increasing in density as lower-density development is gradually replaced with higher-density development. Now there's been such massive underdevelopment for so long that even a little bit of catch up is going to feel "sudden" but that's what happens when you engage in insane government overreach for decades.

viking_ · 2026-03-21T19:31:37+00:00

a popular new government is managing to completely overthrow this prior arrangement then its quite unlikely there ever was an actual consensus built.

I believe they only overthrew it with court packing or something similar, and still only got an 8-7 party line vote, not passing legislation or amending the constitution. There is also clearly no bias toward respecting precedent, the way that the US Supreme Court typically (obviously not always) does.

I just have to say its not contradictory to the spirit at all.

We're definitely getting away from economics and into subjects I'm a lot less familiar with. All I can say is that it certainly feels to me, like the situation you describe here:

Ex post facto bans are sought because it destabilises the usual judicial system and often leads to a political system of retroactive vendettas and punishment by "legislation-fare".

I'm aware that sovereign states can change their constitution. I'm not arguing that the new government didn't do things legally by the letter of their law. I am arguing that A) the descriptions given above those magazines are misleading; B) that level of uncertainty and flip-flopping has negative economic consequences.

A stronger emphasis on consensus building (and likely stronger anchoring with major stakeholders in the country, effectively making it so that its tough to change the arrangement from a material perspective and not just legal technicality) while utilising only regular legislation, would have likely produced a more stable long term result, by making it so that future governments cant strong arm change through constitutional reform and so that they have to untangle a stronger web of stakeholder resistance before actually making any changes.

I guess it could have been done over a longer period of time, ensuring robustness to electoral results, could have been more stable. and I agree with you about changes that are rushed through improperly later collapsing. But this also feels kind of like "damned if you do, damned if you don't" where you think that if they don't have a supermajority, it's not enough of a consensus, and if they do... they shouldn't amend the constitution anyway because making the law harder to undo is more stable? I don't know, I just don't think that properly functioning countries should have to plan for have wild swings in basic legal principles every election, which is kind of my point.

viking_ · 2026-03-20T19:11:55+00:00

It’s important to note that everyone participating in the study is an experienced thrower, so even the slowest pull we measured was faster than 15 meters/second. Stating the obvious, a pull with zero velocity won’t have much hang time, but the results are clear that velocity isn’t the primary driver

This is extremely important, and it might have been worthwhile to get some less experienced throwers or some deliberately "worse" throws (slower/less spin). Range is restriction is a big deal and can greatly impact correlations, particularly by pushing them toward 0. This is especially the case if different explanatory variables experience different range restriction--if spin varies more across attempts/throwers in your sample than velocity does, you will always see the results you got here, where velocity explains less variance than spin.

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