Ruminations-Armistice Day 2021

Today is November 11. Armistice Day to many countries around the world.

Armistice Day is so named to celebrate the armistice signed between the Allies of World War I and Germany at Compiègne, France, for the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front of World War I, which took effect at eleven in the morning—the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" of 1918. Many Western countries have changed the name of the holiday from Armistice Day, with member states of the Commonwealth of Nations adopting Remembrance Day, and Veterans Day in the US. Changing the name of the day subtly changes the intended meaning of the day. Armistice Day is about remembering the end of the war to end all wars — an optimistic mis-foreshadowing if there ever was one. Remembrance Day evokes those who lost their lives in defense of their beliefs. In putting the names of the days in context, the first great war dealt an extensive blow to the psyche of the European continent. A hundred plus years later, the effect of the war is still affecting the way Europeans think, react, and feel whenever large human conflicts are the subject of discussion. It affects the way they memorialize the day, with the subtle pinning of the red poppy flower on the lapels of the general populace and remembrances of the war dead in the battlefields.

In the US, the turning of the day into Veteran’s Day changes the focus of the day to the living veterans, even though the remembrance of those who died are never far from the surface: such activities as the many ceremonies placing flags on the graves of those who died fighting the war and the remembrances at the war memorials and tombs of unknown soldiers — the focus is clearly on honoring the living veterans; a chance to give thanks to those who had survived.

This is a clear illustration of the pragmatic bent of the American culture. My thought is that by culture, we Americans as a people are not so inclined to be elegiac. We are a culture of action, doing what is practical and immediate. Hence the turn towards honoring the living is a far more practical thing to do on this day of remembrance than contemplating the past. This is not an indictment; indeed, it is very natural for our cultural personality. Afterall, pragmatism is an American philosophy.

As I think about this, I think about the inadvertent omissions in our thoughts when we changed the name of the day. By changing the name of the day, we unintentionally change our internal conversations with ourselves about the meaning of sacrifice, or the altruistic nature of responsibility and commitment. We miss the necessary discussions about the meaning of  altruism and the psychic demands placed on those who willingly sacrifice their most precious possession, their lives, in the service of a greater good, fully knowing and understanding the role that they will play in the future of civilization. Sometimes I think about those who have passed as they are observing our present in which we are living and wondering whether they think if it was worth their altruism.

On a greater stage, I think about the role of the armed conflict in our society. Of the role that our organized fighting forces play in our own geopolitical chess match. We make noble the cause by waxing poetic about those who willingly give their all, sacrificing their individual good for the benefit of our greater good — fully knowing that their lives may be the price they pay. What very few contemplate in times of geopolitical conflict is the role and responsibility of the leaders; their need to critically self-question, to contemplate the need  to minimize the call upon those who are willing because every life is valuable, every loss of life is too costly. I would hazard to guess that the best of our leaders, both military and civilian, are kept awake at night, contemplating the intricate calculus of making their decisions in the widest and narrowest contexts possible. Yet, I also know that there are blackhearts who does not even think of the sacrifices of the altruistic and haphazardously commit the lives of other humans in the service of their own vainglorious self-serving purposes.

Another thought that crops up is the formalism that we place on the day and on our responses on the day. All around the world, we honor the war dead on November 11, which leads to many other questions. Why don’t we honor the war dead on the other 364 days of the year? Who are we memorializing? Unless the person who had passed is a relative or a friend, there is actually very little or no remembrances of their person or their deeds. Are we going through these exercises to assuage our own guilt for living rather than give remembrance to the dead? What if we took that emotion and exercise in remembrance and turned the attention to the lessons that we ought to have learned and propagated to the future regarding the meaning of the self-sacrifice that the headstones concretely exemplify? Are we deriving the lessons that we should be deriving from the lessons of altruism we are observing?

One thing that has bothered me throughout the years is the obligation that we have imbued our interactions with living veterans. Many are sincere when they say” “Thank you for your service.” While I have no arguments with the sentiment, I wonder if we are commoditizing that sentiment by making it an obligation to say the phrase to anyone that has been identified as a veteran. Once again, are we parroting the phrase for our own benefit because we feel it is our obligation? No doubt there is ample sincerity in the spoken gesture, but how much of it is due to the obligation that we feel?

