Criticising the Coach

Larry Kruger, a knowledgeable media voice in San Francisco, points out an irony: fans are reluctant to criticise the manager in baseball, but feel very free to criticise the head coach and/or general manager in football. Yet this is backwards. Many, many fans actually do have levels of expertise about baseball that they could step in and manage an MLB game or even a week, but nearly everyone would be completely at sea in the NFL.  We know zero about the latter. While the professional baseball game has gotten more sophisticated because of statistics and matchups over the last few years, an enormous percentage of the decisions a manager would face have already been made before he gets there. He has a rotation of pitchers already. You might play with that a little, but when it is already up and running in June, deciding that what you have been doing isn't working and bringing in someone else is already recognised as a high-risk strategy. You drop your fifth starter and bring in your spot starter, or maybe some hotshot from the minors for a game.  If you have injuries, everyone can look at the roster and see how limited your choices are. 

But what about bringing in a reliever, huh? From 1970-2000 the answer was "when the starting pitcher has let in five runs and is in danger of letting in the sixth," and the decades before and after were only marginally different. Beyond that, you have your set-up guy and your closer.  Your choice is to bring them in for between 2-4 batters. At the various positions, you only have so many third basement and especially, catchers. In a doubleheader you use both, and who the pitcher seems to work well with dictates that. 

Steal or don't steal? That depends more on the player than the situation.  Hit and run? Probably no. They work great in retrospect, no so well in prediction. Making sure your players know the infield fly rule?  Should be spring training stuff. Baseball managers make their living by what they do in terms of players over the long run, keeping jerks focused on the main goals and the good guys encouraged that someone is noticing their good attitude. They have value in the personnel decisions on the slow turning of the wheel, so that pitchers don't have their arms worn out or young players get discouraged by not playing.

There is a great deal of specialised skill in scouting, coaching hitting, and "minor" medical evaluation and treatment. But you're the manager.  Someone else does that for you. But managing?  Bring in Michael, bsking's father, for a week in July, and the number of victories that team gets is probably the same as Tommy Lasorda or Tony LaRussa.  Because what those two Hall-of-Famers were going to do that week is already known.  A late-inning situational decision?  Those are already percentage bets to begin with, so Michael is going to be as good as anyone else.  If he needs the pitcher-batter breakdown in real time, someone can bring it to him and then...it's still a percentage bet.

So why do a majority of fans think this is beyond them, and the guy in the dugout is possessed or arcane skills of which they know not?  Because they know that don't watch 162 games and he does, so they are less confident.

In football, you could maybe make the argument that a top high-school coach could come in and be Andy Reid for a play or two, but that would be because Reid had set up an information flow that would work for that long without him. But the number of moving pieces in terms of strategy and personnel is so enormous that you have to be intimately familiar with it over weeks to be able to adapt in real time.  And yet I hear people assert with complete confidence that where Belichick went wrong in the 2007 Super Bowl was that he didn't run enough, because you have to establish the run in order to pass. This is an intelligent person with a responsible job in a technical field who said this, pointing out this cliche to me as if it were obvious Received Wisdom. This happens all the time, even among people who are sober and measured in other evaluations. They know absolutely nothing about football at high levels but they still are sure they have it figured out.  

Because they have watched every preseason game and all the regular season games, so something in their brain tells them they know as much as anyone else, or nearly so. They don't but they feel it is true.

Basketball is in between.  There are numerous tactical decisions about substitution, rotations, and assignments, and these matter, but a lot of the job is managing player attitudes. A lot of that has to do with the number of players on the floor at any one time. In basketball it is very few, and even the nicest guys have to be massaged or they get all upset.  More like race horses than Golden Retrievers. Even in foreign countries, the players have been treated as special since they were fourteen.

Mail Order Annie

In the comments under "Private Services" the Sears catalogue was mentioned, which reminded me in turn of mail order brides, which just naturally led to this.

Female Murderers

As often happens, I missed a trick in the news that I should have picked up on right away, because it was part of my career.  I just didn't apply what I knew to this story in the news. I have noted before that rumors attach to sex offenders like no other category of patient.  I was going to link, but all of the good examples in my writing have distracting information about excess deaths during Covid, types of treatment, and whether sex offender registries are a good thing,* so I will extract a longer section than I usually do from a previous post.

Long sections of my career were spent working with sexual offenders.  The behavior of staff is worth noting. There are rescuers: 

He's developmentally disabled and he mooned some schoolgirls from his bus.  There's no way he belongs on the sex offender list for life.

He was 19 and she was 16 and she has accused other men.

And there are punishers:

After he raped her he knocked her out and tried to set her on fire.

