I think it’s pretty clear what the main difference is between CP’s and my view of MJP. It’s a matter of perspective. He’s looking at rankings as reflective of certain qualities, while I’m looking at them only as a proportion of the pool. Quantitative versus qualitative analysis. He looks at a 1 and sees a certain kind of judge, distinct from what he sees when he looks at a 2 or a 3, all the way up and down the line, however long that line may be. On my side of it, I look at a 1 and say, this is the 20% of the field that will judge your most important rounds, while a 2 is the 20% of the field that will judge you if we can’t find a 1, a 3 is the next 20% and so forth. I apply no characteristics to 1s or 2s or 11s or 352s. He’s looking at it from the judges in, I’m looking at it from the tournament out.
Assigning judges my way forces him to muddle up his thinking about judges, and reclassify them from the 1s he truly considers 1s and the 2s he truly considers 2s and so forth into broader forced (and according to him arbitrary) ratings. His 1s now include some of what he perceives of as 2s, etc. Assigning judges his way respects his classifications, but forces me to deviate from mutuality, because when I do give him mutuality, it is way more mutual, and even when it isn’t mutual, his non-mutuality is mathematically predicted to be closer than my non-mutuality. He’s willing to accept that deviation. The question is, am I?
I think we start getting into a discussion of religion at this point, as I alluded to last time. Should a tournament be built to support his way of doing things, which we can probably grant as comparable to most circuit folks, or my way of doing things, which forces everyone to redefine the categories? My way would seem to insist that there should only be so many categories, supported by a belief that enough is enough, and that while we’re handing the decision of the judge to the teams, we’re handing it over only so far. I seem to be supporting an orthodoxy of having to pick up a wider variety of judges. Of course, in reality, our numbers aren’t all that different, and in any given tournament probably wouldn’t play out all that differently. But the energy spent in preffing, especially for teams new to it and perhaps confounded by it, cannot be ignored. For non-circuit teams, fewer tiers make way more sense than more tiers.
I think what I suggested yesterday has merit, that we apply standards to MJP depending not on our religion but on our tournaments. After all, there are some tournaments I tab, bid tournaments, that don’t use (and in at least one case, refuses to use) MJP. So if we can accept that tournaments are that different already, why not have a couple of ways of doing MJP? The high-ticket circuit tournament vs the regional or college tournament would be the general distinction, and the tournament itself decides how it’s going to go.
Honestly, though, if that is the best way to go, then maybe MJP at the circuit end should be tossed completely in favor of ordinals. The way CP’s analysis works, ordinals make more sense to him than any preset tier, right? I’m not being facetious. The question becomes, where would we do those ordinals?
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