eGrader: The Hostile Takeover of British Trad Climbing

The Rise of the Spreadsheet and the War on Consensus

Here follows some thoughts on the strategy and legitimacy of the eGrader tool and the coordinated elite campaign behind it. We also expose the eGrader algorithm as actually being an excel spreadsheet. Finally, we imagine what a British trad climbing utopia ruled by this spreadsheet might look like.

The Current System 🇬🇧

The current system for deciding upon the grade of a traditional climb is based on democratic consensus. Successful ascensionists of a route are entitled to offer their subjective assessment of their own experience of the route on a scale beginning at Easy and terminating (currently) at E11. The legitimacy of the grade printed in the guidebook is ultimately derived from the consensus reached based on the collective opinions of flesh-and-blood climbers who have been through the experience associated with that climb.

But this is not all: all subjective assessments are inherently relative, so the guidebook grade of that route also depends on the nature of the grading scale itself. This scale is ultimately also the product of consensus, with higher grades being suggested and eventually established and accepted over time.

The British grading scale is thereby built on a bedrock of subjective assessment of lived experiences had by British climbers stretching back over a century. The legitimacy of a grade thus stems from the democratic nature of that grade, the democratic nature of the grading scale itself, and the weight of a century of collective wisdom.

The democratic legitimacy of this system thus places limits on what claims can be made by first ascensionists. If a person does a hard but safe trad climb, they are constrained by what other British climbers have thought about their experiences on similar routes, and indeed on all other routes ever climbed and graded. This means that someone seeking publicity and fame cannot slap “E12” on a route when it is in fact more appropriate to grade it E9. This, in essence, is because a first ascensionist has to situate their experience within the intricate web of over a century of others’ experiences. Their grade’s legitimacy comes from participating in the same democratic creative process as everyone else.

If they disregard this democratic procedure and persist with grading things according to their own idea of what a grade is, or what a grading scale should be, then their grade lacks legitimacy. They are, in essence, playing their own game with their own rules.

The eGrader 🤖

The proposed eGrader system works differently. It asks you to disregard the British trad grade written in your guidebook as irrational and illegitimate. Instead it demands you input the route’s equivalent grade under the French sport system (why the French system should become the basis of the British system is left unsaid). It also asks you to calculate the ‘Danger Points’. This is calculated according to your assessment of risk and severity of injury (assessed on a 0 to 4 scale with 9 levels). At this point it asks you if pads make the route safer, and if so how many pads you need to make it safer. Once you have diligently put in all this information it spits out the new and improved trad grade. This grade is often significantly higher than the version you have ignored in the book in front of you.

The stated aim of the eGrader campaign is to make trad grades linear in nature. But it is not clear why this stated aim makes the campaign’s actions any more reasonable. Indeed, recent statistical research has demonstrated that grades follow a logarithmic function. Where does this desire for linearity come from? The reason for this was initially unclear, because the formula by which the eGrader operated had not yet been made public.¹

However, mad scientists here at Cursed Climbing have reverse-engineered the algorithm into its original spreadsheet format. You can find it here or see the picture below. As you can see there has been no effort made to optimise the algorithm, it really is just simply a addition of French grade and ‘Danger Points’ moderated by a simple look-up table based on number of pads. Honestly, even we were shocked by how gobsmackingly basic it is.

In summary: the eGrader campaign claims that replacing a century of democratic wisdom with an excel spreadsheet represents progress.

The mighty eGrader algorithm

The Change

So what is the point of this spreadsheet? Who is the spreadsheet for? People who have already climbed a route have experienced the subjective nature of the route do not need to rely on a spreadsheet to tell them how it felt. They are entitled to offer their own authentic opinion, relative to the democratically established grading scale, and thus contribute in an equal manner, like all others, to determining the grade of the route.

However, the eGrader throws the democratic and experiential elements of grading out of the window. According to Steve Mcclure and James Pearson the purpose of the spreadsheet is to be prescriptive. Its purpose is to disregard the consensus of previous ascensionists and replace them with the iron-rule of the eGrader algorithm. According to Pearson, this is because “you can’t argue with maths”. No James, you can’t argue that 1+1=3, but what we can argue is that your spreadsheet is both insultingly basic and undemocratic. If you want a grading scale based on your spreadsheet then make your own one there are loads of other letters in the alphabet.

The stated purpose of this new system is to eliminate “any cultural, regional, or emotional bias”. But what is one person’s bias is another person’s legitimate subjective experience. Painting others’ experiences as biased is a technique used by those adhering to an outdated conception of rationality, largely abandoned in academia. Cultural, regional and emotional effects are products of ecology, products of the place and time someone exists in the world. They may be irrational under a narrow, economistic view of the world, but they may well be ecologically rational and wholly legitimate. Who really is anyone to say otherwise?

So if the aim is to “reduce bias”, why does the new system also seem to upgrade so many routes? Experiments conducted by friends of Cursed Climbing found that the system over-grades by 1 to 2 E-points. This was found across several different styles and rock-types. If you were designing an algorithm to help use and understand the current British system then surely you would construct your algorithm such that it output grades which match the democratic consensus the vast majority of the time. This is clearly not the aim, and thus the algorithm is introducing a bias of its own. No argument is made for why the bias introduced by the algorithm is legitimate but the “biases” of flesh-and-blood human beings are not.

The Technological Strategy

Friends of Cursed Climbing have observed that the eGrader campaign appears to be following a strategy of Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish (EEE). This strategy was invented by Microsoft and is common knowledge among business people. The strategy is as follows:

1. Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.

2. Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the "simple" standard.

3. Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.

