Kill Gottlieb
what exactly would indicate whether or not you belong if results don't?
for the same reason that winning the lottery is irrelevant to whether buying the ticket was a good decision.
If I buy a winning lottery ticket, it was a good deciision to buy it.
it really, really, really wasn't. The average return on a lottery ticket is something like -70 cents on the dollar. It's a horrible gamle to take, and buying one is always a bad decision. If you win, you made a bad decision and got lucky. That doesn't mean you didn't make a bad decision. It just means you got lucky.
Hi, turd in the punch bowl.
If I can afford to buy a lottery ticket, and doing so gives me the pleasure of fantasizing about owning a 50 foot yacht, it wasn't a bad decision -- it was a harmless diversion.
Why don't you go to a casino and lecture people at the $5 blackjack tables about how they're wasting their lives.
I've bought a couple myself. My beef isn't with lottery tickets at all (or any other kind of gambling, I'm a huge poker player). My beef is just with people who think you can figure out whether something was a good decision by how it turned out.
You are process-oriented. Nurds often are. Me? I'm results-oriented. Why? It's because I have never seen a perfect process.
I think his point is correct. If you have it 4th and 16 on your own 30 with one minute left and a 2-point lead, lining up in a power I and running up the middle is an objectively stupid decision even if the back somehow breaks a long gainer.
March 18th, 2011 at 11:52 PM ^
Process can be second-guessed.
Results don't lie.
March 21st, 2011 at 12:03 AM ^
But what if I play scratch-offs, pull-tabs, mega millions, keno, daily3&5, and classico lotto? Does it still not count as diversifying?
Depending on what lottery you play, and what the payouts can be, it is not always a terrible decision to buy a lottery ticket.
At certain points, when a jackpot grows to a big enough value (for Mega Millions/Powerball it's generally around $300 million) the expected value of each individual ticket assuming only one winner will be greater than one. At that point, it is worth it to play the lottery.
But in every other case, yes, its usually a bad decision to play the lottery. It serves as a transfer of wealth from average people to a lucky/smart few and the state.
Do you really want to say that if the payout was only 30 million dollars that it would be a bad decision, but with 300 million as a payout it would be a good decision?
It's just a accounting way of determining whether or not it was a good, or rational, decision. If the odds are that if you made that decision "infinitly many" times, you end up with an "accounting" loss, with a return of a fraction of a dollar for every dollar. If you get joy out of the idea that may win the lottery (Which I'm pretty sure everyone does), then in the end you could have an economic profit, which would make it a good decision. It just depends on how much value you place on it.
The whole damn discussion is falling prey to the fallacy that they try to stamp out in Econ 101 - namely, that money is the only driving force behind a decision. It can still be a rational decision even if it's not the one that maximizes your money.
Your basic point is correct, though you shouldn't muddy it by "assuming only 1 person wins". There's an article in the Journal of Econoimc Perspectives from awhile back that showed that it is actuarially advantageous to buy a lottery ticket when the pot gets big but not too big. I don't have the article in front of me to say exactly what those points were. And of course, they may have evolved over time. That still doesn't make it smart to buy a ticket as you should consider risk preferences too, and as the returns are highly skeweed, the expected return is not the only relevant statistic. That said, Gotlieb is still a cocksucker.
AAB - this is probably the 5th time I've seen you use that lottery analogy, and almost every time you've used it wrong.
I agree with your premise that making a bad decision that ended up working out doesn't mean it was actually a good decision. However, that analogy doesn't work here. In the lottery example, there is no skill involved, it is pure probability. Just because you beat the odds doesn't mean you made a good decision. This I agree with. In other words, you can't be "good" at playing the lottery - you are just as good or bad at it as everyone else who plays.
However, Michigan beating Tennessee involved a lot more than luck. The result of this game was not a coin flip, it was two teams actually playing basketball against each other. Michigan did not luck into a win - we were unequivocally better than Tennessee. We beat them in every aspect of the game, and did so in excess. In this instance, our results did show that it was justified to put us into the tournement, that we "belong."
Stop using that lottery analogy is you're going to use it wrong. If someone on this board says "I drove home drunk and because I was drunk I got lost and while I was lost I found a bag of money on the ground so it was a good decision to drive home drunk" then you can use your stupid analogy. But in an instance where people say "Michigan was told they didn't belong in the NCAA tourney but then they blew the fuck out of a pretty good Tennessee team so they belong" your analogy really doesn't work.
