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1minatur t1_iz3qvnp wrote

Reply to comment by ChezBoris in [OC] 3x3 Rubik's Cube Solve Times vs. Blood Alcohol Content by Willr0wH00d

Doesn't this show the opposite? He pretty consistently gets worse the higher the alcohol content

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MufuckinTurtleBear t1_iz3rq7e wrote

There's a notable dip in completion time just beyond BAC 0.12%

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1minatur t1_iz3ryfo wrote

The whole thing about the ballmer peak though is that performance is higher than when completely sober

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MufuckinTurtleBear t1_iz3s18m wrote

That's not what the XKCD graph shows.

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1minatur t1_iz3sbb1 wrote

That's exactly what it shows, 0 BAC has a lower performance level than at ~0.14

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MufuckinTurtleBear t1_iz3ssf4 wrote

At the "Ballmer peak", yeah. Performance is lower than when sober everywhere except that point.

That's not the same as "performance always higher when drunk"

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1minatur t1_iz3swud wrote

That isn't what I was saying. The Ballmer Peak specifically shows that performance at the peak is better than when completely sober. In OP's case, performance was only slightly better than the % above and below it, but still significantly worse than at 0

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MufuckinTurtleBear t1_iz3tam8 wrote

The baseline/0 BAC is just over 14 seconds. The dip just beyond 0.12 is a smidgen beyond 10.

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1minatur t1_iz3tm7y wrote

Single solve times have a lot of random variance, that could just be a random cube pattern that allowed him to skip several steps when solving. The average dips slightly at that point, but not below the beginning average

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MufuckinTurtleBear t1_iz3tzfb wrote

Yes, which is why

> This gives *some* evidence for the Ballmer Peak (but not a lot).

Slight dip on the average. One exceptionally quick game. Not conclusive supporting evidence. Some evidence

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doobieman420 t1_iz4olej wrote

No, it gives no evidence. Not “not a lot of evidence”. Zero evidence. The “dip” (I wouldn’t call it that) you refer to is two, maybe 3, consecutive data points below the average. Would you call three consecutive coin flips coming up tails evidence of a biased coin? You also need to consider streakiness, warm-up time, all that good stuff. You aren’t as smart as you think you are. You completely misinterpreted that poor persons reply about the ballmer curve!

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Sahih t1_iz5b003 wrote

To me, evidence of a 'Ballmer peak' would be any evidence of high performance. If this was the only study, which for the comments it is, I would say this leads to an idea that the 'Ballmer peak' is on average slightly lower skill level at the point, but a larger standard deviation of skill level, leading to occasional brilliance while consistent performance is slightly worse than at 0.

I haven't looked up what the actual 'hypothesis' of the Ballmer peak is, but this shows that some elements of high performance could exist and that kind of thing leads to rumors, plus fun experimentation.

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ChezBoris t1_iz4gl1g wrote

Ballmer Peak is a joke AND this data is (mostly) a joke... but... the two fastest times in their dataset are at about 0.1% and 0.12% (which would show up as a peak).

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