This is a follow up on last week’s post about unresolvable questions in which I discussed evaluating basketball players and LeBron James, in particular.
After the Cavaliers’s win last night, James has once again led a team to the NBA Finals—this for the 8th straight year. This adds to his impressive resume and his claim to be greatest of all time (GOAT). In my previous post, I argued that questions like “who is greater: James or Jordan?” were unresolvable.
At the same time, winning the conference finals 8 times in a row is—well, if Jordan had chosen to continue playing basketball instead of trying baseball, maybe he could have matched that feat. Perhaps Jordan was the more talented, but maybe those 8 straight trips to the Finals is the more impressive career? This also reveals two dimensions of evaluation I didn’t discuss in my previous post: the difference between potential and achievement.
But this is not about multidimensionality, but about the way that emotion can influence reasoning. To what extent is evaluation affected by emotions? There is a plenty of actual empirical data on how emotions do influence reasoning (see, for example, the idea of “reactive devaluation”), but I’m just going to focus on one particular influence on evaluation.
This morning, I stopped at a cafe, and the music playing was music that was new and that I had loved when I was in high school and college. A lot of that music still seems particularly excellent to me. Rationally, it makes no sense to me to suggest that the best musicians ever were all performing their best music in the first twenty years or so of my musical memory. But it often seems that way. Those songs were emotively impactful to me when the whole world was new. Music that is new to me today is often simply unable to catch my attention because I have so many other things in mind.
To what extent is this true for evaluating basketball players? Jordan was one of the great stars of that same period—high school/college—Jordan trying to take the mantle of greatness from Bird and Magic. I don’t really remember the greatness of Kareem, though I remember his long and productive post-peak career. Do I have a propensity to overrate Jordan in the same way that I have a propensity to overrate the music of my youth? The baseball writer Bill James included a repeated item in his Historical Baseball Abstract in which, for each decade, he quoted old ballplayers saying some variation of “they ain’t as great as when I was young.”
Will those who are in high school and college today—people too young to have watched Jordan’s great games live—will they be predisposed to consider James the greatest ever because he was the player who amazed them when the world was still new? And will there be a debate 20 years from now about whether some new player is greater than James (with Jordan having receded into the past)?
The decision-making process includes emotional elements that shape our reasoning. If we’re called upon to make a quick choice, the emotional factors are likely to be the deciding factors when complex decisions must be made because the complexity of carefully reasoned evaluation tends to defy answers.
Monday, May 28, 2018
Monday, May 21, 2018
Unresolvable questions and the search for understanding
Researchers want answers, and ideally, they want good, solid answers that will stand up to examination and challenge. Unfortunately, some questions do not have any fixed answer. The absence of clear answers, however, does not preclude important learning, and researchers can benefit from being able to delve into such uncertainties in search of many interesting ideas, even if no specific answer can be found.
In the late 1950s, a philosopher named W.B. Gallie demonstrated that there were some things could never be fully defined—he called them “essentially contested concepts.” In the late 1960s, design theorist Horst Rittel argued for a class of “wicked” problems (which included but was not limited to design problems) whose members had no definitive formulation, among other characteristics. For both Gallie and Rittel, a crucial factor was the social element: different people view things differently. Gallie relied on a sporting example derived from cricket (I believe—I’m working from memory) to demonstrate how different views about the sport made it impossible to define the “best.”. Gallie’s example is particularly salient for me because I enjoy the sporting fan’s common questions regarding which players are best and what teams should do—one of my favorite authors is Bill James, the baseball analytics guru—and yet, as a philosopher and researcher, the more I look at such questions, the more complexity there is to see. And ultimately, given that I accept the ideas of Gallie and Rittel, I see these questions as unanswerable. Despite believing these questions are unanswerable, I still see the debates that they produce as interesting and often informative.
Not to mention that I am somewhat interested in basketball and the NBA playoffs, and a lot of current discussion revolves around an unanswerable question that is, nonetheless interesting, and perhaps even informative, to explore. That question is the question of LeBron James. How great is he? Is he the greatest ever, the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time)? Or is he “just” top five? You don’t have to read much to find people discussing LeBron’s “legacy.”
Before LeBron, Michael Jordan was generally regarded as the greatest of all time (GOAT). Some argued for Bill Russell with his 11 championship rings and multiple MVP awards, or, perhaps, for a few others, but Jordan was the most common choice as GOAT. LeBron, however, has been doing amazing stuff that no one else in basketball can do, and his accomplishments are piling up. He is currently having another spectacular postseason, at least in terms of individual performances, although his team is facing a 1-2 deficit to Boston in the conference finals. It is these performances that spark the debate: “look at that performance,” says one side, “he’s the best ever.” The other side says “well, it doesn’t mean much if he loses. Jordan won all six times he went to the finals!”
