Tbh, I’m in over my head, so I can’t really debate this kind of stuff atm. I still have so much more to learn.
That said…
For stuff like the 100 meter sprint, it’s hard to argue because one’s time is a relatively straightforward measurement. (Even with a photo finish, they can usually see whose chest/torso crossed the finish line first.)
I wondered about other sports though. I don’t know much about sports, but I think some are graded. I looked up figure skating:
GOE stands for Grade of Execution, and it’s essentially the quality score for each element. Judges award every element a GOE on a scale from -5 to +5 (an integer value). A 0 means the element was done adequately (no big positives or negatives). Positive GOEs (+1 to +5) mean the element was performed well or spectacularly; negative GOEs (-1 to -5) mean there were errors or it was poorly executed. GOE is the judges’ way of saying how much they liked or disliked the execution of that jump, spin, lift, etc., independent of its difficulty.
Each judge gives their own GOE for each element, and then these are averaged (after tossing out the highest and lowest scores to reduce bias). The averaging uses a “trimmed mean” method – drop the top and bottom, average the rest – to get the final GOE value for that element.
I know ~nothing about figure skating. But based on that grading method, I feel like there could be at least a tiny bit of room for bias. “[T]hey could have an argument” to use your words.
I asked Perplexity and found this:
A later investigation revealed that a judge from the French panel had been pressured to give the Russian [figure skating] team higher scores in exchange for political favors.
Anyway, as I said, I’m in over my head atm. But I mention this because if I learn more about CF (including multi-factor decision making math and binary epistemology and problems with weighted factors), I feel that it could be fun for me to think about how it might apply to stuff like sports scoring (or acting or screenplays or hiring decisions) and what it might look like to have a system where evaluations—even about marginal differences—are objective. (Ditto for evaluating meta debates about it.) Or, to use your words, what it might look like for people to be “playing on a level playing field.”
Because if everything could be evaluated as clearly as the 100 meter sprint, then nepotism would stand out like a sore thumb.
Or maybe I’m imagining that “a level playing field” is more complex (and radically different from the status quo) than it actually is.