It’s absurd to track who’s “winning” the Olympics. We shouldn’t do it. But, of course, we’re human, so we do.

Yahoo! Sports says the United States is beating China, followed by Australia, France and Russia. Why? considering the U.S. has 54 medals, compared with the other countries’ respective 47, 25, 22 and 21 overall medals. But China has 27 gold medals, and and the U.S. has 16. Surely gold medals are

worth more than silver, and silver more than bronze. So is China “winning”?

The medal competition within China and USA really masks extremely impressive national Olympic achievement by smaller countries. Simply counting medals is like comparing relative math ability among high school students not by averaging analysis scores, but adding them up. We don’t do that for academics. Why do we do it with sports? Deep down, we all know […]

Orginal post by Mike