In my mind, parroting the phrase reactively is a conversation stopper. It pre-emptively arrests any further discussions into the war experience, the horrors and negativity associated with armed conflicts are stopped cold in their tracks because the speaker has met their obligation to laud the veteran for their service. Indeed, it stops all kinds of conversations, conversations about how many veterans with PTSD are living in the streets because we —the people who make up the government — are unwilling to face the realities of the aftermath of war, we would rather sweep it under the national rug. Conversations about the suicide rates of veterans. Conversations about how we are taking care of the veterans for the rest of their lives.

It is worth saying that the idea of the volunteer army is that those who are willing are depending on those who are unwilling or unable, to meet needs of the willing after the war. Needs that are a result of the decision to commit the willing to the conflict; the after-effect imposed upon those who are willing. This is not a partisan issue, both sides of the wide political divide have failed abysmally in this regard. Those on both sides of the political chasm have taken every chance to make a cape of the flag and performing in their own self-directed political drama while running away from the responsibilities of their positions.

To conclude, I am not saying that calling November 11 Remembrance Day assures that the general populace will naturally conform to contemplating the greater meanings of personal altruism that motivates the willing to give up their lives. I am also not saying that everyone who says: “Thank You for Your Service” are disingenuous in their intent. I am not a veteran, so I can not speak for their emotions as they hear that phrase. I am speaking to my own skepticism of the intent of some when I sense that they are parroting the phrase as an obligation. 

I am, however, serious about using the day as a day of reflection on the meaning of altruism, service to the greater good of society rather than to the self as a regular habit on this day, once a year. I don’t think it is too much to ask.

Ruminations-Why Did I Cry?

I cried happy tears as Jordan Larson collapse to the court after her last kill of the tournament landed at Ariake arena. The euphoria was indescribable and uncontrollable. In the aftermath of that match and watching the players, coaches, and support staff hug and cry together, I continued my emotional catharsis until I was able to get to sleep in the early morning hours.

As I read through the postings on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, I noticed people expressing surprise at their own emotional responses, as well as the responses of other people who had cried tears of joy at that moment. Perhaps a more reserved response is the more rational one, but I doubt it.

I can’t explain why so many felt the same emotions as I did, all I can do it try to explain my own reaction.

I first became aware of volleyball when I saw the fuzzy footage of the 1976 Olympic competition in Montreal. I remember seeing a small man, playing a big man’s game, digging everything in sight. It was the great Stan Gościniak of Poland, and I was hooked.

In the run up to the 1980 Olympics, I became aware of the USA women’s national team, I learned that they had a great chance at winning gold. I was excited, yet I knew next to nothing about the team nor the stories that swirled around them until much later in my life. Then, the USSR invaded Afghanistan and the world changed. The western democracies boycotted the Moscow games and politics interrupted the flow of what was supposed to be.

Ever since then, I have followed the USA men’s and women’s teams. I went to undergrad and then grad school, I played a little pickup in gradual school, I was a never-bloomer, a fat and slow grad student playing with freshmen and sophomores. I loved it, even though I was out of my league and got my butt handed to me every time I played. I continued to play in rec leagues after I graduated and started working. During a league night, one of my teammates asked me to help him coach a 14 and under girls’ team and I have been coaching ever since. I caught the fever.

True to my Type A nature, I dove into coaching: reading, going to clinics for both players and coaches, and talking volleyball with anyone who love it as much as I did. It was through coaching that I met John Kessel, amongst the many other things that he taught me over Mexican food and beer, he taught me the history of American volleyball.

