The recent (last decade or so) rule changes in NFL football around what constitutes a "catch" when the ball comes loose just after being caught are another similar point (ie, whether something is a catch and then a fumble versus a ball that wasn't ever caught and should be an incomplete pass).
The recent (last decade or so) rule changes in NFL football around what constitutes a "catch" when the ball comes loose just after being caught are another similar point (ie, whether something is a catch and then a fumble versus a ball that wasn't ever caught and should be an incomplete pass).
Because they know they have slow-motion hidef replays with a hundred different camera angles as of a few years ago, they changed the wording in the rule book about what has to happen for something to be called a "catch" versus an incomplete pass.
It is now defined stringently to make it totally objective so they can determine every instance as either a catch or an incomplete pass without any subjectivity at all... the thinking no doubt being that there's less likelihood of an instance where one team's fans feel cheated because of some referee making a bad judgement call. It's either a catch or not based on meeting certain established criteria involving a certain number of steps and making some kind of "football move" before the ball comes loose for it to be a catch and fumble instead of an incomplete pass, and naturally there's stipulations about what constitutes a "football move".
But now we have a growing library of examples where something gets called an incomplete pass by those rules even though if you polled a hundred random people on the street after showing them the play, and 99 of them would just be able to look at it and tell very obviously that the receiver caught the ball.
You can just tell if someone catches something. It's impossible to perfectly define. But you can clearly just intuitively tell.
But the NFL rulemakers feel they have to be able to completely remove subjective judgement and intuition to standardize all instances and derisk the potential for an obvious injustice based on poor human judgement. I guess that's the point that's interesting to me. There's this issue we are running up against where we are making a trade-off that involves subordinating intuitive judgement to computational logic, knowingly making everything less functional, but fairly distributing that dysfunction among everyone without any possible credible claim of bias.
But then we have the Galaxy Zoo project, which is sort of proof in the other direction. It's a project where you can sign on to help distinguish among spiral or globular cluster galaxies in deep space photographs because it turns out that we can't program a computer to reliably make that distinction even though any high school dropout can instantly tell between the two at a glance. That's a huge sign that we are improperly devaluing human fuzzy intuitive judgement.
The recent (last decade or so) rule changes in NFL football around what constitutes a "catch" when the ball comes loose just after being caught are another similar point (ie, whether something is a catch and then a fumble versus a ball that wasn't ever caught and should be an incomplete pass).
Because they know they have slow-motion hidef replays with a hundred different camera angles as of a few years ago, they changed the wording in the rule book about what has to happen for something to be called a "catch" versus an incomplete pass.
It is now defined stringently to make it totally objective so they can determine every instance as either a catch or an incomplete pass without any subjectivity at all... the thinking no doubt being that there's less likelihood of an instance where one team's fans feel cheated because of some referee making a bad judgement call. It's either a catch or not based on meeting certain established criteria involving a certain number of steps and making some kind of "football move" before the ball comes loose for it to be a catch and fumble instead of an incomplete pass, and naturally there's stipulations about what constitutes a "football move".
But now we have a growing library of examples where something gets called an incomplete pass by those rules even though if you polled a hundred random people on the street after showing them the play, and 99 of them would just be able to look at it and tell very obviously that the receiver caught the ball.
You can just tell if someone catches something. It's impossible to perfectly define. But you can clearly just intuitively tell.
But the NFL rulemakers feel they have to be able to completely remove subjective judgement and intuition to standardize all instances and derisk the potential for an obvious injustice based on poor human judgement. I guess that's the point that's interesting to me. There's this issue we are running up against where we are making a trade-off that involves subordinating intuitive judgement to computational logic, knowingly making everything less functional, but fairly distributing that dysfunction among everyone without any possible credible claim of bias.
But then we have the Galaxy Zoo project, which is sort of proof in the other direction. It's a project where you can sign on to help distinguish among spiral or globular cluster galaxies in deep space photographs because it turns out that we can't program a computer to reliably make that distinction even though any high school dropout can instantly tell between the two at a glance. That's a huge sign that we are improperly devaluing human fuzzy intuitive judgement.