3 ms·

What a brilliant example of scalability in a real world sense.

• ubernostrum 16y ago
  Not really. This concept of "scalability", while alluring at first glance, falls flat on multiple counts. First and foremost, it verges on a straw man; Felten argues against unspecified "Americans" with largely-unspecified views, when in fact criticism has been quite specific and has come from practically every part of the globe. The things people are asking to have "fixed" are not the lack of an official clock or any of his other examples; the things people are asking to have fixed seem mostly to be abysmally inconsistent officiating standards. Which, in an article praising the uniformity of the game at nearly all levels, is a glaring oversight. Second, Felten's concept of "scalability" is deeply flawed; we might as well argue for the World Cup final to be played on a parking lot with piled-up sticks for goals -- after all, your neighborhood game doesn't have those big fancy stadiums, does it? Privileging some aspects of the game by allowing them to be radically different at higher levels of play, while arbitrarily requiring other aspects to be uniform at all levels, is frankly irrational. Worst of all, he touches on baseball as a game which "scales", but fails to note that while the basic rules of the game are the same at practically every level, the implementation varies considerably and the game is better for that. For example, a local sandlot game doesn't need six professional umpires, instant replay and a strike-zone-tracking pitch-plotting camera system, but a major-league championship game does. This allows each game to have the level of officiating it actually needs, rather than forcing impossible burdens on the local game or false austerity on the professional game.