You agree that "Skater's greatness – whatever that means – is hard to define", but I would say that the problem is then the idea of competition for this sport and not "how you judge" / "how you measure".
There is no inherent need of competition for every sport in my opinion. There can be prizes, juries, etc, but if people would accept that in the end it is subjective might make it easier than overly complex system to rate "fairly" something unclear (doubt anybody would want to put rules on how you rate a film for an Oscar - they just know it is "fuzzy").
I disagree. Competition is a defining property of ‘sport’.
What’s wrong with calling figure skating an art form? Nobody calls ballet or violin playing sports [1], but there are “prices, juries, etc” for them.
I would split various activities in a group where objective measurements are more or less possible (they never fully are) and one where they aren’t.
The first would consist of:
- games, where your opponent has significant influence on your behavior or performance (basketball, judo, billiards, etc). Basically, if you can play defensively, it’s a game.
- sports, where they don’t (archery, skiing, all forms of athletics; I would include the jumping events, even though your opponent’s performance may significantly affect your strategy. Etc.)
The second would be ‘arts’.
[1] if you look at the modern Olympics, painting and other art forms were events at some time, but that, but even then, did people call those sports?
This requires a reference though. For example:
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/sport
does not exclude non-competition based physical activities from the definition of sport, to quote: "a game, competition, or activity needing physical effort and skill that is played or done according to rules, for enjoyment and/or as a job: ". Definitions might differ from dictionary to dictionary and language to language
Your definition of games assumes an opponent (ex: Rubik's Cube would not fit), so I think it is not ideal.
Overall I think we could just stick to existing definitions and just accept that some competitions are "subjective" (ex: gymnastics, etc.)
So, again, the goal of the competition is to incentivize athletes to show their best. Accidentally, we need some way of comparing results here, and that's where the judging system comes into play. It has (or rather should have) a nice bonus of giving feedback to the athletes on what to improve upon.
Unfortunately, the majority of people in sports equate sports with competitions. Even some definitions of sports contain clauses like "...in a competitive fashion...". They strongly believe that without competition, there is no sports component.
Yet, every four years, the world rediscovers a unique Norwegian sports policy for children. [1][2] They banned competitions for kids till the age of 11 in the late 1970s. You can have competitions, technically, but you are prohibited from ranking kids and publishing results with rankings. That, of course, is based on the studies of the reasons behind drop-out from sports rates and the science of motivation (self-determination theory, mainly). As a result, Norway has 1st rank in medals in the Winter Olympics and 9th in both summer and winter (they even won gold in beach volleyball!) and the highest sports participation rates in the world (9 out of 10 kids and 7 out of 10 adults, I believe). Sports != competitions indeed.
Another example I like is Magnus Carlsen refusing to participate in the Worlds Chess Championships for the 11th time because it simply doesn't challenge him anymore. [3] Again, competitions are not about "finding who's the best" (that's a byproduct). It's about challenging to show an athlete's best. In the case of Magnus it failed to achieve this goal.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/03/03/norway-is...
[2] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/olympics/article-norw...
[3] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11034789/Magnus-Car...
That's great if the purpose of PE is to create elite athletes. If the point is to encourage a healthier population by instilling an appreciation for sport and physical activity in kids it's an abject failure. Kids that are already good at sports love PE, while less gifted kids develop a disdain for sport and by adulthood have often dropped all sports and exercise.
Drawing from SDT (self-determination theory), one of the main predictors for motivation is a psychological need called 'competence' (perception of whether your actions lead to the feeling of growth or accomplishment). Different actions and situations can send either a positive competence signal to a person (and increase motivation) or a negative one (and decrease motivation). These things are measurable.
The main issue with competitions is that they send positive competence signal to one person (winner) and negative to everyone else. Like you trained for months, and now you've lost. This leads to increased dropout rates in sports, which are especially pronounced in kids. Norwegians asked the question – instead of spending money and effort to try to engage people and kids in sports, maybe we should ask a question, 'Why do they drop out in the first place' and prevent those? Competitions came as one of the strongest predictors of dropping out of sports, hence the policy.