It was while learning to coach that I met Arie Selinger in a coaching clinic in Chicago. A connection to that 1980 and 1984 USA team. It was also through coaching that I met Janet Baier (Howes), one of the original members of that 1980 team. An undersized middle, Janet was supposed to play in 1980 but was denied that chance. She was then replaced on the roster in 1984. Janet worked as an official and she also coached junior volleyball. While she was doing those things, she also always had a presentation with her. She had all her memorabilia from her time on the national team, all of them. She would show them to kids during her volleyball clinics and she would regale them with her stories. A true ambassador of the game of volleyball. She would tell me stories about Flo, and her beloved teammates on that 1980 team. Janet was usually a very upbeat person until the subject of the boycott comes up, then she visibly darkens, and the vitriol comes out. She never forgot and she never forgave. The pain of losing her chance competing in the Olympics gnaws at her even decades later.

All that personal history serves to give an idea of what shaped my mindset about the Olympics and the USA Women’s National Team. I always felt that there was unfinished business for that group of athletes, I deeply felt they were owed a debt for the missed chance to compete and claim their spot in volleyball history. It  was a debt that someone needed to pay them, and us, the American volleyball fan.

As I became more involved and educated in coaching, I started to learn more of the history of American volleyball from the people I met through coaching volleyball, as well as experiencing history in the intervening years. Every four years I lived and died following Olympic volleyball: 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and now 2020 (2021).  I followed the national teams in their journey to the quadrennial in the other three years of the quad. I watched players grow from club players to college players to national team players. I celebrated with every triumph and suffered with every defeat. I followed the scant media reports on the technical and strategic nuances of each win and loss, even though I was always on the outside looking in. While I would not consider my experience unique or comparable with the experiences of the coaches and players throughout the years, I would have to give myself credit for being committed to the cause. I am sure I am not alone; I know  others who have had the same fervent desire to see the USA women’s team get their gold. The silvers and bronze were great achievements, but to reach the top of the podium is the goal.  I suffered with the team and my fellow fanatics in 1984, 2008, and 2012 when we were so close, and I cheered mightily in 1992 and 2016 as the teams won the last match of their Olympics. Buried deep inside me, I had a mental ledger to balance, a debt that needed to be made good.

I knew rationally that I was being overly emotional and small minded, but rationality had nothing to do with what I was feeling. This was volleyball.

You ask me why I cried when the 2020 edition of the USA women’s team won gold? I cried because the ledger is balanced, the debt has been made good. I cried because Flo and Janet did not live long enough to see it. I cried because all the players and coaches who were a part of this team throughout history finally know that the mission is accomplished, built on the foundations that they provided for this group of #12Strong. I cried because the chase is finally over, and we can reset the balance to my personal volleyball scales. We can start anew, without that sword of Damocles hanging over us.

Of course, that is just me.

Ruminations-Medals and the Competition Format

Swimmer Lilly King rightfully went off on the general sporting audience for belittling the accomplishments of the silver and bronze medalists in these games. https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/olympics/lilly-king-slams-bull-5bexpletive-5d-mentality-of-not-celebrating-silver-and-bronze-medals-at-olympics/ar-AAMKAPV

The attitude that only gold matters is rampant throughout all the global cultures, there have been trolls on the Chinese social media platform Weibo taking the Chinese athletes to task for not earning more gold, even as China is leading the gold count.

King is correct in her indignation concerning the attitude from the folks back home, and it is admirable that she was strong enough to speak her truth. It is difficult to even make it on the USA swimming team, let alone make the finals of these games. Of course, that has never stopped people from spouting off before.

Part of the general public’s cognitive dissonance is their understanding of the purpose of the Olympic games. The Olympic motto, as it was amended on July 20, 2021 became: Faster, Higher, Stronger - Together”. The addition of the word together reminds everyone that these games are meant to bring the world together in celebration of competition amongst all nations. The focus on earning a gold puts the focus on the winning and not on the competing. The emphasis is of course human, we look at competition as a means to an end, that the sole purpose of competition is to win at all costs rather than in the comradery of competing with the world.

The other influence on our thought process is that most think of winning as a domination of the opponent, a declaration of being the best of the best period. In reality, the Olympic competition is not formatted towards selecting the best of the best for all time. The Olympics are formatted to create a specific opportunity, at a specific time, demanding a concentrated effort by the athletes to perform under a high stress environment. It is selecting the best at a moment in time. Which introduces a large amount of uncertainty to the proceedings as well as mental pressures on the athletes under stressful conditions beyond that of normal competition. It is not just another championship, another meet, another series of games. It is the Olympics.