This is the simplistic version of the argument, of course, because on closer examination this simple argument will reveal complexity that cannot be eliminated—complexity of the sort that contributed to the claims of Gallie and Rittel that some things cannot be completely defined. The simplicity of saying “Jordan won all six times in the finals; LeBron only won three and lost five,” might be fine for chatting at the bar during a game, but it certainly isn’t enough for serious research.
Firstly, we note that we can’t just reduce the argument to who has more rings, because by the “rings” standard, neither Jordan nor LeBron is all that close to the top of the list. By the rings standard, Bill Russell is the greatest, followed by a bunch of his teammates and Robert Horry. And, with all due respect to Robert Horry and Russell’s Celtics teammates, they are not all-time greats—no one is suggesting that Sam Jones, with 10 rings, is the second-greatest player ever. Trying to reduce the debate to a single dimension distorts the question: a player’s performance is much more complex than that single dimension. This problem of multidimensionality makes it difficult to evaluate many things—what is intelligence? what is creativity? what is a “good employee”? how do we evaluate students’ learning?
Once an issue is understood to be multidimensional, it becomes increasingly difficult to make any certain decision. Beyond championship rings, there are many statistics that allow a comparison between two basketball players—points scored, rebounds, assists, etc., etc. But the more dimensions added to the evaluation, the greater the likelihood that there will be contradictory indications. If one player had better stats in every possible category than any other player, there wouldn’t be difficulties. But that’s not the case, and that leads to complexity and uncertainty: how do you choose to weight different dimensional in an overall evaluation? If Jordan has more points but LeBron has more rebounds, who is greater? What’s more important for evaluating greatness?
Focusing on won-loss records can give an example of this problem of evaluation. MJ won more rings than LeBron, and that matters. But LeBron advanced to the finals more times, and that’s worth something, too: after all, if LeBron is criticized for losing in the Finals, shouldn’t MJ be criticized for losing in the Conference Finals? How do we compare those different achievements? Or, at the other end of the playoffs, we can see that MJ lost in the first round three times, while LeBron has never lost in the first round. If MJ were clearly greater, shouldn’t he have a better record in the first round? There are lots of stats and sometimes Jordan’s are more impressive (30.1 pts/gm vs. “only” 27.2 for LeBron), sometimes LeBron’s are (7.4 rebounds/game, 7.2 assists/game vs. 6.9 and 5.3 for Jordan).
The search for detail in comparing the two may not lead to any conclusive answer about which is better, but it can help us see the question more richly, and this can inform us about basketball and about processes of evaluation. And, in a way, what we get out of the examination is potentially more valuable than an answer: it doesn’t really matter who is “the greatest”—whether we say that Jordan is the greatest or LeBron is the greatest or Russell, Kareem, Bird, Magic, Wilt or whoever. It doesn’t really matter who gets called the greatest, or who really is the greatest (if it makes sense to reduce such complexity to such a simple question). But, although the question itself cannot be answered, what is learned in the process of trying to answer that unanswerable question can give us insight into the more general process of player evaluation, and that has practical value to basketball organizations or to fantasy players.
Some questions that have no answer are still worth asking and examining.
In the late 1950s, a philosopher named W.B. Gallie demonstrated that there were some things could never be fully defined—he called them “essentially contested concepts.” In the late 1960s, design theorist Horst Rittel argued for a class of “wicked” problems (which included but was not limited to design problems) whose members had no definitive formulation, among other characteristics. For both Gallie and Rittel, a crucial factor was the social element: different people view things differently. Gallie relied on a sporting example derived from cricket (I believe—I’m working from memory) to demonstrate how different views about the sport made it impossible to define the “best.”. Gallie’s example is particularly salient for me because I enjoy the sporting fan’s common questions regarding which players are best and what teams should do—one of my favorite authors is Bill James, the baseball analytics guru—and yet, as a philosopher and researcher, the more I look at such questions, the more complexity there is to see. And ultimately, given that I accept the ideas of Gallie and Rittel, I see these questions as unanswerable. Despite believing these questions are unanswerable, I still see the debates that they produce as interesting and often informative.
Not to mention that I am somewhat interested in basketball and the NBA playoffs, and a lot of current discussion revolves around an unanswerable question that is, nonetheless interesting, and perhaps even informative, to explore. That question is the question of LeBron James. How great is he? Is he the greatest ever, the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time)? Or is he “just” top five? You don’t have to read much to find people discussing LeBron’s “legacy.”
