Definition Fallacies at the Olympics
It is Winter Olympics time (or at least I assume they haven't done the closing ceremonies yet; which tells you how well I've been in touch with the games). And that means it's time for people to throw back and forth the usual arguments about "Is Figure Skating a Sport
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To put it another way: In a "sport" according to Wetzel's definition, it could in principle be judged by a set of high-speed cameras and computers, given enough technology to pull it off. For example, baseball has already used a camera system in evaluating umpires' ball/strike calls, although the technology is still far too crude to entrust the calls to the cameras entirely.
Or-- near the other end of the sporting spectrum-- suppose that vaulting in gymnastics were purely a matter of flying and landing cleanly, with points deduced only for extraneous motion. Then you could, given enough technology, program a computer to look over the camera images and say, "Okay, her knees buckled an inch and a half on landing, and her right elbow got an inch out of place in midair-- that's a 5.7 out of 6.0." In that case, vaulting would (even now) meet Wetzel's definition of a sport, as the human judges' goal would still be an objective one, even if that objectivity could only be approximately achieved.
To look at it another way: If a group of kids is playing football in an empty parking lot, they might occasionally get into an argument over whether someone committed pass interference or some other such foul. But if someone scores a touchdown, there won't be any arguments over how many points it was worth. (Indeed, it's quite possible for a bunch of competitive 12-year-old boys to play football for an extended time without controversy, even in the absence of adult supervision-- which I'd have to say constitutes a pretty high degree of objectivity!)
But now suppose the kids were instead skating on an empty rink, and trying to score each other's long and short programs. Could that happen without controversy? I really don't see how it could. It's not even approximately objective.
(Apologies for the overlong philosophical rant on "objectivity"; that's been one of my big standard issues in HP fandom, along with definition fallacies and the disregard of authorial intent. I trust that neither of you really meant to say that "everything is just an opinion"-- that last-resort position of H/H shippers desperate to provide an intellectual justification for their position-- but to avoid such an absurd position, it is necessary to recognize some criterion of objectivity other than absolute freedom from human judgement. The common-law standard of "reasonable doubt" in the courts is, I think, a very good solution of the problem.)
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peachespig: No, I didn't see the Baker column in question (I used to be a BP subscriber but am not currently). His definition of "sport," in terms of "attempted occupation of the same space," seems awfully strict-- I have a hard time seeing that even a substantial minority of the sporting public would use the term that way.
Also, you make an interesting point about the public's not understanding figure-skating judging very well. Are there, then, actually accepted standards about how much a fall hurts a skater's score, how much a quadruple axel (or whatever) helps, and so forth? If so, I've never seen it mentioned before.
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I won't argue this point, because knowledgeable skating fans argue outcomes all the time, for example my comments about previous Olympic outcomes.
Are there, then, actually accepted standards about how much a fall hurts a skater's score, how much a quadruple axel (or whatever) helps, and so forth? If so, I've never seen it mentioned before.
There are now, more so, with the new scoring system. The old 6.0 system was far more vague, but with that system the number wasn't so important as the ordinal (i.e. the order in which the judges placed various skaters -- the skater who got placed in the top position most often was the one who won that segment of the competition). However, under that system there were still deductions for falls in the short program. The long program was judged a bit differently, in that a skater would get judged for what he or she did do, rather than what he or she didn't do. A fall is far less disastrous under these circumstances. If a skater fell on a certain jump, it was just considered that this jump wasn't performed at all. Where the falls would come into account was on the second mark -- the "artistic impression" mark. Having falls all over the place would seriously damage the artistic value of the program.
That was the old system though. After the judging scandal at the 2002 Olympics, the IOC put pressure on the ISU to clean up their act or face being excluded from the Winter Olympics. The new system operates much more like the code of points in gymnastics. Each skating move is awarded a set base mark. For example, you do a triple axel, it's worth a set number of points. You do some complicated footwork before doing the triple axel, then it's worth even more. There are technical judges whose role is to simply determine the number of points a program is worth. This sort of sets a "base mark".
There is another set of judges whose role is to determine how well each element (for example, the triple axel I mentioned -- but it's not confined to jumps; spins, footwork, 'moves in the field' are all judged) is performed. The range runs from -3 (for a fall or a complete miss) to +3 (for something simply spectacular). A zero would be attributed to a properly done element without anything great happening.
And if a jump is "cheated" (i.e. some of the rotation being preformed after the landing), the value of the jump gets downgraded. So if our hypothetical skater cheats his (I say "he", because only men *routinely* perform this jump) triple axel, the technical judge will only award points for a double axel.
There is still a second mark -- the so-called artistic mark -- that grades presentation elements. Things like extension, musicality, aesthetic appeal. Yes, I know. This is the murky and subjective part.
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As if that wasn't enough, they've got twelve judges actually scoring the program (not including the technical judges -- I mean the ones who are grading each element), but the computer randomly selects only nine of those marks when determining the final score. No judge can know whether his or her marks were included in the final score or not. I suppose a judge can hypothetically score an entire competition and never have his or her marks included in the results!
Obviously this is still very subjective, but IMO it's a lot less subjective than the old system. Not that it's completely devoid of controversy, because I've heard of some judges giving positive points on how well an element was performed while others gave negative points on the exact same element. The system is new, however, (not to mention complicated!) but I imagine they'll be tweaking it between now and the next time this argument comes up in four years' time. Now all the "real man" sportswriters (being facetious here, if you couldn't tell) can go back to covering real sports! :P
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