The Will to Win

So . . . it is a time of anticipation in the sports world. The baseball playoffs are around the corner. The NFL season is beginning. Hockey and basketball, while still a bit away, are about to get going again. As such, it's prediction season! Who will win this year? Lucky for you, I have the answer; the knowledge of who will be the champion in every sport. Just examine the contenders closely. Don't bother looking at talent, or skill, or experience. None of those matter. According to most sportswriters and commentators, it usually comes down to only one thing.

Just find the team that wants it more.

So, amongst the division leaders in baseball, who wants to win the World Series the most? In the NFL, which team is hungriest for a Superbowl victory? Because if wanting it more truly leads to success on the field (or ice, or court), then it should be easy to suss out the eventual champion.

Funny thing about that. It's usually very hard to tell at this point who wants it more. I think that overall, it is usually much easier to determine who wants it more after the champion wins than to figure that out before the game is played (or while the game is being played). As such, "wanting it more" is not an antecedent to a win, but rather a post-hoc story that is supplied, a retrospective explanation.

I know what you're thinking - you've watched games where you could tell who was trying harder, who was more driven, who wanted it more. Two things about that. First, is it not possible you were entangling success with drive? Does a basketball player miss a shot because he didn't want it to go in? If wanting it more leads to success, why don't all of a very driven player's shots go in? Second, it is sometimes true that a team or a player is complacent (or hungover, or has just signed a long-term lucrative contract). This may seem like semantics, but while wanting more doesn't actually lead to a win, wanting it less certainly can. I would argue, however, that wanting it less is rare - to reach the professional leagues of any sport, it requires a whole lot of dedication, drive, and thirst for victory, and most people don't shrug that off once they make it.

Wanting it more also often gets mixed up with aggression. In many sports aggression can be successful (e.g. hockey teams down one goal nearing the end of the third period). But aggression is also a risky strategy. What ends up happening is that a confirmation bias gets introduced; when aggression is successful, that team wanted it more. When aggression is unsuccessful, then the losing team got reckless, or lost their head, or resorted to thug-like play.

I have suggested this idea to several other people and I tend to receive a negative reaction. It is part of the mythology of sport that inner strength and drive leads to success; after all, if it is not, then it's just talent and luck. Talent can be measured and often quantified, and luck is random and usually an unsatisfying explanation. But heart, heart is something that anyone can have. Rudy had heart.

The other thing I'm asked is if I have competed in sport, because then I would understand "wanting it more." I'm no athlete (no, please, it's nice of you to say, but I know my limitations), but when I do play basketball, or soccer, or whatever, I really, really want to do well. And I often don't. I get "in the zone" and it doesn't improve my shot. In other words, I have firsthand experience with the idea that wanting it more doesn't matter.

And if you need further proof, consider this example. If I were to play one-on-one with LeBron James, I guarantee you I would want to win more. The win would mean so much more to me than to him. And there is absolutely no way you could convince anyone that I would win.

You're So Vain, You Probably Think This Blog Is About You

So . . . since I've started writing this blog I have, on a few occasions, been accused of writing it with certain people in mind (I haven't). A few friends and family members have asked if my comments or central point was directed right at them (it wasn't). In fact, this is probably the first time in my blog where I am referring to some people in particular (but definitely not you, so don't get paranoid).

Today's post is kind of a follow-up to yesterday's entry, which dealt with our need to come to half-assed conclusions about the causes of events or the motivations of others. I'd like to expand the topic by talking about how ego fits into all of this.

When we make attributions for actions, we are subject to what is called the egocentric bias; if the event is positive (we won the game!), we attribute the success to ourselves (because I'm awesome!). If the event is negative (we lost the game) we tend to attribute the failure to others (because the other team cheated and the refs were biased). Watch any sporting event on a local station and you'll see this in spades: the announcers will treat any favorable outcome as the result of the home team's incredible god-like talent, and any negative event as bad luck or an error on someone else's part.

But there is also another manifestation of the egocentric bias. We also tend to believe that we are at the centre of everyone's universe. So if we get cut off in traffic, the other driver wanted to cut us off specifically (ignoring the fact that in all likelihood the other driver either didn't notice us or give us a millisecond's thought). If a teenage girl goes to a Justin Bieber concert, naturally he made eye contact with her in particula and will go to sleep dreaming of her. And, from my own life, when my wife goes out and leaves me with the baby, the baby chooses to take that opportunity to wake, cry, and prevent me from writing this blog.