Before LeBron, Michael Jordan was generally regarded as the greatest of all time (GOAT). Some argued for Bill Russell with his 11 championship rings and multiple MVP awards, or, perhaps, for a few others, but Jordan was the most common choice as GOAT. LeBron, however, has been doing amazing stuff that no one else in basketball can do, and his accomplishments are piling up. He is currently having another spectacular postseason, at least in terms of individual performances, although his team is facing a 1-2 deficit to Boston in the conference finals. It is these performances that spark the debate: “look at that performance,” says one side, “he’s the best ever.” The other side says “well, it doesn’t mean much if he loses. Jordan won all six times he went to the finals!”
This is the simplistic version of the argument, of course, because on closer examination this simple argument will reveal complexity that cannot be eliminated—complexity of the sort that contributed to the claims of Gallie and Rittel that some things cannot be completely defined. The simplicity of saying “Jordan won all six times in the finals; LeBron only won three and lost five,” might be fine for chatting at the bar during a game, but it certainly isn’t enough for serious research.
Firstly, we note that we can’t just reduce the argument to who has more rings, because by the “rings” standard, neither Jordan nor LeBron is all that close to the top of the list. By the rings standard, Bill Russell is the greatest, followed by a bunch of his teammates and Robert Horry. And, with all due respect to Robert Horry and Russell’s Celtics teammates, they are not all-time greats—no one is suggesting that Sam Jones, with 10 rings, is the second-greatest player ever. Trying to reduce the debate to a single dimension distorts the question: a player’s performance is much more complex than that single dimension. This problem of multidimensionality makes it difficult to evaluate many things—what is intelligence? what is creativity? what is a “good employee”? how do we evaluate students’ learning?
Once an issue is understood to be multidimensional, it becomes increasingly difficult to make any certain decision. Beyond championship rings, there are many statistics that allow a comparison between two basketball players—points scored, rebounds, assists, etc., etc. But the more dimensions added to the evaluation, the greater the likelihood that there will be contradictory indications. If one player had better stats in every possible category than any other player, there wouldn’t be difficulties. But that’s not the case, and that leads to complexity and uncertainty: how do you choose to weight different dimensional in an overall evaluation? If Jordan has more points but LeBron has more rebounds, who is greater? What’s more important for evaluating greatness?
Focusing on won-loss records can give an example of this problem of evaluation. MJ won more rings than LeBron, and that matters. But LeBron advanced to the finals more times, and that’s worth something, too: after all, if LeBron is criticized for losing in the Finals, shouldn’t MJ be criticized for losing in the Conference Finals? How do we compare those different achievements? Or, at the other end of the playoffs, we can see that MJ lost in the first round three times, while LeBron has never lost in the first round. If MJ were clearly greater, shouldn’t he have a better record in the first round? There are lots of stats and sometimes Jordan’s are more impressive (30.1 pts/gm vs. “only” 27.2 for LeBron), sometimes LeBron’s are (7.4 rebounds/game, 7.2 assists/game vs. 6.9 and 5.3 for Jordan).
The search for detail in comparing the two may not lead to any conclusive answer about which is better, but it can help us see the question more richly, and this can inform us about basketball and about processes of evaluation. And, in a way, what we get out of the examination is potentially more valuable than an answer: it doesn’t really matter who is “the greatest”—whether we say that Jordan is the greatest or LeBron is the greatest or Russell, Kareem, Bird, Magic, Wilt or whoever. It doesn’t really matter who gets called the greatest, or who really is the greatest (if it makes sense to reduce such complexity to such a simple question). But, although the question itself cannot be answered, what is learned in the process of trying to answer that unanswerable question can give us insight into the more general process of player evaluation, and that has practical value to basketball organizations or to fantasy players.
Some questions that have no answer are still worth asking and examining.
Monday, May 7, 2018
Cultural appropriation and appropriate responses
The APA Manual discusses bias in writing and suggests, basically, that if anyone is offended, the writing should be considered offensive, and change is worth considering. I’d like to take this premise as the basic starting point for this discussion: if someone is offended, it is worth considering doing something different. If someone feels hurt, that feeling should be taken very seriously.
At the same time, however, not all hurts are the same. And losing sight of that, means sucking important nuance out of any possible dialogue that might move toward redress of hurts.
It is the loss of nuance in the debate that worries me. If serious ills are conflated with minor ills, it makes it harder to generate community action to address (and redress) the serious ills.
The recent case of Keziah Daum’s prom dress brought this question to mind, but I had already been thinking about those issues due to several previous situations that sparked cultural appropriation debates.
Cultural appropriation can be a serious problem. Many people have really suffered from it. For example, historically, the US music industry was a cultural appropriation machine that stole millions from African American musicians. White people got rich on music drawn from African Americans, while the African Americans who first made the music got little or nothing. It was a large-scale issue.