Focusing on winners only is a societal choice though. I have met people (in countries were a lot of people like doing sport) that were practicing a sport and joining competitions for years even though they were not very competent in that sport - because it was their hobby and they just enjoyed being there.
Tennis' Play&Stay program for kids under 10 years old is also a good example – they use different tournament structures, so no one feels like they lost.
If anything, the hardest part about sports is that you have to be the sort of person who can try their hardest, compete, lose and then use that as motivation to further improve yourself. Do you know how it feels to give something your all, and then fail - all in front of hundreds of people counting on you? And then come back from that? It's not easy. Behind any champion you're going to see a lot of pain and loss that they had to overcome. It's not like you're born a champ and everything is just easy. People of course are not equal, but the struggle is something we all deal with, and sports really helps with that.
So, to be clear, competition – with rewards, prizes, and medals – is a form of extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is often very powerful (gun at your head – also an extrinsic motivator – will motivate you to do what's asked). The problem, though, is that it's short-lived.
So if you were a sports minister who tries to maximize people's involvement in sports (at all ages), you would prefer to have more intrinsic motivation to sports, rather then extrinsic.
In chess, for instance, a 200 point rating difference usually gives the stronger player an expectation of about 3:1. And ratings range from about 500 to just under 2900. So those ratings are absolutely critical in order to find an opponent at your skill level. In sport the exact same thing is true, with similarly wide scales of ability. I think the humility that rankings force upon one is also a very important part of sport and improvement.
So for instance about the Norway anecdote you gave (related to the prohibition on youth rankings from the 70s onward), Norway was always absolutely god tier at the winter Olympics, long before the 70s. In the 6 Olympic games from 1924-1952 they came in overall #1 5 times, and #2 once. In the 12 games since 1980, they've only came in overall #1 3 times. [1] Their total number of medals has increased, like everybody's, because many more events, and occasionally even new sports, have been added to the Olympics over time. I would not read much into this one way or the other, beyond pointing out that it's not a particularly relevant anecdote.
The Nordic sports model is specifically against rankings for kids. It's fine to give them detailed scores or ratings or evaluations that help them improve. It's not fine to order their results and put them on a list of winners and losers.
Generally, sports feedback (and also goals) should be centered on things that you can control (like technique). Ranking – the place you earned in a competition or a tournament – is outside of your control, as it depends on the performance of others (and also on the quality of the judging and judging systems). Rankings are based on comparison and have a number of issues – take Uber ranking inflation, for example.
If your kid scored 3rd place in a competition – what does it tell you exactly about her/his technique or quality of coaching? Pretty much nothing. Only the fact that 2 other kids scored higher. Unfortunately, it's not rare in sports to see how the general national level of coaching in some sports goes down, while everyone still have their ranking and medals.
Using (measurable) ratings and scores as feedback also needs to be taken with a dose of caution. These systems are developed by humans, they're imperfect and usually measure only what is measurable. Sometimes, they're even wrong. Back to the IJS example – the system that was designed for Olympic-level athletes – it is often used for kids' competitions. For the lack of other options, judges enter entry-level elements into the system and assign base values. Instead of "quad lutz" it's a "shooting duck" entry-level exercise and assigns points to it. Then, judges pretend that they can "measure" this child's exercise – was it 0.4 points or 0.5? Needless to say, there is no actual measurement of "shooting duck" – it's just when all you have is a hammer, everything seems like a nail. Then, the parents fight over whose kid is judged more harshly. So, these systems can be pretty flawed.
And yes, of course, I don't attribute the Norway Olympics' success to the lack of competitions till the age of 11. Rather I'm showing that the policy of late specialization and withholding competition till kids mature a bit is not against the goals of high-performance sports.
And in general I am very much a fan of avoiding excessive extrinsic motivation. For instance I loathe, with a passion, participation trophies. Because I do agree that this results in people participating only for those trophies rather than for the sake of the sport. But where we may differ, perhaps, is that I do very much think that excellence should be rewarded and recognized. Not even just for the sake of those victors, but as a model for other people to strive for. And, in any case, if somebody is good enough at basically anything to be #1 in it, they're already going to be driven intrinsically, or have crazy parents... but that's another topic!
