The Allure of Binary Drama
Why all binary sports are fake. Especially American politics.
I grew up loving basketball. Well, it’s more appropriate to say that I was dipped into the culture of basketball from a young age. Some of my first sports memories were of fast cars and football. My dad drove a Porsche 356 Cabriolet and took me to Riverside as a kid. I was a huge fan of the Miami Dolphins and their perfect season. All of my 70s era Converse and hightop socks were Miami colors. I couldn’t love basketball because it was in third place. The first time I played I didn’t understand that I was supposed to be on offense and defense. In the end, I was under 5 feet tall until sophomore year in high school and could never palm the rock. My younger brothers all grew taller and stuffed my jumpers. It was love hate at long last.
As the game changed over the years I became disenchanted. I was, in fact, a halfway decent defensive player. I could survive a game of HORSE and never shied away from Hustle or TipIn. I could run in at least one game in any average park and still played on the regular up until age 33. For a short player who also played beach volleyball, I had hops and quick reflexes. When I lived in Boston in 92, the three point game changed everything. Nobody charged the lane. The game started to resemble what it is today, a lot of changeup for the fall away jumpshot beyond the arc. As a kid, shots from the top of the key were considered selfish. Driving inside the key was manly. We loved players like Barkley and Malone. The young kids were calling fouls for the most okeydoke boxing out, when they even bothered to get all the way down court.
One thing that never changed about basketball, and all of the sports we love to hate or hate to admit that we love, is that nothing is appealing about a three way tie. It has got to be the worst thing ever.
Non Binary
When I started to get into business intelligence and the prototypes of data science, I started to find sports interesting for Moneyball reasons. I was one of the few people with that idea, but it cut no mustard with management. The statistical thing about sports that was the most mind-bending to me was the idea that a seven game series in baseball was more or less arbitrary in determining who was actually the best team. Even so, baseball was the major sport with the most game in the regular season (162) so that filtered through most of the noise. But the World Series was essentially a tossup. That’s why winning the the pennant was the biggest deal of all. Just getting there gave you even odds of winning the the whole
In basketball on the other hand, there are so many possessions and scoring opportunities in a single game, that you pretty much know who is the better team in every game. Ahem, Detroit Pistons, this past weekend. Pathetic. Nevertheless, all of the sports without any exception are structured so that tournaments give us an opportunity to boil the whole season down to answer the question “Who’s Number One?”
That’s always the most satisfying question to ask, and when it comes to the various sports, each has strengths and weaknesses that help to make that determination clear for us. For the diehards who paint ourselves in team colors, the true fans who are likely to know how our teams are doing during the entire season, and the occasional fans who basically tune in during the playoffs. And yes, if you are one of those objectionable nebbishes who use the term ‘sportsball’ I’ve got words for you and it ain’t beanbag. Most people will debate whether or not America is a ‘Christian nation’ but you’ve got to be incredibly gullible or perverse to think we are not a Sports nation. We are a sports nation in spades. So I do not apologize for using all of the metaphors. America is our home team.
Just what if there is no actual and true number one? What if we’re not being as properly efficient in determining who are the winners and losers, even with our historical regressions over seasons. The new Amazon oriented stat freaks have begun to encroach on our ideas and traditions of figuring out the champions from the chumps. It may be marginal now, but what if?
Before I get into that I want to assert the bottom line about sports that echoes something I heard somewhere this past week. Nobody wants a three way competition.
Three Is a Tragic Number
Forget about the time you actually had to be chaperoned on a date. I believe there’s something fundamental in our evolutionary biology that snaps our attention to the binary and rightfully so. The binary abstraction allows focus. As soon as the focus is broken, things get freaky. But there are any number of ways to violate what we think is orderly. Remember this video?
Imagine the dynamics if you will, of a three way basketball game. Suddenly, a lot of things break, but a lot of new things emerge that are fascinating. There are a number of complications when we break basketball from a series of two team competitions to a series of three team competitions. So here’s the setup.
Each team defends one goal and can score on the other two. Same four periods, same halftime. That’s it. Simple, right? Nope. A two way competition is a simplification that strips out coalition dynamics. When you add additional competitors, it splits attention for resource allocation. In Tri-ball, you are literally more tribal.
Consider a home game. Your team is stronger. Do the other two teams gang up against you? Well, maybe in the first quarter, then the tables turn. If I’m down after the first quarter, how well have I got a feeling for the other two teams. The tradeoff isn’t clear. Maybe they will continue to cooperate a combined press, or maybe there will be a defection. Suddenly it’s like the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Coaching completely changes. New strategies and tactics emerge.
For example, the team with no chance of winning can determine which of the other two win by choosing who to attack or defend. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s a rock paper scissors relationship with each team having a particular advantage. You’d have to have a longer season to round robin your way across all combinations of 12 teams. It turns out that the formula is C(n, r) = n! / (r!(n - r)!) = 220 for 12 teams. That’s quite a season.
What’s interesting is that I think a three-team game can actually be more deterministic in identifying the best team than two up games. That’s because when you’re playing just one team, it only tests one set of capabilities. When you’re going up against two teams simultaneously you have to demonstrate a richer set of skills. In baseball, you can select a different starting pitcher and relievers based upon how the opposing team hits, that particular aspect of the game adds dimensionality, but nowhere nearly as much as if each baseball game were a three team competition.
Parallel Competitions
Aside from being a great 80s electronic song by by Kraftwerk, the Tour de France is arguably the most highly competitive sporting event we have. Here we see a prime example of parallel competition in which multiple teams are competing all at once. Yet there’s something special about this which is missing from other similar events.
