Facial expression software confirms bronze medalists happier than silver
twin-cities.umn.edu
twin-cities.umn.edu
- Jerry Seinfeld
The gold medal is made of solid silver that is plated by a small amount (4oz, IIRC) of gold. EDIT: 6 grams, not 4oz, as pointed out below.
Also, athletes would probably feel more pressure to sell their medals if they were solid gold. That would enrich them, which is good, but there's something to be said for the medals remaining in the hands of the athletes.
Well, not really thousands of medals - in this year's summer games there will be 339 medals awarded, so 113 gold medals.
Tokyo gold medals weigh 556g, so if they were solid gold (their weight would differ a bit but be in the same ball park) each gold medal would be worth nearly $33,000 just in metal costs, which would work out to a total of $3,694,286 for all the gold medals.
So the actual number will be north of 10 million it seems.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tokyo-olympics-staggering-p...
Apparently gold is nearly twice as dense as silver: https://www.edrsilver.com/English/ceo-corner/ceo-corner-deta...
Let's take the Rio 2016 medal as a reference. It has 494g of silver and 6g of gold. For a cost of $564 [1]. There were 307 gold medals awarded[2]. This comes to a total of 173148$ for the medals.
Let's take the worst possible conversion. i.e. you want a solid gold medal with the same volume as the original. Silver has a density of 10,49g per cubic centimeter and gold has a density of 19.32g per cubic centimeter. So to get the same volume we need 910g of gold to replace the silver. Price of gold per gram in 2016 was about 40$. So this 910g of gold would cost 36400$. For a total gold medal price of 53,329,584$. Let's ignore the silver you no longer need since it's not that significant.
For reference the entirety of the rio olympics cost 13.2 billion[3]. Having solid gold medals would be about 0.4% additional cost. Yes it's a lot of money but it doesn't seem unrealistic to me at all.
[1] https://somethingborrowedpdx.com/how-much-does-a-olympic-gol...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Summer_Olympics_medal_tab....
[3] https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1051553/cost-of-rio-...
Does that account for team sports, or Paralympics?
Clearly, the composition of the medal has symbolic value beyond "usefulness". Also, I expect an Olympic medal is worth at least a little more than any ol' hunk of the same constituent materials. So it's not like they are without risk as is.
This happens a lot for any sport considered fun or prestigious. For example the prize money from competitive programming in the 2000s was actually pretty decent (topcoder paid out 100k total). Then they realized the top people will still show up even if there's no prize.
There was, if I recall, an example of two Olympians melting down their medals because of some totalitarian government (Jews in 1940's Germany?) The medals were later recast. Only example I know of of the base value being worth more.
Meanwhile, it helps athletes. Because you have to pay income tax on the base metal value, not the assumed collector value. Although the US may have exempted medals from income taxes??
https://www.espn.com/olympics/story/_/id/17740769/obama-ends...
From an article I read:
This year's medals are made from material recycled from electronic devices donated by the people of Japan. However, Olympic gold medals are required to be made from at least 92.5% silver, and must contain a minimum of six grams of gold. The Tokyo 2020 Olympic gold medals contain more than six grams of gold plating on pure silver. Silver medals are pure silver while bronze medals are red brass (95% copper and 5% zinc). The Olympic gold medals at Tokyo 2020 weigh roughly 556g, with silver weighing 550g and bronze 450g.
If you think about any sport with a one-on-one final, the silver medal is for the loser of that final. But the same team/athlete won a semi-final and were probably excited when they did. So just hand them the medal at that point.
Things are a tad more complicated for tournaments with 3+n finalists. But I have the feeling that being the second-fastest out of ten sprinters is not a bad thing.
edit: but of course, it's also common that there are two big names in a competition, so winning silver in that case means you lost gold.
edit: Now I looked at it again and I see that F1 has adjusted their points system throughout the following years, so you need to replace the 7th place with whatever is relevant now.
That's Haas
- Due to financial reasons they had to let go their veteran drivers (just two in F1) from last season and are currently featuring an all-rookie line up.
- They've gone on record to say that they are not developing the 2021 car, instead focusing on the specs change for 2022.
So two rookies in a team that is basically just in the competition for the participation. At least one driver from Williams, the bottom feeders a season or two ago, have the chutzpah to aim for points finish this year. Haas can't be a fulfilling team to be in right now.
It's why even tragic situations can be an opportunity to be happy because the alternative is even worse, while some happy situations can be disappointing because they could have been so much better. Or the stock market where a modest win that could have been huge might feel worse than a loss that could have been huge.
“We suggest that patients' memories of painful medical procedures largely reflect the intensity of pain at the worst part and at the final part of the experience.”[1]
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/030439...