Re: extrinsic motivation. SDT (Self-Determination Theory) actually has quite a lot of studies on this matter. See Deci, Koestner and Ryan (1999) as an example [1] If you're designing reward/incentive system and want to maximize intrinsic motivation, what to choose – reward for showing up, reward for doing a task, reward for doing great or reward for winning?
Here is a quick breakdown of these contingencies:
1. Task-noncontingent – Reward is given simply for being present and does not specifically require actually being engaged with the target activity.
2. Engagement-contingent – Reward is given for spending time being engaged with the target activity.
3. Completion-contingent – Reward is given for completing a target activity (sometimes within a time limit).
4. Task-contingent – Refers to a larger category containing both engagement-contingent and completion-contingent rewards.
5. Performance-contingent – Reward is given for reaching a specific performance standard, for example, doing better than 80% of other people who have done it.
6. Competitively contingent – Reward is given to the winner of a competition and the loser gets lesser or no rewards.
Simplifying a bit, the results are – the further you go from 1 to 6, the stronger the detrimental effect on intrinsic motivation. In 6, for example, intrinsic motivation can be sustained only for the winners (because it carries a strong positive competence signal) but undermines it for everyone else.
Note that it's not always bad. In a private company, you may want to get rid of "underperformers", so rewarding excellence works fine.
Anecdotally I'm sure you can also rebuke such, as can I. In sports and games I did do well in, I obviously did not start out amazingly, nor did I receive any accolades or such for merely existing. Yet I went on to thrive in a number of sports/games, in no small part because I wanted to reach the top.
And the same is true of endless household names. E.g. Michael Jordan is quite famous for having been a bench warmer until he hit a growth (and competence) spurt, which started to transform him into the beast he would become. It's not like he just quit when he was relatively weak.
The incidents of competitors which started and stayed at the top, through ever more stringent competition, are very much the exception, and not the rule. Yet if your above hypothesis was correct - they're pretty much all we'd see!
I think the real problem with "participation trophies" is that it has very low competence signal. Not negative. But very low for everybody, regardless of performance. The winner's prize, at the same time, gives an extremely positive competence signal to the winner (at the expense of the negative signal to everybody else).
Again, if you put yourself into the shoes of a designer of an incentive structure, then you are facing a trade-off here. Do you want more people to keep doing this activity, or do you want to single out top performers? In sports, I believe it's more of a cultural element. Scandinavian countries, for example, are notorious for their culture of not expressing their personal success (Janteloven). That fits well with the Nordic sports model. More individualistic countries or post-soviet countries with "win at all costs" sports ideology tend to favor incentive structures optimized for early top performers.
Ultimately I strongly disagree that participation trophies incentivize participation, as well as that merit trophies discourage it. It is plainly illogical. I'm certain I could dig through the study and find a way that their methodology could easily lead to false conclusions, but I'm not terribly interesting in doing so, and in any case such a thing would be highly unlikely to be persuasive anyhow - because we aren't arguing that study, but our own personal biases. And, like with just about everything, there's extensive evidence for whatever side you want to argue.
Same goes for other key needs in SDT – autonomy being most important. Here is a study of swimmers and their drop-out after 10 and 22 months after assessing their coaching styles (autonomous vs controlled). [1]
Competition prizes are also form of extrinsic motivation ("external regulation" to be specific). Extrinsic motivation can be (and often is) very powerful. It just don't last.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225153306_Associati...
Back to speaking like humans, the thing you are not responding to is expectations vs reality. Participation trophies are near ubiquitous in places like the US, and there's an ongoing attack on merit across a wide array of domains - let alone efforts to recognize and reward it. Were this having the effects you claim, would you not expect to see absolutely skyrocketing sports participation? In reality it's down, in many areas sharply so.
Before replying to expectations vs reality, we need to establish and agree on facts. Are you saying that in US, across all states and all sports, competition prizes has been replaced by participation trophies and you see a negative trends in sports participation?
And no I'm (obviously?) not speaking of every single instance, as for a topic like this there will always be some exception or another. I am saying that as an aggregate - sports participation is down, and participation trophies are up.
On the other hand, I think that there are kids who are coordinated/sporty/physically talented and just as we celebrate and nurture the academic talents of academically talented kids, I think it's good to celebrate and nurture the talents of physically talented kids. Not everyone is going to excel at academics and if we steer schools to only encourage excellence in certain areas, I think we risk discouraging those who excel in other areas from feeling good about themselves.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.0066...
