As obscure as ATP

Posted by on February 16, 2008; This entry is filed under Uncategorized.
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By the good graces of google I stumbled upon this ranking system.

7 Comments

  1. Michael February 16th, 2008 at 2:42 am

    I’m not sure I understand the relevance of the title of this post.

  2. ThaGreat February 16th, 2008 at 7:03 am

    Nice Razib! Interesting, BTW do you any idea who was the first miss universum in the world, the very first one? 
     
    From the favourite country of yours…. 
     
    http://i95.photobucket.com/album…at/ armi1952.gif

  3. agnostic February 16th, 2008 at 9:00 am

    They’re not taking population size into account, which I tried to do here, with mixed success: 
     
    http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/10/leprosy-and-scandinavian-babes.php 
     
    A better statistician / modeler could improve it, but pop size has to be taken into account. That’s how we know Ashkenazi Jews are even smarter than their Nobel Prize record suggests — they did that, and yet make up only 2% of the US population. 
     
    Puerto Rico is among the top countries, but only has on the order of 10^5 people, compared to 10^9 in India or 10^8 in the US. Other top countries Venezuela, Spain, and the Philippines only have 10^7 people. 
     
    On the other hand, you could argue that the countries with small pops are more homogenous, while the biggies like India and the US (but not China) show crazy variance — and that, really, Indians and Americans are only drawing from the sub-pops comprising 1% – 10% of their population that shows any hot babes at all. If so, we should knock the pop size used for these biggies by several orders of magnitude. 
     
    But that’s not true for the US — beauty pageant contestants run the gamut of ethnicity and geography. Could be true for India, I suspect, but I don’t know.

  4. David Boxenhorn February 16th, 2008 at 10:23 am

    Agnostic, I think your assumption is incorrect. Winning a beauty contest is not like winning a Nobel Prize. The key factor is that each country has one nominee – i.e. the number of nominees are not proportional to the population.

  5. agnostic February 16th, 2008 at 12:01 pm

    But the point is, the girl from Puerto Rico is ranked 1 out of 100,000, while the girl from the US is ranked 1 out 300,000,000. This should give the American girl a higher z-score, relative to the American distribution, and the Puerto Rican girl a lower z-score, relative to her country’s distribution. The fact that Puerto Rico can take on the entire US suggests that their mean is much higher than ours. 
     
    Think of it in Nobel terms again — what if each ethnic group were only allowed to send 1 person to an international math olympiad, or chess competition? The Ashkenazi Jewish guy would still have favorable odds compared to the Japanese or German guy, because he’s drawn from a distribution with a much higher mean.

  6. David Boxenhorn February 16th, 2008 at 9:46 pm

    But the point is, the girl from Puerto Rico is ranked 1 out of 100,000, while the girl from the US is ranked 1 out 300,000,000. This should give the American girl a higher z-score, relative to the American distribution, and the Puerto Rican girl a lower z-score, relative to her country’s distribution. 
     
    I understand your point, I think it’s wrong. Think of it more like music. Listen to the top artists in Kenya, Greece, Spain, etc., and I think you will see that they are all excellent – just as good as the top artists in the US. I simply don’t think that past a certain point you win based on anything as objective as a “z-score” it more likely represents chance or structural artifacts of the system.

  7. razib February 16th, 2008 at 11:45 pm

    I’m not sure I understand the relevance of the title of this post. 
     
    tennis.

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