A Betting Man’s Game

Superbowling for fun and/or profit

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From the Diaries of John Henry

6 min readFeb 10, 2017

Enjoyed watching the Super Bowl this week. Have grown so used to the college game that had forgotten how different the game play can be on the professional level. Players are faster, coaches are smarter, the stakes are higher, and some players even get rich. This year’s game was quite a contest, a tail of two halves. The transformation in gameplay, the switching of dominance between the two teams, unexpectedly appeared late in the third quarter (I feel sorry for those that may have fallen asleep or switched to Netflix). The point where the Patriots finally scored their first touchdown felt like a phase change, with the game prior a supercooled glass of water only waiting to be seeded with a tiny ice crystal for instant transition to winter.

supercooled water demonstration

In other words (and it pains me to say this), the Patriots were always the better team, it just took the perturbation of a few halftime adjustments to dislodge from a fitness curve local minimum and jump into the eventual end state.

image: Giacomo Balla, Swifts: Paths of Movement + Dynamic Sequences, 1913

This comeback, what some have called the best comeback in Super Bowl history, while not a black swan, was definitely a tail event.

The forecasting of outcomes that can be found from the likes of this tweet are useless on their own, for the probability of an occurrence is only one part of a two-sided coin, on the other side lies the payoff — it is only by looking at both sides that we can determine if a problem is thin-tailed or fat-tailed. For those more tractable thin-tailed distributions the probability side dominates payoff, while for fat-tailed distributions the payoff swamps probability. When life throws these lemon-soaked fat curves at us we should drop the urge to turn to forecasting and prediction, and instead tailor our exposure to volatility and disorder in the direction of convexity, letting Murphy handle the rest. How does one gauge whether our exposure is convex? Well for one there’s a simple stress test heuristic, simply perturb your model a few points and check for acceleration of harm — if it’s there consider yourself concaved. There are some cases where one might even find an exposure with an inflection point, facing convexity in one direction and concavity in the other, say Elon Musk betting all of his Paypal earnings on seeding electric self-driving cars, reusable rockets, and residential solar panels — in best case he goes to Mars, in worst case he goes broke. While some may try to invent a fourth point on the anti-fragile triad and call this position “anti-robust”, I would contend that this is simply another subset of fragility (unless you’re Elon Musk and have a reputation to fall back on, in that case I say aim for Mars and consider the concave exposure sufficiently clipped).

Success is not final, failure is not fatal it is the courage to continue that counts. — Sir Winston Churchill

For some the simple idea of forecasting is taboo, an attitude that perhaps extends to the spiritual — after all if humans have a soul and free will, than why can’t their influence on a system disrupt an existing exterior probability distribution? While I sympathize with the attitude, I would offer that while a man’s consciousness may allow him to journey within the bounds of his own probability distribution, it does not allow him to escape it (but don’t count yourself out, for you can always be brave and journey into the tail events). Consciousness, free will and all, is an emergent system, just like an ant hive or flock of birds, simply on a different scale — as is the collection of people in a society or the collection of neurons making up a half brain hemisphere. Granted as we transition to different scales the properties of a system may change — if you removed a half brain hemisphere (pick one) you would have some difficulties, but if humanity’s population dynamics logistic map transitioned through a chaotic regime via war, climate change induced famine, or even influences more subtle, while the expected drastic shock to our population would be tragic we would still go on like a tree after pruning — after all the risk born by an ensemble is an entirely different category than the same risk born by an individual.

In his book A New Kind of Science Stephen Wolfram writes about the principle of computational equivalence, stating that all systems can perform computations up to a maximal universal level of computational power, and that most systems do in fact attain this maximal level of computational power. That is not to say that a different systems aren’t more efficient at achieving Turing equivalence, but regardless all Turing machines (and even quantum computers for that matter) are constrained by the Church-Turing Thesis on the types of problems they can address. In fact, the only genuine escape from the Church-Turing thesis is to propose entirely new laws of physics.

So in the end here we all are, emergent consciousness on a field with a collective emergent consciousness of our own playing some game or another. Some of us are Fat Tony’s, some of us are Nero’s, some of us are even long-time Nero’s simply trying to act like we think a Fat Tony would act in our circumstances even though we’re most certainly getting it way wrong. And we’re all playing in our own bowl game of one kind or another. I wonder if playing in a Super Bowl is fun. On the one hand if things go well players could potentially find a profitable endorsement deal or a trip to Disney World, on the other hand if things go bad they could end up labeled a loser for at least another few months. That strikes me as a high stress environment, like an unemployed office drone trying to network at a trade show, handing out ridiculous business cards and pining for face time with executives, in sports it’s much more relaxing to be a spectator. On the other hand the life of a spectator is a life without skin in the game, and stress be damned wouldn’t it feel great to be a Patriot this week?

Outkast — Rosa Parks