In 100m dash, in track and field, you certainly have head to head to head competition. The same goes for swimming events, but what the competitor in lane one does to change the conditions in lane four is negligible. So this kind of competition is really not interactive as compared to basketball where the position of players on the field makes all of the difference. Same with football, soccer, rugby which are strongly interactive. The exception would be the longer distance events like the marathon or the steeplechase where there is some jostling, but those are weakly interactive.
Auto racing. I love motorsports so here is where we come close to the ultimate competition. You have multiple teams competing, the condition of the field of play is affected by the position of opposing teams. When cars have to pit, when contact between racers forces change, the condition of the surface of the road itself, because weather is a factor as well as the amount of rubber or oil on any particular racing line. So this is strongly interactive, but weakly coupled. When it comes down to it, auto racing is an individual sport and opposing teams will not cooperate for any length of time. Call this dynamic coupling, or coalition formation. It may happen from time to time, but in long distance cycling this is fundamental.
Unique Challenges of Cycling
Drafting, which is common in long distance running and auto racing, is more fundamental to cycling than pretty much any other sport. While it comes into play for short periods in competitive yachting, cycling has a full language of tactics for it.
As your team sits in the peloton, the large group of cyclists moving at the same pace, multiple teams are forming coalitions to take advantage of drafting. You’re often safer in the middle of the pack, and of course many team members are selected just for that ability to keep tight and conserve energy for leaders. Some leaders will then perform a breakaway, and that changes the structure of the entire race.
The Tour has multiple challenges owing to the fact that there are typically 150 individual riders split across 20 teams competing simultaneously. There are 21 different days of racing, each in a unique type of course. Some stages are sprints, sometimes there’s a very long stage, sometimes there’s a hill climb, generally followed by a treacherous high speed descent. A crash at any point in the main peloton is much more consequential than in just about any other sport.
Each day times are calculated and particular racers are chosen to wear colored jerseys that indicate their particular leadership in the tour. The yellow jersey is awarded daily to the rider with the lowest overall time. The green is award to the rider with the most overall points for winning sprints and stages. The young rider will get the white jersey if he is under 26 and wins the most points for those riders. The polka dot is awarded for the king of the mountains. Each of these four jerseys are part of the competition which changes the tactics as they could be changed each day.
This is why I think the Giro and the Tour de France exemplify the most meritocratic and well-determined competitions. They reward teams and individuals in parallel competitions that are strongly coupled and strongly interactive in varying environments that reward different tactics in unpredictable conditions.
A Game Theoretic Society
Although today I don’t want to get into the details of what our American meritocracy is and how it works, because there is a lot of subtlety I have added to my understanding since I wrote the Meritocracy Question.
Nevertheless, I would venture to say particularly during this election primary season that we are significantly bogged down in our dualities. That is to say fundamentally that Left vs Right is reductive of our pluralism and it is unfortunately not a false dichotomy. I want to argue that our parliamentary system is broken and the only thing that’s going to fix it is more parallel competition.
I cannot remember from whom recently I heard it, but essentially we have started down the wrong path in our Congressional capacity when we began to give over to domineering leadership in the two parties. This has lead to monster-sized omnibus bills, lack of accountability and transparency, not to mention a kind of bi-partisanship that stinks up the whole joint with compromise.
As I am overly impressed with Alexander Karp’s latest book on the failure of citizenship in Silicon Valley in particular is leading us to a need for more desperate reform along lines we’re not used to discussing. Here is the best summary I can find apropos this discussion.
The experience of living in the United States, for many, has grown too fractured, too disparate to allow for such a broad aspiration to something common and shared. It is almost as if Americans have ceded their ability to draft the country’s cultural history to others, abandoning space for any such discussion to the editors of foreign textbooks about America—to histories being written by others from the outside looking in. Indeed, the editors of the textbook American Culture, published in 2008 principally for students outside the United States learning English as a second language, offered a pithy and perhaps unintentionally critical assessment of the status of the American national project: “The study of American culture has moved from being a search for a national character or a national identity to focus on American conflicts, within and without.” The issue is that humans will inevitably seek out ways of finding intimacy and connection with strangers, with people they will never meet. Should we challenge the nation’s role in that process? Or allow it to step into a breach that would otherwise be filled by an ascendant consumer culture, in which identity and belonging are defined by what one can afford to buy and, as a result, one’s caste and wealth? This is, perhaps, the modern left’s most glaring strategic mistake. It claims to be committed to curbing the excesses of the market, but its unwillingness to reckon with and take seriously the good that can come from a national culture or shared identity has only enabled the very excesses it purports to oppose.
Karp, Alexander C.; Zamiska, Nicholas W.. The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West (pp. 193-194). (Function). Kindle Edition.
In short, whenever we find something strategically wrong in our culture and politics, we tend to blame the Left or the Right which in turn, according to party politics and rhetoric must be countered. So we are full of ‘fake news’ because in the end all we know is Ford vs Chevy, Red vs Blue, Coastal vs Flyover.
We do have a shared national culture, but we are not expressive enough in our pluralism to admit our shared values, because ultimately our political dichotomy is real and unfortunately we have politicized culture. We pretend that only our side is moral and that the country goes to hell when we lose. It’s absolutely foolish to believe that there are always only two alternatively integral solutions to our social and political dilemmas. But we have been playing binary basketball instead parallel cycling, and we already know that our ‘winners’ are not the best we can do.
I believe every one of those tactical and strategic aspects of competition we can well understand in sports can be applied, game theoretically, to our democratic processes. First we have to stop being so dramatic.
Impressive.