The eGrader is VAR

Or, the futility of the hunt for objectivity in climbing

First Things First

Last week, several high-profile UK trad climbers collectively announced the launch of the ‘eGrader’. The stated rationale behind this innovation was not unreasonable. At the top end, the E grades have clearly become compressed. UK climbers are now climbing sport grades far in excess of what they were doing 20 years ago, but the hardest trad grade has moved only from E10 to E11. What the eGrader is supposed to help do is loosen the blockage. By inputting an estimated French sport grade, danger rating, and whether a nest of crash-pads reduces the severity of a fall, what co-creator Tom Randall calls a “‘tool’ of objectivity” is (allegedly) introduced into trad grading.

Or at least, that’s the theory.

From the horses’ mouths.

The Case for the Prosecution

We’ll get back to what I think may be the real motivations for this putative “tool of objectivity” a little later, but first we need to note two objections already made to the eGrader. These have been voiced with particular ferocity over at Cursed Climbing.

The first is that the eGrader is not actually a scientifically robust mechanism, and to that extent is simply not an improvement on the existing consensus-based system currently in use in UK trad climbing.

The second is that the eGrader represents a hostile take-over of UK climbing culture: a small group of elite climbers – an aristocracy, if you will – seizing control of a vital part of our shared tradition by overthrowing the democratic consensus system currently in place.

A Mitigated Defence

On the first point, I think Cursed Climbing have a pretty solid case. The methodology behind the eGrader appears flimsy (it’s really just an excel spreadsheet), and rather than representing a more objective measure of grades, it is an attempt to champion the adoption of a rival, incommensurable, grading system (French sport), mixed with arbitrary ‘danger points’, in a way that is not sufficiently compelling to warrant the replacement of the existing consensus system. I buy the case that the eGrader isn’t a good alternative, at least not as it is currently configured.

On the second point, I’m much less in agreement with Cursed Climbing. For a start, this is because the mere fact that something is rooted in democratic consensus doesn’t automatically make it good. Democracies have done stupid things from the very beginning: from going to war with Sparta to voting for Brexit, democratic outcomes (even if consensus-based) are sometimes poor, or at least suboptimal. Accordingly, at times democratic consensus needs to be overcome and changed, as when Roy Jenkins and the Labour Party legalised homosexuality in the face of overwhelming popular opposition in the 1960s, and when politicians today resist calls to bring back the death penalty. If the eGrader was better than the existing democratic consensus, then we ought at the very least to consider moving on accordingly. So the argument-from-democracy doesn’t move me, at least not in this case.

But where I also depart from Cursed Climbing is that I’m much more sympathetic to the motivations of the people who have developed the eGrader. I think it’s just implausible to see the main motivation here as sinister, or even unconsciously ideological; as part of a move to take over UK climbing culture so as to e.g. sell more Lattice plans. I think the motivations here are altogether more human, and much easier to sympathise with.

Not a sport climb

Human, all-too-human

In essence, I suspect the real reason that top athletes like Steve McClure, Neil Gresham and (especially!) James Pearson are attracted to the eGrader is because they are genuinely scared of the backlash they may encounter if they stick their necks out and grade something E12, or (heavens above) E13…and find it later gets downgraded.

This is not merely a matter of these individuals being precious, or lacking the courage of their convictions. It is rather because everybody at the elite level in UK climbing knows full well what happened to James Pearson when he graded The Walk of Life as E12 – and then it got downgraded. Now of course there were other factors involved: Pearson had been a young, cocky, loudmouth; had talked shit on Dave MacLeod’s Rhapsody beforehand; was flagrantly sticking two fingers up at the trad establishment in general, etc. etc. He certainly set himself up for a fall. But what happened next was brutal: the guy was cancelled (albeit before we called it that), and subjected to such a vicious online pile-on that he literally left the country, basically going into hiding in France. Speaking about the experience on a recent Lattice podcast, it is abundantly clear that he suffered (and indeed, still suffers) PTSD from the experience.

We punters are apt to forget it, but elite climbers are just human beings. And as human beings, they are extremely sensitive to the negative judgements of others, and most especially when those judgements take place in a niche sport where reputation is everything and livelihoods are potentially on the line. Nobody, and especially no elite climber, wants to risk going through what Pearson went through. When I hear Neil Gresham and Steve McClure agonising about whether to grade Lexicon E11 (as they both did last year), what I hear is trepidation and fear, rather than a sinister desire to advance their own careers or agendas.

The apparent appeal of the eGrader, I think, is that it promises a way out of this trap. Because if you can input some numbers and get a ‘scientific’ grade spat out by the formula, then you can say ‘it’s not on me, it’s on science!’ Or as McClure himself puts it, “The basic point is, a mathematical model can't be argued with”. What I suspect is really going on here, therefore, is that the elite climbers pushing for the eGrader are doing so because they want to be able to appeal to an objective, external authority and thus insulate themselves from any potential backlash. ‘Don’t blame me if it gets downgraded, blame the robot, whose authority lies in objective reality!’

And this, I want to stress, is an eminently understandable, entirely human, urge. It is something to be sympathetic towards, not to simply condemn.

It is, however, not going to be helpfully addressed by the eGrader.