[2] https://sportforlife.ca/long-term-development/
[3] https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Constraints-B...
This is further emphasized by the fact that the one opponent he was willing to play is a brand new player on the scene who is absurdly insanely good at bullet (1 minute) chess, but has had relatively mixed results in classical (bear in mind he IS a top 10 player), is prone to psychological issues, and is very young with 0 experience at the world level. He somewhat predictably ended up scoring 0.5 points away from last place in the candidates event - and that is who Magnus wanted to "challenge" himself with, like a cat challenging himself with a particularly fast mouse.
---
Also, I was curious about the petere issue, as the Romans in particular took their competition quite competitively. Looking it up, it seems that it means many things such as attack, assail, aim at, etc. [1] But it does not seem to mean to strive, let alone with?
Re: petere, it's not about Romans, rather the original meaning that provides insight into the pure form of competition. There is a great book called "True Competition" by David Shields that explores this topic and tries to answer the question "How to make competitions more healthy so they don't deteriorate into something that destroys the original spirit of competition".
It's also interesting that in English word "competition" is also used for business, economics, biology, and political sciences. In business, it's clear that competition is a tool to incentivize market players to pursue the highest quality of service at the lowest cost ("show your best"). Again, in monopoly/monopsony, there is no competition – we need other players for that – and no incentive to "show your best".
On Magnus - there's a huge chess subculture, so it's hard to reference any given thing. I might start with this [1]. He's giving every single reason for why he might decline in the future, which I think terrifies him. It's quite unpleasant to imagine that you'll not only never be as strong as you once were, but that you will start to see your strength all so gradually decline, year by year.
So amongst his million preemptive excuses, you also him somewhat rewriting history now claiming his "2 down, 5 to go" comment was "just trolling." He made that comment after his second world championship victory, which was extremely convincing - as it was against the previous generation of players. For some context, no chess world champion has ever won/defended their title more than 6 times. The most dominant champions ever, Lasker/Karpov/Kasparov all won/defended 6 times a piece. Magnus, it seems, will go down with 5.
[1] - https://www.chess.com/news/view/carlsen-on-his-future-person...
I've watched a figure skating routine recently for the first time in almost 20 years (I think the last show that I had followed was the 2006 Winter Olympics) and I was surprised to see how technical it had all become, how routine, there's no "artistry" left. It didn't use to be like this.
Similar thing happened with the NBA, now everyone chases the 3-point shoots and in so doing whatever it is that had made the NBA one of the best sports shows in the world is losing its shine. In this day and age Jordan would be seen just as a gimmicky player.
A related but less clear point is whether it's fair for the skater to be judged by people who have no idea about skating. If my code were to be negatively judged because (say) the person in charge judges the amount of comments rather than their content, I would probably be unhappy about that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurovision_Song_Contest#Politi...
I’m looking into Eurovision judging as a curious example (half votes come from public and half from judges) :)
That’s happening to, like, all of life, across the world. Beancounters have conquered the planet
No part of this is true or even really makes sense.
Are you saying that Curry wouldn't have been a star due to how they played in the 90s? Or are you saying that Curry wouldn't have been a star because 90's players are much better?
If it's the latter, I 100% disagree with this.
The 90's definitely did not focus on 3-point shooting like there is today, but Curry has so much more going for him aside from his 3-point shot.
I very much do not like the Warriors, and I'm quick to call out that the whistle is in his favor during the regular season (especially with moving screens) - but even I can recognize his skill. Additionally, refs enforce rules much more during the playoffs, and he's still won rings.
Curry's off ball movement is phenomenal. Numerous players have talked about how hard it is to guard Curry because he has so much stamina. Additionally, he's in his 30s now and has had some of his best seasons for his career.
If you're saying that the play style of the 90s would have held him back - I agree with that. I like the NBAs current style of fluid, "positionless" play over the 90s more rigid adherence to roles. The current NBA of today lets so many more players shine, especially dynamic bigs.