He molested all the girls in that family but only one had the courage to testify against him. 

Versions of these statements had made it into the chart, the hospital's official record of the patient's history, which can be brought into court and used as a reference for expert testimony.  Thankfully, that information cannot in and of itself be submitted as evidence.  Normal rules of evidence apply in court. This is a good thing, because all four of the above statements were false. For example, the man started forcibly raping the neighbor girl when she was 11, she first reported it when she was 16.  No one tried to set anyone on fire in that other case, or even knocked them out. He groped her while she was asleep and the house burned down two years later. People get activated around sex offenders.  They want certain things to be true. I shouldn't say "they."  I should say "we."

Usually the corrective can be fairly low key, with someone saying "I don't think the evidence for that is very good.  I've been doing the psychosocial history/talking with his attorney/going through the old records and I think this got added in.  It seems to come from a neighbor saying 'We always knew something was going on in that house.  I'll bet he molested all those girls.'" But sometimes it has to be a bit harsh, and though I was not a confrontative person by nature I learned to be, because sometimes you are sitting at a table and have to say. "I have put a note in my official eval that this is not true and previous records claiming it should be ignored.  We have to stop saying this, both formally and here in the team room." Not easy when one of those claims is by your supervisor, who is sitting right there. I have experienced this in reverse as well, of making a statement and having another staff member saying  "That's just a rumor, started by her previous girlfriend while they were divorcing. There's no evidence for it."  It's pretty humiliating, but if you don't want to be part of keeping non- or low-level offenders locked up or dangerous people let out, you try and be a stand-up guy. When something isn't true you can't let that go.

There is a second group that also attracts stories that just won't die, and that is female murderers or attempted murderers.  As with the sex offenders, something about them just activates all the wrong parts of our brains. Or something. The narrative is so unlike our everyday experience that we seem to want to attach explanatory stories to them, whether they have any basis in evidence or not. I had some females in that category (usually the "attempteds" rather than the actuals, because there are just many more of those) on my caseload over the years. The same sort of stories attach, some trying to exonerate or excuse, some trying to accentuate what a monster she is: He had been abusing her for years...there was a letter to her sister fantacising about cutting him into little pieces...she made his daughter watch...` 

So it should have clicked for me, of all people, that the whole Karen Read case down in Canton was going to attract this sort of stray energy and people were going to convince themselves of strange things. I got distracted by all the conspiracy-theory stuff. Which is also fascinating.  Yet I should have been alert right from the start that as soon as there was a female suspect in this murder, the discussion was going to turn weird.  Because it usually does.

*They aren't. Half the people on them are only marginally more dangerous now than the average person, and more that half of the dangerous sexual offenders aren't on the lists, so it's mostly just an excuse to Do Something.

No Bark

Brought forward from October 2006. I brought the whole thing forward because of the excellent and revealing nature of the comments. There were many comments about science fairs, including one of bskings early rants, which was pretty good. Another Concord Christian HS girl chipped in and so did two of my sons.  We were still very much a local blogging concern in those days.

******

There will be no discussion about the fractal nature of bark. Jonathan is baiting me here, trying to get me to go off about the recursive nature of leaf growth, which was his 7th-grade science project. I no longer care. The one thing I do still carry around resentfully from that whole event is that his project finished fourth, mostly because the judges - including the school secretary - didn't understand his project. The girl who did a really nice vinegar and baking soda volcano finished ahead of him. It's one of my prime examples of how schools favor girls shamelessly.

Or maybe I have taken the bait after all, and that episode was what Jonathan was trying to draw me into, so I would say nice things about how brilliant he is, er, was.

Private Services

 The Problem with Self-Checkout Tills. It's Britain, so Not Us. We want to cling to the belief that the market will work this out eventually. But tell me where he's wrong.

Please.

When a right-wing capitalist like me, working in marketing, is calling for greater consumer protection, things have probably reached a crisis point. But why? Until this century, most transactions were conducted face-to-face. Such transactions are lubricated by a high degree of tacit trust and shame avoidance. By contrast, any online exchange must be designed to be proof against the world’s most dishonest people. This imposes a huge burden on the majority of honest customers.

I liked the proverb "Trust arrives on foot, but leaves on horseback."

Rocker Writing Country

This song was written instantly after Dustin Hoffman handed McCartney a Time magazine article with Picasso's last words "Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can't drink anymore" and challenged Paul to write a song to it.  McCartney played a single chord and sang the chorus immediately to those lyrics.