There are many ways to determine the winners in the sporting world. Each format affects the nature of winning. The amount of time that elapses between each stage of competition also affects that nature, whether we pay attention to it or not.

In the world of the NBA, NHL, MLB, and MLS, each stage of the head-to-head competition between teams are divided into a best of format, where teams are required to compete in a predetermined series of odd number of games and the one who wins over 50% of the predetermined number of games is the winner. This format ensures that the best team wins, without doubt. If you can beat your opponent more often than your opponent  can beat you, the nature of the win is unequivocal.  The probability of the underdog triumphing over the favorite is minimal, if all goes as planned, i.e. discounting the occurrence of injury etc.

In the Olympics format, as in the in the Super Bowl, college basketball, and most other collegiate sports, it is the bracket play format. The probability of the underdog winning is much greater because if you are not at the top of your game at that point, in that space, your chances of winning is greatly reduced. In sporting lore, we talk about having a puncher’s chance, this is the situation where the puncher increases their probability of upending the expected results. We, as fans, look forward to the upsets, whether it is because of one team overachieving, the other team underachieving, or whether it was just by fluke; the results stand forever, there are no mulligans. This is why we all love March Madness as we live for the spectacle of the lower seed beating the higher seed.

While the college basketball March Madness is held over a month, and the NCAA volleyball playoffs for almost all divisions are held over three weeks with each team playing two matches every week, the Olympics are much more compressed: two weeks of competition with the first week devoted to pool play every other day, while  the second week is planned for sudden death bracket play.

The Olympic schedule is super compressed for all sports because the schedule for the entire enterprise is two weeks. As a comparison, the Volleyball Nations League takes place over six weeks and the teams playing three matches a week on three consecutive  days.  In some ways the consecutive days of competition and the week-to-week travelling makes the tournament challenging, but each team is given the freedom of changing the rosters from week-to-week. While the roster is set for the Olympics, with designated alternates waiting outside of the Olympic Village if injuries occur.

Most of the general public does not understand nor care that the format of the contest, the format of the selection process, and the nature of athletics, has an impact on the results of the competition.  The athletes are asked to perform at a predetermined time every four years, and they have planned their training  so that they peak in those two weeks.  You cannot afford to have a bad day. A bad day in those two weeks means that all the training, learning, and effort are impacted and competing at the highest level during those two weeks may not happen as planned.

It also means that there is a large amount of uncertainty in the contests. Depending on the sport, the winner may not be the best of the best for all time, instead they had achieved their best performance at that moment in time at that designated place, as planned. They need to be the best at dealing with their own human nature towards pessimism as the competition evolves, the best at maintaining their personal “flow” at all times, and they need to have the best athletic reactions while under stress, for those two weeks. Indeed, the gold medal winners may also need to be the luckiest out of all the competitors in those two weeks.

Those factors make significance of recognizing the top finishers more important. In examining the great number of things going right, the massive amount of uncertainty that happens in a single elimination format, it is very plausible that any one of the top competitors could have won the gold. Depending on the circumstances, environment, and a myriad of factors, one can arguably say that even those competitors outside of the top three could have won it all. There are too many factors that must go right in order for one person or team to win it all.

The cliché of just making it into the Olympics puts you at the pinnacle of your chosen sport is true, because you have a chance to compete if you are just present. Getting a medal at the Olympics means that you  have been able to not only train physically but excel at maintaining your mental composure while successfully processing the challenges presented to you in a compressed two-week period. Being the top three also doesn’t mean that lady luck did not smile upon you, it means that lady luck gave you enough margin to put you at the top three; and that, is worthy of celebration.

