Understanding the +5/-5 system

[el henry]

The last thing I want is for judges to take into account the hot takes of fans, particularly fans (including me) on the Internet. The time honored “The ref is blind” happens in all sports everywhere

“The judges are so obviously stupid and biased because they didn’t score my fav correctly. They clearly are prejudiced against my country/my fav/my fav’s coach/my choice of breakfast....

If only I got to judge, it would be fair fair fair :dev2:”

I don’t think so:sarcasm:

 

[chopinskate]

The last thing I want is for judges to take into account the hot takes of fans, particularly fans (including me) on the Internet. The time honored “The ref is blind” happens in all sports everywhere

“The judges are so obviously stupid and biased because they didn’t score my fav correctly. They clearly are prejudiced against my country/my fav/my fav’s coach/my choice of breakfast....

If only I got to judge, it would be fair fair fair :dev2:”

I don’t think so:sarcasm:

Not quite "the ref is blind" with FS, though. It's a judged sport with a history of politics, and biases can leak in from any side. It's just not a proper analogy.

 

[el henry]

Not quite "the ref is blind" with FS, though. It's a judged sport with a history of politics, and biases can leak in from any side. It's just not a proper analogy.

In some ways, you are right, the ref is only calling one play out of an entire game.

But I have been watching FS for some time now (with a break) and judges are far less “biased” now than they were when I started, when it was pretty much a given. The East German Judge would way underscore Toller and the Canadian Judge would give him the marks he deserved (ha, of course, according to me. How was Jan Hoffman scored? You would need to ask a Jan Hoffman fan).

And it appears as though FS was way more popular and taken seriously as a “sport” in those days. (I’m not one of those who feels it needs to be taken “seriously” as a “sport”, maybe because of my other sports watching habits).

Wuzrobbing is as old as the hills. The hills do not seem any larger to me these days:confused2:

 

[gkelly]

Not quite "the ref is blind" with FS, though. It's a judged sport with a history of politics, and biases can leak in from any side. It's just not a proper analogy.

Yes, but it is also a judges sport with a lot more detailed rules and guidelines and accepted valuations of quality than were ever publicly available to fans. They are now much more detailed for judges and much more available to fans. The few very most educated fans -- especially if they were experienced skaters themselves -- may know more than the less educated judges. But the average judge knows a lot more than the average fan, and the best judges know much much much more than the casual fan.

And of course all fans are at least as biased as the judges, in most cases more so. If you're rooting for someone, you're biased by definition.

Before questioning whether a judge's score might be wrong because of bias, first one would need to examine all the relevant criteria and the actual details of the element or performance to determine whether the score is in fact wrong at all.

However, because most fans don't know much about the rules and techniques and do know that there's a history of bias, there is a tendency for fans to jump straight from "I don't understand/agree with that score" to "That judge must be wrong because of bias" without going through the other steps to understand where the scores came from and what might be the causes of any discrepancies.

Of course there's also a history of fans booing or otherwise judging the judges, and that's part of the fun for many fans. But that doesn't mean the fans are actually better at evaluating the skaters according to the rules of the sport than the judges are.

As for evaluating which skater you liked best, well, everyone's answer is the correct one for themselves.