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Comment by function_seven | Hacker News Reader

Video review (at least in the NFL) has a good answer for this. Clear and convincing. Anything that's borderline will stay with the ruling on the field. Only those situations where the live call missed something are overturned.

Last night's Rams/Seahawks game had a perfect example of this. A late-game pass from Jared Goff was tipped by the intended receiver and hit the ground behind him. The Seahawks' safety picked it up right away but the play was whistled dead (incomplete pass).

Except that's not what happened. To the refs on the field and to us at home, it looked like the ball hit ground. But a slow motion video replay showed that the safety never allowed the ball to touch the turf. He intercepted it.

This was a huge turn of events, and probably changed the outcome of the game. It wasn't borderline or vague. It was just too fast and the distances (between ball and grass) were too small to rely on a real-time judging of the result.

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The article addresses that consideration as well:

> But here’s an objection: You might think these problems can be avoided if video review is used only to correct “clear and obvious” errors. This is the supposed standard for use of VAR in soccer. Things aren’t so simple, though, because there aren’t just borderline cases. There are borderline borderline cases. That is, it can be vague when the borderline cases start. It isn’t just that there is unclarity, but that there is unclarity about when the unclarity even begins.

And the argument is unclarity about that unclarity is worse than nothing at all?

> The motivation for using video review in sports is obvious: to get more calls right.

The writing seems to ignore the very premise, by arguing the existence of edge cases to the edge cases makes any improvement impossible.

Seems the sort of ridiculous navel gazing that earns philosophy a bad reputation.

I don't think that section invalidates my point. Those borderline-borderline cases can also be dealt with by leaving the call on the field in place. Or not.

What I'm saying is that video review doesn't make the judgements worse. It either illustrates the vagueness, or discovers a concrete fact that was missed during live action judgements.

Just because video review can't solve the Sorites Paradox (or any of the meta-paradoxes at the margins of the excluded middle), doesn't mean that it's useless. What replay review does do is mitigate the fallibility of human judges seeing the action from limited angles in real time.

When Google's self driving car hits one of these paradoxes and a kid dies can they be sued?

It seems Pareto superior to still have the replay, though... with no replay, obviously wrong calls exist and borderline calls will go whichever way was called on the field... with replay review, the obviously wrong calls are fixed and the borderline calls still go whichever way it was called on the field.

Borderline borderline doesn't change this... by definition, a borderline borderline call is neither is neither super-right or super-wrong, so a overturn is not a travesty of justice.

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