 

Ruminations-Acatalepsy

The word acatalepsy appeared on my radar a few weeks ago. I looked it up and the definition from Merriam Websters is as follows: 

Acatalepsy (Noun): 

1: an ancient Skeptic doctrine that human knowledge amounts only to probability and never to certainty 2: real or apparent impossibility of arriving at certain knowledge or full comprehension 

Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary attribute the word to the sceptic school of Carneades (214-129/8 BCE) 

The reason the word caught my attention is that it perfectly describes my present belief regarding my own philosophical outlook; that my perception of now is probabilistic in nature and the certainty of what I know and see are uncertain and subject to randomness and any inference that I make about the future is uncertain and subject to that randomness. 

It hasn’t always been this way. As with most children, my worldview comes from my faith in the people around me, that they are giving me the straight dope; what they believe and what they tell me is certain and unwavering. Most adults are insightful enough to know that explaining the uncertainties of life to children will inevitably end up in frustration, for both the explainer as well as for the explained to. The fluid state of reality is such that the inevitable follow up questions tend to grow exponentially as the uncertainties concatenate and the naïve and innocent minds will inevitably find the loopholes in our explanations gaping. 

It is easier for adults to give young minds a set of absolute beliefs and dogmas to follow temporarily so that they can at least manage to live in this limited reality long enough to learn about uncertainties; we also hope that young minds can achieve a level of critical thinking which will allow them to question their first beliefs and dogmas intelligently as they gain more experience. 

Some can navigate this journey into the world of critical thinking as they gain more experience and come to understand the complexities and nuances of the real world; others hold steadfastly to their very first beliefs: some do it because it is just easier, while other cannot fathom the idea of randomness and uncertainty being the primary state of being. 

Historical lessons became set in stone and no amount of nuance or interpretational ability was allowed because it was easier to teach. The math and sciences became a recitation of accepted facts and figures. Of course, the way math was taught gave the students no recourse: if there is a number, then that number is correct according to the tradition. Math is never that way, the creativity and wonders of mathematics became lost in our desire to be deterministic. 

 My formal education reinforced this deterministic viewpoint. As an engineering student, my belief in determinism hardened into stubborn dogma. I became enamored with the idea that the world is certain, that the errors from my calculations and experimentation comes from unwanted noise — which is minimal— i.e. the signal to noise ratio is very large, so the introduced errors are inconsequential and negligible. My initial foray into probability reinforced my dogma, we wrestled with coin flipping, die tossing, and Polya’s urn problems until we were blue in the face. These seem to be childish games that are distracting our attention from the important work of engineering. The importance of how measurement errors, quantization errors, and approximation errors in simulations were lost on me. I took Einstein’s quote: “God does not play dice” to heart and was in denial about the role that randomness play in the physical world. As I worked away at my control system classes in gradual school, I became more predisposed to the optimal control course that I took because I did not have to disturb my beautiful solutions with small signals; while at the same time was much less predisposed to the optimal estimation course that I had to take at the same time, where I had to go through great lengths to filter out the randomness. Kalman filtering was just some mental gymnastics that I had to work my way through to get rid of those pesky noise that are predetermined to be large enough to be a nuisance and small enough to be handled efficiently. 

As I entered the work force, where I had to measure real signals, not signals cooked up by my professor to fit into an exam problem, reality intruded. It became apparent that the noise that we are measuring as a part of our experiment was many times greater than the signal that we were wanting to measure. First thing that occurred to us was that our measuring equipment was crap; so, we bought better, more expensive equipment, but even then, the relative magnitude of the noise was beyond what I was expecting. This was a cataclysmic shock to my philosophical foundational beliefs regarding reality. 

As I came to terms with the way reality really behaves, I became more interested in those things that I had subconsciously rejected as perturbations on reality. Probability and statistics became grudgingly interesting and important. As I progressed through the bastardized corporate versions of statistics in the form of Statistical Process Control (SPC), Quality Control, Six Sigma etc. I became better acquainted with the ideas of statistics. I read through some of the introductory texts of statistics with interest as I became a convert to SPC. The ideas of being in control and out of control, special and common cause variations crept into my vocabulary; run charts became a natural part of my subconscious. I took the SPC view of engineering processes into my outside life and looked at my real world reality in those terms, much as I had taken the dynamical systems vocabulary and framework into the way I looked at reality when I was introduced to control theory. 

