Typical American energy and enthusiasm pushes for an answer. Am I best? Who's best? Who's number 1? Often, we love the person, the team, the organization because they are number 1, the best, without really knowing what it is that they are the best of. When we want to give a prize or celebrate the team that is at the top of the league, we may not care a great deal why that team is considered the best. We may not ask if anyone thinks that team is not the best.
Deciding who is best, who should get a prize is a choice. Which company, team, athlete should we choose? If we take a moment and consider reversing the typical contest, we might ask who is the worst? In college, I read a book on chess that began with a salute to all the losers. The idea was, as in any individual sport or game where there are only two players pitted against each other, every winner has a losing opponent who gave that winner the chance to win. Without the loser, no game. In league play, the bottom teams, the ones who lost most of the time, showed persistence, guts and courage to keep playing against opponents with better records, bigger sets of fans, better reflexes and better coaching.
Suppose we don't want to make a choice. Suppose we say that all the teams, all the dancers, all the artists contributed to the events, to our pleasures. Suppose we decide to give everyone a prize. "They are all winners." You can hear the boos and the yells and the unhappy comments, can't you? We want to know who is best and those involved each want to know, too. For one thing, all those who are not chosen as "best" can examine the style, the achievements, the skills of the "best" and try to modify themselves to equal or surpass that chosen "best".
A typical approach to selecting the best is to make a chart. A spreadsheet will do very nicely. (You can get a free one from Google Sheets or OpenOffice. You may already have Microsoft's Excel, part of their Office set.)
For convenience, we use a separate row for each contestant. We use a column for the number of victories, another column for assists to others on the team, a third column for attitude. The final column is the sum of the other entries in that row. The contestant with the highest final score gets chosen as the best. Then, along come the complaints, the coaches, the fans, the statisticians, the critical thinkers. Only three columns? What about age? What about height? What about personal wealth? Family wealth? Diet? Medical complications? Psychological burdens from inferior parenting? Inferior grandparenting?
"It's not fair. He got better genes than me".
Who is "really" best?