Several years back there was a research study in which university students were tasked with buying condoms. These condoms were to be purchased from a machine in a seldom-used bathroom down a seldom-used hallway. Even so (and despite the fact that precautions were taken to make sure the purchaser was alone), participants in the study reported that they were watched (or scrutinized) by others (there were no others!). Try it out - go to your local bookstore and browse the how-to sex books or the erotica section, and try to feel like you're not being watched by others. But the reality is that you're probably not.

Why? Because other people don't care about you. They're far to consumed with feeling like they themselves are the centre of the universe. Think about it. When you go to the bookstore, do you pay attention to what strangers are looking at (well, maybe if an attractive stranger is browsing the erotica section . . .). No - you're looking for your books, cool books, books that will impress all those people who really aren't paying attention to you.

The next time you feel like the victim of a slight or an insult, really make sure it's intended, because it may not be. It isn't necessary malice, just lack of consideration in its most literal sense. Remember also that the Carly Simon song I use in the title of the post was believed by several famous men (Mick Jagger, Warren Beatty, James Taylor) to be about them (despite two of them singing backup on the song), when in fact is was about none of them (Simon recently admitted that it was about David Geffen).

And that's right, this blog was directed at you. No, not you, you there.

Cause for Concern

So . . . I was reading a column by one of my favorite writers, Bill Simmons (this is the second consecutive blog that I go after him for something, but I actually really enjoy his stuff), the other day and the opening paragraph made me gasp in horror (figuratively). Here's what he wrote:

"I hate hearing the phrase "There's no answer." I can't accept it. Everything within reason should have an answer. And if you can't come up with one? Come up with a theory."

Guess what? There isn't always an answer. And coming up with a theory is often a bad idea, because we tend to draw on the obvious and apparent, and ignore that there may be causes that are hidden and unknown - unknown even to the actor.

Whether everything within reason has an answer, knowable or unknowable, is a philosophical question. That we cannot and do not always know the answer, or have the capacity to discover it, is not a philosophical question, it is a fact. When we ascribe causes or blame, bad things usually happen (world wars, genocides, Ann Coulter books). Yet we still persist in doing this (yes, it persists even though I've already written a similar blog on the topic - I guess no one followed my advice).

But this time I'm not writing about placing blame vs. taking action, but rather our propensity for searching out causes (noble) and coming to conclusions (bad idea); in other words, our naive scientism. A scientist methodically theorizes and tests various causes. What we do, instead, is the theorizing without the testing. And we seem to believe that knowledge of underlying causes is within our grasp, which it isn't.

Equally troublesome is our tendency to take causes and see effects that may not be there. Howard Stern (whom I enjoy) does this all the time - radio or Wi-fi waves must be bad for you because they are floating around. How can they not be bad for you? This type of thinking caused a good portion of a whole generation avoid vaccines. Putting part of a virus or disease into you? Must have an ill effect. I know, let's say it causes autism. Doesn't matter if the data doesn't support it, there is a cause, so there must be an effect.

In today's paper I read about a group of churchgoers who were prosthelytizing in a Toronto neighbourhood. Apparently an altercation ensued because some of the neighbourhood people were offended at the recruiting because they believed that the religion-pushing was directed specifically at a homosexual couple who lived nearby. Now, it is certainly possible that this was the motivation of the parishioners; however, it is equally likely that it was not. The altercation could have been caused by the neighbours determining on their own that this must have been the motivation of the parishoners, due to their own biases about people who would prosthelytize Christianity. In other words, they ascribed a cause to others' behaviour, with incomplete information. Maybe the church-folk were only trying to spread the word about Jesus to people who didn't really want to hear it.

I do this as much as anyone (ascribing causes, not prosthelytizing - I'm not a character in a Tim LaHaye book) - when I get bad reviews back about my research, my initial reaction is that the reviewer didn't understand the topic or the paper, or that they didn't read it thoroughly enough. Of course, that same reasoning could apply to me (I didn't communicate effectively). The real reasons for the bad review could have nothing to do with those (maybe a personal vendetta?). Anyway, keep this in mind when you comment on my blog - I'll be in the background checking and ascribing causes to your reactions.

The Narrative Fallacy of Bill Belichick

So . . .we like stories. Stories populate our lives and help us make sense of the world around us. As part of our natural inclination to ascribe causality to disparate events, we like to see events linked in stories. After all, if there is no narrative to drive events, then it’s all just random noise (not Lou Reed-like Metal Machine Music random noise, but just random events), and we can’t have that, can we?