Imagine, if you will, that the current British grading system, grounded in collective subjective experiences is the prior software. The eGrader software is presented as an allegedly harmless optional extension, only really relevant at the top-end where E9s become “E11s” and E11s become “E13s”. However, as we have already seen, the two systems are built on different philosophical bedrock, and yield conflicting answers throughout the grade scale. Thus, when examined more closely the eGrader system is in fact incompatible with the existing system. So we are therefore currently already at Stage 2: Extend.

If, as we suspect, the eGrader campaign is following the EEE strategy, the next step will be eGrader campaign adjacent athletes establishing routes and justifying their grade-selection based on the spreadsheet and not, as previously, in comparison to other routes of a similar nature that they have climbed previously. This has, to some degree already happened, with some questioning how it is possible for Lexicon to be E11 under the established British trad grading scale.

The final step in the EEE strategy will be getting institutions which utilise a grading scale to move away from experiential-consensus-based grades to the eGrader spreadsheet. This might be achieved by convincing UKClimbing to regrade existing climbs, for Rockfax guidebooks to edit their rough grade conversion chart to be consistent with the eGrader, and ultimately to win over the guidebook team at the British Mountaineering Council. At this point, the ancient British system will have been extinguished and replaced by the eGrader spreadsheet as the de-facto standard.

Some hints that this strategy might be already unfolding can be seen by the glowing and decidedly imbalanced advertorial posted on the UKClimbing news section.

The Political Strategy

A brief observation on the nature of the eGrader campaign. Tom Randall, James Pearson, Neil Gresham, Steve Mcclure and Hazel Findlay all coordinated to post their exaltations over the eGrader to Instagram at approximately the same time. It is almost as if, by leveraging all of their elite status all at once, they are creating the illusion that all top-end British trad climbers consent to the abolition of the existing system.

But this consent is by no means unanimous. Franco Cookson has already stated that he will not be “downloading his brain to the Lattice cloud” and kowtow to the hostile takeover of British trad grades by the eGrader campaign. The consent of elite Scottish climbers such as Dave Macleod and Robbie Phillips is also remarkably absent, despite reports that James Pearson went to great efforts to recruit these men to the campaign.

However, even if all the elite trad climbers in every corner of the UK consented to the hostile takeover, this would still not be grounds for abolition of the consensus-based British trad grading system and its replacement with the eGrader spreadsheet. The British grading scale is something all of us, trad climbing elites included, inherited from previous generations. We, including them, are mere custodians of this system, with a duty to pass it on to generations not yet born. The British trad grading system is a national institution which belongs to all of us, and to those of the future. A small cadre of determined elites is not entitled to change it, no matter how many of them there are and how hard they climb. To suggest otherwise is to assert that they are of higher moral worth than the average British climber because of their elite status. This is fundamentally illiberal and undemocratic. Indeed, you could reasonably conclude that the campaign intends to impose the eGrader spreadsheet upon Britain as an authoritarian athletic aristocracy.

Who Stands to Benefit

Here follows a list of the types of people who might stand to benefit from the abolition of the existing subjective-consensus-based system and its replacement with the eGrader spreadsheet.

• Climbing athletes whose livelihood depends on grabbing the attention of media outlets and social media with big numbers. This will allow you to claim “E11” or even “E12” for routes that under the consensus based British trad system would actually be E9.

• Climbers who are stuck on a hedonic treadmill whose mental health is tied into constant grade progression. Stretching out the current scale to include more grades makes jumps between grades smaller and results in less disillusionment and existential ennui in the face of the dreaded ‘plateau’.

• Coaches who sell training plans that guarantee big grades to those with “big number=good” philosophies of climbing.

• Companies who need a way to make statistical models accurately predict whether a person has the physical ability to climb a particular trad grade. The eGrader is based on French sport grades and so retrofitting these as the underlying system by which British trad grades are calculated means you do not have to construct a new model, just use the one you already have.

• The people who own the proprietary “algorithm” (spreadsheet, lol) on which the eGrader is based. Once the existing consensus based system has been fully replaced by the eGrader, other companies will have no choice but to pay to use the algorithm you own.

What Stands to be Lost

Grades held up as legitimate and built upon the consensus opinion of over a century of thousands upon thousands of British climbers reflecting upon their subjective experiences are, in a stroke, swept away and replaced with the iron bureaucratic law of the spreadsheet.

The existing system asks you to reflect on how your experience compares to those who have come before you. But with the eGrader grades are no longer a result of deep introspection on what you have been through. Indeed, it abstracts you and other people away and renders you a mere input to a machine that claims to have a better account of what you experienced than you do. Even though you lived it.

Idiosyncrasies arising from geological, cultural and sociological diversity between climbing areas are intentionally erased by the eGrader. A rich, intricate and diverse web of grading patterns throughout These Islands is washed away in the face of an impersonal and bureaucratic procedure. The existence of these differences depends not just on the diversity of geology but also diversity in the subjective experiences of the British. The eGrader thus removes the ability for a people and a place to express something unique about itself and its relationship with climbing. This creative process of building a home in the world is simply considered unimportant and inconvenient; its fruits are condemned and scheduled for immediate demolition. The eGrader spreadsheet is thus also a great homogeniser seeking to crush the expression of a multicultural British trad climbing community under its totalitarian fist.

To summarise: if the eGrader campaign succeeds, British trad climbing risks being transformed from being a democratic creative endeavour rooted in history to a being a game of chasing big grades decided and decreed by a spreadsheet masquerading as a privately-owned algorithm. Great.

1. This has since been clarified by the eGrader campaign. We address this point in our second post, entitled eGrader: Evaluating the 'Scientific' Argument.