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. It is then through the combination of the different information 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.