Yes, it took a sound-sensitive actor to sense that it might be a poem or a lyric.  Yes, it strongly echoes Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," which was released earlier that year and was in the air...take this badge off of me.  I can't wear it anymore. And yes, it has a strong Gaelic folk music feeling as well - one can imagine the Chieftains or the Rovers or the Clancy Brothers singing it. But such folk music was one of the 3-4 main feeder streams for country music anyway.

You can imagine Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, or George Jones on this. Someplace along the way, the Liverpool boy absorbed something. Only a hundred miles from the very porous Scottish border or across the water to Belfast, after all.

 

I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now

 

Mirrors

Reposted from November 2006.  I devised lots of my own theories then, or explored odd ones I heard from others.  I am less interested now. 

*******

Most human beings didn’t know what their faces looked like. The familiarity with our own looks that we take for granted because of mirrors and photography was unknown for centuries. Imagine for a moment what it would be like to have your face unknown to you, and all knowledge of it derived from what others said. We occasionally see our faces reflected in still water, but we bring the knowledge we have from mirror and photo to that experience. Rarer still, and more recent historically, people saw themselves in polished metal. There are many living today who have still never seen their own faces with any clarity.

One school of thought (Alfred Crosby, Alan MacFarlane) dates the beginning of the Renaissance to the last quarter of the 13th C, with the improvements in glass and mirrors in northern Italy (Venetian mirrors were the first widespread mirrors of excellence). As one of the key features of the Renaissance was supposed to be the emergence of the individual, this makes a sort of intuitive sense.

I don’t mean to be reductionist. It is a favorite sport of historians to try and identify the one unnoticed factor that changed a culture, or even the world. Double-entry bookkeeping, Toledo steel, and a dozen other advances have been proposed as the key. I don’t believe in the Renaissance anyway, so I won’t offer an opinion on its putative beginning. (For the record, I believe in a period called the Enlightenment even less than one called the Renaissance.) Major technological changes were always coming along and remaking Europe from the 8th to the 20th Centuries: the moldboard plow, the stirrup, vaccination.

Yet I ask you to consider this one, this improvement in glass and silver backing which allowed people to see who they were – to see of themselves what others had always seen. More than the day before, you as an individual could see you existing without depending on the village to tell you who you were.

Marshall McLuhan

David Foster passes along this essay about McLuhan from the Free Press from their series The Prophets. It includes a clip that is quoted in the article, and I could quote from it here, but watching is more amazing. I could just post that and leave it here also, but I think the full package is important. I will quote another part instead.

Something about Marshall McLuhan has struck a chord—has resonance, as he liked to say. (He believed the electric age was fundamentally acoustic; a confusing concept, but roughly meaning that everything occurs simultaneously.) The long-deceased Canadian scholar—he died in 1980—who first blew people’s minds in the mid-1960s, is blowing people’s minds again.

This is not because he predicted specific devices or apps, but because he understood, with a poet’s intuition, the effects of the electronic age on human psychology.

He describes what my nostalgia means to me incisively. In his words I hear The Seven, Hayek and Friedman, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Greg Cochrane and a great many of you, frankly. 

I have now also included Tom Wolfe (indirectly here) in two successive posts and am wondering if I should go read something of his that I have not to date.  I have found his fiction entertaining and definitely insightful, but somehow not compelling to my own life. I have done better with his nonfiction.

For the Benefit of Mr. Trump

If he had been elected in 2020 we'd be done with him now.  I'm just sayin', because there is a certain irony to it because of how exercised his opponents are getting again, about a Plague O'er The Earth about to descend and all that.*

There used to be a sign on an apartment complex near the Mass Pike just outside of Boston years ago that said "If you lived here you'd be home now," and my first thought was Well, yeah, but this place sucks, so why would I want to live here? However, I did take the point, and later learned that if you are stuck in traffic often the idea looks more appealing.

* Which reminds me of the phrase that Eugene Volokh tracked down fifteen years ago "The dark night of fascism is always descending on the United States, yet lands only in Europe." Great story behind that. Tom Wolfe, Gunter Grass, and Jean-Francoise Revel.

Analogies

When Razib interviewed Nick Cassimatis about AI, it was an interesting, and I think sensible definition that AI is getting computers to do things that we call intelligent.  They went on to discuss that biologists study life, and while there are definitions of what "life" is (are viruses life?), not one studying them ever thinks much about what the definition is, even those studying viruses.  Similarly, the SCOTUS may have had a hard time precisely defining pornography, falling back on a rather weak "I know it when I see it" decades ago, as a practical matter, no one working on a porn site stops to ask themselves "Hey, is this pornography?" 