So what you're saying is AAB is as useless as Gottlieb or.....actually he is. Turd in the punch bowl was the perfect representation of him. We won and someone who said Michigan didn't deserve to get a bye and should've played in Dayton can't at least admit he was somewhat wrong. He's a damn weasel. If you don't believe me just turn on ESPN and look at him.
March 21st, 2011 at 12:39 PM ^
THIS is a conversation you wouldn't see on most team's blogs. Let's just agree that we are all nerds and let it go. I think I would rather talk about politics.
So if we win the tournament then the results still wouldn't indicate that we belong.
Gottlieb should stick to stealing people's credit cards.
So I don't get to watch ESPN, or any other sports related news outlet since I have little kids and the T.V. is perpetually on Nickelodeon. Who is this Doug Gottlieb and why should I care what he tweets?
we belonged because of our resume throughout the season, but he's not wrong. You can only judge these things based on the resume of the team at the time the selection was made. Our resume was clearly good enough to get in, and he's an idiot if he thinks otherwise (not sure he does). But us winning doesn't prove we should have been an 8 seed any more than VCU beating USC proves VCU deserved to get in.
Everyone really, really, really underestimates the variance in one game NCAA Tourney samples.
If it isn't results, I wonder what it is that does indicate whether or not a team belongs.
Maybe he should turn off his phone.
by quite a lot.
Woah, let's show some respect. Stupidity is a terrible, incurable affliction.
Doug Gottlieb is the biggest idiot of all time. He is King Idiot.
AAB = Gottlieb?
What a fucking moron
People tweeting and insulting him, and overall being a-holes, because he picked Tenn. in his bracket, are just as stupid. So he made his prediction and didn't think Michigan would win, he was wrong, most of us are horribly wrong about at least one team a year in the tourney (cough'villecough). Many of us look like idiots saying this team deserves this and this team doesn't deserve this every year. He's just on nation TV.
This is like a troll vs a-hole exchange on twitter...
It's not so much that he picked Tennessee as the fact that he said Michigan had no chance, tweeted about how awful it was to watch Michigan during the game, and then when Michigan was up by 30 he tweeted about how Tennessee had quit. Never admitted he was wrong or gave Michigan props for playing well.
His twitter page is about as bland as his personality.
I'm Doug Gottlieb and I'm an attention whore. Watch me try to spell a word correctly!
Can someone post what it says? I can't access twitter from work...
easy michigan fans, results do not indicate whether or not u belong
easy michigan fans, results do not indicate whether or not u belong
Sad, i was just starting to warm up to him after he called state "kalin lucas and a bunch of other dudes."
To be fair, he also said:
"Michigan belonged long before today, UAB did not belong b4 they were blown out."
It's called backpedaling. He's a turd.
Turdpedaling.
Sounds messy.
If we'd just slid in under the bubble wire to a #15 seed, maybe he could make a reasonable argument. But trying to push the idea that a #8 doesn't belong at all is just bizarre.
This is actually good though—if I were Beilein, I'd be sending Gottlied's tweet to every member of the program, players and coaches.
Is that an issue? I thought the fact that we were an 8 seed showed that we "belong". The fact that we obliterated Tennessee showed that we are, in fact, a pretty good team. If there were Michigan fans saying that Michigan was one of the top 10 teams in the country, I would understand that tweet, but I think Gottlieb is being, in the words of Jimmy King, a bitch.
He has another tweet up further explaining what he meant:
"Michigan belonged long before today, UAB did not belong b4 they were blown out."
So maybe he isn't a complete a-hole like we all thought...
he should be careful, he could hurt himself backpedaling like that. Maybe he should sit this one out for a little while.
In his next tweet he said "Michigan belonged long before today, UAB did not belong b4 they were blown out." probably because of the reaction he got
I'm not bothered by Gottlieb. His job is to stir it up. Good on him.
His job is to analyze college basketball, not to spout bullshit that he doesn't actually believe.
Gottlieb is a hater, a little man. And when you hate back, you play his game. He wins. Let it go.
Hater? Are you from Jersey?
to determine whether a team "belongs" in the tournament is if the selection committee says you belong. Period. Therefore, we belong. Next.