Logiqx
Veteran
During the years I spent as a 400m runner (training 4 or 5 days a week), I don't recall any conversations involving the words luck or filtering. The factors affecting sprint performance rarely involve luck although you can of course have favourable conditions. I just felt it was slightly tenuous to drag athletics into this debate... I've never drawn parallels between the variables in athletics and cubing.
I can make another analogy with different sport that I do... speed sailing on a windsurfer. Whilst it requires a lot of skill, courage (or stupidity?) the weather is a key factor which determines what you can achieve on a specific day. The forecast may be great but you need to be waiting at the top of the course when that "gust of the day" comes through and can drag you down the course at speeds in excess of 50mph / 80kph. We don't discard our best times because it was a lucky gust but we do use averages to lessen their effect in a competition. Nevertheless the top guys still seem to come out on top all the time.
With regards to cubing, I'm content to know what times I'm likely to get if a sit down and do a certain number of solves. If anyone asks, I don't have a problem telling them a lucky PB (i.e. "whats the fastest you've done it") but I make it clear that I'd normally expect times much higher and in a certain range. I spent some time trying to use z-scores and suchlike to decide if single times are too much of a statistical outlier but my findings were inconclusive, hence my simplified view of 50% lucky + 50% unlucky.
I can make another analogy with different sport that I do... speed sailing on a windsurfer. Whilst it requires a lot of skill, courage (or stupidity?) the weather is a key factor which determines what you can achieve on a specific day. The forecast may be great but you need to be waiting at the top of the course when that "gust of the day" comes through and can drag you down the course at speeds in excess of 50mph / 80kph. We don't discard our best times because it was a lucky gust but we do use averages to lessen their effect in a competition. Nevertheless the top guys still seem to come out on top all the time.
With regards to cubing, I'm content to know what times I'm likely to get if a sit down and do a certain number of solves. If anyone asks, I don't have a problem telling them a lucky PB (i.e. "whats the fastest you've done it") but I make it clear that I'd normally expect times much higher and in a certain range. I spent some time trying to use z-scores and suchlike to decide if single times are too much of a statistical outlier but my findings were inconclusive, hence my simplified view of 50% lucky + 50% unlucky.
