When the Green Bay Packers suffered an embarrassing loss to the New York Giants in which they looked overmatched and outplayed, it could have demoralized a team with too many starters and stars on the sidelines in casts and on crutches.
Three days later, almost everyone expected a verbal lambasting from coach Mike McCarthy.
“But he gave this speech,” said nose tackle B.J. Raji, “and it just threw me.”
McCarthy quoted Corinthians from the Bible: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
“The room was in complete silence,” said Raji. “It was not a long speech. I was surprised. And shocked. And kind of impressed. Losing a four-touchdown game on prime time, that’s cause for a fire-and-brimstone type of speech. It just shows how much he understands the players he’s coaching. I think the message got across.”
The message was to learn from the loss and convert it into something useful and therefore something meaningful.
You’ll never hear McCarthy say he’s out to prove the doubters wrong. You’ll never hear him vent his defenses to critics. One of his survival tactics is that he doesn’t waste his energy on anything he perceives as negative.
“I feel the ability to grow the positive is the best way to accomplish things,” McCarthy said last week in a one-on-one interview.
Daily Archives: December 12, 2012
UNDERSTANDING IS A POOR SUBSTITUTE FOR CONVEXITY (ANTIFRAGILITY)
The point we will be making here is that logically, neither trial and error nor “chance” and serendipity can be behind the gains in technology and empirical science attributed to them. By definition chance cannot lead to long term gains (it would no longer be chance); trial and error cannot be unconditionally effective: errors cause planes to crash, buildings to collapse, and knowledge to regress.
Something central, very central, is missing in historical accounts of scientific and technological discovery. The discourse and controversies focus on the role of luck as opposed to teleological programs (from telos, “aim”), that is, ones that rely on pre-set direction from formal science. This is a faux-debate: luck cannot lead to formal research policies; one cannot systematize, formalize, and program randomness. The driver is neither luck nor direction, but must be in the asymmetry (or convexity) of payoffs, a simple mathematical property that has lied hidden from the discourse, and the understanding of which can lead to precise research principles and protocols.
MISSING THE ASYMMETRY
The luck versus knowledge story is as follows. Ironically, we have vastly more evidence for results linked to luck than to those coming from the teleological, outside physics—even after discounting for the sensationalism. In some opaque and nonlinear fields, like medicine or engineering, the teleological exceptions are in the minority, such as a small number of designer drugs. This makes us live in the contradiction that we largely got here to where we are thanks to undirected chance, but we build research programs going forward based on direction and narratives. And, what is worse, we are fully conscious of the inconsistency.