If there are not statistical differences, then there are no performance differences. Cheating by definition should imply performance differences.

If he is cheating, then at some point in the future, if that method becomes detectable and he has to stop, then his play will suddenly suffer, which would be more evidence.

Claiming that statistics cannot answer this question with statistics is not true. It may be hard, or the current sample too small, but claiming stats is not usable is a misunderstanding of statistics.

>This is like the statistical analyses that show election rigging by highlighting a statistically improbable distribution of results

This only works on the public, and is not what professional statisticians that analyze elections do.

And even here, if the event is rare enough, say 1 part in quadrillions, and the analysis is correct, then yes, we would certainly conclude there was rigging.

All human knowledge is statistical. Things we claim to be true are only statistically true to large odds, so even for election rigging, if the stats reach some level of certainty, then it is completely valid proof that would hold in court.

The pop idiocy of election rigging claims has never risen to that level.

>it is completely avoidable if you cheat competently

No, it is not. It may only lower the signal to noise ratio, but there is still detectable differences. If you continually improve the statistics and are forced to lower the signal, eventually the signal would be so low as to not affect the system, which in this case is chess games.

Physics, for example, can tease events out of on the order of 1 part in trillions and demonstrate signal. Plenty of other things do the same.

That's not true. Pick an engine, set to a few hundred points above your strength, then try to beat it using only one or two moves from an engine. You will lose nearly every game, because so many of your other moves will be so below the other player that the 1-2 good moves cannot make it up.

This is demonstrated quite often by the games where GMs are "helped" by others in multi-player games, and it shows that help against a much better opponent takes far more than 1-2 moves.

Among really close players it helps. But not once you get a few 100 ELO points apart.

Modeling provides the best evidence in all aspects of life (design, science, invention, marketing, medicine, ....). All human knowledge is built in modeling and statistical evidence. Nothing is 100% certain except mathematics, and even that is often fuzzier than 100%.

So how is modeling yet another thing ridiculous when it provides empirically the best methods in so many other domains?

Care to explain why you call the method "really weird"? Is there a flaw in the statistics that you can correct?

Here's [1] his publications - all well cited, his h-index is good, and I find no refutation of complaints in the literature about his methods. He seems quite competent in this area.

>how you can state there's no reason whatsoever to suspect him of cheating is absurd

If cheating does not show up in performance then is it cheating? If there is any performance gain then it should show up at some statistical level.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=8nk9k5oAAAAJ&hl=en...

I've done quite a bit of modeling for predictive house pricing and investment questions, so I am very aware of how mortgages, math, and housing markets worth. As far back as around 2001 I was writing pricing algorithms for companies that needed it (look at my resume), and I've done a lot since then. So I'm pretty clear on how they work.

>5) Typical money available determines house prices.

No, house prices are indifferent to what one buyer can afford; they are determined by the entire market of buyers AND sellers. If a seller doesn't want to sell at price X, they will not. If a buyer doesn't want to pay Y, they will not. If a buyer cannot afford price Z, they cannot buy that house.

After your step 4, the buyer knows how much they can afford, and looks at houses already at that price.

>Reducing the length will cause people to build equity faster and will reduce volatility and the dangers of things like interest rate hikes

Over 85% of mortgages are fixed interest rates, so interest rate hikes are not that much of a problem. People can use them to their advantage if they understand the pros and cons, but the vast majority will never be affected.

People have a fixed amount of monthly income they can use to pay a mortgage, so the amount they can borrow is completely predicated on that - their ability to make payments. If they are forced to get short loans, they will only be able to buy lower priced houses, and will miss out on traditional housing stock growth. A 100k investment returns half what a 200k investment does.

Also, many people will be priced out of mortgages completely since cutting loan lengths in half roughly cuts affordable house prices in half.