Now, a while ago, back when I was blogging at my daily/breakneck pace, my cousin Rob mentioned the Bill Belichick 4th-and-two as a good example of the paradox of outcomes (which it is). I would like to use the same situation as an example of the narrative fallacy, which involves the power of stories. Because of our propensity to invent stories, we are also unduly affected by them – we remember events better in narrative form, they have a greater impact, and we often view them as instructional. That’s fine for Aesop and Joe Eszterhas, but reality often doesn’t have a moral. In invented stories (books, movies, folk-rock) there is a grand design, a plan, a beginning/middle/end; in reality, there is no grand design and therefore not cohesive tale.

Background: in a meaningful regular-season football game last November, Bill Belichick (head coach of the New England Patriots) made the somewhat rare move of, on their fourth down with two yards to go, going for a first down. Because New England only led by 6 points, they needed to run down the clock so that Indianapolis wouldn’t have another chance to score. The risk was huge – if they failed to get the first down, Indianapolis would get the ball in excellent field position, but if they succeeded, New England would almost certainly win the game. Conventional wisdom dictated that New England punt and leave it to their defence (and Indy’s subsequently poor field position) to hold the lead.

Belichick didn’t follow the conventional wisdom. He went for the first down, and failed, Indianapolis then scored and won the game. It makes an interesting probability example (most analyses had the move leading to victory 55% of the time, whether they got the first down or not) and illustrates the paradox of outcomes nicely. It also led to some boneheaded analysis (Bill Simmons claims that one reason it was dumb to go for it was that Indianapolis had already scored twice in that quarter, and it hardly ever happens that a time scores three times; I guess conditional probabilities don’t apply for some reason).

But what it really illustrates is the narrative fallacy. Belichick is a well-regarded coach and considered one of the game’s thinkers. If New England had been successful, it would have been just more evidence of the same – not an interesting story. If Belichick had not gone for the first down, then win or lose it would have just been status quo (and the story would have been Indy’s dominance more than New England’s gamble). Not an interesting story either.

But what was provided instead was a classic tale of hubris and knocking someone down to size. Belichick had over-thought; he had bucked the trend and the gods punished him. It is a morality tale: hero (or anti-hero) is too successful/arrogant/invulnerable, so he does himself in with a poor strategic decision. And that’s the story that gets reported and remembered.

And that’s a fallacy. Because it’s not a narrative, it’s just stuff that happens. It’s not informative, because he took a roughly 50/50 proposition and lost – it’s just as likely the opposite could have happened. It does not overshadow his success, but it might be more remembered than it (because it stands in contrast).

If he finds himself in a similar situation this year, do you think Belichick will go for it? Difficult to say - to punt would be seen as an admission of error, but to go for it again (and potentially fail again) would certainly provide another tale.

The World Last Week

So . . . I decided today to just briefly comment (me, briefly comment? Ha!) on a few news items from last week's paper. I'll get back to my screeds and didacticism in my next post.

From the "Republicans Can't Do Math" department: Republican Senator Mitch McConnell said that "There’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue." Forgive me if I'm wrong, I'm not mathemagician, but don't tax cuts, by their very nature diminish revenue? I understand the fundamentals behind trickle-down economics, but if I let a person keep $100, and the tax rate is 10%, that money would have to be spent ten times over to make back the money I originally let go. There are intelligent arguments behind tax cuts, and this ain't one of them.

From the "While We're Mocking Republican Senators" department: Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska died last week. And while many remember him for corruption, pork-barrel politics, and generally being nasty, I choose to remember him for this quote:

"And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."

What's odd is that I didn't even find out about his death via the series of tubes, but rather in a newspaper.

From the "Really? I'm Remembered For That?" department: Shirley Thompson, former director of the National Gallery of Canada, also died this past week. She is best known for paying $1.8 million for Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire, a painting that consists of one red stripe flanked by two blue stripes. I actually went to the National Gallery while it was there, and it was explained to me that if you look at the border between the red and the blue, you see what looks like fire. The optical illusion worked, but I was left wondering why they needed to pay so much for it - a trip to Home Depot and some canvas would have done fine.

On the other hand, I'm not expert in art. But I am well-versed in marketing, and I don't think the gallery would have gotten many visitors if they hadn't paid such an ostentatious sum for it.

