Geeks loathe sports, at least stereotypically. There’s now the sports geek, but they make a kind of meta-game of sports that focuses more on developing and adapting predictive models than on the game itself. The orthodox geek, though, does their best to stay far away from sports.
As much as geeks loathe sports, they love board games or video games, many of which rely on similar sets of underlying rules as sports. I don’t think this is just a matter of athleticism or the lack thereof. Instead, I think it’s a reflection of a different orientation towards the world that is worth exploring.
The famous multi-armed bandit problem from decision science literature is a good metaphor for these competing perspectives of the world. A multi-armed bandit is a row of slot machines that pay out various rewards. Some are more generous than others, but you don’t know which are which. Thus, to optimize your winnings for a given number of plays, you have to try several and decide how long you want to play each one.
The challenge of the multi-armed bandit problem is balancing those two possible actions: collecting information about your options and collecting rewards from what you believe are the most profligate bandits. These actions are usually called “exploration” and “exploitation.”
We can think of exploration and exploitation as two poles on a continuum that describe the general approach to a given game. It’s hard to think of a sport that would typify an extreme emphasis on exploration over exploitation, which might look like erratically shifting rules or sets of advantages and disadvantages, but I can think of at least one board game that leans strongly in that direction. Sovereign chess is a chess variant that features 112 pieces in 12 colors. Players begin as either black or white, like in standard chess, but they can conscript other colors and even change their king to a different color as the game progresses. The rewards for controlling any given color tend to diminish quickly, so games tend to evolve into a smattering of colorful pieces with quickly shifting allegiances carrying out short-lived assassination attempts.
On the other hand, there are ample examples of exploitation in sports, where athletes never have to shift their strategies based on what’s happening at that moment. The goal of racing is to run the distance as fast as you can. If your competitor is ahead of you, you just run as fast as you can to try to catch up. If your competitor is behind you, you just keep running as fast as you can so that they can’t overtake you. The thrill comes from finding the asymptote of unaugmented human performance — the absolute limit for how fast we can run — where each broken record nudges our conception of our own power a little closer to the godlike.
At least that’s my guess. And a guess it’ll have to remain, because I deeply don’t understand the appeal of watching a race or participating in one on a more-than-casual basis. I think of myself as a diehard dabbler. Like Max Weber, “I am not a donkey, I have no field.” Once I understand something well enough to see how I might optimize it, it’s generally time for me to move on, lest I get bored and sullen.
This represents a problem, though — mine, yes, because I’m finicky, but also ours, because sports and play in general are means of promoting social cohesion and solidifying shared values. Many an undergrad has awakened to the idea that sports are a medium for transmitting cultural values as they read about how Trobriand Islanders abandoned even the idea of competitiveness by playing cricket in a way that ensured the home team always won. And the debate around AI umpires in baseball is fascinating. The main argument is that the AI adheres too closely to the rules, rather than adapting its calls to the pace of the game. Following the rules unless it’s boring to do so is a cultural value worth exploring.
Even off the field, sports help us to explore our notions around fairness through metaphors. The baseball-derived “fair innings” concept from health economics is posed as an alternative to utilitarian methods of distribution that don’t take equity or capacities into account. The idea is that each of us is entitled to a certain amount of life in good health and that, up to the point when we’ve lived our share, we’re entitled to as much societal support as we need. Any “overtime” that we might live beyond that entitlement, though, isn’t guaranteed, and support can be withdrawn as necessary to maintain others’ fair innings.
There’s a meta-message in having a sports culture that isn’t very exploratory, too, which is that we should approach problems in a way that maximizes our winnings. This implies that the field of play is known and relatively stable. The rules won’t change, and there won’t be any seismic shifts that require an entirely different approach from the one that’s helped us win before.
And so it’s a problem when our sports culture becomes stuck towards the exploitation end of our continuum, since it means that many explorers will be less interested in taking part in them. Many of these abstainers will, I suspect, be geeks, who are a larger and more influential group than ever before. Geeks’ decisions about how social networks function, for example, need to be informed by the public’s conceptions of fairness.
