My only point was to speculate that the playing surfaces are engineered to bring about an “optimal” amount of randomness. The link you provided seems to support that the randomness is actually there. Whether it’s perfect 50⁄50 or instead 42⁄58 is just splitting hairs. I still believe that my reasoning was sound. Given that I see random outcomes in sports, the arrangement of the playing surface is a reasonable candidate explanation. Under the premise that athletic talent does not vary widely enough for talent to be the better explanation (which, whether right or wrong, was the premise I had been assuming), it makes organization of the playing surface a more likely candidate. This is why I disagree about it being non sequitur.
I was not claiming that the playing surface dictates every microinteraction within a game and that all of them come out as 50⁄50, just that the game is engineered to be a sellable product, and without randomness it would not be as marketable. I was claiming that talent is not the primary factor, but to be clear, I think that if talent comprises only 58% of the explanation for a team’s record, as the link you provide suggests, that my conclusion is totally appropriate. Talent might be a larger piece of the explanation than chance, but if it is not much much larger than chance, then it’s fair to use natural language to describe talent as not being the primary factor. If you want to split hairs over my linguistic choice to embed thresholds into that statement, that’s fine. But it’s still a reasonable conclusion.
My only point was to speculate that the playing surfaces are engineered to bring about an “optimal” amount of randomness. The link you provided seems to support that the randomness is actually there. Whether it’s perfect 50⁄50 or instead 42⁄58 is just splitting hairs. I still believe that my reasoning was sound. Given that I see random outcomes in sports, the arrangement of the playing surface is a reasonable candidate explanation. Under the premise that athletic talent does not vary widely enough for talent to be the better explanation (which, whether right or wrong, was the premise I had been assuming), it makes organization of the playing surface a more likely candidate. This is why I disagree about it being non sequitur.
I was not claiming that the playing surface dictates every microinteraction within a game and that all of them come out as 50⁄50, just that the game is engineered to be a sellable product, and without randomness it would not be as marketable. I was claiming that talent is not the primary factor, but to be clear, I think that if talent comprises only 58% of the explanation for a team’s record, as the link you provide suggests, that my conclusion is totally appropriate. Talent might be a larger piece of the explanation than chance, but if it is not much much larger than chance, then it’s fair to use natural language to describe talent as not being the primary factor. If you want to split hairs over my linguistic choice to embed thresholds into that statement, that’s fine. But it’s still a reasonable conclusion.