Lessons to learn from marble racing
I am a big fan of Jelle Bakker, with his successful YouTube channel. He reports about sport events and his videos are watched and enjoyed by about one and a half million subscribers (at the moment of this writing), and there are many more viewers outside that.
Many of you probably know what I am talking about. For the rest of you: Jelle makes beautiful high quality videos about sports events where the competitors are marbles. Yes, you read that right: marbles, the globular pieces of glass mainly controlled by gravity.
Thanks to the fact that Jelle manages to present these events in the same manner and quality as big sports events, the excitement is equal to the real thing. One important factor are the splendid comments from Greg Woods (thanks Greg!).
The fandom pages show how many fans there are of Jelle’s videos. This particular page I bring you to talks about a single marble that has retired, and two people took the effort to express their grief about this. Clicking around in this enormous wiki tell you background stories of each of the teams and their marbles, statistics of races, and so on. I just love to wander around in this place. Did I already tell you these pages are in available three languages?
But real sports is so much different!
The first thing you probably think is: but that can’t be right! Regardless of the illusion created by Jelle, there is no training, no strategy, and no spirit in these teams. The results must be enormously different from the real thing.
The psychology of fandom (see for example this brilliant Be Smart video) shows that it doesn’t really matter what you are a fan of, as long as you feel member of a group. And that means that the emotions about these marbles can be as real as with sports teams.
Randomness
Another factor that makes these races so realistic is that in actual sports, there’s a lot of randomness too. For example, on August 20, 2024 two of the best Dutch runners, Femke Bol and Sifan Hassan, tripped just meters from the finish while they were in the winning position. The drama is beautifully depicted in a Dutch newspaper:
The newspaper article said the runners were “looking for an explanation”, but I am trying to tell you this is not needed. There is no explanation, this stuff just happens.
Wait. You said “lessons”?
But this is just a way to spend your free time. What does it matter if you watch people or marbles?
The point is, as I’ve said before, that your intuition is completely incapable of understanding randomness. Mathematicians (and I am one of these) know that, and are trained to ignore their intuition, relying on computations instead.
Survivor bias
Survivor bias is the effect that the way you measure outcomes depends on the quantity you are measuring. One good example from history is the research by Abraham Wald on airplane damage during the second world war. He investigated the damage to planes that returned from combat, and used that to determine where to further armor the planes. Instead of recommending the areas that were most damaged, which sounds logical at first sight, he recommended to reinforce the part that weren’t damaged. The reasoning was that the planes with damage in those areas didn’t return. (You may want to read this extensive story by David McRaney on this subject.)
The phenomenon of “survivor bias” extends to sports, creating heroes. Consider a sport like Judo, characterized by one-on-one contests. Even an experienced judoka has likely engaged in hundreds of matches. Let’s imagine a hypothetical group of 250 judokas. Without any prior information, we can anticipate that at least one among them has recently won all eight of their latest bouts. While it might be tempting to assume this individual is the best of them, such a conclusion cannot be drawn from this sole criterion.
Many sports enthusiasts are aware of this concept and appreciate the element of randomness that contributes to the unpredictability of competition outcomes. In some sports, the rules and scoring systems are intentionally designed to accentuate these random results. For example in football (soccer, for American readers), many games end in a tie, an the outcome is forced by a penalty shootout, which is very random.
Enjoy your successes, forget the rest
From this we can conclude that in sports, and probably in most things in life, you are not always rewarded for talent, and not even for effort. You’ll have to accept that the randomness of life is just there. If everything goes well, that may have to do with everything you did, but there was some luck involved. My dream job at Worldline is not the result of me preparing for 30 years to get to this point. It is the result of doing the things I like, and getting an opportunity to influence things here and there in an ever changing company.
And when watching sports, marbles or otherwise, you can do the same: enjoy it when everything goes well, and forget the disappointments. In the long term, you will be happier that way.