I went to an affective computing conference in 2019 and was underwhelmed; models couldn’t distinguish between looking upwards (and raising your eyebrows) from exhibiting surprise. Emotions are complex and personal, and the phrase from the article “facial expression software — which nearly eliminates possible bias” seems absolutely ludicrous to me.
I take results like this with an absolutely massive grain of salt, and don’t expect them to be reproducible.
The danger is that they’re “catchy”, clickbait-y results, that are popular because people like to hypothesize about underlying psychological reasons why those bronze medalists might be happier. But let’s examine the core claim first, and not take facial recognition software as a ground truth for emotional state.
In this case however, I do believe that bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists provided that all the participants had a similar probability of victory.
But that's never the case: betting companies are good at earning money off of that.
I definitely agree that the idea that software eliminates bias is laughable. Swaps it for another, hopefully less extreme set of biases doesn’t draw as many clicks, though.
I always assumed that was generally what the models were trained from, are they not? Agree though that ai will just replicate the bias in the training data, which is why its important to have "bias free" data. Or at least as much as such a thing exists.
First, behavioural responses vary from person to person and from culture to culture (Americans will smile in most social situations, Russians don't smile unless there is a laughter coming in).
Second, we are far from associating an internal subjective experience (joy) to an external objective behaviour (smile). It's actually one of the greatest challenges in psychology today. Also, how do you gauge my level of happiness compared to yours?
Third, the whole article is superficial and they don't hide it: first they measure who smiles more ... then they jump to the conclusion - all bronze winners perform the same cognition. Pure speculation.
Even if smiles would denote an emotional episode (joy) it would have to be right in the moment of the emotional episode - and it would be a micro expression (under one second).
Quote: "they studied medal stand photographs" -> posed circumstances.
I was once a volunteer at the world championships of a team sport. At the podium sceremony my job was to lead the team to the spot where each player received their medal. The bronze medalists were super happy and smiling. Almost all silver medalists that I led to the podium were literally crying.
No sophisticated facial recognition was needed to ascertain who was happier.
Again, this is a very general appreciation but it's likely the case for most athletes. In the Olympics you already know before hand who is a favorite and who is an underdog. Of course the athletes are self-aware enough to understand this as well.
If you don't study stuff like this, your models of the world won't update on 'obvious' things like geocentrism or spontaneous generation.
The last century saw enough of these rationalizations for human behaviour - they miss the mark more often than not.
Now for why they decided to use facial expression software on the other hand...
AA == 10, DD == 4, FF (fail and eligible for re-exam) == 3 and FR (fail and repeat the coursework next semester).
Gradesheet was put publically in the hall. I consistently saw that the two happiest people were those either got the AA or DD.
When I got AA I was obviously happy! Once I got a DD on a particularly difficult course. I was damn happy I didn't fail!
When competition is close you can loose for factors outside of the competition itself. You can loose because of differences in judging opinions or because of a Judge not liking you, worse ranked competitors can win due to scoring calculation systems, you can even loose biased on how hungry or how bad the judges last meal was.
The burden of perfection (or close to it) is pretty brutal.
Among other topics the film Gattaca seemed to address that issue.
(Contrary to popular western culture, there are groups who enjoy "grade-racing" --- and from first-hand experience, I can say it was very motivational as well as stressful.)
Confirmation of the fairly obvious aside, if anyone thinks that something as superficial as smiling tells you anything reliable about the internal mental state of a person we truly have reached a new age of phrenology.
However, the model of competitors feeling that silver=‘almost won’ and bronze=‘lucky to get a medal’ is by no means as novel as they claim. It’s strange to me that they present it as ‘new’ instead of a commonly held
There should be medals going down much lower in the results.
Medals aren’t everything passing the qualifiers is an achievement on its own…
A lot of psychology probably goes into the backs against the wall scenario. Not only that, 3rd place in typical tournament bracket style is where you might see underdogs rise to the occasion.
So third got what they could ultimately achieve, second failed to do so.
* I have no idea which sports were analyzed, but as a previous athlete in a few sports the above is something Ive experienced.
* Just read the 10 other comments stating the same thing before I did.
I’m very ready to accept that image recognition can help support the idea that third place winners are happier than second place, but I don’t see how that helps tell us why at all.
They will probably get over it just fine. It's ok to be disappointed sometimes, it can even be motivating.
C students are often happy C students.
Is there any empirical evidence for this? It flies in the face of my experience, which is that A students were A students from the start; that C students almost never become A students, and that A students sometimes become C students.
There are plenty of people entirely capable of A marks in most educational situations who don't get them because they don't care and don't do the work. Something changes and they get interested. The jump from an indifferent C to a solid A often isn't that far.
Somewhat related: There are more PhD's than you might expect that were also high school drop outs.
...and this is why we shouldn't let PR people write about ML.
People who win Silver generally went after the Gold.
Silver: "Shit... I was so close to Gold." Bronze: "Damn, I medaled!"