Designing Olympic sports for the spectator
These are from the same section of the post:<p>&gt; As noted above, I am not a fan of judged sports. While they are not going away, I think there could be merit in moving towards computer judging -- ie. like the clock -- for many of them.<p>&gt; One of the tragedies of sports like figure skating is that because people are pushed to the limit of what they can do, the winner ends up being the one who didn&#x27;t fall. In a contest between one man who can jump a quad axel 80% of the time, but then tries it and fails, he loses to the man who can&#x27;t do it at all and never tries.<p>That does appear to be a real problem in modern Olympic figure skating. But my first guess would be that it&#x27;s <i>caused</i> by the move away from purely subjective judging, which penalized falls harshly, to objective technical scoring, which doesn&#x27;t. Failing a triple axel is almost as good as executing a flawless double axel. So falls are incredibly common now.<p>This actually reminds me of complaints I saw about having the THC content of marijuana varieties listed. Suddenly (according to the complaints) that&#x27;s all customers cared about, so they&#x27;d buy varieties that were worse and end up less happy.