Ryoshishokunin

I'm on it I'm on it. Deadline is 2 july?

The point made above you is the opposite: that you don't have to look depressed to be depressed. Not all people suffering depression "look" depressed, and feelings of depression are no less valid if you can put on a happy face in public or even find fleeting joy. Many people have their depression (or pain, or other chronic conditions) discounted because they don't "look" like they're suffering. (Also, not all people that "look depressed" are: sometime people are just sad/grieving/etc.) I'll miss Hakuho. His enthusiasm and love for sumo will be missed by the JSA, even if they don't miss the man.

Even if we take this as given: since when does any of that matter?

And on the other hand, there's an expectation that all the chairmen will be ex-yokozuna: so clearly there are some privileges that survive into oyakata-dom.

I mean, he's right. It would be laughable for terunofuji--who is also younger than him, on top of the above–to be Hakuho's minder. Sanyo, maybe. Terunofuji, no.

Yeah, but given that it's a huge committee there's every chance that the guys doing the torikumi for lower juryo aren't the same blokes doing the bazuke for the same section—or one or the other attracts additional attention from more of the group.

Yes. If they're making "correct" ranking decisions, then the performance of rikishi that got to the same place should perform about as well as each other. So if they're making a systematic error in promiting too few, you'd expect to see them perform noticeably better than the rikishi that got retained/underdemoted. And of course the opposite is also true: if the newcomers systematically get destroyed, that probably means too many are being promoted. (This is generally true, but it's most noticable at this boundary: you could do something similar to look at the promotion sizes for 4-3 vs. 5-2 rikishi farther down the bankzuke, e.g.) Of course, making everyone start at the bottom throws a spanner in that, as well as the difference in expectations between Juryo and Makushita, which confounds things.

I'm not arguing about the pattern. I'm trying to evaluate if the decision making process is a *good* one.

I don't have time to do it today/soon, but it might be worth doing some statistical analysis to see if the thresholds for promotion are reasonable. Reasonable hypothesis is that the 'correct' threshold for promotion should have the same performance in the next basho. That is, the last retained rikishi and the last promoted rikishi should have similar performance. In some sense this is easy to check, but I don't know how to automate it. (I actually think you might want more volatility than that, but sumo's conservative in its ranking system.)

got chewed up in the joi. oof. in next time.

A bunch of ringers and me :P Good luck to all—it's a hell of a group IRL too.

His intai-zumo will be interesting to see.

The bench euros aren't serious enough for me to be picking strategically, at least for my first few picks--the Oranje are my team, so I'll pick 'em when they're available. We'll see how Group D goes--it's a heck of a group.

I think i'm going to be absent for the rest of the basho. IRL's caught up to me.

Turns out that my internet went out--there's a reason my comment to sakura didn't have a guess in it, and it's because i'd already guessed in my memory. Sigh. 6. hakuoho