Kareem has talked about this as well when watching Giannis play. I can't find the quote, so this is a paraphrase - but he was remarking how back in his day if you were tall you had to play center, and you were never allowed to practice other skills.
Today's game, you have people like Jokic - a dynamic big who can facilitate, defend, AND shoot 3s. I love to see it.
Jimmy Highroller [0], has a very good video on this where he shows that 2-point shots have become much more valuable now due to 3-pointers.
To be part of a starting 5 you typically have to have the capability to shoot 3s - putting defenders in a difficult spot. You could guard the floor to prevent a 2, but that opens you up for a 3. Most people defend for a 3, so many people now are going in for a 2.
I do think in the current NBA we took too much away from defenders. Most of that could be fixed with refs enforcing rules against foul baiting, allowing defenders to be more physical, etc. Refs actually do this during the playoffs, I think they should do it for the entire season. There are some good rules changes I've seen as well, like 6 in the key instead of 3. There's a good video from Rusty Buckets that goes over this [1].
I don't want to get rid of the X second in the key rule, because then teams would just have bigs sit in the paint. I think that would make everyone focus on 3-pointers even more.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/@JxmyHighroller/videos [1]: https://youtu.be/2E0kHY0vMQY?si=3EA3UqSGKdThF3bK
I very much disagree with your Jordan comment. I think MJ could develop a 3-point shot. If anything, I think he could have shined even more in this day and age .
Today's NBA is more dynamic and "positionless" than previous rigid coaching, giving rise to players that would have otherwise been forced to play a role. Jokic & MJ, Haliburton & MJ, or even Sengun & MJ would be scary.
All amazing passers that could feed the ball to MJ, but also put the offense in a bad spot. If you guard MJ, then Jokic, Haliburton, Sengun, etc. could all shoot a 3 if left wide open.
Skaters being rewarded for performing as difficult elements, as close to perfection as possible? I'm all for it!
Same for gymnastics.
In Figure Skating, HNers should also be aware of the issues surrounding the current sport of figure skating:
1) Women's Free Skate is the marquee event in the winter Olympics. Not other event comes close in the ratings, and therefore, the ad buys.
2) Russia. Figure skating, and especially women's skating, is completely jumbled up by the interference of Russia. To sum up a very complex topic (poorly), women's figure skating currently has a strange and deep relationship with Russia's ruling elite and has had one for a few decades. That leads to many scandals and a lot of bribing of officials. It's still playing out from the 2022 Olympics. The US team still has not gotten their medals from the team event.
If you've not seen the end of the 2022 women's free skate, do yourself a favor and watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgiuo4lHFt4 . The meltdowns here are just so emblematic of everything that Russia is today and the travesty of the Ukraine war. The drama leading into this event and the drama coming out of it are much better than any reality TV show.
3) Declining interest. The laws of physics are not kind to figure skaters. The push for quads is only leading to the push for qunits and hexes. The effort required to advance the sport is going to be larger than time allows for training. At which point, probably sometime around the 2050 Olympics, the sport will be 'solved'. Combine this with the explosion of new sports full of frontiers to be broken, and figure skating will no longer be the marquee event. Training so intensely for such meager gains is going to be a hard sell to the boys and girls that are to be the medal winners.
I would just add that the russia thing is a direct consequence of the judge's system change (where russian officials are very much involved). The reason why russia was dominating medal standings for women (and not for men or ice dance), is precisely because russia could afford a stream of pre-puberty girls who win a medal at the cost of their physical and mental health.
Also, needless to say, the russian sport system is still a direct copy of the soviet sport system, which was essentially created by Stalin when USSR first decided to participate in the Olympics in 1952 (guess, why USSR didn't care about the international sport before WWII). The way how sport is organized in russia goes against the sports autonomy principle that is sacred in democratic countries and is embodied in the Olympic Charter and European Sports Charter.
One thing that I think needs stressing is that the base value score is a pretty good system; it's the Grade of Execution (GoE) score that is bad. The GoE is where all the shenanigans are hiding and where all the corruption lies. The 'new' system is a lot better than the old one, that is for sure, and it's a real improvement. But if you thought that Russia was going to let any system be implemented without the ability for them to bribe or threaten their way to a medal, you've got another thing coming. GoE scores are where that happens nowadays.
