If you didn't watch Boise State's simultaneously epic and tragic loss to the University of Nevada last night, you've probably heard about it already. Chances are, you've also already hear the arguments: this proves that Boise didn't belong in the National Title conversation in the first place, or this proves that even the WAC teams still have to compete every week, and Boise's dominance meant it was extremely worthy of its ranking.
The truth of the matter is, the vast majority of people have chosen a side in the AQ versus non-AQ argument already, and are not at all interested in trying to think objectively. That a game like Boise's loss to Nevada can affirm either position just goes to show that most people - and probably most people on both sides the argument - don't have the slightest clue what they're talking about. The challenge, however, is not remaining objective, but rather finding appropriate evidence to determine whether a team like a Boise State or a TCU deserves national recognition and, in the event of an undefeated season, a possible chance to play for the National Championship.
The issue here is sample size. I've been accused, before, of being too baseball-centric in my thinking about football, but I think that just tries to brush off the bigger issue. The reality is, football - and college football in particular - is a sport of small sample sizes. A full season is only a dozen games, there's no balanced schedule, and even the very best teams might lose thanks to a bad bounce on a fumble, a mistaken penalty call, or a missed chip-shot field goal. What's more, a football team is not a single entity, playing in a vacuum. It might very well be that Nevada is better than Boise State, but Boise is better than Hawaii, and Hawaii is better than Nevada.
What I mean is this: Nevada might be "better" because their roster is perfectly adapted to defeat Boise State's, and so on. Match-ups are everything in football, and gameplans the rest. It is almost certainly true that Alabama and Auburn have better players than Oregon, and Oregon has better players than TCU or Boise. I don't doubt that for a minute. What I do doubt, however, is that just as Oregon would struggle in the SEC, Alabama and Auburn would struggle in the PAC-10. The reason? The match-ups are different, the styles are different, the gameplanning is different.
I don't know any of that for certain, but it's a suspicion I have from the aggregate of small samples I've seen. I would add, however, that I do put some stock in computer rankings. Yes, the very same rankings that the media loves to disparage for their nonsensical orderings of teams and conferences (Sagarin, into this week, and if you let him keep scoring margin as part of the equation, which the BCS doesn't, ranks Oregon 1, Stanford 2, Auburn 5, among other things). Of course the media doing the disparaging here has their own ranking system which is entirely subjective, and heavily weighted to the most recent result.
Given football's small sample sizes, you've probably heard that you have to consider a team's "entire body of work." You have to consider strength of schedule, and prestige of opponents, and other intangible factors. The thing is, most of that is not only tangible, it's quantifiable, and the computers do a much better job of actually considering a team's whole body of work than even the most well-informed voter does. The computer can seamlessly consider games played, opponents played, strength of schedule to two or three or four tiers, and overall conference strength. The different computers weight all of those things differently, of course, but that the BCS uses a variety of rankings and drops the best and worst is a mark in its favor.
There is heavy resistance to computer rankings because they often don't pass the alleged smell-test, just like fielding statistics that say that Derek Jeter isn't a great fielder. Oh wait.
In all seriousness, though, the computers here are constrained by sample size in a way that advanced baseball statistics generally are not, but the analogy is a strong one. We have our old statistics - Won-Loss record, conference and conference standing, opponent lists - and we have new, more advanced statistics that take into account score differential and opponent's opponents, and so on. The problem is, when the more advanced, harder-to-calculate statistics show that Auburn is #5, or when they show that a one-loss Stanford is better than an undefeated Boise State and TCU, we scoff at them because they don't align with our subjective, entrenched, traditional approaches.
Of course, as I've said before, the biggest problem here isn't even sample size or public perceptions or the media or the stickiness of tradition. No, the biggest problem is cognitive dissonance: the notion in our head that one team must be better than another. The idea that we can quantify football team quality at all. Is Boise State a 93 or a 94 out of 100? Does their kicker's misses yesterday drop them all the way to 83? Is it maybe true that they would crush Oregon, but be crushed by Auburn (or vice versa)? Is it maybe true that, even for a full season, they could compete in the SEC (because a full season is still a small sample)? Is it maybe true, on the other hand, that they would go 3-9 playing Alabama's schedule?
It's impossible to say, and, what's more, it's irrelevant. Most of those questions are predicated on the notion that there's a simple answer to the question "Which team is better?" There's not. There never is. And, even if there was, the samples we're working with in football are too small to answer the question. All we have, then, is the drama of single games, of missed field goals and overtime wins. The point of college football is not to crown the best team in the nation, but to crown a Champion.
