So how do sports with single-elimination compare to other sports in this regard? In single-elimination bronze medalists finish on a high note, while silver medalists finish with a loss.
Taking the "good enough" approach in life has probably left a lot of potential on the table, but it really has gotten the maximal utility out of any work I put in. It's probably ~50%-100% more work to go from a B+ in life to a straight A.
Like worrying about the first tiny scratch on your new car or new phone. Eventually it happens, you feel bad, but then are free from the burden of perfection.
The effect is also strengthened when you're competing with your peers for grades; it's been several decades now but I still remember someone beating me by 0.7% going into the final exam, and me finishing the course 0.1% ahead of him. It's interesting I still remember the differences, but not the grade (high 90s, probably) nor the course.
(Contrary to popular western culture, there are groups who enjoy "grade-racing" --- and from first-hand experience, I can say it was very motivational as well as stressful.)
This seems logical, especially if the person who got bronze was not expecting to get higher. If the person who had gotten gold previously got bronze they probably are not going to be feeling this way so, so a bit of an expectations game too potentially..
If you take some simple theory - say that the top five people will be roughly the same across any tries, and three will metal, then the bronze medal winner is likely to be someone who wasn't certain they could medal at all.
I did not see any mention of the type of sports they analysed. I think it makes a big difference, e.g. winning silver in a tournament type competition like basketball means you lost your last game, whereas winning bronze means you won your last game. On the other hand a 100 meter dash is 8 people racing all at the same time, so winning silver does not feel like losing gold as much to me. You still beat out the bronze medalist in direct competition.
edit: but of course, it's also common that there are two big names in a competition, so winning silver in that case means you lost gold.
Yes, IIRC, for Formula One there was a saying ages ago that the 3 most unhappy participants after a race are 2nd place (did not win), 4th place (did not get to be on the podium) and 7th place (did not get any points).
edit: Now I looked at it again and I see that F1 has adjusted their points system throughout the following years, so you need to replace the 7th place with whatever is relevant now.
Just a bit more context that might explain why Haas might be the unhappy ones currently. There's a lot of capital-D Drama surrounding the team right now but I'll stick to these two facts:
- Due to financial reasons they had to let go their veteran drivers (just two in F1) from last season and are currently featuring an all-rookie line up.
- They've gone on record to say that they are not developing the 2021 car, instead focusing on the specs change for 2022.
So two rookies in a team that is basically just in the competition for the participation. At least one driver from Williams, the bottom feeders a season or two ago, have the chutzpah to aim for points finish this year. Haas can't be a fulfilling team to be in right now.
I don’t have a source, but I think I remember seeing something about this in the context of a study about olympic swimming, back in my swimming days, for what little that’s worth.
Due to the 3 place podium, regardless of the type of competition second place looks like narrowly missing a total win, while third place looks like narrowly missing a total loss. People tend to look at the alternative to decide their relative feelings.
It's why even tragic situations can be an opportunity to be happy because the alternative is even worse, while some happy situations can be disappointing because they could have been so much better. Or the stock market where a modest win that could have been huge might feel worse than a loss that could have been huge.
I mean isn't it obvious? Third place is great because you narrowly avoided winning no medals, but second place isn't because you narrowly avoided winning the first place.
Yes exactly, the style of competition can certainly affect your perception of the results. For example, in foot race with multiple participants, the silver medalist might be happy with second, because they know they dug in deep and barely beat out the bronze medalist at the finish line. Whereas in archery since you are competing in isolation of the other contestants, the silver medalist might be annoyed that the one shot in round 3 cost them the chance for the gold.
I never v thought of it that way, but your reminds me of Daniel Kahneman’s work regarding how people remember their own experiences. Regardless of how well things went during the entire duration of the activity, the last experience was disproportionately weighted in terms of framing the memory. In that context, it makes sense why the tournament style silver medalists would be more dissatisfied.
“We suggest that patients' memories of painful medical procedures largely reflect the intensity of pain at the worst part and at the final part of the experience.”[1]
I think studies confirming conventional wisdom are often unfairly maligned as uselessly addressing the obvious. It makes sense to back up perception with data.
However, the model of competitors feeling that silver=‘almost won’ and bronze=‘lucky to get a medal’ is by no means as novel as they claim. It’s strange to me that they present it as ‘new’ instead of a commonly held
If you adjust for population growth and the growth of the games, it's clear that we should be giving medals to more than just the top three. And the results have gotten even closer. When I see someone like Torri Huske miss a medal by a hundredths of seconds, I think that something is just wrong.
There should be medals going down much lower in the results.
That’s true for some events, baseball has 6 teams competing so if you copied say MOBA’s/RTS’s and have bronze, silver, gold, platinum and diamond you’ll have what 5 out of 6 teams getting a medal?
Medals aren’t everything passing the qualifiers is an achievement on its own…
After cardboard, sticker! gold stars through pink unicorns. and then a used pizza box for last place, because everyone else needs to feel better than someone.
