Argumentative

John and I get into some pretty odd arguments.

Today we revived an argument we had several months ago, about what constitutes a "sport", and paired it up with what constitutes a "game".

(I should note that I'm using "argument" in the sense of disagreeing with each other. We weren't shouting at each other or anything. They were arguments in the philosophical sense; you could also them "debates".)

Way back when, John put forth the assertion that a sport is an endeavor which requires physical skill. On the other hand, felt (and feel) that a sport needs to involve physical exertion - something where your physical conditioning can play a major role, and exercise is involved. So, for instance, John feels that Pool is a sport, while I don't. (John noted that Pool is featured on ESPN, but then also said that ESPN has shown spelling bees, which we both agreed is not a sport.)

We got into this again while talking about Pool and Poker, and about what constitutes a game. I said that I felt that a game is any contest among people which has as its goal for each player to strive to finish ahead of the other players. In other words, the key components are competition and victory. I then said that I felt that sports are a subset of games.

John disagreed with this last point, noting that track and field events are considered sports, but not necessarily a game. At the time I felt this was a good point, but on reflection I'm not so sure, since even solo track and field efforts can involve competition and victory, even if one is just trying to compete with one's own best time. And of course the Olympics effectively turn all kinds of track and field events into head-to-head competitions. Sports have to involve competition - including self-competition - or else they're just exercise.

John also returned to his "sport requires physical skill" theory by claiming that a game is something where if you're being coached during the game by the game's best living player, then you're sure to win, Chess being an obvious example. This seemed patently false to me, since many games involve a strong luck factor, and being so coached might greatly improve your odds, but not at all guarantee victory (Monopoly - clearly a game - being a fine example of this; it involves some [non-physical] skill, but has a huge luck factor).

Anyway, we also got into talking about Poker, which John has been trying to persuade me to play. I'm not very interested in Poker, and John said he thinks it has more of a skill component than Bridge - which I do enjoy - and that it also involves trying to read your opponents. I was thinking about what I don't like about Poker tonight, and I think the essential piece is that I don't like wagering my own money on games. I don't like having to decide how much real-life money I'm willing to lose to play a game, and there's too much potential for imbalance among players because of that. So because of this the whole bidding system falls apart for me unless artificial caps are imposed and real money isn't used.

I'm not really a gambler. I don't think Las Vegas is for me, in that sense.

Anyway.

John and I played a couple of games of Pool today (did I mention there's a Pool table my new office at work?), and I got my ass pretty firmly kicked. Along with the above, we got into an argument about my mechanics, in particular that I should bend my knees. This didn't make a lot of sense to me until John said that it would make it easier for me to see how the cue ball lines up with the target ball if I lowered my head, and I said, "Oh, so it's purely a vantage point thing." Well, John said it also affected the mechanics of my actual shot, which doesn't make sense to me since the shooting motion is entirely an upper-body one.

"Bending your knees is sports is good," said John before he headed off to his office, a blanket statement which I didn't really buy.

I think one thing that makes arguments between John and myself difficult (and interesting) is that my perception is that he's used to arguing from what you might call a position of authority. It seems to me that his style is to say things that he thinks are reasonable, which seem perhaps intuitively true, and expects them to hold up until some decent evidence to the contrary is presented. (I should emphasize that this is just my perception. And also that he's not dogmatic about it, but is willing to adjust his position when given reason.)

On the other hand, my thought process over the last few years has evolved to be just the opposite: an idea or theory is guilty until proven innocent. I've developed a healthy disrespect for human perception or the ability of humans to make statistical interpretations without gathering sufficient evidence. (Such phenomena are commonplace in the history of baseball analysis, and still dog popular perception of the workings of the game today.)

Coming from such essentially different attitudes about debating in this way I think makes it challenging to argue effectively about subjects. This is probably exacerbated by the fact that I just plain like to argue, and I've noticed that people who seem to take an arguing-as-an-authority approach (and I've seen other people do this) seem to have a fairly low tolerance for arguing-for-the-sake-of-arguing.

Incidentally, my approach has changed from ten years or so ago, when I tended to form opinions based on fairly little evidence, and then modify them over time as I gathered more evidence. Now I tend to resist forming an opinion (unless pressed, or sometimes unless it seems more fun to do so) until I have what I judge to be sufficient evidence. It's a more cautious approach, I suppose. Probably it's a reflection of and/or reflected in other aspects of my personality.

I shouldn't pick on John too much here (even if it is in a sense his karmic payback for all his jokes about needing to read my journal to find out what he thinks about a movie we've both seen!), but I was thinking about our arguments during the evening and wanted to write about them.

I guess the lesson to take to the bank here is just to recognize the sorts of standards I tend to hold theories to, and not to get into a debate with me unless you're prepared for the possibility that I might be arguing just because I'm enjoying the argument. Sometimes it's just fun.