RPD

Something being subjective isn't inherently bad. Musical and artistic tastes are completely subjective and yet we can have plenty of constructive conversations about them. In my last article I argued that difficulty is subjective to such a degree that there is no fruitful conversation to be had just by focusing on that criteria. This can leave a bitter taste, but my ultimate point is not to say that there is nothing to discuss at all, but that we need to find what is worth discussing . Sense and nonsense With a slight rephrasing, the problem about difficulty turns into a well studied topic in philosophy: ethics. Difficulty, or more generally, tournament criteria can be said to be the sets of values that allow us to make sensible judgements about the worth of a combo, in the same sense that ethical values are those corresponding to human actions. From Plato to Thomas Aquinas to Kant to Nietzsche to postmodern philosophers, the origin of moral and ethical values has been argued to c...

There are four traditional tournament criteria: difficulty, execution, creativity and presentation. Recently, effectiveness and construction have joined the party and others have been further subdivided. Almost 20 years have passed since nhk_9's article on the Troposphere about how a pen spinning tournament should be organized where he wondered about tournament criteria and if it even made sense in the first place to give numerical scores to combos. I feel like that question is today as relevant as ever. There are two opposing views. Some people feel like the ever-changing criteria and apparent subjectivity is just a consequence of our lack of understanding. If we really understood pen spinning then we would have clear definitions of all criteria and we would more or less agree with respect to tournament judgements. Other people feel like the criteria are inherently subjective and no matter how much our understanding increases, there will never be objective and clear definitions. ...