So ? There is little value for a human being to be able to do so. Or humanity. We just decided that this particular challenge was worth a huge deal.

We don't give a gold medal for the fastest people to write from memory an algo for reversing a binary tree, or for the person capable of feeding the most children in a day.

It's completely arbitrary.

The GP's point was about "it's just some arbitrary committee of people somewhere that decide who wins it". That's not the case for at least some Olympic sports.

You can't make a blanket statement about all Olympic medals like that. Ironically, some of the most prestigious gold medals are indeed the product of human judgement: figure skating and gymnastics.

In fact at one time figure skating was objective. They would take a clean sheet of ice, the skater would skate a figure 8 ( or whatever) then the judges would measure it. Not fun to watch.

The comment used the words most and some. It also included an example about synchronized swimming.

Maybe prestigious from a mass market perspective; but IMO that’s just because both sports feature very young girls in various states of undress (simulated or not).

Both sports trade on the sexualization of young girls. Why do we even have a sport where the main criteria are older men passing judgment on young girls? The scoring system is vague/complex enough that the “victory” game in both sports is highly rigged anyway, so it’s more about politics than skill when deciding between the top few spots.

That’s just bizzare. Most men don’t watch figure skating or gymnastics, the audience is mostly female. So I’m not sure why they would be sexualized or how they would “trade” on the sexualization; there’s no money in it.

Why, do you think the competition in these fields is exclusively for young female participants?

Obviously that's not the case.

Do men’s gymnastics and figure skating draw the same prestige? My comment is simply about the prestige of the sports, not the merit of the sport itself.

>Olympic gold in most sports are based on excellence measured objectively.

Just because something involves a measurement doesn't mean it's completely objective. All the medal tells you objectively is who ran fastest in that particular race, on that particular day, out of the people participating.

There are many subjective factors contributing to that result, and any "excellence" we infer from it is still highly subjective. Indeed, the very notion that running the fastest is something worthy of prestige is a subjective one.

And gymnastics, figure skating dressage, ...

It's irrelevant to the point, things are prestigious because enough people decide they are. The longest breath holder gets an entry in the Guinness Book and a cocktail icebreaker, a Synchronized Swimming Gold Medalist is always a gold medalist.

Ok, but that only tells you how to win it, not how or why it’s more prestigious than other gold medals. That’s the point of the parent I think, that prestige is part of humanity and not always easily defined.

I think the Olympics are prestigious because it is such a large competition. Every nation pretty much competes in a large spectacle. So if you win, it means you're the best in the world. The Olympics has more eyeballs on it than the world championship for most sports. And as said, it's objectively measured (although some sports like diving, boxing and gymnastics are determined by subjective scoring to some extent). The only sport I can think of which has more viewers is the Fifa World Cup, and indeed in football/soccer the Fifa World Cup is considered more prestigious than the Olympics.

And as you know, Alan Turing pioneered computer science and helped saved millions of lives, so he deserves our respect :-) Perhaps prestige is like natural snowball kind of effect, like how the rich will naturally get richer. A prestigious event becomes somewhat prestigious, so people want to win it. Then more people want to win it. Then it becomes more prestigious, etc.

>> in football/soccer the Fifa World Cup is considered more prestigious than the Olympics

That has nothing to do with number of viewers though. It is just a dirty trick from FIFA to eliminate competition: national teams in Olympics are junior (U-23) teams because FIFA does not allow senior teams to participate.

Didn't know that. That's weird.

Prestige is often fickle... it’s kind of a truism that the most prestigious artists (painters, writers, sculptors, etc) never enjoy success in their lifetimes, but rather find audiences well after they have passed.

In a hundred years, the olympics and the nobel prize could be seen as quaint reminders of an earlier time — entirely without prestige, leaving the observer wondering why we cared so much in the first place.

> Olympic gold in most sports are based on excellence measured objectively.

Athletes may value Olympic Gold more so than gold at a smaller, regional competitions, even when posting better results at the smaller venues ...

Society at large has been "tuned" to regard Olympic Gold as the "gold standard" regardless of whether the athlete performed better at other competitions.

Just another subjective aspect, the rules define what exact sports are even awarded medals. Nobody gets anything for best backwards running.