As someone who was involved with music competitions I can attest to being happier with 3rd than 2nd. For me it was the fact that if I was 3rd, well at least 2 people were better than me, but if I was 2nd (and it was a close competition) it became an issue of "why did I loose?"
When competition is close you can loose for factors outside of the competition itself. You can loose because of differences in judging opinions or because of a Judge not liking you, worse ranked competitors can win due to scoring calculation systems, you can even loose biased on how hungry or how bad the judges last meal was.
"Are you color blind too Vincent? Its silver. Jerome Morrow was never meant to be one step down on the podium. With all I had going for me I was still just second best." - Gattaca
> A students are often formerly unhappy C students.
Is there any empirical evidence for this? It flies in the face of my experience, which is that A students were A students from the start; that C students almost never become A students, and that A students sometimes become C students.
There are plenty of people entirely capable of A marks in most educational situations who don't get them because they don't care and don't do the work. Something changes and they get interested. The jump from an indifferent C to a solid A often isn't that far.
Somewhat related: There are more PhD's than you might expect that were also high school drop outs.
Bronze medallist by the time the competition is near the end, usually compete just to get on podium, or they will feel a silver was lost instead of gold, but a podium was gained. Silver medalist usually compete for the gold near the end, a gold lost is a bigger loss, and a silver is a bad consolation.
I’m very skeptical about the veracity and accuracy of facial recognition software to detect emotions.
I went to an affective computing conference in 2019 and was underwhelmed; models couldn’t distinguish between looking upwards (and raising your eyebrows) from exhibiting surprise. Emotions are complex and personal, and the phrase from the article “facial expression software — which nearly eliminates possible bias” seems absolutely ludicrous to me.
I take results like this with an absolutely massive grain of salt, and don’t expect them to be reproducible.
The danger is that they’re “catchy”, clickbait-y results, that are popular because people like to hypothesize about underlying psychological reasons why those bronze medalists might be happier. But let’s examine the core claim first, and not take facial recognition software as a ground truth for emotional state.
Excellent point. People need to be more skeptical of novel technology in general. I mean, the big proponents of any new technology usually have a financial incentive to over sell its capabilities. I've noticed that with AI/ML especially people are willing to hand-wave away nuance and blindly believe that anything is possible. In reality AI is mostly iterative pattern matching and is far from perfect.
In this case however, I do believe that bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists provided that all the participants had a similar probability of victory.
In this case, however, there is evidently prior research using humans judging the faces that shows similar results. There definitely are all kinds of biases that could creep in from using facial recognition software, but a well designed study will attempt to quantify and control for those biases.
I definitely agree that the idea that software eliminates bias is laughable. Swaps it for another, hopefully less extreme set of biases doesn’t draw as many clicks, though.
>prior research using humans judging the faces that shows similar results
I always assumed that was generally what the models were trained from, are they not? Agree though that ai will just replicate the bias in the training data, which is why its important to have "bias free" data. Or at least as much as such a thing exists.
First, behavioural responses vary from person to person and from culture to culture (Americans will smile in most social situations, Russians don't smile unless there is a laughter coming in).
Second, we are far from associating an internal subjective experience (joy) to an external objective behaviour (smile). It's actually one of the greatest challenges in psychology today. Also, how do you gauge my level of happiness compared to yours?
Third, the whole article is superficial and they don't hide it: first they measure who smiles more ... then they jump to the conclusion - all bronze winners perform the same cognition. Pure speculation.
Even if smiles would denote an emotional episode (joy) it would have to be right in the moment of the emotional episode - and it would be a micro expression (under one second).
Quote: "they studied medal stand photographs" -> posed circumstances.
I was going to say the same thing: There's no way facial expression software (not quite the same as facial recognition software) is un-biased. What unbiased ground truth could you possibly train it on? Answer: I don't think there is anything, at least nothing that is valid across cultures, genders, races and so forth (and I'm skeptical that there is any good training data even for white college age males).
Makes sense, bronze medallist are just happy to be on the podium whereas silver medallists usually messed up slightly, or even worse are simply slightly worse than the top dog, which prevented them from getting the gold.
Cornell University already did that over a decade ago so the conclusion that bronze medalist appear happier is probably true as the human and AI models got the same results.
I feel like this would be heavily biased by the culture of the people in their training set and the culture of the medalists. Different cultures have different facial expressions for happiness.
I was once a volunteer at the world championships of a team sport. At the podium sceremony my job was to lead the team to the spot where each player received their medal. The bronze medalists were super happy and smiling. Almost all silver medalists that I led to the podium were literally crying.
No sophisticated facial recognition was needed to ascertain who was happier.
Medal ceremonies in team sports are usually after a bronze medal match (which bronze medalist won), and a gold medal match (which silver medalist just lost).
