Marbury

capello's critics and hindsight bias

At last, a sports writer who doesn't automatically assume that because something precedes something it must have caused it. Here's Matthew Syed on the pundits who have suddenly decided that England needs to fire the manager:

When Fabio Capello took over as England manager, his most eye-catching initiative was to treat the players like schoolchildren. England then happened to win a succession of matches in qualification. The inference was inevitable. Treat England players like schoolchildren and they will win football matches. QED.

When things started to go wrong for England in South Africa, those who made the initial leap of logic found themselves leaping the other way, without seeming to notice the epistemological abyss they were hurdling. The “Joyless Regime that Sucked the Life out of England’s World Cup” was a headline from a publication that had previously eulogised Capello’s dictatorial style. Hindsight bias is a wonderful thing, of course, but do we really need to make a virtue of it?

The critics calling for Capello's head are stuck in a strange, recursive loop of self-deception. They're not stupid: they know that every time England lose, the manager is blamed and usually replaced with someone else who has all the opposite qualities (if foreign, choose English, if a "fighter", choose an intellectual, if friendly, choose disciplinarian, etc) and they know that this trick hasn't ever worked. They can even see how ridiculous this is. But somehow, they tell themselves, this time is different. This time, we just need to lose the Italian autocrat and choose an English bloke's bloke. That'll sort it out. There's remarkably little appetite on the part of these pundits for self-examination. They should at least ask themselves why it is they get everything so brilliantly right in hindsight and so wrong in foresight.

Capello has his flaws. But so do all available choices and we can't be sure enough that our disappointing form was his fault, tempting as it clearly is to assume so. We may as well stick with what we've got. After all, if your expectations are realistic, we're not even doing that badly.

anger management

Somebody has put together this montage of Fabio Capello's reactions during England's match with Slovenia. It's extraordinary. When he's upset about something on the field, which is often, he writhes and explodes with rage, swearing at the players and shoulder-charging his assistants, who just bounce off him. There's a savagery to him, and something dark and bullying - watch out for a fairly brutal exchange with Stuart Pearce, whom he clearly regards with contempt.

retro-spying

The Russian spy story really is a blast from the past. It's like all the participants had been watching a lot of cold war movies and reading Le Carre thrillers and thought, hey, we should bring spying back home. All this modern satellite stuff, this talk of data encryption, is dull and dehumanising. Let's stand up for the old ways! Let's rage against the machine!

We'll get our money from buried paper bags:

“METSOS secretly buried some of the money in upstate New York,” the FBI affidavit says, referring to one of the defendants, “and two years later, in 2006, the Seattle Conspirators flew to New York and dug it up.”

We'll have cryptic conversations:

Moscow Center’s instructions were explicit: For the meeting in Rome, its American spy would approach a stranger and ask, "Excuse me, could we have met in Malta in 1999?" "Yes indeed,” the answer should be. “I was in La Valetta, but in 2000.” According to Moscow’s instructions, the stranger would then slip the spy a false Irish passport, for travel on to Russia.

We'll make concessions to technology but only as long as we can use it in a way that you can imagine in a movie:

The affidavit also describes how “Russian Government Official #3 surreptitiously gave cash and a flash memory stick to RICHARD MURPHY," the defendant, during a "brush pass" at a New York-area train station. Just like it sounds, a “brush pass” of messages and money is executed swiftly, face to face.

We'll inhabit whole new identities:

But the FBI may never find out who they really are, because of another tried and true technique Moscow Center uses, according to the affidavit: obtaining the birth certificates of dead Canadians and Americans, with which they can build a whole new, false “legend” for their spies. The FBI affidavit turns up several. That trick, too, is as old as the hills, with an added virtue. Unlike the others, it could well prevent the FBI from ever finding out exactly who all these people really are.

Now we're caught, should we defect?

Link to Jeff Stein's summary of the case.

why we love football

An American blogger's view:

I can see why futbol is so big in Europe and Latin America. Largely arbitrary, controlled by officials who are in no way accountable to anyone, yet who are remarkably incompetent and indifferent. Everyone constantly pretends to be a victim, and rolls around on the ground crying until they get a subsidy they don't deserve. And then they waste the free kick, just giving up the ball. And then they run around in random patterns, hoping that someone will get lucky and do some actual work, so we can all celebrate.

(via The Browser)

living for the peak-end

The Boston Globe has a fantastic review of the research on how to get the most out of our holidays (or if you prefer, vacations):

For example, how long we take off probably counts for less than we think, and in the aggregate, taking more short trips leaves us happier than taking a few long ones. We’re often happier planning a trip than actually taking it. And interrupting a vacation — far from being a nuisance — can make us enjoy it more. How a trip ends matters more than how it begins, who you’re with matters as much as where you go, and if you want to remember a vacation vividly, do something during it that you’ve never done before. And though it may feel unnecessary, it’s important to force yourself to actually take the time off in the first place — people, it turns out, are as prone to procrastinate when it comes to pleasurable things like vacations as unpleasant ones like paperwork and visits to the dentist.