As an aside, now is the time to revamp figure skating with Russia being sidelined. I hope that such an opportunity never comes again, but now is that opportunity. The lack of push to really get the sport ready for the 21st century just speaks to the deep and embedded corruption at the international level.
I love the sport and still follow it. But my kids are not going to be participating at senior level (or whatever it's called these days) because of the futility and geopolitics.
Is this really a result of the current points system? Even in old-school, 6.0 human judging, wouldn't it be preferable to reward a much more difficult routine with higher scores? Is there any reason not to reward, say, a triple-triple combo better scores than a similar routine which tops out at a double-double?
In a way it was similar to how classical music contests are judged. No one could claim that they can measure the performance, so they rely on the subjective and imperfect judgments of the humans who are considered experts in music. One judge might be consistently high-scoring, another might be consistently low-scoring, and they might look at the different aspects (technicality, musicality, etc.). They just try to capture their ranking (voting) distribution.
In a way, the old system was more like voting. Even if the judge can't formally explain why s/he thinks skater A has better skating skills than B, the system would capture their preference. (And of course, this comes with all sort of biases – sequential bias, national bias, etc). But an important distinction is that in this system there is no proxy variable to optimize for.
In the IJS it's very clear what to optimize for. So everyone is doing it. One of the major changes, of course, was eliminating compulsory figures from competitions. Modern skaters don't even know they existed as a thing. Nowadays, everyone knows that you win a figure skating competition not by having Patrick Chan level skating, but by rotating your body in the air quickly – that is what gives points. So in modern clubs all over the world people start learning jumps in the first half of a year of practice. Which, ironically, leads to the lower probability of them actually mastering the jumps, because you still need insanely good edge control for take-offs and landings.
This is fine for an artistic competition, like classical music as you mention. But figure skating is a sport, it's in the Olympics, not having stated goals seems unfair to the competitors (athletes), and I can't think of any other sport which doesn't have very specific rules describing the criteria for winning.
Take figure skating as an example. Since 2006, ISU has introduced a similar judging system - IJS – that uses points for elements and an increasingly complex code of rules on how to assign those points. Each element has a so-called "base value" and judges determine GOE value in the range from -5 to +5 for each element. The computer averages that and takes trimmed mean to produce the final points for the element.
Those base values and points are logically assigned by the complexity of elements. More complex elements cost more. Great skaters can perform more complex elements. Sounds logical, right?
What has happened, though, is that using these points as a target has changed the way how skaters train. Why spend time learning "easy" elements that give little points? All time must be spent now learning "complex" elements that give more points. In a way, before, IJS skaters were chasing overall greatness; now, they chase points.
"Skater's greatness" – whatever that means – is hard to define, let alone measure. The ability to perform complex jumps was a consequence of it, not a cause. Using points as a metric changes the whole system of training, and a new generation of skaters can perform insane quads (often because of pre-puberty body sizes, though), but no one would call them great skaters.
I'm not even starting with how these points affected artistry. "Program components" (PCS) that should measure artistry are practically a joke now. You basically can multiply jump scores by some constant and get PCS. [1] All skating programs look the same now and are very predictable because of points maximization.
Back to AI. The rules for figure skating become more and more complex each year in order to duct-tape the constantly emerging issues. Many judges admit that complexity is so high that the human brain can't even possibly apply them in real time and has to resort to cognitive shortcuts. There are some early flirtations with using AI for judging figure skating [2], but nothing serious yet.
As outlined in the "Categorized Variants of Goodhart's Law" [3], one of the major reasons of this effect in sports is not just the fact that elements != greatness, but the fact that there is no shared definition of what is a True Goal of this sport. What exactly judging system try to measure? What would constitute the best skater?
Where there is no explicitly stated True Goal, any proxy variable used as metrics (like "ability to perform complex elements") will be far from good and will be distorting the system even further.
Eventually, this boils down to the structure and decision-making in the international federation that governs this sport.
And these things cannot be solved by AI. In a way, using AI is a yak-shaving for ever-increasing rules of an inherently wrong judging system.
[1] http://libjournals.unca.edu/OJS/index.php/mas/article/view/2...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq_mv1eyZyA
[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04585