Contemporary History

Sports Have Their Mussolini

Rights in America are on their deathbed.  One of the undertakers, eager to size up the coffin, is Senator John McCain, who wishes to unleash fascist nanny-statism on the world of sports, as explained in this ESPN article and this interview.  In other words, he wants to impose federal regulations on boxing and baseball, and on sports-related enterprises, so that they might conform to his idea of how they ought to run.

Let's refresh ourselves on the meaning of the most sacred right, the right to liberty.  It means that each and every man has the right to decide for himself what is best for his life, and then act accordingly.  He accepts the consequences, good or bad, for his actions.  His only obligation to others is that he not violate their rights by initiating force against them.

If Senator McCain was a man concerned with protecting rights, he would realize that those who run Major League Baseball have a right to set their own policies concerning the use of performance-enhancing drugs.  But McCain is apparently a fascist.  He does not want the responsibility of running the league, but does demand that they run things right, or he will swoop in and impose legislation upon them.

If Senator McCain cared about the legacy of the Founding Fathers, he would realize that all men, including boxers, can choose to enter into arrangements with other men, and then deal with the consequences.  But again, McCain loves fascism more than freedom.  He does not wish to make boxing a nationalized operation, but he does want a national boxing commission to fight the "exploitation" of healthy young men capable of rational thought, by regulation and decree.

The good senator also has a mind to go after evil supplements used by athletes, by telling manufacturers how to label and advertise their products.  He also wants to skip regulating, and go straight to the proscribing of gambling on college games.  I hope the pattern is clear by now.  McCain is doing his best to make sure the world of sports has its own Mussolini, ruling with an iron fist, while claiming that he is the one that makes the games start on time.

I am not claiming here that what McCain is doing is new or unprecedented.  Many, if not all states have boxing commissions.  Pharmaceutical companies have to lie prostrate before the FDA.  Baseball has faced threats of government intervention before in regards to labor disputes.  What is sad here is how fawning the ESPN article is.  McCain is never questioned on why the government should play the role he envisions.  All that is discussed is whether his agenda is politically feasible, or whether politicians with other interests will thwart it.  Fascism is accepted, rights are noticeably absent from the discussion.  Maybe the interviewer did not wish to discuss the dead.

(Note to Objectivists: check out the name of the author who wrote the ESPN article.)

Detroit Tigers in First Place!

As a long-suffering Detroit Tigers fan, I have to celebrate when I can. They went 43-119 last year, but have started out 3-0 this year. Restore the roar!

Bad Thinking and the NCAA Tournament

If you have no interest in basketball, probability, or epistemology, feel free to stop reading. Since I am a statistician who likes basketball, I cannot pass on the opportunity to opine on fallacious ideas I hear every time the NCAA basketball tournament starts. I will focus on one in this post.

The fallacy: knowing something about college basketball doesn’t help.

This is usually accompanied by a tale about how a woman who picked teams based on the color coordination of their jerseys won the office pool, trouncing all of those obsessed basketball fans. These guys poured over the stats, considered every match up, each team’s strength and weaknesses, and made their selections. What schmucks! They should have picked Duke to lose in the sweet 16, because, while blue and white is a classic combination, it is so passé.

What no one seems to think about is this: the fabled woman probably did learn something about basketball. For instance, no 1 seed has ever lost to a 16 seed. Every time I have seen the office pool organizer handing out brackets, some nice guy makes sure that those new to “bracketology” know this critical fact. That is a huge bit of help for someone who is completely ignorant, because it clues them in to the importance of seeding. Thus, even the person who picks by team colors probably isn’t making all of her selections randomly, as the story would suggest. She probably snuck in some knowledge about seeding in the umpteen match ups in which she had no idea what color the uniforms were, and picked the lower seed, i.e. the favored team.

Also, the extra information the office experts have is difficult to evaluate, since most of the games will feature teams that have never played each other, or maybe faced each other once. And they use this information to take a gamble, by picking upsets. Why? Because they know that always selecting the highest probability event will give a reasonable score, but will give a lower score relative to the guy who took a chance with some educated guesses that panned out. So they all try to predict upsets, i.e. make suboptimal but not-completely-ludicrous selections. For most guys, this will not work out. They will miss upsets, and then pick upsets that did not happen. I would guess that people who truly know what they are doing pick upsets at a better rate than random selection would give them, but that this would only be apparent after many, many years of bracket selection. And even then, they would still not win most of the time, but will probably be near the top quite often.

Also, given the large number of office pools out there, and given that any funny anecdote will likely be circulated on the internet, anyone who has played enough has a story about a situation to which they feel fairly close, e.g. their brother’s office pool, their best friend’s country club pool, their third cousin’s post-sermon discussion group pool. They never mention all the times where someone who knows at least something about college basketball makes the best picks and wins.