According to what psychologists call the "peak-end" rule, what we tend to remember from any experience are the most intense sensations (the peaks) and how it ends. So the optimium holiday isn't a long one, necessarily, but one that's packed full of events and ends on a high. Thomas Gilovich at Cornell says, "If you have to sacrifice how long your vacation is versus how intense it is, you want shorter and more intense.” It can help if you strategically break it up with dull stuff - it might actually be a good idea to take your work on holiday, providing it doesn't dominate your time:

Having a trip interrupted in effect turns what had been a more open-ended experience into a bounded one, triggering the peak-end rule. That means, says Gal Zauberman of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, that if we break up our trips strategically, we might actually get more enjoyment out of them. “If you partition after each peak experience, then you remember that piece as better than if you partition after each lousy thing,” he suggests.

So as soon as you've returned from your diving trip or your dinner under starlight, you should open your laptop and get to work on that revenue projection spreadsheet. Your partner or family will think you noble and wise.

Read the whole thing.

robert byrd was really old

To get an idea of how long the grand old man of the Senate was around, watch the first thirty seconds of this clip of President Kennedy making a commencement speech at Byrd's university. The president refers to "My old colleague Senator Bob Byrd," in the course of making a self-deprecating joke. Today, President Obama paid tribute to Byrd on his passing.

(via The Corner)

yeah!

the unvarnished truth about english football

Scott Heavey/Action Images

Tim Harford takes this opportune moment to summarise a few key points from the book Why England Lose, by statisticians Stefan Szymanski and Simon Kuper:

- England do about as well as you’d expect, given their size, economic power, proximity to football’s “core” in Western Europe, and footballing history. That is, you’d expect them to usually make the last 16, sometimes make the last 8, occasionally make the last 4 and make the final very rarely. And they do.

- Managers don’t make much difference to a team’s expected performance.

- There is no correlation between the qualifying performance (which in this particular campaign was outstanding) and the performance at the championship itself.

Looks pretty convincing today. Perhaps Capello was secretly working on behalf of this book's publicity campaign.

A psychologist might say that when it comes to football we have a persistent excess of positive illusions.

american telegraph

I like the Telegraph's Toby Harnden, not least because he was generous enough to blurb my book, and more importantly because at his best he offers an independent-minded perspective on American politics that the UK press often miss. But Toby's very opinionated pieces - presented as news rather than comment by his employer - play an inside game that most British readers will be baffled by.

Today's column is a case in point: the first two paragraphs don't report on reality, but instead are all about what a straw man he calls the "Washington cognescenti" think about the McChrystal affair. They're full of implied inverted commas (Wonderful Week, Ultimate Cool Cat, etc) and strongly flavoured by sarcasm and contempt. Before he tells us what's really going on, Toby is very concerned to let us know how a certain conspiracy of dunces is reporting on it. Before telling us what's going on, he wants us to know - a little too much, perhaps - that he stands apart from his peers.

There are two potential problems with this approach. The first is that if you spend too much time kicking against (what you perceive to be) a distorted conventional wisdom, your views inevitably get distorted in the opposite direction. There are several points at which today's column parts company with reality but I'll pick a couple. Toby says that Obama won the Democratic nomination on the back of anti-war rhetoric. In fact, he employed anti-Iraq war rhetoric (and he was always pro-Afghanistan). This really isn't a fine distinction. Second, he argues that Obama's decision reveals him as weak and thin-skinned, and that the man he's picked to fill the slot is more popular than he is and therefore unsackable; not the action of someone either weak or thin-skinned, I wouldn't have thought.

The larger problem is that most British readers don't care about Toby's noble battle with elite Washington opinion, which is itself a Washington game, or at least an American one. Jargon like "Beltway groupthink" goes over the head of most Brits. What they'd prefer from their Sunday newspaper, I suspect, is clear-eyed, perceptive reporting on American politics and policy.

But here we come to an interesting question. Perhaps Toby and his employers don't have British readers in mind when they publish pieces like this. After all, a large proportion (50%?) of the Telegraph's online readership will be Americans. Toby's anti-Washington rhetoric may go over the head of Brits but it's perfectly formulated to generate hits from American conservatives (indeed he borrows his tone  - the heavy sarcasm, the knee-jerk derision of Obama's motives and personality, the anger at "elites" - from US conservative blogs and politicians). His comment sections are often dominated by enthusiastic Americans.