Showing posts with label Cognitive Dissonance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cognitive Dissonance. Show all posts
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Friday, October 2, 2009
Cognitive Dissonance and College Football
I have to admit, from the very beginning, that this post isn't really about College Football. I am not currently in possession of a TV, nor do I have access to one, nor would I particularly have the time or motivation to watch one if I did. Therefore, I have watched only one college football game this season, and that was in person at Stanford Stadium (my second will be tomorrow, when the Cardinal play UCLA). I'm more concerned with expanding a little on this idea of "framing the discussion" (though that exact term won't show up here, the idea is present), since I've been thinking about it over the last couple days.
One of the purposes of asking questions, especially philosophical questions - and especially uncomfortable philosophical questions - is to broaden the spectrum of a conversation. We may all agree, in principle, how important education is, for example, but we are usually slow to consider what assumptions have lead us to that seemingly obvious conclusion (let alone to consider what we mean by "education" in the first place). Likewise, we may agree, in principle, in the value of a representational government without ever considering what the virtues and faults of such a government are, and how that form of government is influenced by outstanding circumstances like, for example, modern information technology. In general, most of what we do and think on a day to day basis is, ultimately, unexamined, even among the "well-educated." Ironically, we tend to become more automatic in fields that we know particularly well and use frequently. Driving, for example, is a fairly complex task that is essentially automatic, and how often do we contemplate the reasons for traffic laws?
That's a fairly mundane example, but the same goes for more intellectual pursuits, and more specialized fields of knowledge. Of course, one might say that PhDs of pure Philosophy avoid this by studying a question-oriented field, but that really seem to be the case, given the intense bickering and in-fighting that happens in Philosophy departments across the country (though limited funding and high competition for jobs might have something to do with that as well). Strong as the tendency to turn even the most complex thought-processes into repeatable and eventually unexamined habit is, the tendency to do so with already unexamined thoughts acquired merely by living in a society - that is, "conventional wisdom" - is even stronger. There are certain expectations that arise, not from any systematic decision that those expectations make sense, but by virtue of some long-lost and accidental situation, and these expectations dictate a substantial amount of our behavior.
The concept of cognitive dissonance, from what little I know about it, is something psychologists use to explain what happens when two of our ingrained intellectual habits come in conflict with each other. The basic idea is that, if you discover that something you really like (cheap prices) is closely related to something you really hate (draconian labor practices), your efforts to reconcile the two will lead to a compromise. As a result, you'll like or hate the objects in question just a little bit less, as you try to bring them somewhere closer together in your head.
There are plenty of examples of this concept at work, and if you pay attention, you might catch yourself doing it quite frequently (I know I do). The example I want to talk about is College Football polling. Cognitive dissonance is usually explained numerically, because a sliding, quanitative scale of likes and dislikes is an excellent heuristic tool. In the case of NCAA polls, however, the numbers involved are actual manifestations of the concept in action, albeit at a social and not personal level.
Since I now attend a Pac-10 school, I want to point to the dance that Washington, USC, and Stanford have participated in over the last few weeks. The perennial powerhouse USC lost to Washington - who went winless in 2008 - in week 2. USC had been ranked #3 (AP poll, that's the one I'm going to use), and Washington had understandibly been unranked. The outcome of that game was not enough to convince voters that USC is actually worse than Washington, but it was a kind of cognitive dissonance. As a result, USC dropped to #12 the next week, with Washington climbing into the top-25 at #24.
Unfortunately for the poll-voters, things are never that simple, and Washington was routed by the Cardinal last weekend, 34-14. Stanford is not ranked, and is not particularly thought to be that strong of a program. Of course, the voters took their cue here to drop Washington out of the top-25, but a few of them did - in a classic example of unexamined, reactive thinking - throw a couple of votes at Stanford, though not enough to breach the magical #25 barrier. The odd part about this is that USC jumped all the way back up to #7 at the same time. Extenuating circumstances aside, it's as if the voters decided that, really, USC isn't #12, and that they just kind of had a bad week in a tough stadium (Washington plays at one of the largest venues in the country). A little distance goes a long way in clarifying the real meaning of a terrible upset.
There's a similar example to step through involving California and Oregon, but we don't need to go there. Rather, the point is that there is a kind of unexamined assumption among fans of college football - an assumption originating largely from the way the sport is covered - that there is some mystical difference between a team that is #5 and a team that is #8, when in reality there is probably very little. The way that teams match-up against each other, where they play, who's injured, which coach has a better game plan, and whose kicker is hungover all have way more to do with which team wins a game - which team is "better" - than where teams sit in the polls. "Duh," you're probably saying, because we all see and hear about upsets all the time.
