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by Maursault 1353 days ago
> two dozen chess Grandmasters who have admitted to cheating on chess.com. The fact that online cheating is so widespread

chess.com globally has more than 93M members. There is cheating, but a dozen admissions can't be accurately described as "so widespread." Research has shown fewer than 0.02% cheat. While this is mildly shocking, your statement based on 12 grandmaster admissions is a sweeping generalization.
1 comments
daveguy 1353 days ago
Two dozen is 24, not 12.

This is how many grandmasters admitted cheating, not how many players globally have admitted it.

As of 2021 there were 1,315 active grandmasters. [0]

24/1,315 = ~1.8% of grandmasters admit cheating (give or take a few depending on how many play online chess or are still active). In my opinion, that is a serious problem.

[0] https://chessdelta.com/how-many-chess-grandmasters-are-there...

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Maursault 1353 days ago
Even with my careless error, the statement in question is still a sweeping generalization.

> As of 2021

This is a tough number to track down, and you've limited the count by "active," in 2021, but the number is rapidly increasing. According to the FIFA Database as of a few moments ago, there are 1771 chess grandmasters.[1]

24/1771 < 1.4%

> In my opinion, that is a serious problem.

Even assuming 1.8% of chess grandmasters are cheaters, this means that 98.2% of them are not. If you tested a 98.2% of a perfect score on a test, would you really think your grade was a serious problem? If you had the chance to retake the test for a replacement score, either better or worse, would you?

[1] https://ratings.fide.com/advaction.phtml?idcode=&name=&title...

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daveguy 1353 days ago
That's how many grandmasters there are total (1771). I was quoting the number active, hence the hedge of give or take current active / cheating.

Yes, I think cheating more than a fraction of a percent as you originally posited is a detriment to competition.

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Maursault 1353 days ago
> That's how many grandmasters there are total (1771). I was quoting the number active, hence the hedge of give or take current active / cheating.

The difference between 1.8% and 1.4% is negligible and is only in regards to the limited population of chess grandmasters which could not be a valid sample representation of 93M chess.com members.

> Yes, I think cheating more than a fraction of a percent as you originally posited is a detriment to competition.

Your answer is apparently in reply to some question that was not asked. On the contrary, my claim was that the argument that cheating was "widespread," by extrapolating a mere two dozen cheaters among 93M, is fallacious reasoning, specifically a sweeping generalization, and also that

>>> Research has shown fewer than 0.02% cheat.

which is not a postulation but a published fact.[1] Being that two hundredths of a percent may be described as a tiny fraction of a percent rather than more than a fraction of a percent, you can clearly see in this case, by your own scrutiny and straw man, cheating is not a detriment to competition.

[1] https://www.chess.com/article/view/online-chess-cheating

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