From the "Not Getting to the Root of the Problem" department: The town of Shitterton, in England, unveiled a 1.5 tonne rock with the town name carved into it, to serve as the town's welcome sign. The problem was that conventional signs would often get stolen, because they say "Shitterton" on them. In my opinion, a better solution would have been to change the name of the town. Maybe the sign won't get stolen now, but the citizens still live in a town called Shitterton.

And finally, from the "Best Story of the Week" department: A 75-year-old man in Massachusetts was found to have a pea plant growing in his lung. The plant was discovered when his doctors ordered a biopsy of a dark mass in his lung, fearing cancer. It seems the man had accidentally inhaled a pea and it had sprouted. Apparently a similar thing had happened in the past to a man in Russia, who had a fir tree growing in his lung (well, the sprout of a fir tree).

And the pea-man's first meal after the operation? You guessed it, peas.

Writing Late, Tempting Fate

So . . . yesterday was Friday the 13th, and though I'm a few hours late I thought I would talk about superstitions. As you might have guessed, I'm against them. I know that there are people out there who have specific instructional anecdotes illustrating the value of a particular superstition, but I don't buy it. It seems to me to just be a combination of confirmation bias and narrative fallacy.

(Confirmation bias is the overweighting of supportive evidence; for example, if you believe that Yahoo Serious is a comic genius, you cite the success of Young Einstein and ignore the subsequent failures, or worse yet, claim they are the exceptions that prove the rule. Narrative fallacy is our general bias towards stories and using narrative to make sense of disparate events, thus making them more impactful and memorable. So if you get fired, then get drunk, and then find yourself laughing at a Yahoo Serious movie on at 4 A.M., you may believe the events are related and that a higher power had guided you to comedy gold.)

If you believe in a superstition (e.g. black cat crossing your path equals bad luck, don't walk under a ladder, don't light three cigarettes on one match, etc.), then any time that the superstition is "supported," you have both evidence and a story to tell. Any time it is not supported, you tend not to notice, remember, or accept it.

I can see the logical basis for some superstitions. You shouldn't walk under a ladder because crap can fall on you. You shouldn't light three cigarettes on a match because it raises the probability that you'll get burned. But avoiding the 13th floor? Carrying a lucky charm? Come on.

One of the things that drives my wife nuts is when I'll make a statement like "Wow, the baby is sleeping really well these past few nights," because she believes I am tempting fate and that our good fortune will be reversed. Think about what would be required for that to be a causal chain. Our newborn baby would have to hear and understand what I am saying, and then make the conscious decision to then get upset. Highly unlikely. More likely is that if we've had a run of good luck, it will eventually end (due to random fluctuations and variance), and that we recall the times when "tempting fate" leads to negative outcomes and ignore the times it doesn't.

I've done some research on the topic of tempting fate as well. One of the studies involved priming people with either neutral words or words related to superstition (priming was done by having people do a word completion task, and the words that needed completion either had to do with superstition or not). Just reading and thinking about words that have to do with superstition (e.g. charm, fate, thirteen) caused people to avoid tempting fate (in this case, they said they would buy insurance) much more often than those with the neutral words (e.g. chart, date, twelve). Funnily enough, even though the superstition prime caused people to behave differently, when asked about their beliefs about superstition, the prime had no effect. In other words, people believed that they were not superstitious, but behaved superstitiously.

Anyway, I'm off to walk behind a black cat under a ladder on the thirteenth floor of a building while lighting three cigarettes on one match. While uninsured.

Using the Wrong Map To Find My Way

So . . . like pretty much anyone else, I've done personal budgets in the past. After all, we have make sure we're keeping tabs on our spending and not buy things we can't afford (yeah, right, like no one does that). But the funny thing about budgets is that they're always wrong, if only because we can't predict the future. I've gotten better at making budgets by avoiding the planning fallacy (i.e. don't allocate every dollar of your income, because there will always be unexpected events) and leaving a generous (seemingly too big) buffer. But whether we overestimate or underestimate, our budgets and predictions will be wrong.

One recent example that caught my eye was that there is a proposed rail link between downtown Toronto and Pearson airport, and apparently the project is going forward. The lease for the lands is 46 years long. Besides wondering why they specifically chose that number, I had to wonder whether we would actually still be using airports 46 years from now (probably, but you never know . . .). My point is that we can't predict two weeks into the future - I am almost positive that something will have changed such that this rail link will no longer be (as) useful in 2056.