But my point isn't that upsets happen, or even that it makes sense that upsets should happen. My point is that, even though we all know that upsets happen and that's a part of the fun, we still buy into a ranking system that obviously does not and cannot function. Can you arrange 112 football teams linearly, from best to worst, in any meaningful way? Sure, we might all agree that USC is better than Louisiana Tech, but between USC and Louisiana Tech there are a bunch of teams that we don't agree about.* And that's the point; there is no meaningful and definitive way - even playing games - to determine which team is better than which. We complain about the BCS, but that's just a system for choosing two teams to play for a National Championship; if we chose four for a playoff, we'd have the same trouble, or if we chose eight, or sixteen. Even in NCAA Basketball, 65 isn't enough to satisfy people. And how often is the National Champion not, in reality, the consensus "best team?"
* (This is called a Posterisk - or at least, that's what Joe Posnanski calls it. Basically, it's an end note that doesn't happen at the end. Or maybe it's a footnote that occurs in the middle of the page because, really, there is no page for it to be at the bottom of.) For example, who's better, USC or Cal? Cal or Oregon? Oregon or Notre Dame? Notre Dame or Michigan? Michigan or Indiana? Indiana or Western Michigan? Western Michigan or Fresno State? Fresno State or Hawaii? Hawaii or Louisiana Tech? I don't follow the sport close enough to know of those are good examples, but I have a sense that you'd probably be able to argue both ways about each of those pairs, even though no one would argue that Louisiana Tech is better than USC.
The exercise is one in repetitive, habitual, and unexamined thinking. We feel the need to put things on a straight line because, really, that's just what we do. We see politics as being about left, center, and right. We see grades as being A to F. We see football teams as #1, #2, #3, and so on. We do all of this even though the reality we're dealing with - even in something as trivial and straightfoward as football - is way too complicated to fit in a single dimension (how much more so with politics or student assessment?). We open ourselves up to cognitive dissonance, and we let it work it's paradox-resolving sorcery, even though quick reflection would tell us that, just because Washington beat USC and Stanford beat Washington, that doesn't mean that Stanford should beat USC. So why should Stanford pick up votes? Is the subconscious that powerful? Is habit that strong?
It is quite common to hear about "thinking outside-the-box." In a way, we've even turned outside-the-box thinking into a linear phenomenon: "He's outside-the-box, but not as outside-the-box as she is!" We subject ourselves to the same vagaries of cognitive dissonance: "I thought he was pretty outside-the-box, but his solution to that problem was fairly uninspired, I guess he's not all that outside-the-box after all, and all that innovative thinking isn't all it's cracked up to be." Really, we don't need outside-the-box thinkers nearly so much as we need off-the-line thinkers. Right now, more often than not, we get stuck in one dimension. We'll deal with boxes once we get to three.
One of the purposes of asking questions, especially philosophical questions - and especially uncomfortable philosophical questions - is to broaden the spectrum of a conversation. We may all agree, in principle, how important education is, for example, but we are usually slow to consider what assumptions have lead us to that seemingly obvious conclusion (let alone to consider what we mean by "education" in the first place). Likewise, we may agree, in principle, in the value of a representational government without ever considering what the virtues and faults of such a government are, and how that form of government is influenced by outstanding circumstances like, for example, modern information technology. In general, most of what we do and think on a day to day basis is, ultimately, unexamined, even among the "well-educated." Ironically, we tend to become more automatic in fields that we know particularly well and use frequently. Driving, for example, is a fairly complex task that is essentially automatic, and how often do we contemplate the reasons for traffic laws?
That's a fairly mundane example, but the same goes for more intellectual pursuits, and more specialized fields of knowledge. Of course, one might say that PhDs of pure Philosophy avoid this by studying a question-oriented field, but that really seem to be the case, given the intense bickering and in-fighting that happens in Philosophy departments across the country (though limited funding and high competition for jobs might have something to do with that as well). Strong as the tendency to turn even the most complex thought-processes into repeatable and eventually unexamined habit is, the tendency to do so with already unexamined thoughts acquired merely by living in a society - that is, "conventional wisdom" - is even stronger. There are certain expectations that arise, not from any systematic decision that those expectations make sense, but by virtue of some long-lost and accidental situation, and these expectations dictate a substantial amount of our behavior.
The concept of cognitive dissonance, from what little I know about it, is something psychologists use to explain what happens when two of our ingrained intellectual habits come in conflict with each other. The basic idea is that, if you discover that something you really like (cheap prices) is closely related to something you really hate (draconian labor practices), your efforts to reconcile the two will lead to a compromise. As a result, you'll like or hate the objects in question just a little bit less, as you try to bring them somewhere closer together in your head.
There are plenty of examples of this concept at work, and if you pay attention, you might catch yourself doing it quite frequently (I know I do). The example I want to talk about is College Football polling. Cognitive dissonance is usually explained numerically, because a sliding, quanitative scale of likes and dislikes is an excellent heuristic tool. In the case of NCAA polls, however, the numbers involved are actual manifestations of the concept in action, albeit at a social and not personal level.