 Even as I came to value the understanding the uncertainties in the physical world, I clung on to the old paradigm that is best expressed by the Michaelangelo quote. 

“Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” - Michelangelo 

My belief was that reality existed under all the noise and randomness, much like the sculpture under the stone that Michaelangelo referred to. As such, I felt that it was possible to completely decouple the uncertainties and randomness structurally from the “reality”. Which is how I came to the belief that we can use the SPC tools in volleyball. The idea was to treat each player or each team as an industrial process, that we can identify the underlying physical process of the player or the team by applying the SPC and inferential statistical tools to identify the human capabilities of an individual or a team. I was hoping to gain an understanding of the essential ability of the athlete or the team so that I can devise training regimens which directly addresses the performance weakness identified by the SPC analysis. It was a naïve and simple-minded approach, one that I undertook because of my adherence to my rigid world view: randomness and uncertainties can be readily filtered and reality made whole by proper application of statistical tools, and we can make good decisions based on incomplete statistical information because of the previously stated belief. 

Yet, as I investigated further, I realized the immensity of the data set needed for each athlete and each player just so that I can indulge in my fantasy of consistently inferring and identifying training needs from pure statistical analysis. 

 A critical mistake I made was to underestimate the complexity and the deep coupling between the various parts of the process I was trying to measure, i.e. I underestimated human complexity, I assumed that we can easily decouple and measure parameter within humans and that the assumptions we make to measure isolated parameters would be simple and leave the parameters unaffected: I assumed that humans are as simple as machines and industrial processes. I realized quickly that I was on the wrong path as the complexity of human reaction forced me to rethink my ideas. 

 In addition, I had approached the measurement process in an open loop manner, I assumed that if I gathered enough data the numbers will tell me where to look, what to look for, that the calculated data will cause rational conclusions to jump out. Not adequately setting expectations meant that the data had little or no meaning. I did not know the question that I wanted to ask, so the answers that I got had no meaning. The data can and will mislead us unless we knew what we are looking for. 

 All my thinking does not, however, lead to the conclusion that the Moneyball idea is fundamentally flawed, it is saying that reliance on just numbers is as silly as relying on just “gut feel”. I cringe when I hear managers in corporations say: what does the numbers say, or the numbers will tell us the truth, or our decision is decided by the metrics that we can measure and not what we should measure. I also cringe when I hear coaches say: the numbers determine who plays and who doesn’t, or our numbers are why we lost, or we need to train to improve these numbers rather than improving our skills or our game play. 

“The world cannot be understood without numbers. But the world cannot be understood with numbers alone.” —Hans Rosling  

We mistakenly rely on numbers as the bulwark for our arguments because people tend to substitute numbers for their lack of expertise: i.e. I am not sure of what I am saying, but I have lots of numbers to prove it. 

There should be a hybrid approach which takes advantage of the salient qualities of both experiential knowledge while backing up the experience with good Design of Experiments practices. Being biased one way or the other will inevitably introduce fallacies and biases into the decision-making process, which leads to bad decisions. 

As my experience with uncertainty and randomness evolved, I changed my beliefs, I adjusted my assumptions about the role that randomness plays. I no longer look at the physical world as having a pure truth, i.e. I no longer see the statue in the stone that will inevitably be uncovered through my efforts. I see the randomness as part of the reality rather than as noise that we can filter out. I do believe that there are some noises that can be filtered out, but not all of it. I see our role as being able to discern and identify those noises that can be filtered and those that cannot; our more important role is to make better decisions DESPITE having those pesky random events constantly obfuscating our understanding of our processes, be they in the sciences or in sports. I now see reality as the parable of the blind men trying to describe an elephant. We “see” different parts of the whole and we come to an understanding of what we see, but our perception should be changing as we learn more by perceiving more of the elephant through our experience and measurements, even as the elephant is constantly changing. We must continue to gain experience and take measurements just to keep up. 

 So, this was a very long way to explain why the word acatalepsy describes my view of reality.