But I digress. In the book The Black Swan, Nicholas Nassim Taleb (who is an awesome thinker and writer, by the way, despite my occasional disagreement with his ideas, like here) takes issue with the notion that even flawed predictions are better than no predictions. Because a central tenet of his ideology is that we can't predict, he is often accused of being a nihilist and advocating no predictive tools at all. One response he has to this is that it would be a bad idea for someone to use the wrong map (e.g. using a map of the Pyrenees to navigate the Alps, or a pilot using a map of LAX to find a gate at JFK), and it would better to use no map at all in such instances.

I disagree (with a caveat). It would be beyond foolish to expect that the wrong map would accurately tell you where to go. But what the wrong map can tell you is the general information that may be helpful in navigating yourself. A map of LAX would at least give some information about the general design of airports and terminals, and their associated component parts. A map of the Pyrenees would inform you of mountainous terrain in general. But if we are going to use the wrong maps, we need to be aware of that fact and incorporate it into our thinking. Use the limited tool for limited purposes.

The problem occurs when people use flawed predictive tools as the decision-maker, rather than as information helpful in making decisions. Let's say you play the stock market, and have a computer program that predicts future prices. If you take the output of that program and blindly follow it, you are using the wrong map in the wrong way. If you take that output and combine it with other information and your own judgment, you are using the wrong map in a potentially helpful way.

So go ahead, make a budget. But don't ask why reality differs from your expectation, because it always will and we won't always know why. Recognize that it is guideline rather than a rule, and that it is a flawed map. It could help, but to find your way home you're going to have to use your own sense of direction.

A Rock Story

So . . . today I’m going to take a departure from my usual moaning and complaining about people in general to tell one of my favourite rock’n’roll stories. I’m actually amazed that it hasn’t been made into a movie yet – it would have sex, drugs, and some of the best rock music ever.

Picture this: England, 1970. Beatles have officially broken up after a long and lingering illness. All four Beatles working on their solo albums, but none would be as acclaimed as All Things Must Pass by George. The album is stunning – tons of classic tunes both well-known and less so (My Sweet Lord, What is Life, Isn’t it a Pity, Let it Roll, title track, and the list goes on). Everyone in rock music guested took part in the sessions: John, Ringo, Badfinger, Gary Wright (Dream Weaver), the drummer from Yes, Phil Collins, Billy Preston (Nothing from Nothing), Peter Frampton, Ginger Baker from Cream. And, of course, George’s best friend Eric Clapton.

Clapton at the time was between bands, having left Blind Faith the previous year. He was also addicted to heroin, which didn’t help his situation. Looking to be part of a band where he wasn’t the only star, he put together Derek and the Dominos (apparently originally called Del and the Dynamos, and changed when a concert announcer got it wrong). The band consisted of Clapton, Duane Allman (of the Allman Brothers, themselves riding a crest of success) and members of a Delaney and Williams (a band Clapton had been playing with).

And they created what is one of the greatest albums of all time: Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. Though most of the songs (other than the title track) don’t get much radio airplay, there are tons of great tunes (pretty much all of them). They recorded Hendrix’s “Little Wing” because he died while recording was going on. They recorded “Key to the Highway” because they heard another artist (Manfred Mann) recording it in adjacent studio. These were some talented musicians, and their album bears their credo of “no chicks, no horns.” Good, simple rock music..

So we already have the kick-ass soundtrack and I haven’t even gotten to the story yet.

Layla was inspired by a woman who had captivated Clapton and occupied all of his thoughts. Unfortunately for him, she was a woman that he couldn’t have, even as a big rock star, because she was Patti Harrison, George Harrison’s wife. He wrote Layla for her, basing it on the Persian love story “The Tale of Layla and Majnun” where a man is driven mad by his love for a woman he cannot have. Other songs are less well-coded – in the song “Have You Ever Loved A Woman,” Clapton sings “Have you ever loved a woman so much it’s a shame and a sin/All the time you know she belongs to your very best friend.”

Unfortunately for George, Clapton eventually succeeded in winning Patti’s heart, and George had the misfortune on walking in on them when they were in bed together. Distraught, George took the natural step of then going and bedding Maureen Starkey, Ringo Starr’s wife. Wait – what?

