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What a shame that I have to leave town for the holidays just as the discussion starts getting good! I'm going to try to address a bunch of important issues right before I leave. Unfortunately I won't be discussing them much until I get back after Christmas.

I'll be frank - I have no idea why the major push is to ignore what happened this season and just continue on without revision. After a an Edgic victory, I can see it. After we went an entire season with NO ONE even considering Bob until the very last second, I see no better time to reevaluate our methods. We were about as far off as we could be on this one and yet the dominant response is to stick our heads in the sand and pretend it didn't happen. For the people here who would posit Edgic as a sort of science, I must point out that this is a very bad science practice.

Bob DID NOT fit the guidelines. He DID NOT fit Edgic. People didn't fail to pick him because they "missed something." People didn't pick him because he clearly did not fit the guidelines. We can try, in retrospect, to cram him into the guidelines, knowing he won, with limited success. But using the guidelines, we could NOT have predicted Bob. If we could have, someone here would have pointed it out - we have plenty of people here looking to make "unique" picks. Even they did not pick Bob. Bob was practically the last person (excluding Susie) on our radar. If he fit the guidelines well, I imagine someone would have picked him (no not just having an inkling that he might not be eliminated after Episode 1)

When it happened once (Danni), I can understand the search for an explanation that is not damaging to tradition. It could have been a single outlier due to returning players, the story of how Steph lost, etc. However, we now have a second example of it - Bob was given a similar UTRP type edit as well. Again, we see pushes to explain it away. This time, however, we have a pattern forming. When the situation prevents the typical Edgic winner edit from being feasible, the editors seem to use a second predictable pattern. I don't care what the situation is (Sugar not wanting to win, Bob being UTR in real life, Danni hiding her strategy) - the point is that when one method won't work, they seem to use a secondary pattern that we can predict to some extent.

People keep trying to downplay the importance of this because it "may not happen again." We can hope for that, but right now we have had 17 seasons and 2 of them (maybe 3 or maybe 4 depending on how you personally define it) have had a distinctively different style of edit. That's over 10% of the time. Are we supposed to just shut our eyes, hold our ears, and scream "LALALALA IF WE DON'T ACKNOWLEDGE IT IT WILL GO AWAY!" in hopes that it never happens again? What if it does? Is everyone here completely content with a total failure guaranteed from the outset? Why pretend data and information doesn't matter ONLY when it disconfirms our hypotheses?

Accomodating different types of winner edits does not require any omissions or deletions. The guidelines we have now do not need to change - they work most of the time. All that is required are new guidelines to help us spot possible Bob's and Danni's in the future. While I know most people will see this as a radical, major, or unthinkable type of change, why would this be a bad thing? It doesn't hamper our ability to pick the usual likely winners because the old guidelines are still there. All it does is make us more conservative in that we aren't as likely to see one of these people and then instantly decide they win, writing off all others. This does not necessarily lead to 100% accuracy (and it can't happen). This helps prevent guaranteed failure.

Now, this does become a problem because Edgic is a competition to most people. I'm not going to pretend it isn't. People are still going back and citing examples of their insights early in the season (congrats?). The goal here is not to pick the winner by the merge. It's to pick the winner as early as you possibly can - ideally before everyone else. That's why I can see a desire to avoid any changes that might advocate a more conservative and careful approach.

Specific responses:

During this season, two Edgic stalwarts, whose opinion I respect very much, had this exchange:

Okay seriously, who would think Bob isn't eliminated by now? I've joked about it but there is no way Bob wins, Edgically. I mean, luckily no one has him as a pick, but what's the reason to not eliminate him?

I agree about Bob, but at least this season you can see that Edgic is a system, and the people posting to it have different applications and ideas. Normally it's the cry of, "Spoilers!" It isn't here. But it shows that different people at different levels of experience play Edgic with varying ideas.

I think the primary lesson to be learned from this season is to have an open mind: to give new ideas their due consideration, even those that appear to go against the grain. It's an inexact science; let's not have in place systemic biases that might prevent us from seeing, for example, the possibility of Bob winning.

I agree that we need to not lock ourselves into methods and to not be dogmatic about keeping it unchanged at all costs. Nonetheless, I stand by my assertions that Bob was rightfully eliminated based on the guidelines. People should not make unique picks juts to be different. They need a basis in Edgic. If someone wants to pick an unpopular choice, they really should have some Edgic basis for it if they do it in the Edgic thread. If someone picks an unpopular choice, they make a weak/nonexistant Edgic justification for it, and it does not fit Edgic, their methods do need to be questioned, even if they get it right in the end. I still think a lot of outside the box "Edgic" picks are based on the desire to hit the jackpot earlier than others and lay claim to ultimate Edgic personal victory, even with no Edgic being used to make the pick.

Yes, edgic failed. But unless GC (or someone else) comes up with a realistic way of distinguishing between "normal" edit seasons and the S11/S17 edits, I don't want to muck with edgic too much.

I think the key is that people with typical "Type A" edits eventually build up enough flaws that it becomes unlikely that any of them win. This is the most accurate way to figure it out, but it takes a while, which upsets the competitors (I figured it out first! Hooray ME!)

Even if we can't figure out an early indicator of Type B edits, why shouldn't we prepare for them in the event that another Marcus happens (Edgic picks a Type A winner that gets unexpectedly axed)? I think that's a much more pressing question. Why should we ignore a new type of winner edit when we know for sure that it exists? That's like not buying car insurance because it's unlikely that you will be in an accident (except in this case it appears that the likelihood is 1 out of every 10 times you take a drive).

Besides, how do you create standards for selecting a winner when the most featured player (Sugar) had little - if no - interest in winning? That's the grand assumption behind every player, whether they're OTT or MOR or CP or whatever: the person is trying to win. Sugar wasn't. She wanted air time, and that's all.

I just want to point out that again this is just another example that can boil down to "it was not possible to craft a Type A edit for the winner." I'm not picking out this example as a bad one or anything but I'm just pointing out that while we can cite 100 different reasons for why a Type B edit was used, they all seem to be premised on one central thing - there was a reason the editors could not use a Type A edit.

As of now, I'm quite comfortable with the fact that edgic totally bombed precisely because the motivation of the primary individual was contrary not only to edgic but to the frigging game itself, and further - to try and figure out changes to edgic that would make bob's victory far more apparent would be well nigh impossible without blurring the guidelines to the point that they're too vague to be of help.

Again I really want people to know that this is not necessary. We don't even need to change the guidelines that exist. This does not make anything vague.

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All in all, I am convinced that watching out for new types of edits is a GOOD thing. People should be watching out for Type B edits because they can happen (and I think eventually they will happen again). Whether or not people decide to do this is not up to me. Personally, I've already decided that I'm using some modified version of it for myself (see my original Type A/Type B post for what I think is a good framework). This post is not to twist anyone's arm to do it too, but more to try to convince them to consider it themselves. It's not a rethinking of Edgic. I'm not destroying anything and building it from scratch. I'm just adding my own toppings to the burger, so to speak.

Something to think about and chew over. Happy holidays! I'm looking forward to discussing it further after the holiday (gonna be quite the chunk of reading!).