User:V 0 1 D/Draft:Lens Theory
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Lens Theory is a proposed methodology of examining combos through the use of varying points of view, and explicitly defining the rules for those points of view. It was proposed by V 0 1 D in 2021.
Original Text
- Written by V 0 1 D
Preface
It is well known that pen spinning is viewed only through specific points of view from individuals and communities, and that these points of view vary wildly between said people and communities. In the past it was assumed but not known that this was the case, for instance in the differing approaches of the early Korean community (Pencil Turning Cafe and PDS), which focused on refinement, the early International Community (UPSB and UCPSB), which followed various trends and the early French community (FPSB), which focused on creativity and experimentation. This culture difference became more apparent during UCPSB, when feuds started between the UCPSB members there and the FPSB members also using the site in 2006 when FPSB was in a transitional period, leading to action needing to be taken by the board's administration to put an end to the arguments, and to accept different points of view on pen spinning.
This was a good enough indication, but by the time competitive spinning had progressed to the world stage, the large variations in how pen spinning is viewed and considered became a provable issue. In the Pen Spinning World Tournament 2007, the rules defined several criteria, which were summed together among all judges to produce a final score. This had the unanticipated effect that the overall result would not match the consensus of individual judge's results, as occurred in the final round of KTH vs Eriror. Many judges in that battle ruled in favor of a small lead for Eriror ahead of KTH, but one judge chose to instead put KTH at a significant lead over Eriror, cancelling out the small leads of the other judges and deciding KTH as the first world champion. Future organizing of competitive events learnt from this mistake, and instead moved to consensus of individual results, formally acknowledging that inconsistency between judges can be so large as to change the result of an entire competition. Further competitive events that chose to ignore this precedent faced similar issues, as in the Pendolsa World Tournament 2017 when Pixels vs Beige resulted in a win for Beige despite judge consensus favoring Pixels.
Outside of summed results, other cases exist such as the Pen Spinning Olympics 2020 final round battle of Neir'da and Allwars, where the scores between the judges had such a large variation that it was difficult to ascertain whether they were statistically different from random, with Allwars having judge scores that varied from 8 to 28 out of 40. The large variation in scores makes it increasingly difficult to ascertain whether a judge is reliable or no, as with a hypothetical board of perfectly fair judges and perfectly fair criteria, the same results should be reached. The current systems in judging appear to make no mention as to the individual point of view of a judge, which would seem to indicate that they aim to reach this hypothetical perfectly fair scenario as closely as possible, as best as they can manage. However, despite attempts to improve judging over the years, this has consistently led to failure, such as in the Pen Spinning World Tournament 2015 when many judges had to be thrown out of their position after the first round results came in.
It seems only right that points of view should be examined when it comes to pen spinning, such that they can be better understood for the creation of more satisfying competitive processes, plus adding an additional layer to current analysis of pen spinning.
Philosophical point of view
In philosophy, a point of view or POV is defined as the 'specific attitude or manner through which a person thinks about something'. It is commonly referred to when studying POV bias, wherein multiple individuals can observe or think about certain phenomena and come to different conclusions. This could be due to error, but in the case of POV bias there is no error in the analysis from the POV of an individual observer, rather that their POV contains some section of the greater truth. Often a distinction is made between 'appearance' and 'reality', where the reality is the greater truth, and the appearance is how it is observed from a given station, with the intention of an observer to attempt, through observing appearances, to determine what the reality is.
Importantly, the issue of 'faultless disagreement' arises, as neither observer is wrong about their observation once their position they are observing from is understood, but they nevertheless conflict. Take the example image provided to the right, both observers are correct that the symbol displays a given value, but their conclusions conflict until the information of where they are standing when making the observation is taken into account. To go further, the more subjective an observation is, the more likely there is to be deviation and for there to be faultless disagreement, although subjective observation is not required. For instance, a discussion about whether a painting is beautiful or not will have wild deviations, depending on the standard of beauty that the observer uses, which varies by individual taste, cultures and so forth.
The first step we can take is to first assume that observations made from a point of view are not immediately incorrect or due to error, as first it must be understood where the observer stands to make their observation from before we can understand their observation fairly.
On lenses
A lens is an optical device that focuses or disperses a beam of light through the use of refraction. When we can take multiple POV observations, we can refer to the place we make the observation from as a lens rather than POV, as a lens transforms beams of light in a manner that provides some information, but not all the information in a scene. A zoom lens provides details, but misses the greater picture, a tinted lens can reveal how much light adheres to certain frequencies, and so on.
In literature a Critical Lens[1] is when a specific focus on style choices, plot devices and character interactions can be used to show a certain theme. There are many types of critical lenses that can be utilized to reveal additional information by how they are used to focus on specific areas and then provide underlying commentary.
It is then through the combination of the different facts that the greater picture can be observed, which is why we will refer to a given POV as a lens for the remainder of this article.
Personal lenses
An individual making an observation will always have some personal lens on which he views the observation through. They may even have several personal lenses that they can make specific observations through, combining these to make up an observation from a meta-lens. When judging on criteria, an individual tends to have multiple lenses that they apply to each criterion, then summing the results at the end for a final meta-lens observation. For an example of four criteria to make an observation against, it may be assumed that there will be a lens for each criterion, but this is not the case. A less knowledgeable person may have less than four in total, and a more knowledgeable person may have several for each criterion. Therefore, it cannot be understood what a result of an observation in a criterion means unless all the lenses that were applied to it are described.