In addition to the "last match" effect mentioned in the thread, I wonder if this has to do with who wins which medal. Maybe the people winning bronze are more often doing better than they expected, while the people winning silver are more likely to expect that they might have been able to win gold.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadThe burden of perfection (or close to it) is pretty brutal.
Among other topics the film Gattaca seemed to address that issue.
(Contrary to popular western culture, there are groups who enjoy "grade-racing" --- and from first-hand experience, I can say it was very motivational as well as stressful.)
Silver: "Shit... I was so close to Gold." Bronze: "Damn, I medaled!"
edit: but of course, it's also common that there are two big names in a competition, so winning silver in that case means you lost gold.
edit: Now I looked at it again and I see that F1 has adjusted their points system throughout the following years, so you need to replace the 7th place with whatever is relevant now.
That's Haas
- Due to financial reasons they had to let go their veteran drivers (just two in F1) from last season and are currently featuring an all-rookie line up.
- They've gone on record to say that they are not developing the 2021 car, instead focusing on the specs change for 2022.
So two rookies in a team that is basically just in the competition for the participation. At least one driver from Williams, the bottom feeders a season or two ago, have the chutzpah to aim for points finish this year. Haas can't be a fulfilling team to be in right now.
It's why even tragic situations can be an opportunity to be happy because the alternative is even worse, while some happy situations can be disappointing because they could have been so much better. Or the stock market where a modest win that could have been huge might feel worse than a loss that could have been huge.
“We suggest that patients' memories of painful medical procedures largely reflect the intensity of pain at the worst part and at the final part of the experience.”[1]
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/030439...
However, the model of competitors feeling that silver=‘almost won’ and bronze=‘lucky to get a medal’ is by no means as novel as they claim. It’s strange to me that they present it as ‘new’ instead of a commonly held
There should be medals going down much lower in the results.
Medals aren’t everything passing the qualifiers is an achievement on its own…
When competition is close you can loose for factors outside of the competition itself. You can loose because of differences in judging opinions or because of a Judge not liking you, worse ranked competitors can win due to scoring calculation systems, you can even loose biased on how hungry or how bad the judges last meal was.
C students are often happy C students.
Is there any empirical evidence for this? It flies in the face of my experience, which is that A students were A students from the start; that C students almost never become A students, and that A students sometimes become C students.
There are plenty of people entirely capable of A marks in most educational situations who don't get them because they don't care and don't do the work. Something changes and they get interested. The jump from an indifferent C to a solid A often isn't that far.
Somewhat related: There are more PhD's than you might expect that were also high school drop outs.
I went to an affective computing conference in 2019 and was underwhelmed; models couldn’t distinguish between looking upwards (and raising your eyebrows) from exhibiting surprise. Emotions are complex and personal, and the phrase from the article “facial expression software — which nearly eliminates possible bias” seems absolutely ludicrous to me.
I take results like this with an absolutely massive grain of salt, and don’t expect them to be reproducible.
The danger is that they’re “catchy”, clickbait-y results, that are popular because people like to hypothesize about underlying psychological reasons why those bronze medalists might be happier. But let’s examine the core claim first, and not take facial recognition software as a ground truth for emotional state.
In this case however, I do believe that bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists provided that all the participants had a similar probability of victory.
But that's never the case: betting companies are good at earning money off of that.
I definitely agree that the idea that software eliminates bias is laughable. Swaps it for another, hopefully less extreme set of biases doesn’t draw as many clicks, though.
I always assumed that was generally what the models were trained from, are they not? Agree though that ai will just replicate the bias in the training data, which is why its important to have "bias free" data. Or at least as much as such a thing exists.
First, behavioural responses vary from person to person and from culture to culture (Americans will smile in most social situations, Russians don't smile unless there is a laughter coming in).
Second, we are far from associating an internal subjective experience (joy) to an external objective behaviour (smile). It's actually one of the greatest challenges in psychology today. Also, how do you gauge my level of happiness compared to yours?
Third, the whole article is superficial and they don't hide it: first they measure who smiles more ... then they jump to the conclusion - all bronze winners perform the same cognition. Pure speculation.
Even if smiles would denote an emotional episode (joy) it would have to be right in the moment of the emotional episode - and it would be a micro expression (under one second).
Quote: "they studied medal stand photographs" -> posed circumstances.
I was once a volunteer at the world championships of a team sport. At the podium sceremony my job was to lead the team to the spot where each player received their medal. The bronze medalists were super happy and smiling. Almost all silver medalists that I led to the podium were literally crying.
No sophisticated facial recognition was needed to ascertain who was happier.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/bronze-medal
AA == 10, DD == 4, FF (fail and eligible for re-exam) == 3 and FR (fail and repeat the coursework next semester).
Gradesheet was put publically in the hall. I consistently saw that the two happiest people were those either got the AA or DD.
When I got AA I was obviously happy! Once I got a DD on a particularly difficult course. I was damn happy I didn't fail!