Discussion: What is the best sport?

"Intelligent Life" magazine, a lifestyle spin-off from the British "Economist" magazine, is doing a "What is the best sport?" survey which (a) has fairly modest voting numbers (at least so far) and (b) offers the option to write in an answer, with all the write-in answers being displayed in the results. Which is interesting.

http://moreintelligentlife.com/page/what-best-spor...

important yall is that dont write the reason for it. it just spreads the vote. Theres a lot of reasons put already so its already covered. ;)

my vote goes to this

Well clearly it is hockey (ice hockey to overseas folk), but orienteering is good too. With spectator value being the tiebreaker.

>Well clearly it is hockey

Yup. No other sport is even close.

Yup. No other sport is even close.

Is that because it's only Canadians that play it and Canada is so far from anywhere?

curling is close, about as entertaining too

rogaining is the best sport. ever.

What's a row gain? Is that where you paddle forwards instead of backwards?

No, it's where everyone stands around and watches hair grow (back).

I have to say that my instinct when I saw this poll was to click 'baseball', but I think that it would be silly to try to argue that point here. :-)

Orienteering now has a narrow lead :-)

As jmnipen points out, putting a reason just splits the vote - if you want to vote for orienteering, it's better just to put "Orienteering".

Obviously nobody on Attackpoint would do anything so nefarious as voting more than once, but it appears to be restricted to one vote per IP address, so if you were to do so you'd need to use different computers, or the same computer on different internet connections...

I just like the fact that orienteering has completely overwhelmed the five sports nominated by the writers. What I don't understand is how some of the various sub-orienteering choices with detailed write ups have received more than one vote, since you don't seem to be able to choose them.

so we've seen a classical flash mob in action.

Urban Racing was my close second choice

Apparently rugby has a spirit of camaraderie not found in other sports...?! Perhaps in 'other' that contributor meant orienteering?

You missed the better reason.

Rugby because it requires a greater degree and trite skills than other sports.

I have a commerce degree and my jokes are stale and repetitive, can I join in?

Read the editor's response: http://moreintelligentlife.com/node/4662

He sounds like a nice guy.

Most of the comments posted below the editor's response well define our sport for the editor. They also put the finger on the reason for his jaundiced view of orienteering: he grew up in scouting where any kind of compass game is called orienteering.

Or he was trolling.

It seems like an entirely appropriate British response, and not completely without merit.

Anyone running that sort of on-line survey deserves to be gamed.

Perhaps, but if you have to game it, you don't deserve to win it.

If you can't calculate the standard error of your estimate, its not an estimate. So a 'win' is just another meaningless number. Such an exercise is never anything but a game.

It may be a "game" but if the sport of orienteering is in the lead or close to it some people seeing the word may investigate the sport. Who knows, someone may start orienteering because of it. Any publicity for our sport is good as long as it is in a positive vein.

Not if "deductive reasoning" continues to be part of the image, much less the message put out by the game's advocates.

Map reading, yes, but if anyone thinks that "deductive reasoning" and "risk assessment" distinguishes orienteering from other sports, they are simply showing their ignorance of other sports. Other sports are just not into fancy language, and if we want to be perceived as a sport we have got to discontinue this "thinking sport" nonsense, which is a direct contradiction in terms, and tragic public relations.

Thinking is part of the preparation in all sports, but not during the competition. If you are thinking, you are losing. Every decision of a successful competitor in any sport, is a trained reflex, and that includes orienteering.

Backing up Eric, this was from an article linked to in a baby shopping discussion:
" The probes in the rats’ heads, however, told a different story. While each animal wandered through the maze, its brain was working furiously. Every time a rat sniffed the air or scratched a wall, the neurosensors inside the animal’s head exploded with activity. As the scientists repeated the experiment, again and again, the rats eventually stopped sniffing corners and making wrong turns and began to zip through the maze with more and more speed. And within their brains, something unexpected occurred: as each rat learned how to complete the maze more quickly, its mental activity decreased. As the path became more and more automatic — as it became a habit — the rats started thinking less and less"

That would happened if we ran same course over and over again, luckily only some of us do such things, others face different challenge each time. Another interesting idea: sniffing the controls out!

Eric is so right. I once wrote a training article called "Training to NOT think."

The premise was, good athletes in all sorts of sports have to process huge amounts of data and they must respond without hesitation. Analytical decision making is slow and mistake prone. Instead, one must train to make every action automatic, instinctual, and reflexive. Thinking is part of the game, and the less you do it during competition, the better.

System 1 and System 2 thinking as described by Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow). In orienteering we talk about simplification as a technique to save time. I think simplification is a collection of system 1 decision heuristics that we develop through practice. Errors generally arise because our decision heuristics do not effectively solve a problem designed by the course setter. Afterwards we look at our error and think 'How could I be that stupid'. That question is based on the often false assumption that we are actually using system 2 thought processes when the mistake was made. A better question to ask is 'How was my collection of heuristics unsuited to this problem'. And at the time of the mistake we may need to revert to relocation which is a system 2 skill that requires more disciplined thinking, even deduction. The more skilled the orienteer the less often this happens and the lesser need for deductive thinking.