Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeffy
The only thing stopping your team from being like them is more hard work.
|
Just going to point out that this is the same "poor people deserve to be poor" nonsense that you see thrown around in modern politics, and is not necessarily grounded in reality. Success does not correlate perfectly with effort; if you deny that there is a very large "lottery" element then you are fooling yourself.
It is very likely true, as Dave said, that there is no real way to make this competition "fair" for teams with limited resources. However, it certainly can be made
more fair or
less fair by certain rules, and I think this is pretty clearly in the latter category.
I must ask, why exactly would reworking the system to remove the benefit of a second robot be a bad idea? Even if we concede that the
only factor allowing teams to build a second robot is "hard work," this is wholly irrelevant to the impact of the proposed change on the competition in all capacities except for motivation for well-off teams (keep in mind that "fairness" is a heuristic; the real question at hand is
whether the competition would be improved by the rule change). Does anyone honestly think that this change would so demotivate teams with the resources to build two robots that it'd be a detriment to the competition? On what basis? That seems patently absurd to me.
As it stands, the current rules very clearly widen the gap created by access to resources; it seems obvious to me that, within reason, FIRST should do all it can to promote the opposite.