> “Outside his online play, Hans is the fastest rising top player in Classical [over-the-board] chess in modern history,” the report says, while comparing his progress to the game’s brightest rising stars. “Looking purely at rating, Hans should be classified as a member of this group of top young players. While we don’t doubt that Hans is a talented player, we note that his results are statistically extraordinary.”
I basically made the argument that, in any sport, when a player does statistically much, much better than their previous performance would predict, that in and of itself should be considered evidence of cheating - perhaps not conclusive evidence, but definitely evidence warranting further investigation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32990022
> All this talk of "Carlsen accused him of cheating with no evidence" reminds me of the blowback against some athletes in the 70s and 80s who accused rivals of taking PEDs "with no evidence".
> Sometimes the evidence of someone doing monstrously better than can be expected by their history is sufficient IMO. I mean, look at this article about swimmer Shirley Babashoff [1], dubbed "Surly Shirley" at the time by the media, for suggesting the East German women were on PEDs in the 70s. Nowadays we look back on those images of the East German women, looking more manly than any dude I've ever seen, and wonder how we considered with a straight face that they weren't on a boatload of drugs. Similarly, it completely baffles me how any sane person can think that Flo Jo wasn't on PEDs in the runup to the 1988 Olympics - her 100m dash record still stands today.
> I'm not saying Carlsen went about it in the right way, because now Niemann is basically in an indefensible position, but I'm also not willing to quickly dismiss it because Carlsen has "no evidence".
Yeah you pointed out something special here. It’s like those unsung Russian sub captains who didn’t start the nuclear apocalypse because they had an intuitive understanding between faulty and genuine threats. You can’t explain why you know something you just know it.
Besides, Magnus genuinely has never seemed like the guy to get petty and up and throw a fit, he’s lost plenty of times without doing such.
> You can’t explain why you know something you just know it.
The way Carlsen described his suspicions reminded me of "connoisseurship" in the art world. Now that's a "skill" that's not as important as it once was but once the science has given its results and there are still no firm conclusions, connoisseurship is all you have.
Magnus cares deeply about the image of chess as a sport. He has done a great deal to popularize chess. Cheating threatens the legitimacy of chess itself.
It makes sense that Magnus would take a stand on it, even if he risks losing face by doing so.
My understanding of the Russian sub captain that I'm aware of is that he was able to explain it clearly - it appeared that only one missile had been fired, and he knew it made absolutely no sense that the US would start a nuclear war by firing a single missile.
I might take into consideration rapid rise in ratings, and even this chess.com report, but please, this argument about post game interview is pure nonsense. It is not a 'tell' in the slightest. Any player with at least IM title will give you a decent analysis of that position if he wants, and Niemann is certainly better than IM even without alleged computer help. He was visibly disinterested in the interview and it was conducted in a rather hostile manner, so it is perfectly understandable that he probably just wanted a break and rest.
It’s definitely evidence just not very strong evidence on it’s own. Combined with a history of cheating and a few other tells and things look rather damming.
Whatever people do at young age does not have to define the rest of their lives. Did you never do anything stupid in your life?
Also, I don't know why alleged cheating when playing on some site should affect OTB tournament games. They are even governed by different bodies! Just have really thorough anti-cheating measures in place, and see how strong he plays.
I don’t know if you are aware but he was removed from chess.com in 2020 and admired he was cheating then. So has a long term and recent history with cheating, this wasn’t just some youthful indiscretion.
The report includes strong evidence he was recently and repeatedly cheating in games for prize money which shows a serious lack of ethics.
Anyway, I don’t see any significant difference in OTB vs online cheating. It’s at most slightly easier to cheat online, but the OTB prize pools are significant.
I think this lines up with the other circumstantial evidence, but can you quantify this? Like, was he pretty much never willing to explain his plays? Has any other rising star or top competitor been similarly uncooperative?
People aren't coins, with each toss unaffected by previous landings, but at the same time, not giving evidence shouldn't be considered evidence itself.