Finally, even if one can afford monthly payments on a 15 year mortgage, it's still better economically to get a 30 year mortgage and make the payments as if you had a 15 year, except only pay the minimal amount on the actual mortgage and pay the rest into an investment. After 15 years, you will be better off in almost all cases (check the math, last time I poked at it I would be $60k on a $300k house doing this).

As to reducing volatility, if you can just afford a 15 year mortgage for a given house, then you are at more risk since you're not saving cash (as investments) for problems. If you instead turn that into a 30 year, cutting your payments down, and save the excess, you will have cash you can use in case of problems. So this is another benefit to getting a longer loan - you can truly make yourself more resistant to problems and volatility.

A third factor is fixed rate mortgages means the cost of your mortgage goes down over the length of time due to inflation: your income goes up, your mortgage goes down. Inflation gives benefits to borrowers (mortgage holders included) at the cost to lenders (banks).

So, if you check the math, buying a bigger house (up to the limit of what you can spend) and getting a longer term loan historically has resulted in more, not less equity. Model it out and check the math yourself.

Making minimum payments always increases the length. How do you define your pay off?

For the record [1], in recent years around 58% of bachelor's degree holders incurred debt, with the median at $23,000. If you want to pay over 8 years this is around $3k per year, which should be completely doable for anyone with a bachelors degree over an 8 year span (over 8 years the average person will make far more per year than starting wages).

[1] https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/average-student-loan-d...

Making loans higher interest to handle increased risk, making it even harder for someone to pay for college.

May I ask which country? Whenever I look at education stats for a taxpayer college funded system versus the US, there are tradeoffs made, such as less of the population getting college degrees through stricter (taxpayer desired) requirements. I'm curious if your country has a solution that's better on some Pareto frontier of education funding methods.

But go ahead and do minimal work at all your jobs, then report how well that worked for you.

Then we can empirically see which world view is more accurate.

Of course, crypto boys don't have the best track records of reading reality, do they?

Of course you could show that sampling is an invalid way to gather estimates of frequency, and rewrite all of statistics, but I suspect your high level C++ perfection is more time useful to you.

Me, on the other hand, trusts the aggregation of researchers over an internet commenter, even if they do have half of all comments in a topic.

Of course your mystery programs no one else can see provides you a way to claim such sampling is not representative. But since you made the claim, it is up to you to provide evidence.

I get that you have none except your anecdotal self-claims, which is certainly selection bias.

For example:

>Programs they are not in (e.g. mine) are nowhere in your list

I could point out you do mot have proof they are not in it; you just have not found one. Current tech on whole program correctness provers don't yet scale to codebases of this size, and absent that, you do not know your few programs do not have them, no matter how much you claim otherwise or try to code otherwise.

"To pretend as you do ... is not honest."

I just provided thousands of examples where it is true. To offset all that evidence can you provide, say, millions of examples where zero (your phrase) use-after-free bugs have been found?

>You reveal that you never had any intention of engaging honestly.

Honest engaging would be for you to provide evidence for a claim you made when asked. I provided extremely solid counter evidence from the result of many, many research teams.

So, care to honestly engage about your claim?

And, if you really want to restrict to your goalpost moving subset, then go ahead and demonstrate that the above general trends are not trends in your subset. Because the literature on it disagrees with you.

So, to defend your claim "The mistake is thinking everybody else is in it too", care to show where "everybody else" is free from these bugs?

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C15&q=use...

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=use+after+f...

Which project of similar size doesn't have bugs? You seem to imply most don't, which is empirically untrue.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C15&q=bug...

On a big project, say 100 devs over 3 years, 6 man months is 1/600th of the work, so a single person is replaceable and it's not even noise. If the replacement takes 6 months to get up to speed the replacement is certainly not a very good developer, even on the biggest projects. At that size, there's lots of small side projects, testing groups, and the like, so there should be plenty of smaller pieces to work on, and some on those small projects are always happy to jump into the main work, not needing 3-6 months to be useful to it.

This is not highly damaging on any but the smallest, shortest projects. And even there people move around all the time and don't destroy projects.