So too with intelligence, and therefore, AI. If we went to observe a fifth grade class, or the staff of a catering service, or a station of firefighters for a week each, we would have considerable overlap of which ones we considered intelligent, even absent a definition or a test. We migh add one who did deserve it or leave one off who did, but we would have enormous agreement, and some discussions about the disagreements might resolve quickly.  "She is so nervous and timid that it takes a while to see it, but look what she did with that _____ situation." "He is clearly knowledgeable and has worked very hard, but his information is already out-of-date and he doesn't seem that able to adapt." 

Life, intelligence, AI, pornography - these are all hard to get words around to define, but as a practical matter, we can plow on, all understanding each other except in marginal circumstances.

Graves Into Gardens

We are having some discussion of the country influence on rock and vice versa over at Grim's and I made the comment that modern worship music owes a lot to 80's-90's country rock fusion.  Right on schedule, this was in the second (the contemporary) service this morning.

Sure you can hear gospel, even some folk influence and camp meeting going on here.  But this is very solidly in realm of soft rock turned up loud and fused with country.

Still Hiring

 I have driven past this most days for months.  I have the same misreading every time.

Depression

Right after Grim brings up exercise and depression, more in the context of PTSD, following on discussions of morbid disposition, The Studies Show comments in its mistakes-we-made episode, Mea Culpa, that they have some skepticism, not so much of the concept, but of the slippery definitions and actual degree of effect.  So stay tuned.  I hope it's not a paywalled episode, but if it is that might push me over to actually spring for a subscription.

Reasons to Marry

This is one of the reasons why it is good to marry:  I would have walked around the house for a long time looking for my hat, which had fallen into the hood on the back of my neck. Fortunately, I said aloud what I was looking for.

National Genetics

Razib has an essay* about how the Germans remain skittish about anything to do with genetics, despite having such top-flight institutions as the Max Planck Institutes. Other Europeans, including especially the British and the Estonians, have done detailed analyses of their variations, and the US has a few depth-samplings of genetic clusters. (Map previous post.) It even seems an early version of what we now call political correctness or wokeness, of refusing to know something because you might not like the answer. Greg Cochran was interviewed about genetics by a Norwegian woman who asked "but why would you even want to know these things?" 

At some point, it would be in even the most wary, risk-averse Germans’ interest to consider the reality that human genetics has long since become a modern science that sheds light on human history with almost miraculous depth and precision, and retains no material connection to the dark arts of intuitive pseudo-taxonomy practiced by misguided race scientists 80-100 years ago.

These are other geneticists. These are not the droids you are looking for.  Quoting Wally in Dilbert, "those are other men." Quoting Alison Krauss's bandmate "These are different ducks."

It's not just the Germans, of course, they were just first-to-market on this. Kambiz Kamrani at Anthropology.net reports how the academics in that entire field seem to be intentionally sticking their fingers in their ears and singing "la la la" about anything that looks like it might be second-cousin to a racial discussion, and quelle horreur, misused by irresponsible people (most of whom are actually deeply responsible people.  I'm just sayin'). It used to be that we expected academics to be the adults in the room. Though people who attend faculty meetings will assure you this was never the case.

We can all understand these things on an individual level, and heck, we all probably have lots of doors we don't open, not because we don't know what's back there, but because we think we do. That's fine.  I see no reason to try and make you look behind any door unless there are consequences for others.  My objection comes when you disparage those who do want to know, and even try to prevent them from knowing.

*Might be paywalled

More Links from October 2006

Again, they almost made the cut.  Enjoy.

A hearings officer who, right or wrong on the issue, is nonetheless a hypocrite.

Criticisng Israel hasn't changed much in 20 years.

We discuss getting cross-imprinted jackboots.

Is It Neurodiversity?

Althouse linked to a NYT article that continues to trouble me. It is an interview with someone who describes herself as a sociopath, which she contrasts with the rest of us, whom she calls "neurotypicals." That word jumped off the page for me, because it is usually associated with the concept "not autistic," rather than "not antisocial." I am reluctant to lay this at the feet of Aspies in any way.

I have already gotten ahead of myself here.  Going back to the article, which is unlocked rather than behind a paywall, she talks about "masking," and consciously imitating what other people are doing, because you have noted that it isn't coming naturally for you for some reason and you want to be part of the rest of us. That is very much the language of many on the spectrum, or of the people trying to help them fit in. To my eyes, I'm not seeing a sex difference here whether men or women are more likely to consciously mask and imitate, though there may be some research on it that I have missed. The stereotype would be that it is women who would notice not being like the other girls and taking steps to correct that, but i have some pretty spectacular examples otherwise. Small sample size, though. 

