Competition

I don’t really understand sport competition. There is no denying that sport competitions are popular. I don’t participate in them much – to start with, I don’t like crowds or being yelled at.

I suppose the core is that humans value extremes for their rarity. Competing is one way, but not the only way, to encourage reaching and exceeding extremes.

It is interesting that the number of competitions we value is very limited – only a few sports take most of people’s interest, foremost running, skiing and ball sports. This leading to a somewhat one-dimensional thinking.

As a statistics interlude, the fastest 0.1% of people would be in the 3 sigma tail of human distribution. But how much does it take to be good in two or three axes? If you are a two sigma outlier in two unrelated disciplines, that makes you rarer than a more than 3 sigma outlier in one discipline. If you are merely a one sigma outlier in three disciplines, that makes you a 2.65 sigma outlier in one discipline. That assumes independence of course, if the disciplines are highly related, than it would be common to be simultaneously good at them. Nevertheless, this illustrates that combining disciplines is gold.

I’m curious whether more competitions (chess boxing, triathlons) and jobs (computational astrostatistics) are possible that encourage excellence in multiple disciplines, to avoid one-dimensional thinking.

Whether are sport competitions are interesting to watch, depends crucially on their randomness. Soccer for example has very few points during a 90 minutes match, and it is extremely hard to predict which team will win if they are not extremely different. The satisfaction of a fan whose team rarely wins is that much higher, and random rewards are more addictive than predictable ones. Running perhaps the opposite: People know their marathon time quite precisely, there are no direct interactions, so the randomness is very limited, and so marathons are not such interesting watch.