Yup, that’s what happened. Clapton’s need to requite his love broke up the marriages of two of the Beatles. Clapton ended up with Patti for about 15 years until they broke up (she also inspired the less-inspiring “Wonderful Tonight”), George re-married, Ringo re-married, Duane Allman died in a motorcycle accident a year after Derek & the Dominos’ only album (they recorded some other songs intending a second album, which never materialized). Most amazingly, the friendships between Clapton and Harrison and Starr were not affected. Which speaks to how the two cuckolded men regarded their wives’ virtue (well, that and the fact that they cheated on their wives incessantly).

It would make a great movie and a killer soundtrack. Desmond from Lost could play Clapton. And if you haven’t before, listen to the album. It rocks.

Try Re-Assembling an Egg

So . . . let's talk about problems. I have always maintained that there are two types of problems: those you can do something about, and those you can't. And why worry about problems that you can't do anything about? The trick, however, is knowing the difference. And we as a species seem to have a problem figuring out problems (which is a problem that we probably can't do anything about, but I'll write about it anyway).

The problem we have is arrogance. Humans are arrogant in that they think they can solve problems that are beyond their reach. And this arrogance is best summed up in a quote by John F. Kennedy, who said in June of 1963:

"Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings."

Frankly, he's wrong. There are lots of problems created by man that cannot be solved by man. A simple example: I can crash a car, but I can't fix it. And it's ironic that JFK said this a scant 5 months before he had a problem, created by man, that couldn't be solved by man.

This problem problem puts us in a lot of messes. Two of the biggest issues of the past couple of years, the economy and the environment, are being treated as though we can solve them. Most of the debate around global warming has centered on whether it is man-made, as though that means it is man-solvable. Guess what: even if it is man-made, doesn't mean we can do anything about it. We could cut off all CO2 emissions starting today and it doesn't mean that global warming will reverse, or correct, or change. We can throw as much stimulus money as we want at the economic downturn, doesn't mean it will work. And it's arrogant to think otherwise.

War, famine, the Dustin Diamond sex tape - all man-made problems, all unsolvable by man. This isn't a philosophical issue like whether a deity is so powerful as to make a rock too heavy for him to lift it; it's a tried and true fact that we are much better at creating situations than resolving them. There exists pirate treasure from the 17th century that was so well hidden and booby-trapped that to this day it cannot be retrieved. I could continue with examples all day. So we need to get off of our high horses and be a little more humble. We can't fix everything and anything - we aren't all Vanilla Ice (if you got a problem, yo, he'll solve it).

This of course will beg the question of "well, what are we supposed to do, just sit on the sofa and eat Cheetos?" No - we should focus our efforts on those problems we can solve. To borrow an example from Bjorn Lomborg (author of the Skeptical Environmentalist, and maker of good points even if they are sometimes obscured by a rather forceful writing style), rather than try to stop global warming because coastal areas will be submerged, take direct steps to prevent submergement of coastal areas - build a wall. We could help millions of people dying of malaria and other tropical diseases right now, but instead we press on to try to solve a problem that is probably beyond our reach, and may affect people several decades from now. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

You got a problem with that?

The Good Guys is One of the Good Guys

So . . . I started watching a show called the Good Guys, starring Josh Lyman from the West Wing (who has a moustache now) and Tom Hanks’ younger clone, er, son. Not a bad show, really super-cheesy, but entertaining. And a complete departure from how TV has gone in the past few years. I like this change so much that I stopped watching the show.

Because I could! Imagine that, a TV show where you can enjoy it without having to watch every single episode. Most of the shows that I have watched in recent years (Lost, Mad Men, The Wire, The Sopranos, etc.) require that you watch every episode if you want to know what’s going on. You can’t just tune into a single episode of Lost and expect to follow the action. But this show, The Good Guys, you can miss as many as you want. It’s a definite throwback.

The serialized-series phenomenon goes back as far as TV itself, with soap operas. I don’t mean to generalize, but these were shows that were geared towards housewives with their hair up in curlers who sat around after the cleaning was done and waited for the husbands to come home from work so they could give them their martini and dressing-gown before serving dinner (hey, I said I’ve been watching Mad Men). Prime-time soaps like Dallas and Dynasty also had storylines that bled from one episode to another. But the soap-opera format was also designed to pick up viewers along the way, always providing enough information to let a new audience understand. Now they just do “Previously on [whatever show]” and expect that to be enough.