This seems quite different from the sociopathy usually described, of a person who does see that others have needs but even then doesn't particularly bother about that.  I give her credit though most of Ann's commenters don't.  Even though she doesn't have this fellow-feeling we expect from others, she seems to recognise that it's good for society, and she likes how things go in good places, and she should try to fit into this.  There are people with more inborn conscience who can't do this.

And yet I can see how some of it might be related to autism. I don't think of sociopathy of being neurological, even though I see it as having a large genetic component - which shows how asleep at the switch I've been.  "So this relationship meets your needs.  What about the needs of your partner?" Oh, I hadn't thought of that. Yes, I suppose that's important.  I should do that, shouldn't I? That doesn't sound unkind at all. Not selfishness in the usual sense. I think of Monty Python and "It looks like I'm down a pound." He is mostly puzzled by the concept at first and we might think that the importuning man might even teach him something and soften him.  Well that doesn't happen here.

I have not run across other sociopaths who talk like Ms. Gagne, so I am wondering if she is some ASD variant rather than an APD variant, and has mostly mislabeled herself.  Or is that just a convenient explanation that allows me to keep my previous categories?

Sadie Hawkins Day

My wife just asked me to marry her.  I didn't pick up the reference and was merely puzzled, hoping that I was not missing some important romantic communication. She then told me it is Sadie Hawkins Day. I figured I had better post about that while I could and learned that February 29 is not Sadie Hawkins Day.  The Real Sadie Hawkins Day is in November, now set officially as Nov 26, and was invented by Al Capp for his Li'l Abner comic strip.  I had always thought this was based on some older Appalachian custom, which is only half true.  February 29th is Bachelor's Day, celebrated mostly in Ireland, though that might have less influence on Scots-Irish than you would initially think.  But the custom was observed in Scotland and Northern England as well, perhaps even centuries back. As these things go, there were further customs and counter-customs, often loosely based on what was considered bad luck because of associations with various religious dates, especially Lent. 

So if there is anyone out there still adhering to the older stereotype of men having any say whatsoever in marriage and weddings and women having to scramble to get in on the game before spinsterhood, have at it.  Pretend it is Sadie Hawkins Day, because how many men are going to know that you're wrong?  And you can still have November 26 as a backup.

Oh, right.  I forgot one of my other motivations for posting this.  It is not inaccurate to say that Al Capp based his characters on the type of people he saw in West Virginia and Kentucky while he was hitchhiking there as a young man. And I will note that though he was making fun of them in many ways you couldn't get away with now, he also showed many with a shrewd wisdom that was not the product of money and education, he humanised them, and he showed their universality with the rest of us despite appearances. But there is another piece as to the origins of the characters. When I went to a statewide studies progra and then worked at a statewide facility, I learned a great deal about communities that had previously only been names on a map. I was told that part of the inspiration for Li'l Abner was the residents of Seabrook, an extremely poor town on the NH coast. People from surrounding towns would snigger or roll their eyes, much as Rush used to poke at the people of Rio Linda, CA. Seabrook got most of its prominence because of the nuclear power plant, but it also had a brief notoriety during the trial of Pamela Smart, who got an underage boy to murder her husband on the basis of his sexual fascination with her. The boy and his co-conspirators were from Seabrook, attending Winnacunnet HS, which serves some more affluent communities as well. Kids from Seabrook were often seen as lesser and saw themselves as one-down in all social situations, which supposedly influenced their readiness to go along with such a scheme.

Al Capp lived for a while in Amesbury, MA, the next town over from Seabrook, and folks in that area claimed that was a larger influence than is generally credited.

Cemeteries

 I take some of my walks at a local cemetery, a large French one with a lot of mid-20th C stones. It is interesting to see what people chose as their final statements - when they could afford to make a statement. Many short scripture verses. Lots of robed statues, usually saints, but sometimes an angel or an abstract like Death or Sorrow.

Because of the recent thaw, there are more graves than usual that have been recently opened. As some are in sections of the cemetery that are not new I get curious what the dates are. Some of the spouses died long ago, one back to 1979 that I saw yesterday.  I used to assume that this meant 45 years of widowhood for one of them and pondered the sadness of that, but we keep good enough track of our relatives of the previous two or three generations now to know that who is buried together is not always an indication of your first guess as to the reality. People remarried, but a double plot and stone had been purchased fifty years before when their first wife died. The second wife is buried in some other place. And sometimes it is clear that people moved away, leaving a birth year of 1897 inscribed but no death year.

It is still jarring to see the wide span of dates between spouses on the stone, and deaths of children recorded before their parents, sometimes long before. Memento mori. Remember that you have to die.  I have a friend who told me, almost fifty years ago now, "You will die on a day just like today."