At the same time, again, not all hurts are equal. The class of “micro-aggressions” explicitly marks the limited nature of those hurts. This is not to say that micro-aggressions ought to be ignored, but again, this invites the question of degree of hurt and appropriate responses to that hurt. If micro-aggressions were equivalent to outright aggression, then no one would create the term “micro-aggression” to describe them.
Are all cases of cultural appropriation equal? Clearly not. Some cases of cultural appropriation affect the flow of millions of dollars, and directly impact the lives of many. Other cases? Well, what about the case of Keziah Daum and the response thereto?
Let us give full respect to the feelings and lives of those who were hurt by her decision to wear that dress, pose in the way she did, and post that image. Let us also retain nuance in the conversation by understanding the degree of injury and other potential ill effects of Daum’s choice to wear the dress and to post the now-infamous images, and the question of what is an appropriate response.
Let us suppose that you are browsing, you come across Daum’s post, and you are hurt. What hurts have you suffered from that image? Emotional hurts are significant and real, so we’ll count them. Are there other injuries from that image? Specific injuries from those posts or from Daum’s actions that led to the posts?
Let’s put aside a more general critique of Daum and society: perhaps she is more generally culpable, and unquestionably larger society has committed bad acts of cultural appropriation, but nonetheless, this image is a single act. Do we want to condemn this one act as if it embodied a who person’s life? What specific injury does the image do? Asking whether Daum is guilty of other things is not entirely at issue. Now one might think, on seeing the image, that Daum needs to be educated—an idea with merit (of course, I’m generally biased toward education)—but that is a separate question from the question of what the image does.
So what is an appropriate response to the image? If that image is hurtful, should it be spread as far and wide as possible? That seems like it would only hurt more people. And if the image is spread with the idea of censuring Daum (assuming that she needs censure) will that censure help promote the idea of cultural sensitivity and help prevent cultural appropriation?
Until this event Daum was hardly well known, now she has become a flashpoint of cultural conflict. If no one had decided to spread the image as a display of cultural appropriation, Daum would have remained in shadows. Does making an example of her help the fight against cultural appropriation?
I don’t want to make light of the hurt that anyone might have suffered through Daum’s choice of dress, use at prom, and images posted on public forums. But personally, I don’t think turning Daum’s dress into an issue of import helps eliminate cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation should be eliminated, but I don’t think the way to go about it is to lose sight of the nuance in the discourse. Some hurts are too small to warrant a reaction. The potential hurts of Daum’s act seem small, and that makes the complaint a weaker issue to use in any public discourse that attempts to educate people about the ills of cultural appropriation.
About a year ago, a burrito shop in Portland, Oregon similarly became a “cultural appropriation” flashpoint, and that case was one in which the response seemed grossly out of proportion. This little burrito shop run by two women was open on weekends. Let’s say they were basically stealing—how much were they stealing? The cost of dozens of burritos? That’s a bad thing. But what about Taco Bell? Is it owned and managed by Mexicans or is it cultural appropriation on a massive scale? The wave of public sentiment against that little burrito shop didn’t transform into a wave of public censure of Taco Bell. Is that an appropriate set of responses?
If we want to convince people that cultural appropriation is a real problem that we should work to fix, it would be effective, I think, to try to focus on more serious instances—and that means instances where a lot of money is changing hands, or where people are suffering serious immediate injuries. By focusing on cases with smaller impact—a weekend burrito shop or a high school student wearing a prom dress—it makes it easier for complaints about the real problem to be brushed off as just another example of a non-problem imagined by some fevered liberal.
This is about rhetoric and debate and how to shift public opinion on the large scale. Many people—the same people would would think in terms of “fevered liberals”—view the idea of cultural appropriation as ridiculous. These are the people whose opinions it would be most valuable to change—what discourse is going to reach them and educate them and get them to be more sensitive to the real problem of cultural appropriation? Complaining about Daum might be very effective in reaching people who already believe that cultural appropriation is a problem, but is it effective in reaching people who don’t take cultural appropriation seriously?
In rhetoric and debate, it is, of course, very effective to fix upon an example that sparks a strong emotion. But when the emotions generated are anger and resentment, it makes it harder for people to work together. And when emotions run high, it’s easy to lose the important nuance.
We don’t want to lose nuance in this debate (or in any debate, if we can help it), because that loss of nuance makes it harder to address and ameliorate the difficult and significant problems that face us—“us” the community of scholars, “us” the people of the US, and “us” the people of the world.
Cooperation won’t grow out of disrespecting the opposite side of the argument. Cooperation grows out of seeing the opposite side of the argument as real humans despite their faults.
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