Building a Better Echo Chamber

So a historian wrote a book on Jesus.  Fox News invited him on.  Said historian pwned said Newscorp.

I try not to write about politics anymore, but I'd like to think the Aslan/Green exchange is about something bigger than partisan politics and represents a victory for anyone who thinks of themselves as one of the good guys.

Contemporary society has become so postmodern that it is skeptical of the very idea of expertise.  When we hear an expert speaking on something, we think they're just one more salesman pushing one more product.  Salesmen have facts and figures too, yet they always seem to omit those facts that don't support their desired end.  Understandably, we've all gotten pretty cynical when someone claims to be presenting just the facts, ma'am.

What makes this three minute video so fascinating and important is that Aslan strongly asserts that we need to get over all that shit.  This is the most vigorous, concise statement I've yet seen of what I'll call The Nate Silver Lesson.  Remember when conservatives thought Nate Silver was not a witch but merely a partisan hack?  How did that work out for them?

Experts exist.  Plenty of very smart people spend their entire lives pouring through hundreds of thousands of pages of Ancient Greek, developing ridiculously complex statistical models, and doing a million other really cool things.  The best part: they do so not to get over, but because they want to do the best possible job capturing reality, in all its complexity and messiness.  They constantly ask themselves whether their biases could be compromising their ability to accurately depict reality, and they take steps to compensate for those biases.  A worldwide community vets their work, and the vast majority of its members share the same commitment to presenting the world as accurately as possible.  The resulting product that they put out is measurably more accurate than the ranting of some person who's on TV because s/he is entertaining or looks like what we think an expert should look like.

If the notion of expert seems less than robust these days, it may be due less to the failings of the experts themselves and more to the inability of society to distinguish real experts from people who can act the part and still say what the audience wants to hear, rather than the truth.

The Yoga of Public Speaking

Imagine providing information to over 100 proud professionals that, at first glance, could be taken as a sign that they were not doing their job.  Last week, I presented some data to some employees that seemed to indicate, at first blush, that they had not entered data correctly into one of our systems.

Before I get fired, let me be very clear: this group of employees care about their jobs and do them well. That pride may have sparked the initial reception I received, which was that I should get the fuck out of here.  I was told in no uncertain terms that my numbers were inaccurate and that they resented any attempt to use those numbers to evaluate them or their programs.

Remember, all of this is happening as I stand in front of 100 people.  My natural reaction in such situations is fight or flight.  You call me out on something, and I want to either get out of dodge or immediately crush you.  That defensiveness has gotten me into trouble in the past, specifically in professional settings.

Fortunately, that's not what I did .  I admitted that this system was still in its infancy, which meant we were still working out its kinks.  I acknowledged the very real possibility that some people had entered the data and that the system was, for whatever reason, just not showing it.  I agreed that any attempt to use this data for evaluation immediately was wildly premature and promised I would do my best to stop any attempt to do so.  I made a point to show where the data showed instances of success, and specifically successes where an employee had overcome the technical difficulties and learning curve to get information into the system during the past month.  What I was most interested in, I said, was getting this data right, so that, in the future, the employees could use this tool to approach their supervisor to begin a conversation about how to solve problems.  We ended up using the time to diagnose problems with the system, so that our team can fix them.  At the end, I got a nice round of applause, and everything was all good.

Yes, this situation makes me think about yoga. One of the things yoga can teach us is that we're not going to be perfect or right at every moment.  Sometimes, everything just comes apart.  Sometimes, you don't have all the answers.  Sometimes, you will fall on your ass.

Over the past year I've gotten much, much better about acknowledging where my body is in the moment I am practicing, as opposed to where I think it should be.  I've accepted the situations where I can't get into poses that normally pose no challenges.  Today I couldn't stick an eagle pose to save my life, and I smiled through my wobbling.

Eagle Claw don't need no reason

"Your life becomes your practice, and your practice becomes your life."  Quite right.  As I've been able to accept a yoga practice that is imperfect, I've learned how to accept imperfections elsewhere in my life.  Now, when I report out a finding, I'm keenly aware that I need feedback to determine how valid it is, or whether I need to go back to the drawing board work with other people to make it better.  Now, criticism isn't an attack on my person.  Now, criticism is a chance to make a good thing better.

Almost everyone can accept that.  I'd like to think that the professionals to whom I presented saw someone who wasn't defensive and who wanted their help to achieve a common goal.  I find that people can forgive almost any screw up so long as I own it.

FGCU, or the Power of Outliers

Any red-blooded American male knows that there's a formula for how a low-seeded team in the NCAA tournament pulls off an upset.  Takao maintains that all upstart double-digit seeds need a quick point guard, a lights-out shooter, and a bamma-ass power forward who tries hard.  It doesn't hurt when the favored team doesn't take the game seriously.  The lower seeded team hits 'em quick and builds a double digit halftime lead, usually because they hit a ridiculous percentage of their three-point shots, then holds on as the more talented favorite makes a run that may or may not make up for their early laziness.

If it doesn't, you have two days worth of heartwarming stories and images of the latest Cinderella, but two days is all they get.  Cinderellas can win one game in the NCAA tournament, but they rarely win two.  Most of these stories end with Cinderella absorbing a 20 point loss in their second game and everyone forgetting about them.

Needless to say, Florida Gulf Coast University is not following the formula.

This can't be stressed enough: Dunk City is far, far, FAR more athletic than the average low-seed Cinderella, and they didn't hit more than 8 three pointers in either of their first two tournament games.  Neither of their first two opponents took them lightly.  FGCU was basically tied with both Georgetown and San Diego State at the half.  The typical underdog script does NOT include blitzing the higher seed team after halftime with the type of free-wheeling athleticism seen above.

Because I'm a nerd, I think about the difference between the typical Cinderella and FGCU as a difference between types of outliers.  The script I described above is probably the easiest way for an outlier to manifest itself, and outliers are bound to manifest themselves.  Odds say that the worst Division III team in America could beat Louisville or Indiana if they played enough times, even if those odds are probably, literally, at least one million to one.  The odds of a real, live Division 1 program that won its conference getting hot enough from the 3pt line for a day and catching a good team napping are considerably higher.  However, no one pretends that the normal Cinderella is actually better than the teams they beat.  They get hot for one night, and they get a great win, but there's no doubt who would win if they played a best of seven series.  What makes FGCU an outlier among outliers is, I think they're actually better than the two teams they've beat.  Once FGCU stopped holding Georgetown on a pedestal, they blew them away.

Stats has come to dominate sports generally and the NCAA tournament selection process specifically, and we have really good stats that measure the quality of teams that can predict with startling accuracy how 99 percent of the games between two teams will go.  I'm starting to think that FGCU is the 1 percent of teams that advanced stats really can't capture.  This team isn't winning flukey, like most underdogs do.  Over the past week, they have been better than two really good teams, because they've been more athletic and more skilled.  Maybe the stats penalized them too much for playing in a crap conference.  Maybe FGCU just got a lot better over, say, the last month, and the advanced stats are not rewarding that improvement.

It's one of those craziest, most unpredictable things I've seen in sports, and anyone who tells you they know how this will end is lying.  All bets are off with this team.  If they can blowout Georgetown and San Diego State, they can absolutely beat Florida and the Michigan/Kansas winner.  Numbers tell you that they shouldn't have a chance against any of those three teams, but it's pretty clear that numbers fail to capture the magic of FGCU.