Re: 2017 Women's World Championships
Let's set aside the subjective discussion of adults who enjoy stealing candy from babies, and focus on the fact that games between badly mismatched teams are not actually good learning experiences for anyone. The key element of learning from experience is taking the things that you do that don't work against the competition and figuring out what does work. If you are a lot better than your opponent, there probably aren't very many things that you do that don't work, so you don't improve. And a lot of the confidence that you build can be confidence in things that won't work against a better opponent.
If you are a lot worse than your opponent, you have plenty of things that don't work, but you probably aren't capable of making the adjustments necessary to find things that do. Even your new ideas get stuffed back in your face. You don't learn how to be better that way. I suspect that the friend you played tennis with spent some of the time teaching you rather than just destroying you, which makes it a very different enterprise than a fully competitive game where your opponent has no interest in stopping to help you out.
This is true in all sorts of ways; I sometimes see it when involved in a writers' group that mixes published pros and those who just write fiction for fun. A lot of the time, the critiquing of the amateurs' stories is at a level that doesn't do them any good given where they are and what they are trying to do. I confess that I'm one of the ones who has a very hard time dialing things back when critiquing, which is why I don't participate in that sort of mixed group anymore.
In sports, the most obvious example is minor league baseball. It's set up with about seven levels of competition for a reason. One of the surest ways to ruin a prospect is to push him up to a level that he isn't ready for.* No one sends a kid drafted out of high school to AA for his first pro experience, because he won't even know what to do with the assortment of breaking balls he's going to see. If it turns out that he could have started at AA, it means you drafted Mike Trout.**
In order to provide a good learning experience, you have to put someone in a position where they're competing in a population of roughly comparable skill level.
*Why, yes, I did take Mike Zunino with the first pick in my fantasy league's 2012 draft, only to watch the Mariners screw him up completely. Thanks for asking.
**On the other hand, I also took Trout with the tenth pick in 2009, and I'm still feeling pretty smug about that.
Originally posted by Timothy A
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If you are a lot worse than your opponent, you have plenty of things that don't work, but you probably aren't capable of making the adjustments necessary to find things that do. Even your new ideas get stuffed back in your face. You don't learn how to be better that way. I suspect that the friend you played tennis with spent some of the time teaching you rather than just destroying you, which makes it a very different enterprise than a fully competitive game where your opponent has no interest in stopping to help you out.
This is true in all sorts of ways; I sometimes see it when involved in a writers' group that mixes published pros and those who just write fiction for fun. A lot of the time, the critiquing of the amateurs' stories is at a level that doesn't do them any good given where they are and what they are trying to do. I confess that I'm one of the ones who has a very hard time dialing things back when critiquing, which is why I don't participate in that sort of mixed group anymore.
In sports, the most obvious example is minor league baseball. It's set up with about seven levels of competition for a reason. One of the surest ways to ruin a prospect is to push him up to a level that he isn't ready for.* No one sends a kid drafted out of high school to AA for his first pro experience, because he won't even know what to do with the assortment of breaking balls he's going to see. If it turns out that he could have started at AA, it means you drafted Mike Trout.**
In order to provide a good learning experience, you have to put someone in a position where they're competing in a population of roughly comparable skill level.
*Why, yes, I did take Mike Zunino with the first pick in my fantasy league's 2012 draft, only to watch the Mariners screw him up completely. Thanks for asking.
**On the other hand, I also took Trout with the tenth pick in 2009, and I'm still feeling pretty smug about that.
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