The word "evidence" is badly misunderstood, often even by the very people throwing it around.
There's a rather large contingent of people who use it as a synonym for "proof", thus demonstrating their complete lack of understanding of the very concept even as they think they are looking smart. There's a lot of people who think that it is somehow the responsibility of someone like Carlson to have unambiguous proof that is often physically, legally, or morally impossible for them to have. Not that the Kantian imperative is the be-all, end-all of morality or philosophy, but it's still a useful idea, and if one runs this memeset through that grid it quickly reveals that you can't use this as the bar people must meet. It creates a society where anything that can be hidden, often not even hidden particularly well but just hidden at all since the standard is "proof", will be gotten away with. This is impractical.
(Although there is an extent to which we do indeed live in that society.)
There's another smaller contingent (from what I can see, the former is the dominant group) who thinks that "evidence" doesn't have to be proof per se, but that for something to be "evidence" it must be single-handedly capable of meeting some bar, be it "preponderance of evidence" or whatever is being used. These people are blind to the fact that it is often possible to produce ten pieces of evidence that are individually weak, but together are too improbable to ignore. While this case must certainly be treated with care since it is sensitive to how well done the Bayesian-style analysis of their probabilities is, it is perfectly reasonable to use such evidence to come to conclusions. This contingent will often try to defeat the evidence in detail, decrying each individual one and downplaying it, and completely failing to address the totality, be it either as a method of being disingenuous, or, I am convinced, often just lacking the intellectual firepower necessary to address the totality of evidence holistically.
It's important not to fall into that trap because I think in the real world, this is how many very important questions can be settled... and I don't just mean big philosophical or societal questions, or even news of the day like this, but even little personal things. The signs that your partner is cheating on you often come in like this... you may not catch them in the act, nor even receive some individually huge clue, because there's one or two humans intelligently trying to deceive you. Such situations often end up giving off a lot of little clues, each of them individually explainable-away, but the totality pointing to the truth. Or you can determine some new direction your company may be trying to take by a pattern of little changes long before they announce it publicly. Any number of things in the world where you can carefully assemble a lot of little things to come to some reasonably strong conclusion.
Back on topic, the combination of the fact that Neimann was known to have cheated before and the accusation of the current best player in chess, who was kind of going out on a limb to do so, was quite strong evidence that Niemann did cheat. Neither individually would be enough for me to come to that conclusion strongly on its own, but the combination was compelling. I considered that enough proof for my personal opinion. Proof enough for authority figures to sanction would require a higher standard and I support and applaud them for being more careful.
You have summed it up beautifully.
In the real world, we have to tolerate the awful smell of people/companies getting away with bad things because it is too easy for a brazen person to sail below the level of proof needed to stop them.
We shouldn’t have to tolerate this in sports, which are an escape from the real world.
I basically made the argument that, in any sport, when a player does statistically much, much better than their previous performance would predict, that in and of itself should be considered evidence of cheating - perhaps not conclusive evidence, but definitely evidence warranting further investigation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32990022
> All this talk of "Carlsen accused him of cheating with no evidence" reminds me of the blowback against some athletes in the 70s and 80s who accused rivals of taking PEDs "with no evidence".
> Sometimes the evidence of someone doing monstrously better than can be expected by their history is sufficient IMO. I mean, look at this article about swimmer Shirley Babashoff [1], dubbed "Surly Shirley" at the time by the media, for suggesting the East German women were on PEDs in the 70s. Nowadays we look back on those images of the East German women, looking more manly than any dude I've ever seen, and wonder how we considered with a straight face that they weren't on a boatload of drugs. Similarly, it completely baffles me how any sane person can think that Flo Jo wasn't on PEDs in the runup to the 1988 Olympics - her 100m dash record still stands today.
> I'm not saying Carlsen went about it in the right way, because now Niemann is basically in an indefensible position, but I'm also not willing to quickly dismiss it because Carlsen has "no evidence".