One of the strategies that British newspapers will increasingly employ, as digital become dominant over  print, is a more aggressive targeting of eyeballs (and thus advertising revenue) from abroad. British newspapers are becoming global brands, and their smartest writers are adapting their styles to reflect this.

the age of the kvetch

The peerless David Brooks manages to find something new and interesting to say about the McChrystal affair, by placing it in a history of the changing relationship between the media and the establishment:

During World War II and the years just after, a culture of reticence prevailed. The basic view was that human beings are sinful, flawed and fallen. What mattered most was whether people could overcome their flaws and do their duty as soldiers, politicians and public servants. Reporters suppressed private information and reported mostly — and maybe too gently — on public duties...

Then, after Vietnam, an ethos of exposure swept the culture. The assumption among many journalists was that the establishment may seem upstanding, but there is a secret corruption deep down. It became the task of journalism to expose the underbelly of public life, to hunt for impurity, assuming that the dark hidden lives of public officials were more important than the official performances. Then came cable, the Internet, and the profusion of media sources. Now you have outlets, shows and Web sites whose only real interest is the kvetching and inside baseball.

In other words, over the course of 50 years, what had once been considered the least important part of government became the most important. These days, the inner soap opera is the most discussed and the most fraught arena of political life.

And into this world walks Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

Read the whole thing. I'm off to Oxford to listen to some clever people talking, so blogging will be light to non-existent today.

Enjoy the sunshine when you can.

U-S-A!

England did brilliantly yesterday (which in our terms, means not terribly) but we should also extend congratulations to the American team, which topped the group after a dashing last-minute win against Algeria. Sadly the Guardian cheapened the moment with a joke at Bill Clinton's expense. Here's the opening line of its match report:

Bill Clinton was at this game, probably reflecting for 92 minutes that he scored more often than this lot.

Not funny. Not funny at all.

if the iPod had been launched in 1977...

A time-travelling fantasy...via HowToBeARetronaut

al gore, crazed sex poodle?

1. 

Not my words. Portland newspaper the Oregonian has just printed a story it landed in 2009 but elected not to publish (for reasons unclear): a masseuse called to Gore's hotel room one evening in 2006 filed a police report (in January 2009) accusing him of sexual assault:

Earlier that evening, Gore addressed a near-capacity crowd in the Rose Garden's Theater of the Clouds, telling the audience that man-made global climate change is the most important moral challenge of our time. She said Gore changed into a bathrobe, spoke of his grueling travel schedule and need to relax and told her to call him "Al." While giving Gore an abdominal massage, she said he demanded that she go lower and soon grabbed her right hand and shoved it under the sheet...She called him a "crazed sex poodle" and tried to distract him, pointing out a box of Moonstruck chocolates on a nearby table. He went for the chocolates and then offered her some, cornering her, fondling her and shoving his tongue in her mouth to french kiss as he pressed against her.

It gets worse. If it's true, it's deeply unpleasant. If it's not true, it's also unpleasant, albeit in a different way.

The only bit that made me wonder about her report was this:

She...described his "violent temper, dictatorial, commanding attitude" -- what she termed a contrast from his "Mr. Smiley global-warming concern persona."

Wait - his global-warming persona is dictatorial and commanding, isn't it?

(via Ben Smith)

mcchrystal remainders

A few more small observations:

• Funnily enough, the most concise articulation of why McChrystal had to go comes from McChrystal, preparing for a Q&A session: "I never know what's going to pop out until I'm up there, that's the problem." Yes, it is.
• The ash cloud has claimed another victim. Rolling Stone's reporter Michael Hastings was only meant to be embedded with McChrystal's team for a few days. But they were grounded in Paris, and things loosened up...
• Was that Biden/bite me comment really disrespectful? It read to me like McChrystal making a joke at his own expense - ribbing his inability to deal smoothly with difficult questions.
• Bet you David McKiernan is enjoying this.

chop

I don't think Obama believes McChrystal to be disloyal. But he does think he's politically undisciplined, and at this level of command that's unsupportable. This was a screw-up too far; last autumn, remember, Obama gave his troublesome general fair warning, after McChrystal came to London and told the world he didn't think much of Biden's ideas on counter-terrorism. To let this latest lapse of discipline pass would have sent the wrong message to the Afghan team, and to the world.

Politically, Obama comes out well. He acted swiftly and decisively. His speech was gracious in its praise for McChrystal's service. Even conservative hawks agree he had to do it, and they're pleased with his selection of Petraeus as a replacement, because Petraeus, they feel, is one of them.

In terms of the bigger picture, it's not pretty. The current, much sweated-over strategy doesn't seem to be gaining traction (the article itself gave some clues as to why) and this change of command won't help. The in-fighting in the American team inspires no confidence at home and will only give hope to the Taliban. Karzai is still hopeless. I can't see any way forward except for a slow drawdown and exit over the next year.