Any Given Sunday

[I'm taking a short break from work for a few days, so I'm re-posting a few golden oldies. Here's another little mini-essay from years ago that was buried inside a longer post. I've re-written it somewhat so it makes more sense standing alone. —Ed.]

-

"Best of" awards have always annoyed me because of a principle I'm highly aware of, yet which doesn't, to my knowledge, have a name*. Namely: the closer to equal two things are, the less important it should be to rank them—but the more important it seems to be to humans to do so. So if two DACs (digital to analogue converters) are almost indistinguishable from each other, you won't see people saying "ah, just get one or the other, it doesn't matter." More likely, you'll see people arguing strenuously over why one is better.** If two Olympic skaters skate hell-bent-for-leather for three minutes and one of them crosses the finish line .02 seconds sooner, that one gets a "gold" medal and the other one gets a "silver" medal, even though it might have come down to where their feet were in their motions at just the critical moment. Whereas to me, what an .02 second difference means is that each of them is just as good as the other. The difference is simply below the threshold of significance.

Basketball is completely annoying in this respect. Extremely close basketball games are decided by such contingent and capricious factors that some of them might as well be decided by a coin toss.

In American sports that idea is sometimes known as "any given Sunday." What it means is that on any given Sunday in the Fall, one football team can beat another, even if the loser is "better" and the winner is "worse." Because...well, on any given Sunday, things happen they way they happen, and don't always go according to how analytical observers believe they should. Relevant cliché: "That's why they play the games."

American pool matches have recently been adapted to the short attention spans of modern Americans by standardizing on races to seven (i.e., best of 13 racks.). (It used to be that a "short" race was to 11 and more standard races were to 15.) That's just not long enough for the "better" player to emerge: sometimes, in a race to seven, the difference can be decided on one mistake or one stroke of good or bad fortune. I'll give that to the British: the final of the World Snooker Championship at the Crucible is a best-of-35-frames match played over two days (in pool, best of 35 frames would be called a "race to 18"—and a frame of snooker takes longer than a rack of pool to play). It takes some time for the cream to rise to the top, and the British are more comfortable with that than we are.

But where our primate ranking obsession becomes really silly is in subjective awards and contests. It's just not meaningful to have a photo contest, say, where there are 15,000 entries and one picture is called "the grand prize winner" and another is called "the runner up." Things like that are so utterly arbitrary. Quick, who was better, Monet or Van Gogh? Which is better, Zion or Yosemite?

But it's human. It's how primates tend to think and act. It's what satisfies us. We're driven by competition. We want a winner. And losers.

I concede that the "rankers" can have their way with objectively quantifiable races. One skater does cross the finish line "ahead" of the other, even if fractionally, so, fine, that person "wins." Have it your way, humans. Whatever.

Really, though, we ought to be paying attention to the magnitude of the difference. Where there's a big difference, then it's a big decision; where there's a minuscule, tiny difference, then it really makes no difference. Instead, what we do when the difference is huge is just say that the two things are not in the same category and/or "don't compete with each other." What we like to find are two things that are extremely close to each other. Then we can analyze and argue to our hearts' content! That seems to be what makes us happy, after all.

Mike

*I actually did encounter the name for this just a few days ago! ...And failed to write it down, for which I am kicking myself. And now I can't remember where I saw it. Oh well...at least these days I can finally remember the name "Dunning-Kruger Effect," which for years I could never remember.

**Recently I discovered an "objectivist" audio website where DACs are fastidiously measured and ranked, while, simultaneously, everyone strenuously insists that all the differences that are measured are outside of the range of human perception and the differences can't be detected by ear. To which I say: um, what?

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Richard Parkin: "Snooker has been ruined by these short 35-frame matches. Proper length is 61 frames. The 1975 final ended 31–30 between Reardon and Charlton."

Mike replies: That helps make my point. Sports fans love close finishes but I would argue Reardon and Charlton proved themselves equals on that day.

Comments

[robert e]

Whatever the effect is called, there are a number of sports where we basically throw up our hands and "decide" contests with a separate mini-contest--some variant of the "sudden-death tiebreaker". For example, the penalty-shot shootout, a deus ex machina devised to solve the apparently intolerable problem of a tie in several team sports. In effect, the "shootout" nullifies the equality of the teams' efforts, as determined by the rules of the game, in favor of a series of brief, simplistic one-on-one contests that are even more subject to chance than the regulation contest.

Wait. Isn't this the plot of Homer's Iliad? Except, of course, for the beauty contest that started the whole debacle?

At any rate, it's probably a mistake phase out coins.

[Sroyon]

The narcissism of minor differences?

[beuler]

Minolta CLE. Does that count?

[Jimmy Reina]

I don't buy much stuff, but when I do, I research obsessively.

Working remotely, and needing to set up a better version of a home office, I started noodling around online. Two different websites came up in two different searches for two different items, both had a title such as, "The best XYZ" for 2020".
Both had product lists, one of them did not have comments or actual reviews, just Amazon links.
At the bottom of the page, was a statement indicating that if the Buyer clicks through to Amazon from the site, the author gets paid a spiff.

I am grateful that TOP gets a slice when I do click through to a vendor, but these other guys are just p*mps.

By the way, I wouldn't put us Naked Apes in the same class with the other Primates. It has been said that Chimpanzees share 97% of our DNA, but they don't seem to be fretting about which earbuds to choose.

[Istvan]

Maybe it's related to Sayre's law:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

[Not THAT Ross Cameron]

Indeed, the Brits seem to like a casual sport - just see Cricket. A Test Match taking a leisurely 5 days to play out (although one does need to be fit & highly skilled to play at elite level).
Darts & Snooker aren’t the most energetic sports. Golf (apologies to the Scots for the correlation) also less energetic.
Just see the Australian ice skater Steven Bradbury’s 2002 performance re the fickle nature of sport. Not the fastest skater, but first over the line. Doing a Bradbury has a special meaning Down Under :)

[David Graham]

I think of it like a hilltop. Two choose-able options are both near the top of the hill, and one may be slightly higher than the other, but the hill is generally rounded at the top, so the difference is not great. Thinking this way has definitely lowered my anxiety about picking the wrong one. I just want to avoid picking a worthless option.
My other stress reliever is, when I think about spending 1000 dollars, "I've made worse mistakes than that before".

[Luke]

Re: "it might have come down to where their feet were in their motions at just the critical moment."

Yep, the timing of those final motions is a critical part of their training.

I think the racer who was a tiny hair slower would be just as crushed even if they got identical awards. It IS a race.

[Malcolm Leader]

Timed and scored events are different than critically judged events. I agree that timed and scored can be so close as to be trivial. Critically judged events are dependent on the "eye" of the judge and the bias they bring. For example, a local photography club I belonged to was so besotted and aligned with certain members that no one else could possibly "win" a photograph contest. I though the "winners" were often junk (opinions...) so I simply stopped going to the relatively useless meetings.

[phil]

Mike, I once was on the other side of this phenomenon, what ever it's name. I have a twin brother, and we both took the same classes in a small high school. He was much better than me in mechanical drawing. On one test he got 94, I got 87, and the other scores were 86, 85, 84 and on down. When the instructor gave out the grades 87 and higher got A, 86 and lower were given a B. All because the instructor thought my brother and I should get the same grade. Phil

[Earl Dunbar]

I know we will forever disagree, but for me it’s the current MP for metered or M4-P for unmetered. O 🇨🇦 for the latter and current meter/technology for the former. I need 28mm frame lines. And I will continue to use Rodinal, thank you very much. 😝