Good grief

[pootlus]

Leaving aside the annual headbanging over the number of A grades awarded at A-level, this is the standard of journalism in the UK.

Note this paragraph:

In 1953 two people got to the top of Everest, an extraordinary achievement at the time. Yet on a single day in 1996, 39 people stood on the summit. That might suggest that Everest had become 20

Comments

[pootlus]

Despite your protestations the Everest analogy becomes even less appropriate if I add the text that followed (incidentally, the article does not place the Professor's text in quotes - which implies that the journalist paraphrased rather than took a direct quote).

That might suggest that Everest had become 20 times easier to climb. Yet the mountain remains the same height.

Of course, today people have better equipment, better training, better nutrition and so on. In that sense, it is less surprising that more people can climb Everest.

Good grief.

Firstly, I don't know why 'might' is used here. Is the author saying that the technological advances, ropes, and the teams of Sherpas are having a negligible effect? Or that people (many Everest ascendees have virtually no mountaineering experience) are, over time, becoming better mountaineers? He could have added "But take away all the assistance, and Everest is just as difficult to climb as it ever was." (which is almost certainly true). The problem is that this still doesn't help because people are doing it (with notable exceptions) with the assistance. Saying that the mountain is still intrinsically difficult to climb when people are claiming the achievement having had a good deal of this difficulty taken away misses the point entirely.

"But they're reaching a standard!" you wail. They are reaching a standard that says "with a tremendous amount of assistance, a few weeks to spare, and a lot of cash, anyone in reasonable physical shape can reach the summit of the world's highest mountain". Is something that half the planet could achieve, with the same assistance, still an achievement?

Secondly, "Less surprising"? It's not surprising at all! Am I just cynical? How easily are people surprised? More to the point, why should people be surprised that all the things mentioned make ascending the mountain much easier (though not, it seems, any less dangerous)? It's easier to multiply two twenty-digit numbers together with a calculator than in your head. Is that less surprising?

People in general are not magically becoming better mountaineers, just as people in general are not magically becoming cleverer.

The thing is, we can measure achievement on Everest. We can see the people who do it without oxygen, solo, on a new route. We can tell them apart from the people who are hauled up to the summit by their climbing harness. It's becoming increasingly difficult to do that with exams, however. How many more stars can we add to an A?

How do I pick out the really exceptional from just the fairly intelligent? If I want someone to climb a new, horribly difficult mountain, I want Hillary and Norgay, not some random guy. If the only criterion I have available for picking people is that they can truthfully say "I climbed Everest", how am I supposed to tell the difference?