Another Super Bowl

Only looked up the result well after the game was over. Why? Because I never had any doubt they’d win. I was at the gym – 30 minutes punching practice and then a ton more – and saw a handful of moments, mostly the score 14-3 and then 20-10, but I turned off ‘worry’ by remembering that I had absolutely no worry about the game. I became very slightly concerned yesterday: lots of information came out late Friday and then through Saturday that said Tom Brady was indeed hurt and more than a tiny bit. But even as I updated my priors, I realized that did not change my perception they’d win and that I shouldn’t worry. In retrospect, I’d update my priors to ‘worry but’, meaning worried about the flow of the game but not the outcome. Updating priors is a Bayesian reference: what you believe affects your perception of the probabilities. Still, I’m really proud of myself for coming to a conclusion and then holding to it while evaluating new information and not worrying at all because I had faith in how I processed the information! Added: now that Philadelphia has won, I pick the Patriots to win unless Gronk can’t play, and I expect him to play. I’ve watched Philadelphia play several times, including after their QB was injured: this was the best they’ve played perhaps all year. It’s possible they can do that again, but I expect the Patriots defense to do well and I can’t see the Patriots offense not scoring at least in the 20’s (because they always manage to score). A thought – an actual thought! – about how hard it is for a team to do this year after year. I don’t pick Jacksonville to be a big power next year, though they may be, because it’s much harder to do really well again, especially without a top QB. It’s hard to do well year after year in the NFL. Next year’s Jaguars team is not this year’s team. But the Patriots? Well, they’re not going to be the same either but they’ve had Belichick and Brady year after year so each year they become a Patriots team that looks more or less like every other year’s Patriots team. That is extraordinary: 12 wins in 8 straight years is the longest streak ever. They’ve played more than an entire other season in playoff games over the past 7 years: this Super Bowl will be their 18th extra game in 7 years. That’s a lot of mental effort, a lot of physical effort and wear, and a humongous commitment to winning. I also want to add a thank you for not having to listen to the absurdities of ‘they shouldn’t have traded Jimmy G’ if they lost. All that depends on knowing he won 5 games in SF, but that wouldn’t have happened if he were in NE. He would have played a handful of kneel-down snaps at the ends of games. He would have sat on the bench for this game because no one would have known he would have won 5 games for SF if he wasn’t traded.

Updated Monday AM, I was listening to sports radio and they made an intelligent point: they have no problem with Jaguars fans complaining because there’s never been a loser in the history of sports who didn’t have a complaint. This gets at something much deeper, which is that you don’t get a replay, just a chance to win in the next game. That applies to life as well: you don’t get a replay, just a chance to win the next game. The full meaning of ‘carpe diem’ isn’t just ‘seize this day’ but ‘seize THE day’. The difference is not just a capitalized THE: it stands for all the days put together, in plans that stretch from this moment where you seize the day to some distant moment where you seize THE day made of all the seized days in between. I actually mean a defined ‘Between’ that idealizes to a square with one hypotenuse running from Start to End, with those standing for each seized day, and the other hypotenuse running from B1 to B2. The B’s stand for all the days that aren’t ‘seized’ in whole and in part. That B hypotenuse counts the potential of days, while the journey from S through B to E counts your path. This is true in layers: set the biggest labels for S and E as birth and death and all the threads of choices you make and those chosen for you lay out across the Between of your life. The idealized center point where the hypotenuses cross is where B potential reduces to its minimum when counting in from B1 and B2, and where B potential is maximized when counting out from the center toward B1 and B2. That idealized center point represents the ideal balance between S-B1-E and S-B2-E. That’s a pretty clear description of how I think: I think bidirectionally across SBE, meaning I think S-B1-E and S-B2-E and across B1-S-B2 and B1-E-B2 when S and E and B1 and B2 can be flipped both E to S and B2 to B1 and E to B1 or B2 and S to the other. I also fold these labels over on each other.

Back to sports, complaining has different meanings. You can analyze why you lost and seek to improve for next game. You can analyze what you got wrong and what you got right. You can analyze what went right because the other guys made mistakes and analyze why they made those mistakes. When you review game film or memory, you figure out tendencies: they tend to make this mistake, and they tend to do that in these situations. Or they tend to do this when that happens, so if we make it look like that is happening, can we do something else? Can we build expectations and frustrate them? The more you get into the response to complaining, the more you see how it affects what you do next: do you let a loss fester? Do you blame coaches, teammates, officials, anyone for letting you down without taking any responsibility for your own failures during the game? Do you blame yourself too much? Do you not think about it? Is thinking about it too negative an experience for you so you resist learning from defeat because you’re unwilling to learn from it? Are you so used to defeat that you internalize defeat as a victory in the sense the streak has to stop sometimes? Do you not see that ending a losing streak doesn’t mean you embark on a winning run?

I’d love to talk about the social aspects of complaining but not now.

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