RowanE comments on [Open Thread] Stupid Questions (2014-02-17) - Less Wrong

3 Post author: solipsist 17 February 2014 05:34AM

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Comment author: ThisSpaceAvailable 18 February 2014 04:33:11AM 3 points [-]

Can anyone explain the Olympics' tournament system to me? Team A beats Team B and advances to the finals. Team C beats Team D and advances to the finals. Team A beats Team C. Team B and Team D now play for third place, and Team B wins. Team A is awarded the gold medal. Team C is awarded silver. Team B is awarded bronze. What's up with that? Team B and Team C have the same win/loss record. They both beat Team D, and lost to Team A. Why does Team C get the silver?

Comment author: RowanE 18 February 2014 09:53:24AM 2 points [-]

Well, on the surface level, Team B lost their first match and won their second, while team C won their first match but lost their second, so clearly order matters.

On the more meta level, a format optimised for selecting one winner has been poorly adapted to the task of selecting three winners and ranking them. Adjusting the format to fairly select silver and bronze would add complexity and cost and time, and apparently not enough people care enough about fairly selecting silver and bronze for this to have happened.