Two shows in the 1990’s pushed through this idea that viewers had to watch every episode, and both failed. Twin Peaks is more like a 25-hour movie than a series, with the disadvantage that anyone not watching from the start felt like they were walking into the middle of a (very weird) movie. As a result, it could only lose viewers, not gain them, and was cancelled after two seasons. The other was Murder One, which told the story of one murder trial stretched over a whole season. It abandoned this premise in season two and told several overlapping stories. As a counterpoint, Law & Order used to highlight the fact that each episode was stand-alone.

There was no penalty for missing an episode of Knight Rider, Diff’rent Strokes, or MacGyver; though there may have been the occasional recurring character, each week brought a clean slate. One of the most celebrated episodes of Family Ties had to do with Alex P. Keaton’s grief over the death of a close friend, but even the most loyal viewer wouldn’t have mourned the dead character, because he had never been on the show before. Clean slate.

Now if you want to watch decent TV, it has to be a ritual – miss a week, miss a lot. If you didn’t start watching from the beginning, you don’t know the whole story. And with iTunes and DVD sets and all of that, you can watch the whole thing, but sometimes it’s fun to just tune in when you feel like it. Otherwise, TV can feel like a chore; I recently finished watching season one of the Good Wife, which we had recorded all season because we didn’t have time to watch it every week. And we would refer to it as “working our way through the episodes.” TV shouldn’t be work!

So I’m happy can delete episodes of The Good Guys from my DVR worry-free when I need space. And unless I want to start watching the crappy dregs of TV (I don’t think I’m too at sea if I skip an episode of Ghost Whisperer or Cougartown, but who knows), this is what TV will be, at least for a while. And I can be more selective about the shows I take on, because it is a commitment, at least until the show starts sucking (e.g. Heroes). Even so, a few more cheesy throwback shows wouldn’t hurt.

O Ban-It-A, My Home and Native Land

So . . . I read in the paper last week that they’re trying to ban teens from using tanning salons. If there’s one thing the Canadian governments are good at, it’s banning stuff. That’s their forte!

I can think of many recent bans and rules that have been proposed: light bulbs, weed killer, helmets for tobogganing, garbage disposals in the sink. This last one is my favourite, because it’s legal to sell it, it’s legal to buy it, and it’s legal to have one in your house – but it’s illegal to install one. So you can see a selection of them at Home Depot, purchase it, bring it home, but don’t even think of putting under the sink or the cops will come and get you. Or at least fine you.

Banning stuff is a very visible, obvious way of a government coming out against something, but it is almost always a misplaced overreaction. A lot of people drink bottled water, and some of the bottles end up in the garbage – let’s ban bottled water. A similar kind of thing is what happened a couple of winters ago, when a kid got a head injury while tobogganing – let’s make a toboggan helmet law. Never mind that there had only been 4 such accidents in the previous seven years; we need to make sure that everyone knows that we’re against toboggan-based injuries.

The tanning salon example is another case of the government stepping in with a rule that, when you think about it, makes little sense. Unless tanning, like smoking, is something that is picked up as a teenager and is then hard to stop (or addictive), setting the rule at eighteen years of age will have little long-term impact on the health of the populace. People will just wait a bit longer to get that healthy bronze sheen.

There are two other things going on here. One is the modern “think of the children” attitude, where we have to protect our kids from everything. I have kids, and I want to protect them. I expect the government to help protect them too, but more from criminals or alien invasions than from tanning beds. I don’t want my kids going to tanning salons, so I will make that clear. If my kids don't listen, that’s on me. I don’t want them avoiding certain behaviours because The Man says so; I want them to make the choice themselves.

The other complicating factor is that the government is also an investor in our health. Because we have government-funded health care (not going into the merits of that today, that’s a whole other series of posts), they have a financial interest in the populace staying healthy. But to single out one or two things will not lessen the tax burden on health care. And I don’t think tanning is the major concern. If they really wanted to cut costs, ban fat and sugar and salt. And alcohol, smoking, driving, guns, knives, swimming pools, and toboggans. But because too many people like those things (or at least some of them), they won’t do it; better to pick a target that won’t cost too many votes. And we all know that people under eighteen don’t vote.

Let’s work on helping people make better choices rather than constricting them. Because historically, reducing choices and options doesn’t work (see: prostitution, drugs, etc.). People will do what they want to do, even if it’s getting a deep, brown, carcinogenic tan while smoking crack with a hooker. Banning things isn’t going to stop people from making bad choices – you could ban Chevy Chase and there would still be a few people secretly selling DVDs of his movies. Now that’s a crime!