Comment by sodic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sodic | Hacker News Reader

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I have a similar story, but perhaps even stranger.

I work for a startup. We often bring a wooden arcade with us to conferences as a marketing gimmick.

The arcade runs a single side-scrolling video game. You're running from a monster and dodging obstacles. The goal is to survive as long as possible, and your result is measured in meters.

There are always a few competitive guys who spend the entire conference taking turns to play it. And every single time, the same thing happens.

Say the current high score is around 200m. Everybody fails somewhere around that number: 190m, 186m... Maybe someone manages 210m. And the high score moves up at a snail's pace.

Then, a new guy shows up and gets something like 500m on his third try. From their next turn on, everybody easily does 450 or more, even though they were struggling to get past 200 just one turn ago.

What makes it stranger is that the game is dead simple. It's not like the new guy discovered a move that unlocked this capability. And it wasn't a lack of motivation either - they'd all been playing for an hour already. They just started performing better after seeing it was possible. There has to be a name for this phenomenon.

Climbers know this phenomenon as the "send train". A group of climbers has been working on a problem for a while. When the first person sends it, it often happens that multiple people are successful in the immediate attempts that follow. Part of it is watching the successful beta, but it happens even when everyone knows the moves. Once you've seen it's possible, you stop climbing tentatively and commit to the hard move instead of hedging for a fall.

Reminds me of amateur table tennis. There is a strange dynamic where you down regulate your performance unconsciously when the opponent is playing worse and vice versa.

Could be described as some physical form of this effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

The term would be conformity / normative social influence.

Surely this has nothing to do with specifically table tennis, nor that it's amateur.

A better example would be mixed boys/girls sports classes in school, where the boys deliberately hold back as to not injure/scare the girls.

It's a pretty obvious and human thing not to go out and completely destroy a much weaker opponent. We're social animals after all.

There also may be an element of energy conservation, there's objectively no need to put in any more effort than necessary. Inefficient.

I think the difference is that, in the table tennis example, it happens unconsciously and you can't help it. But you're right, it likely happens in most sports.

The mixed boys/girls classes example is, as you said, deliberate. And I too remember holding back on purpose in such situations when I was a kid.

With the arcade, no one was deliberately holding back. I'm sure of it.

Is it that you’re holding back against weaker opponents, or that you’re more excited and engaged when you’re playing against someone that forces you closer to the edge of your ability?

I am pretty sure if you play at pro level you train this out of yourself. But then, the marathon / running examples where certain milestones get broken by one person and then suddenly by a host of others, is a counterargument.

I think it's largely due to psychology. If 210m is considered the best, then as they approach it they may start to tense up and choke. When the goal and possibility is known as 500m, then there's no point being concerned near 210m.

Achieving a high score requires focus and effort.

There's little reason to aim for a score a lot higher than the current best; and when getting close to the score you're aiming for, it's easy to get agitated and make a mistake.

And if you do beat the high score, you're likely to loosen your attention right after that, and it's even annoying to keep going for much more.

I wonder if it's the same with the sub 2 hour marathon which was broken this year (it certainly was with the 4 minute mile).

I like to leverage that when brainstorming solutions to hard problems. Instead of contemplating small percentage improvements, try to think about what's in the way of improvements that are orders of magnitude better (e.g., don't take time to run a big task from 100s to 90s, take it to milliseconds). Sometimes it unlocks big ideas.

I work in software deployment for large orgs. I use this technique to optimize. "How can I provision or deploy this with one package install, and launch instance." Typically take multi-page or multi-step deployments down to fully automated.

This is like the mile record. Everytime someone breaks the existing one a bunch of people surpass the old record shortly after.

Reference-dependent effort ("bunching" around a target) [1] is probably the closest thing. The existing high score was acting as everyone's reference point. Anchoring [2] is the more general cognitive version.

[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w20343/w203... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_effect

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