#9 Why every Olympian should be celebrated irrespective of they winning a medal or not?

Hey Buddy, Today let’s set aside design for a bit and talk about the Olympics, since it’s super fresh in our mind. However, it’s not a complete non-design topic, the core maths and psychology we will discuss can be useful for UX researchers dealing with samples. Okay, let’s begin. Here’s the core message:

If you understand ‘regression to mean’ you will understand that every olympian is as good as a medalist. Everyone deserves a celebration.

Understanding the effect of ‘Regression to Mean’

Say you give one exam and your rank is 1. Then you give another exam and your rank is 100. By just taking these two incidents into account, we can tell your rank is about 50 in class. But instead of just 2 incidents, if we observe 100 incidents and see the rank something like 1,100,10,4,6,10,1,etc then we can confidently guess the rank to be in the top 20 in class.

The more incidents we observe, the more accurate we get and the lesser the influence of random luck. That is because good luck and bad luck cancel out each other when we take the average of a large sample. Similarly, we can say when we observe a very less number of incidents, the result has a higher probability of giving an extreme result (high deviation from the mean.)

Still, confused? here are a few good videos to check:

Regression to mean:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_n6kiLZH4Q

Law of small numbers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS0giOP44RU

Back to Olympics

The idea is when we say someone’s calibre, it should not be judged by 1 exam but by a track record of multiple exams. The more the incidents observed, the lesser the extreme results and lesser the influence of luck.

The fact that someone has gone on to represent the country in the Olympics is not a result of 1 lucky day but a result of consistent top performance. Winning a medal by observing 3 incidents (rounds), doesn’t mean the person is better than others in general.

In a sprint, if all athletes in their past 100 sprints run at approx. 44KM/hr then Olympics just becomes an event to see “Today, who’s the luckiest among the fastest humans on the planet”

Conclusion

What all that means is that people who win medals are not disproportionately better than those who didn’t, but we as a society disproportionately celebrate those who win the medal.

That’s all folks! Have a good day ahead! 😃

Regards
Bharat Apat
All works 👉 (bit.ly/bharat-apat)