FanPost

Tiers are a cheap trick to spur conversation

Why do we fall for it every time? What is it about categorizing things according to quality that proves too hypnotic to resist? It isn't just QBs, folks, it is in every single game. Blood Bowl has tiers according team's inherent quality and ability to win in an even match. Heathstone has card tiers according of the quality and syngeries of cards within it. Overwatch and League of Legends have tiers for characters/classes you can play as based on the quality and synergy of their abilities with other character/classes.

For any game with varied enough quality of pieces or participants you can probably invoke a conversation about tiers. Checkers doesn't have tiers of pieces, it's normal or a king, but there are some world class checker players. Chess doesn't have tiers of pieces because they functionally do different and unique things. Again, the person driving the pieces talent can be identified and can be placed in a tier with a specific title.

But what is a tier really? It's an arbitrarily defined and nebulous grouping mostly around qualitative opinions rather than quantitative analysis. Some rating systems rely on quantitative analysis to define tiers of player but no conversations revolve around whether a USCF Life Master should be or shouldn't be, he is or isn't based on the numbers. In fact the semantic difference between teir and rank or class is important as illustrated below.

Think about the following: Among 32 QBs how many tiers should there be? Usually I see anywhere from 3 to 5. Why don't we have 32 teirs? Why not 2?

If we had 32 tiers it would essentially function as a ranking and while we could debate the rankings, we would need underlying rationales to justify the precise placement in the correct tier of 32. Those rationales manifest themselves with statistical selection and weighting, interpretation and reference and we tirelessly seek out new ways to measure individual talent in isolation from the team. With tiers we don't need to do any of that. Tiering things relies on abstraction to avoid arguing an obvious idiotic point like Sam Bradford is the 8th best QB in the league or that Andrew Luck is a top 5 QB. Neither has any measurable basis. But both are tier 2. Or tier 3. Further, this abstraction is ironclad because as I just illustrated in the prior two sentences, every participant in the conversation has their own fuzzy interpretation of what defines a tier along with their ceilings and floors. And that's not even factoring in the participants own evaluations of the QBs in question.

Why not 2? Because it would probably be obvious based on the limited parameters you would need to define both tiers. It's dichotomous.

As to why we have 3 to 5 it's because those are easily digested breaks for our brains to process. If you had to sort players into 6 or 7 tiers, it would take a lot more thought to form a cogent opinion because the precision would start to matter more. We could probably sort QBs into tiers that follow a Gaussian distribution that goes 1,2,3,4,5,6,5,4,3,2,1 but that'd probably break people's brains.

So what ultimate utility is there to the cognitive process of sorting things into tiers? Vapid conversation in the pursuit of validating existing opinions. Because you are never really called to justify your tier slotting as long as they closely resemble an acceptable collective opinion, you don't have to dig into the why except for a handful of QBs who generate the most conversation by being denied their proper due by their participants. People don't spend the conversation space devoting thought to whether Aaron Rodgers or Drew Brees are 'tier 1' QBs. It's an acceptable collective opinion. It's dedicated to QBs with their various fans and proponents validating their own qualitative beliefs for why their guy is being denied his due. Rarely do we ever see people who are fans of a specific QB argue that their guy is too high in a tiering system. Do you believe this to be mere coincidence? When a QB has a down year do you see people who have argued their guy is tier one back down from that opinion? "Gee, I really like Andrew Luck but he's obviously tier 3" said no Colts fan ever. No, you have everyone else championing their guy tearing that off-year QB down to justify the rise of their champion. They are hiding behind the structural abstraction to justify their love.

When is using tiers at its most awful? When we add another qualitative layer to the process and actually label our tiers. Elite is the most obvious and obnoxious example of this. Instead of dryly assigning people to numerical tiers, you now must impose your own definition of what elite even means to reconcile against. You would think this helps define the parameters more but it doesn't. In reality we see the semantical conversation of elite take on a life of its own further distancing ourselves from a more informed opinion. This sleight of hand is where the worst insipidness of tiers lie.

So is there a purpose that conversations about tiers can serve that goes beyond self indulgent opinionating? In the rare circumstance you might find a conversation about tiers that are predicated on absurd tier labels like using SCOTUS Judges. "I'm telling you guys, this is a Ruth Bader Ginsberg tier weed, not Clarence Thomas tier like last time", that might be worth a gander to watch or participate in. The value is in providing humorous juxtapositions between two seemingly unrelated subjects. Now, I know you olds will bristle at this seemingly neo dadaist humor, and yeah, it can be a bit insipid at times when done to death but it's there and people enjoy it and Jerry Lewis is dead so get over it, he wasn't THAT funny. You might also find a conversation about tiers about something so unimportant where other participants are so dedicated to their own belief in the objectivity of their tiers that you can't resist lobbing nuclear grenades into the conversation. This opportunity is often very hard to pass up but you must be wary not to become a hot take artist, saying contrarian things just to amuse yourself because you may never pull out of it. The line between what you actually believe and what you know will provoke a response then becomes so blurred that life passes you by in a never ending takefest and you risk alienating people to the point that they wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire.

The next time that you see the opportunity to engage in conversation about QB tiers ask yourself this: Is there someone you have talked to about your last will and testament? Have your funeral arrangements in order? Insurance policy premiums paid up? Because if you err and decide it's a valuable use of your time, you've given up the ghost and are no longer living. The cause of death being loss of dignity from a cheap trick designed to consume your time without revealing any new insight or knowledge. You're just flinging entrenched belief excrement at other participants. Shun all tiers and live life to the fullest.