It’s both potentially important and really fun to try to imagine how we can nudge sports towards a more exploratory approach. Contrary to the goal of trying to maximize our scores, an exploration-centric sport would require us to take attitudes of radical uncertainty. We can imagine sports that would force us to recognize and make peace with our inability to predict the future. Sports that would lead us to strategies that focus on winning by outsurviving our competitors, or by approaching problems with the aim of minimizing regret.
Rather than picturing this as a war of attrition, I think this could make for excellent entertainment.
An idea about America’s favorite sport, football: as it’s played currently, football always uses a ball of the same size, shape, weight, and texture. The ball is extraordinarily standardized, which allows for strategies of play to always assume that same sized ball. I imagine instead a version of football where a different ball would be randomly substituted into the game each time control of the ball shifts. One ball could be a perfect, peach pit-sized replica of a standard football. Another could be a 20 pound sphere the size of a beach ball. The point is that a team won’t know what they’re working with until their team is already on the field. They have to select their players with the goal of probably being able to cope with whatever ball might be selected.
We don’t need to just tinker around the edges. Imagine soccer if the locations of the goals were randomized to a different location each period of the game. Or basketball if each team got to assign different point values to different types of goals, which would shift the other team’s emphasis on offense or defense, or make them more or less averse to fouls. We could come up with new sports that would require facility with rarely mastered skills, like quadrupedal movement.
I can even imagine a form of racing that would have a more exploratory bent. Races are usually done in a gender-segregated manner right now. The need to maintain a strict gender binary has created misery all around by subjecting some people to invasive scrutiny, while others have become convinced that the rules are stacked against them. It doesn’t need to be that way. All we need to do is shift from distance-based races to time-based races. We can use regressions to calculate how far a given person could run in, say, a minute based on things like their hormone levels, age, lean weight, pulmonary fitness, and so on. Then we’d position their starting point so that they’re all what we expect to be one minute away from the finish line. If each ran their expected distance, they’d cross the finish line at the same time. The person who outperforms their expected time the most is the winner
This could lead to very diverse sets of people competing against each other. Rather than having records for time, we could even have records for how many standard deviations away competitor’s actual times were from their expected times. The winners of these races could look very different from what we see as professional athletes now, which would help us explore different notions of what we value.
Providing a venue for exploring notions of value, fairness, and how to face problems is what a geek like me sees as important about sports. We should be intentional about using sports as a tool for generating shared experiences around these values, rather than accepting their current stasis as a sort of end of ludic history. And revising them to be more exploratory is just the sort of project that would bring new fans into the fold.
"At least that’s my guess. And a guess it’ll have to remain, because I deeply don’t understand the appeal of watching a race or participating in one on a more-than-casual basis. I think of myself as a diehard dabbler. Like Max Weber, “I am not a donkey, I have no field.” Once I understand something well enough to see how I might optimize it, it’s generally time for me to move on, lest I get bored and sullen."
I think this is an atypical perspective and is maybe the source of your divergence with other people. An obvious follow-up question is how do you that your plan to optimize performance actually works? And even if works, there is still uncertainty on what your potential is. Could you reach the 90th percentile? 99th percentile?
Ultimately, there is no singular reason why people are into sports. If I had to list a couple of them (in no particular order), they would be:
* Enjoyment of the act of exercise
* Enjoyment of the pursuit of status
* Mimicking high-status role model
* Enjoyment of the feeling of progress, of watching yourself get better day after day
* Enjoyment of being on a team with other people working towards a common goal
So why do geeks not like sports? I think it's mainly a status thing as far as I can tell. Almost by definition, geeks are smart people who aren't high in the "normal" status heirarchy ("normal" taking to mean the status heirarchy as internalized by the median high schooler). People have a tendency to tilt their sense of status to flatter themselves, so they devalue traits they lack and emphasize traits they have. That's sort of a reductionsist explanation, but it seems true for the most part.