To Run or Not To Run

As hurricane Florence spirals her way towards the Carolina coast, all the weather prognosticators are predicting massive waves, winds, and disaster. The storm is expected to wreak havoc with North and South Carolina, as well as Virginia. This is supposed to be a super storm to end all super storms. The state and local governments have declared mandatory evacuations and the weird sight of all lanes of traffic heading in only one direction is filling up the screens.

But, there are also people who are defiantly staying, managing to hoard bottle water, batteries, food and fuel and hunkering down in their homesteads. The news outlets are of course focusing on some of these people. While not overtly lauding them for the independence and their expressions of rugged individualism that American society find so commendable, the tone of the reports all seem to observe the action of these folks as an act of defiance in the face of officialdom and the inevitable acts of nature.

In some ways they are putting the lives of potential rescuers in peril if they end up changing their minds, usually at the worst time, i.e. when the options for evacuating them are nonexistent, even though the rescuers are always willing to put themselves on the line to save another human from certain peril.

The thing that I find interesting is the decision making process that these folks undergo in order to make that decision. The primal consideration might be driven by the fear of forever losing what they had. This thought process elicits in me the Stoic tenet and nothing is forever, and that material things are transient and temporary. Losing material things seem to be an inconsequential consideration when compared to a life.

Another consideration is the idea of a personal probability. The idea is that people have an ability to calculate a personal probability of failure or success for different situations. In this case, and I am projecting my own prejudices on this conjecture, that they probably have a belief in that nothing can happen to them because they are who they are, or that they have such abilities that they are able to survive the natural forces of our world. In short, they have the hubris to believe that they are immune to the forces of nature, whether it is by their won ego or by their belief in their capabilities, so they put a thumb on the scales of survival and increase their personal probability of survival.

Another way to look at it is that they are risk averse in their own way. People behave differently when faced with the same option but presented differently, as Kahneman and Tversky had discovered through their work. Given the same circumstance, people will inevitably be more conservative in their decision making if the proposition is made in terms of potential losses, whereas they will tend to be more aggressive if the proposition is made in terms of potential gains. Although the options of either losing a house versus gaining a life seem to be clear cut to me, it may not be to them, and their defensive response is to be conservative in terms of clinging to what they have materially. Of course coupling the aforementioned biases in the calculation of the personal probability in combination with the human proclivity to respond to more drastically to losses may explain this.

Officiating and Subjectivity

In the continuing conversations with my friends regarding the US Open situation, a few points were brought up with made me think about the rule itself and our expectations of the officials.

First the rule. Almost all sports have behavioral rules which do not exist in response to the on field play but rather exists as a deterrent to undesired behavior from the coaches and players. The logic to these kinds of rules are along the line of hitting them where it hurts, i.e. in the score of the game itself. Even though this deterrent never stopped anyone from behaving themselves the first time, the threat of further sanctioning, it is thought, will deter them from reacting errantly the second time around. What is different this time is that tennis has an escalating scale of punishment: a sanction with no consequences in the actual score, the awarding of a point, and then the awarding of an actual game. It is the second sanction which set Serena Williams off and resulted in the third sanction. In volleyball, we do have a sanctioning of a point and then the officials can deprive the team of the coach by ejecting him or her. In the greater scheme of things, the volleyball sanctioning affects the team psychologically rather than in terms of actual points.

I am not sure if I know of any other sport where the officials have so much power as to being able to definitively throw the game in favor of one player. This is an awful lot of power to invest in one person, which brings us to the other topic, which is:  the expectations we have of the officials.

The ideal model for a good official is the stoic and objective interpreter of the arcane arts of the rule makers. The are expected to know and understand the rules and adjudicate with Solomon-like righteousness and fairness; in presupposing this model of the official, we are assuming that these humans can strip away their humanity and very human emotions to serve the integrity of the game. This is an impossible task, even as we are entering an era of AI and automation the rule makers leave quite bit of room for human interpretation and allow the official to use their best judgement to best serve the integrity of the game. Officials are human, not only human, but human because being human is characteristic to be celebrated.

In looking back at the situation, Serena Williams behaved as a human when she interpreted the coaching penalty as an accusation that she is a cheater. The chair umpire behaved as a human when Serena called him a thief for taking a point and then a set away from her. Both behaved as any humans would except one is being castigated for showing her emotion, even if it was over the top and expressive. Carlos Ramos reacted emotionally when he assessed the third penalty, even though he didn’t show the emotions externally, it was an emotional reaction to her accusation. The difference is that we are assuming the official does not and should not react with emotion, we therefore interpret his actions as a due part of his duties as an official arbiter of the rules. Was he at fault? I would say no because he was at the mercy of the ambiguous rule. What constitute verbal abuse? Different people have different thresholds in the face of socially unacceptable behavior. As evidenced by the videos of McEnroe, Kyrgios and others, some of the officials just let the torrent of abuse roll off their backs while others react in other ways. Which brings us to the point of Serena’s contention: do the officials in tennis have a different threshold for men versus women? I would say that they do, they have demonstrated it time and again. The question is: do we allow the normalization of attitudes to equalize those thresholds, allow the situation to persist as status quo until humans alter their attitudes towards the genders or should we enforce equality immediately? Either option make it difficult for the official as they are asked to rule as they have always done while pretending nothing is wrong and suffer the wrath of players and fans alike because the inequality has been exposed publicly or to think about their own inherent bias they most often are not aware of consciously and rule accordingly, which robs them of the spontaneous skilled responses that they have worked hard to hone and perfect?

How did we get here? I still point at the rule itself, it is an imperfect rule and in this case it is a judgement call. In volleyball you cannot argue a judgement call, but in this era of instant replay, judgement calls are argued all the time amongst the fans. The more egregious point regarding the coaching rule is that it is exclusively a judgement and that judgement suffers from large amounts of variability and randomness, this is where the inclusion of human interpretation comes to serve to the detriment of the game. Even if the definition of “coaching” is specific in the rule book, it is still subject to human emotions and immediate reaction. Couple that with the escalating scale of justice imposed by the tennis organizing bodies, the capriciousness and randomness of human judgement inevitably play a large part in a game that is supposedly objectively adjudicated.

Some question then: is it desirable to have behavioral deterrent rules that punish the player? Is completely objective officiating desirable? If not, if we want to have that human element rather than having robots officiating, what are the limits for the human officials? Is it desirable to have any rules that is so broad and have so much impact on the outcome of the game be dependent on  the variability of human emotions?

I don’t know the answers, but it is interesting to consider.