Who will sign first? Melo, Lebron, or Bosh? In game-theory terms, what type of “game” are these free agents playing: Prisoner’s Dilemma, Chicken, Stag Hunt, or Battle of the Sexes?
Nate Silver — yes, that Nate Silver, who had predicted Brasil to win the World Cup (see diagram in the post above, courtesy of FiveThirtyEight) — compares his complex (and, dare we say, opaque) statistical methods, like the Soccer Power Index and “Elo ratings,” with simple betting markets in his humble-pie post titled “The most shocking result in World Cup history.” Here is an excerpt (emphasis ours):
The Soccer Power Index (SPI) match-predictor (which uses a poisson distribution to estimate the range of possible scores) gave Germany only a 0.022 percent probability (about one chance in 4,500) of scoring seven or more goals …
Although we don’t have SPI ratings before 2006, we can look at the Elo ratings, which are heavily correlated with SPI and contain data back to the 19th century. The Elo ratings (which we’ve updated manually since the start of the World Cup) had Brasil as a 65 percent favorite before Tuesday’s match, with most of that based on its (supposed) home-field advantage …
Betting markets, which had the game at even odds going in, look a lot better than SPI and Elo in this instance. But there was almost certainly some bad luck for Brasil. [The Brasilians] had more shots than Germany in the match — I would never have guessed that while watching the game — and kept possession of the ball slightly more than half the time. Some of the goals that Brazil keeper Julio Cesar allowed were unavoidable, but he was not exactly Tim Howard in net …
In other words, prediction markets are great, but no one can predict a “Black Swan” like the lopsided outcome of yesterday’s Brasil-Germany match. By the way, what do you think about Silver’s observations about the role of luck? Wouldn’t you expect “luck” (bad and good) to be distributed randomly on both teams during the duration of the match? Also, should FIFA consider a forfeit rule?
Nous somme tous américains …
Are the Brasilians themselves mostly responsible for Neymar’s horrible on-the-field injury during their quarter-final match with Team Colombia on 4 July? Before you say “no,” check out this excellent analysis by Sam Borden recounting the sordid details of Brasil’s dirty tactics as well as the one-sided officiating during the Brasil-Colombia match. Here is an extended excerpt of Mr Borden’s thoughtful essay:
So what happened to Neymar? How did the face of this tournament end up in a hospital? Brazilian fans will not like to hear it, but while [Juan Camilo] Zúñiga was directly responsible for causing Neymar’s injury, Neymar’s teammates — specifically Fernandinho, though there were others — as well as the referee, Carlos Velasco Carballo, deserve their share of the blame, too. They did not commit the crime, but they contributed to an environment of lawlessness that led to Neymar’s being battered …
… from the first minute it appeared that Brazil was determined to play the game cynically, tripping and pushing and kicking at Colombia’s players, especially James Rodríguez, the team’s wunderkind scorer. Colombia, on the other hand, seemed almost deferential at first. When Neymar went off on a spirited run six minutes into the game, the Colombian defenders did little to try to knock him off stride, let alone scythe him to the ground as previous opponents had done. He ran freely.
When Rodríguez went to claim the ball a few minutes later, however, Brazil’s Óscar ran right into Rodríguez’s back as if to make clear to him that no space on the Fortaleza field would be a safe space. Rodríguez’s teammates were understandably upset, but there was no retaliation — the feeling of violence in the game, especially early on, came almost exclusively from Brazil …
It was in the 57th minute, though, when the match began to boil over. The Colombians had continued to mostly sit back and take the punishment, but they were clearly infuriated when Silva crushed Ramos from behind as he went toward a ball. Velasco Carballo, again, declined to whistle a foul. The Colombians’ ire was raised even more 10 minutes later when the referee showed a yellow card to Rodríguez — who was apoplectic at the decision — for an innocuous trip that was, as Rodríguez vociferously pointed out with multiple hand gestures, a first offense compared with Fernandinho’s harrying.
In other words, a rough-and-ready form of retribution (some might say “justice”) was finally meted out to the Brasilians in the 87th minute of the match, who got what they deserved, don’t you think?
We are re-blogging this post since “The Old Man and the Sea” is one of our favorite novels of all time. (Isn’t it really a novella or “short story,” though?) By the way, do you agree with Faulkner (see below) that Old Man is Hemingway’s best work? In literature and the arts, how does one decide (beyond one’s subjective personal opinion) what the “best” is?
His best. Time may show it to be the best single piece of any of us, I mean his and my contemporaries. This time, he discovered God, a Creator. Until now, his men and women had made themselves, shaped themselves out of their own clay; their victories and defeats were at the hands of each other, just to prove to themselves or one another how tough they could be. But this time, he wrote about pity: about something somewhere that made them all: the old man who had to catch the fish and then lose it, the fish that had to be caught and then lost, the sharks which had to rob the old man of his fish; made them all and loved them all and pitied them all. It’s all right. Praise God that whatever made and loves and pities Hemingway and me kept him from touching it any…
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A reader of The New York Times asked Chuck Klosterman (a/k/a “The Ethicist”) the following thought-provoking questions about the ethics of flopping in football: “If (nearly) every player does it, is it wrong to flop? … If flopping is part of the game, as it obviously is, are you not putting your team at a disadvantage by refusing to flop?“
Here is an excerpt from Klosterman’s reply: “Within every sport, there is an undefined ethos dictating what degree of deception is acceptable … Part of what draws people to any sport is the clarity of its conventions. The rules are supposed to be everything: Soccer (or any game) is simply a manifestation of the rules that were designed to govern its existence. Yet even in a constructed world, certain details are open to interpretation (particularly when a game is played by so many disparate cultures). There is, technically, a FIFA rule against diving; a player who attempts to ‘deceive the referee by feigning injury or pretending to have been fouled’ is supposed to be cautioned by the official. But this rule is (clearly) not enforced with any intensity or consistency. Diving is accepted. For whatever reason, there’s a theatrical aspect to soccer that is awkwardly embraced as an element of its richness. What we call ‘flopping’ is part of what international soccer is; it’s not essential, but it’s also not aberrant.”
Is Klosterman’s armchair analysis of the ethics of flopping persuasive? (Compare, for example, Klosterman’s ethical analysis above with Michael Gard’s economic analysis “Why football players feign injury” here. See also our post titled “Faking it.”) In any case, are we asking the wrong question? Shouldn’t we be asking instead: what is the optimal level of deception in any given sport?
Why are there so many angry faces in this picture? The next time these citizens complain about “illegal aliens” taking over our country, they should ask themselves two simple questions: (1) did your ancestors come to our country legally?; and (2) was our nation’s war of conquest against Mexico in 1848 (and our subsequent acquisition theft of Mexican territory) legal? That’s what we thought!
Amid today’s Independence Day festivities, let’s reflect … Why don’t we see closer political cooperation among all English-speaking peoples, to borrow Winston Churchill’s beautiful phrase? Suppose, for example, that the 13 North American colonies had never declared their independence from Britain or that the British had actually won the Revolutionary War. [*] Would the United States (and Australia and Canada, for that matter) have become an integral member of the United Kingdom, like Scotland (for now) and Northern Ireland, or would the British Empire have evolved into a loose but more unified federation? Bonus question: Why are hypothetical historical questions like these worth asking? [*] Addendum: Uri Friedman poses this same question in The Atlantic.
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