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Amat's avatar

Excellent article. Yet again people from afar making decisions based on technology while ignoring the experience of the individual with real life knowledge of the situation, it never ends well. Technology has its place but it is to help man not take over and replace the hard earned human experience that no machine will ever really know and understand. From that experience comes change, growth and innovation, it always has, if the human experience is ignored we will stagnate and regress.

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Simon Cavadino's avatar

I enjoyed this piece immensely. On a personal level it made me feel less alone, as I'd thought a similar thing (although not as well expressed of course). So thank you for that!

A recurrent theme from pundits discussing VAR is 'all anyone wants is the correct decision,' and this point is nodded through as though it's obvious. I don't think it's true. I think all anyone wants is a 'fair' decision, which is a slightly, yet fundamentally different thing. Fairness is a human idea, complex, nebulous, but exceptionally well understood on an instinctive human level. Fairness is a holistic sense of the rights and wrongs of a situation, not a technical binary calculation. So, using the toenail offside example, the question should be 'is the attacker clearly in front of the defender and thereby gaining an unfair advantage?' If, on a quick replay from a revelvant angle, the answer is not clear then the answer should automatically be no. The technicality of a toenail or kneecap offside is not the point and the benefit of the doubt should go to the attacking side. Football fans understand this. Technocrats don't.

In a recent podcast Mary Harrington referred to continuous attempts to "technologise human nature," which always fail. It's a good way of describing it. VAR is a relatively frivolous, but instructive example.

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