A little bit of Zen (75)

 

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one."

François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire)

"Whenever you are most certain that you are right, you are most likely to be wrong. And least likely to persuade anyone else, either way."

GW

A little bit of Zen (69)

"You should be self-confident enough to abandon your 'certainty' - and to explore and to allow contradictions."

Christoph Waltz

A couple of weeks ago, the great Austrian actor was the featured guest in Mythical Kitchen's 'Last Meal' series, chatting thoughtfully with erudite host, Josh Scherer, about a range of topics, while enjoying some of his favourite dishes and wines. It's a curious coincidence that I should stumble on this pithy warning against the vice of excessive 'certainty' so soon after coming across Derek Muller's video on the same topic, 

This is one of the best things I've seen on Youtube all year: Waltz is a wise and funny man, full of intriguing insights. He's nearly 70 now, but still exudes a boyish enthusiasm about everything, am effervescent joie de vivre. The line above comes at timestamp 29.17. There is a bit earlier in the conversattion, around about 13.35, where he touches on another idea that I often like to highlight on this blog - the importance of prioritizing process over result.

I highly recommend watching the whole thing. Waltz is a treasure; Scherer too.

Another way of looking at LUCK in FPL

 

Following on from my comments the oher day about the perils of over-confidence, I want to make a further observation about how we should view our LUCK in this game.

In Tuesday's post, I pointed out that if our self-confidence in regard to our FPL decisions were what cognitive psychologists call 'well-calibrated', it would correspond exactly to the probability of the outcomes we were betting on with those choices. But there are so many variables at play in a game like football that no one game event ever has anything like a 100% probability; in fact, with there usually being multiple potential outcomes to any situation, very few of them can properly be said to have anything near even a 50/50 chance of happening. [Even an absolutely 'ever-present' player can.... catch a cold, break his toe in the shower on match-day morning, wrap his sports car around a lamp-post, have a row with his manager or his girlfriend.... No-one, absolutely NO-ONE has a 100% probability of even starting a game, let alone of achieving any particular points-outcome in it.]

We should never presume to know what a player is going to do in a game. The best we can hope for is to formulate a fairly reasonable projection of his range of likeliest points-outcomes.

And then we have to try to judge what the median likelihood return is on that spectrum of expected possible returns.

Now, it is always more likely that a player will only perform at the lower-end of that scale - or perhaps even have an unexpectedly disastrous week and return well below even his lowest predicted outcome. A disappointing - or, sometimes, outright terrible - return is almost invariably a far more likely outcome than some kind of very big points haul. Thus, the median point of a player's projected most likely returns for the gameweek will not be in the middle, but skewed quite significantly towards the lower end of the range.

Now, of course, as I observed in that post on Tuesday, if a player does really, really well for us, we always like to convince outselves that we absolutely foresaw this - with perfect confidence - and are thus absolutely deserving of all the points we receive. But in fact, even a middling points return is usually at least a little bit above what would have been a reasonable median outcome, and you should be very happy with any such returns. Every really big haul you get is well above what you could reasonably have expected as a return on this basis; every really big haul is, to a significant degree, 'LUCKY'.

Our results in this game are not earned 100% by merit. We should be more ready to acknowledge our debts to good fortune and the caprices of Fate, to cultivate an attitude of humility and gratitude when we enjoy really big points returns - rather than constantly trying to deceive ourselves into believing that such a result was entirely deserved.

The vice of OVER-CONFIDENCE

 

I've referrred to Derek Muller's consistently thought-provoking science channel, Verittasium, on the blog before - here and here.

His latest post last week was on the unfortunate human predilection towards being massively - and inappropriately - confident about our beliefs all the time. 

He starts by touching on the notorious Dunning-Kruger Effect (which identifies the tendency for less 'knowledgeable' or 'competent' people to most drastically over-estimate their abilities in self-evaluations), but goes on to discuss how EVERYONE tends to be massively over-confident - even when making a guess about a problem that we really don't know the answer to - and explains the concept of 'calibration', meaning the correlation between the confidence we have in our beliefs or predictions and their accuracy.

Playing FPL, of course, is a classic case of having to constantly make intelligent predictions of events in the football world that we can't actually know the outcomes of in advance; we are just making guesses about problems we don't know the answer to.

And such events in football all come with a high degree of uncertainty: even the great Erling Haaland, even when he's on such a great run of form as he has been so far this season, cannot be relied upon to always get a big haul against a 'weaker' opponent, nor indeed can he be relied upon to score at all in every single game.

'Calibration', in this sense, means that our confidence in a particular outcome should correlate exactly to its probability. 

Therefore, if our guessing was 'well calibrated', we wouldn't ever feel much more than 60% or 70% confident that Haaland, even in the form of his life, was going to score in any given game, and should never really be more than about 50% confident - or anywhere near that! - of him notching a brace; and confidence in him returning a hattrick cannot ever be more than a very, very low percentage - it is just too rare and unpredictable an event, even for a player like him (especially when Pep so often subs him off early!). 

And yet, somehow, we always seem to end up professing near-100% confidence in such predictions. That is a dangerous INSANITY.

It probably arises from our desire to feel good about ourselves all the time, and to look good in front of others. Anxiety about future outcomes, and doubt about the accuracy of our decisions are uncomfortable feelings, something we seek to suppress. And we imagine that other people will be more impressed by us, and be more likely to be swayed by our opinions if we express them with absolute assurance. Hence, once we've made a decision, we immediately reassure ourselves that it must - absolutely definitely - be correct, and that we can place near-100% confidence in it. But that just ain't so - EVER.

There are, I think, FOUR supplementary vices which follow on from this tendency to be over-confident in our choices.  1) It hurts harder, makes our disappointment and dissatisfaction all the sharper when we happen to be 'wrong'.  2) It makes us more stubborn: the disproof of an idea we had become so confident of, and so emotionally invested in, undermines our sense of self, and we struggle to accept that; the powerful impulse of denial drives us into thoughts such as, "I might have been wrong this week, but I'm bound to be right next time!" and into sticking by bad picks longer than we should.  3) It makes us less self-reflective, more resistant to the possibility of change in the short-term as well. (Many FPL decisions, such as the captaincy choice, playing a chip, the starting lineup and bench order, can be changed without cost within the gameweek, right up until the deadline. And late-breaking news might often give good cause to do so. But once we've made our choices for the week, we tend to be very reluctant to revisit them - for any reason.)  And 4) It makes us less grateful for our good fortune: when we get a great haul from a player, we always like to think, "I predicted that, I knew that was going to happen: I completely deserve every single point of that improbably huge return!"  Hmm, NO, you don't; you got LUCKY.

We would be much better off - certainly happier in our playing of the game, and probably more successful too (though these two things should not be inextricably correlated) - if we could break away from this habit of always wanting to be believe that we are absolutely correct in our decisions, that we know what the best FPL picks for the week are going to be. We don't; we're just guessing.