Magic Wands

If I had a magic wand, I would make every UK trad climber read and understand David Hume’s essay Of the Standard of Taste, which explains how, when it comes to certain matters of expert judgement, popular consensus can be wrong, and there are cases when we should instead defer to the verdicts of experts (think: what makes certain paintings masterpieces and others merely good pictures; why some opera is better than the rest, etc). When it comes to elite trad climbing, my view is that if (e.g.) Gresham, McClure, and Dave MacLeod all say “this route is E12”, then the rest of us should just shut up and believe them. This is because the rest of us are not competent to judge, and we should here defer to the experts.

If my magic wand still had some power left, I’d also wave it so as to get everyone to stop caring so much about grades. We punters haven’t got a clue, really, what the difference is between E9 and E11. All it gives us is a vague handle on the accomplishments of people operating at a level far beyond us. For elite climbers, the grades really do matter both in terms of their securing a livelihood and in terms of not, y’know, dying. So they have to care. The rest of us, however, ought to chill out.

But I don’t have a magic wand, so we are left with the eGrader. And here, I cannot help but conclude that what has been invented is basically Video Assisted Refereeing (VAR) for climbing.

Not paddable

VAR for Climbing

For those of you who don’t follow football, here’s a very brief history of VAR.

Once upon a time, all decisions in football were made by the on-field referee and two assistants. This often led to mistakes: penalties that ought not to have been given; offsides that should have been called but weren’t; Maradona punching the ball into the back of the net and claiming God did it. The pundits and viewing public frothed themselves into outrage upon every occasion, and demanded the introduction of video technology to end these life-or-death travesties. Enter VAR, the stated rationale behind which was to correct ‘clear and obvious errors’ made by the on-field officials. What happened next is that football entered the sunlit uplands and no mistakes were ever made ever again, and everyone lived happily ever after.

Lol. Jk.

What actually happened was that the sources of controversy multiplied. Because it turns out that ‘clear and obvious’ is not an objective criteria, but requires subjective interpretation by humans. And what VAR actually did was create new sites of subjective judgement, namely by the video referees locked up hundreds of miles away from the actual grounds and watching the ‘action’ through sterile audio-free video feeds, in super slow-mo. The result? Even more outrageous wrong decisions than before – but now with the added insult that this was supposed to make things better, not worse! Never a weekend now goes by without yet another VAR outrage. It has, most fans agree, made football worse, not better. (There are other factors too, like how much it slows the game down, and how it leads to anal nit-picking decisions that uphold the letter but not the spirit of the laws of the game. But the fact the VAR just so often gets it wrong is a major bugbear for most.)

Why the eGrader Won’t Work

What has this got to do with the eGrader? Well, the problem with the eGrader is that like VAR’s ‘clear and obvious error’ it does not in fact remove subjective judgement, but multiplies the sites at which it needs to take place, and thus multiplies rather than reduces the opportunities for controversy.

The traditional UK grading system is of course based in subjective judgement: over time, you climb enough trad routes to get a ‘feel’ for what VS, E2, etc., is, based on having put in the mileage. But what the eGrader now asks us to do is imagine that a given route had bolts in it (which is weird, because that fundamentally changes it as a climbing experience), then imagine how dangerous it is according to a new made up scale, then imagine whether piling up pads underneath it would make any further difference.

We thus now have at least 3 additional sites of subjective judgement to incorporate, one of which crucially involves comparing incommensurable rating systems (English trad grades simply don’t measure the same thing as French sport grades). And the problem here is that reasonable people are just going to disagree.

Take one of the eGrader team’s own examples: the route Deranged at St Govan’s Head, Pembroke. They suggest a ‘sport’ grade of French 6a. To which I say: are you kidding? I climbed it last year, and I’d say hard 6a+, low 6b. Yet if you plug 6a+ or 6b into the eGrader, Deranged will come out as…E3. And yet it is most certainly not E3. It is E2. Or at least, so I will go to my grave arguing (because I say E2 5c, though the guidebook gives E2 5b). Who is right here? Well, I think I am. But a mate of mine I asked about this reckoned 6a wasn’t so outrageous. Others may go higher or lower. But what should be clear by now is that whatever the eGrader is, it is not Tom Randall’s “tool of objectivity”. Far from it.

The eGrader cannot settle these matters scientifically, because these matters require a subjective judgement of what e.g. Deranged would get in sport grading if you bolted the whole thing. But then, if you bolted the whole thing, it wouldn’t be Deranged anymore. It is therefore inevitable that different people will make different calls about what ‘sport grade’ a trad climb would get if it wasn’t a trad climb anymore, because you are basically asking them to grade an imaginary route that does not exist, and then also making wildly subjective judgements about ‘danger points’, and crash-pads on top of that. So what we have here is the equivalent of VAR’s aim of eliminating ‘clear and obvious errors’: something that whilst ostensibly eliminating subjective judgement, in fact multiplies its potential sites, increases opportunities for disagreement, and thus creates more, not less, controversy.

In the face of this, the eGrader therefore cannot do what its proponents hope. We are thus better off – at least in the lower grades – with the old consensus system, which whilst based in subjective judgement, is actually less problematic in this regard than the eGrader.

At the top levels, however, we should instead defer to the judgements of the experts who know best. If Gresham, McClure, and MacLeod say Lexicon is E11, then it is (unless and until a consensus of other qualified experts overturns this view). If Pearson and McClure say Bon Voyage is E12, or even E13, then it is (unless and until, etc.) But then, that’s really just the old consensus system, only with the rest of us not being twats when top climbers push the boat out, instead keeping quite on matters we aren’t competent to pass judgement on.

But either way, the eGrader is redundant. The king was never dead. Long live the king.