IN PLAY LOSE Important Concept #1: Sayre’s Law

I figured that it’s important, as we go forward here on the LOSE with further explorations of losing, to define a couple of theoretical concepts which will come up in future posts. I can then link back to these later on.

The first of these is Sayre’s Law, which is named for U.S. political science professor Wallace Stanley Sayre and refers to his attempts to explain the particularly vicious nature of politics in academia – in any sort of dispute, the intensity of the feelings involved is inversely proportional to the value of what is actually at stake.

In the sports world, this concept shows up most glaringly every four years during the Olympics, a spectacle which consists of a whole lot of sports that people only care about once every four years. The more seemingly irrelevant the sport, the more prevalent the petty politicking and big-fish-in-small-pond behaviours. You’re more apt to find cheating and corruption in these sorts of situations, because the stakes are otherwise small, and since those who have a passion for the particular endeavour cannot hope to ever achieve any other sort of reward, they’ll fight like hell for whatever crumbs they can get.

Apply this to your own life as you see fit.