Often a given criterion is provided with a description of what to look for in order to provide points for or against. However, these descriptions have different interpretations by readers when it is viewed through the same lenses that will make the judgement, and so do not appear to be effective in preventing variation in results from individual observers. It is tempting to assign the blame to observer error, but the reasoning of attempting to create objective criteria for subjective observations would appear to be the main problem.
Applied to pen spinning
There are numerous applications of lenses in pen spinning, with competition being the most obvious. They can also play an important part in structural analysis, criticism and development of new ideas. On the community stage the knowledge of their existence can help to settle faultless disagreements, and reduce rampant assumptions that observations are made due to observer error or incompetence. In the Preface several examples were stated where contention was raised due to the rejection of the validity of different lenses, but here it appears that the systems that use them are currently too inflexible.
Analysis of a combo to criteria
When judging a combo, there are two schools of thought in terms of criteria. The first is 'absolute' scoring and the second is 'relative' scoring. In the absolute system an observer has an internal normalized range between the minimum score and the maximum score, and distributes observations on that range based upon some personal lens or lenses. The relative system directly compares two observations and determines if one observation meets a given lens or series of lenses more than the other. Both of these are used commonly in judging and provide wildly differing scores, with a lens still at their core. The absolute system does contain some relative element, as a given observation is compared against some maximum and minimum observation, either real or theoretical, but these tend to be more fixed and constant.
For instance, consider the ranking of a difficulty criterion on a provided combo by a variety of observers with different backgrounds and communities. The results when returned come back with large deviations between scores, as the consideration as to what is difficult or not, or what is considered part of difficulty criteria or not is individual to the observer's lenses. Without information on the lenses provided by the judges, and assuming wrongly instead that the variation must be based on error, what is the method of determining a judge has too high a degree of error and must be removed from judging? An example method would be to find the largest cluster of scores within a certain small deviation, say +/- 1-2 points, and then assume judges outside the small deviation have too high a degree of error.
At the end of the competition using this scheme, the most popular spinner in the world, Menowa*, has just won the hypothetical Pen Spinning World Tournament 2021. The judges that voted for him were consistent only in that they used recycled lenses formed from popular opinion, and did not deviate using personal experience, as they were vastly less experienced than the judges that were kicked out of the competition. While the judges that were kicked out had great deviations in their scores, they had developed complex systems of lenses that stemmed from a vast history of unique experiences, which provided more unique information than the simpler, less-deviating lens systems employed by the less experienced judges.
If this scenario appears too hypothetical to be true, remember that judges are frequently criticized for deviations, such as in the Pen Spinning Olympics 2020 when Gollumsk8 and Buła, pioneers of their judging categories, were criticized by some groups over their unusual scores. In the case of Buła, this had extended to a harassment campaign that extended among pen spinning discord servers and social media, including personal challenges, insults and attempts to spread false rumors about the judging spinner, including a claim that he was an 'incel', a term used to refer to violent misogynists. The fallout from this has yet to be seen, but the threat of negative reactions from deviations may lead to judging on the basis of what will be well received, rather than what the judge feels is the most accurate, and could cause irreparable harm to the competitive side of the sport.
Documenting the lenses used
In competitions, judgements release either with a little explanation as for why they are chosen, or with no explanation at all. It is practically unheard of for a judge to rationalize their judgements before they had ever made them in the first place, which at first seems intuitive.
Consider instead what would happen if the judge first thought about what he values in his judgements, and then determined on what basis he would increase or reduce the points of certain criteria to those values. He could then write and release this information, revealing what his particular lens is, and allowing both preparation from the participants and critique before the competition began in the first place. Compare this to when competitions are already taking place, with results released and attempts to criticize a result that won't be overturned are made, with no success.
Instead, statements could be made in advance, and questions posited to determine what a judge will do before the combos are made and submitted for review. For instance:
- Does the judge consider manipulating a non-pen object with their hands and/or pen to still be pen spinning, or will it receive no points?
- Does the judge think that difficult fingercrosses deserve additional difficulty points, or assume that it is a genetic advantage and grant none?
- Is macro-execution largely ignored in favor of micro-execution, with stumbles and failed receiving little punishment if the rest of the combo is smooth?
- Do they exercise legitimate impartiality? Do they have biases towards or against certain styles, communities or individuals that could lead to different results?
These sorts of things can be looked at, and made note of in order to make adjustments towards the amount of points a judge can give, whether they should judge at all, or if they should judge only specific spinners or criteria. This flexible way of adjusting how judge results are treated may help in trending away from upset results and judging difficulty.
Adopting different lenses to improve a combo
While much focus is given to determining whether a combo is better than another combo, it can be useful to observe to reveal issues with a combo using different lenses. For instance, the idea of execution in JEB vastly differs from the idea of execution outside of it, so it can be useful to take their way of looking at execution and make those different observations to better understand what you are doing. Consider the macro and micro execution of a combo separately, so that the mistakes can be separated from flow and proficiency in connecting tricks. Separation of the various elements that make up multiple observations of execution can help with understand what exactly is wrong and what changes need to be made in each area to improve upon them.