Since I now attend a Pac-10 school, I want to point to the dance that Washington, USC, and Stanford have participated in over the last few weeks. The perennial powerhouse USC lost to Washington - who went winless in 2008 - in week 2. USC had been ranked #3 (AP poll, that's the one I'm going to use), and Washington had understandibly been unranked. The outcome of that game was not enough to convince voters that USC is actually worse than Washington, but it was a kind of cognitive dissonance. As a result, USC dropped to #12 the next week, with Washington climbing into the top-25 at #24.
Unfortunately for the poll-voters, things are never that simple, and Washington was routed by the Cardinal last weekend, 34-14. Stanford is not ranked, and is not particularly thought to be that strong of a program. Of course, the voters took their cue here to drop Washington out of the top-25, but a few of them did - in a classic example of unexamined, reactive thinking - throw a couple of votes at Stanford, though not enough to breach the magical #25 barrier. The odd part about this is that USC jumped all the way back up to #7 at the same time. Extenuating circumstances aside, it's as if the voters decided that, really, USC isn't #12, and that they just kind of had a bad week in a tough stadium (Washington plays at one of the largest venues in the country). A little distance goes a long way in clarifying the real meaning of a terrible upset.
There's a similar example to step through involving California and Oregon, but we don't need to go there. Rather, the point is that there is a kind of unexamined assumption among fans of college football - an assumption originating largely from the way the sport is covered - that there is some mystical difference between a team that is #5 and a team that is #8, when in reality there is probably very little. The way that teams match-up against each other, where they play, who's injured, which coach has a better game plan, and whose kicker is hungover all have way more to do with which team wins a game - which team is "better" - than where teams sit in the polls. "Duh," you're probably saying, because we all see and hear about upsets all the time.
But my point isn't that upsets happen, or even that it makes sense that upsets should happen. My point is that, even though we all know that upsets happen and that's a part of the fun, we still buy into a ranking system that obviously does not and cannot function. Can you arrange 112 football teams linearly, from best to worst, in any meaningful way? Sure, we might all agree that USC is better than Louisiana Tech, but between USC and Louisiana Tech there are a bunch of teams that we don't agree about.* And that's the point; there is no meaningful and definitive way - even playing games - to determine which team is better than which. We complain about the BCS, but that's just a system for choosing two teams to play for a National Championship; if we chose four for a playoff, we'd have the same trouble, or if we chose eight, or sixteen. Even in NCAA Basketball, 65 isn't enough to satisfy people. And how often is the National Champion not, in reality, the consensus "best team?"
* (This is called a Posterisk - or at least, that's what Joe Posnanski calls it. Basically, it's an end note that doesn't happen at the end. Or maybe it's a footnote that occurs in the middle of the page because, really, there is no page for it to be at the bottom of.) For example, who's better, USC or Cal? Cal or Oregon? Oregon or Notre Dame? Notre Dame or Michigan? Michigan or Indiana? Indiana or Western Michigan? Western Michigan or Fresno State? Fresno State or Hawaii? Hawaii or Louisiana Tech? I don't follow the sport close enough to know of those are good examples, but I have a sense that you'd probably be able to argue both ways about each of those pairs, even though no one would argue that Louisiana Tech is better than USC.
The exercise is one in repetitive, habitual, and unexamined thinking. We feel the need to put things on a straight line because, really, that's just what we do. We see politics as being about left, center, and right. We see grades as being A to F. We see football teams as #1, #2, #3, and so on. We do all of this even though the reality we're dealing with - even in something as trivial and straightfoward as football - is way too complicated to fit in a single dimension (how much more so with politics or student assessment?). We open ourselves up to cognitive dissonance, and we let it work it's paradox-resolving sorcery, even though quick reflection would tell us that, just because Washington beat USC and Stanford beat Washington, that doesn't mean that Stanford should beat USC. So why should Stanford pick up votes? Is the subconscious that powerful? Is habit that strong?
It is quite common to hear about "thinking outside-the-box." In a way, we've even turned outside-the-box thinking into a linear phenomenon: "He's outside-the-box, but not as outside-the-box as she is!" We subject ourselves to the same vagaries of cognitive dissonance: "I thought he was pretty outside-the-box, but his solution to that problem was fairly uninspired, I guess he's not all that outside-the-box after all, and all that innovative thinking isn't all it's cracked up to be." Really, we don't need outside-the-box thinkers nearly so much as we need off-the-line thinkers. Right now, more often than not, we get stuck in one dimension. We'll deal with boxes once we get to three.
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