The Better Letter: Carolina Crazy

Confirmation Bias + Fandom = Crazy.

I spent some wonderful time with my grandchildren this week, some of it in very cold weather.

Whatever the weather, I’m struck by how little children see the wonder in everything.

As they get older, they want more entertainment. Adults, meanwhile, focus most on finding fault, usually in someone else.

This week’s TBL focuses on confirmation bias. Simon & Garfunkel sang about it before Tversky and Kahneman: “Still the man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

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Carolina Crazy

I also saw my children this week. Wednesday evening, I collected on my Christmas present from my youngest (he’s @CostcoGrillDad on Instagram – you should follow him). We went to see Coach K’s farewell tour stop in Charlottesville, Virginia as Duke played the ‘Hoos.

I was in the student section at Cameron Indoor Stadium for Coach Krzyzewski’s first Duke game in 1980, a win over Stetson, and this week saw one of his last. The game was hotly contested throughout. Both teams were well-prepared and well-coached. The Blue Devils prevailed, 65-61.

Before the game, Virginia coach Tony Bennett took the microphone at center court and offered a generous tribute to retiring Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski. It marked Krzyzewski’s final trip to UVA as Duke’s coach. Bennett presented Krzyzewski with a commemorative plaque and expressed his gratitude to Coach K as the crowd at John Paul Jones Arena offered warm applause.

“I want to take this opportunity, because this is important for me and our team and the rest of us, to acknowledge your monumental contributions to the basketball world,” Bennett said. “Your success is remarkable, and you stood the test of time.” Bennett also offered a shoutout to Krzyzewski's wife, Mickie, and wished them a “blessed retirement.”

Krzyzewski’s final trip as a coach to Chapel Hill to play Duke’s most hated rival, North Carolina, wasn’t remotely similar. Before the Blue Devils’ 87-67 start-to-finish blowout win, Krzyzewski’s 50th against his biggest rival over more than four decades, UNC had planned to ignore K’s swan song entirely. The school declined to bestow public gifts or even commendation for his service to both the game and rivalry over the decades.

Instead, the Tar Heel faithful offered a tribute of a different sort. From the time Coach K took the court, the crowd booed him throughout and hurled F-bombs at him ad nauseum, including “F— Coach K” chants that weren’t limited to the student section.

K said afterward that he got what he expected. And, really, although a bit more class would have been a good (if unexpected) thing, why should it have been otherwise?

Duke v. North Carolina is the greatest rivalry in college basketball history. I think it’s the best rivalry in sports. A celebration of Coach K's career in his final game in Chapel Hill would feel out of place for the Duke legend UNC fans have loved to hate for the last 42 years.

As a freshman, Jay Bilas (now of ESPN) lined up for a free throw in his first rivalry game next to then All-American and future NBA All-Star Brad Daugherty, who looked over at him and said, “I’m going to beat you like a rented mule.” Even so, that comment was astonishingly mild as these things go. Every Duke home game, irrespective of opponent, includes multiple iterations of a single chant cascading down from the rafters of venerable, old Cameron Indoor Stadium: “Go to hell, Carolina, go to hell! [Clap. clap].”

That’s about as serious as it gets.

I first sat in Cameron as a student in 1978 and didn’t miss a home basketball game while I was enrolled at Duke. Every game was special – and wild. NBC came to do the first national telecast from the arena on January 28, 1979 for a game against Marquette (I was there, of course) and insisted on a time-delay so the crowd could be censored if necessary.

Duke-Carolina games are something else entirely. As Krzyzewski put it, the game is a “national treasure.”

I was “in the house” at Cameron as a student for Coach Krzyzewski’s first Carolina game at Duke. Shortly before it tipped off, Duke senior and all-time great Gene Banks put on a tuxedo for Senior Day and threw roses into the crowd. He later made sure that the celebration didn’t stop there. With one second left in the second half and a middling Duke team trailing the eventual NCAA Tournament finalist Tar Heels by two, Banks received the inbounds pass above the free-throw line and drained a jumper over Sam Perkins to send the game into overtime. At the end of the extra session, Banks grabbed a rebound with 19 seconds left in the game and hit a leaner to give the Blue Devils the lead and, eventually, the win. It’s a great memory.

I was also at the 7-0 “air ball” game as a student. On February 24, 1979, the Tar Heels were visiting Cameron and both teams were highly ranked. It was Senior Day for the great Jim Spanarkel. Carolina coach Dean Smith badly wanted to take the typically great Duke crowd (not yet known as “Cameron Crazies“) out of the game.

After the Blue Devils took a 2-0 lead, UNC point guard Dave Colescott walked the ball past mid-court and started passing it around in their (in)famous Four Corners delay “offense.” Earlier that week, future Acting Solicitor General of the United States, Duke Law professor, and Carolina grad Walter Dellinger (who I honored in last week’s TBL) had aggressively argued to me that the Four Corners really was an offensive weapon with Phil Ford at point guard, but Ford was in the process of winning the NBA’s Rookie of the Year award by that time.

In any event, Carolina took more than 12 minutes off of the clock in that fashion while the Duke defense just sat back in a zone and waited. Eventually, the Heels got bored and the ball was passed to center Rich Yonakor on the baseline. He took one dribble and shot. The ball flew over the rim, missing the basket entirely. We fans then created a chant that is still used throughout the basketball world today: “Aiiiiiir-baaaaalllll!  Aiiiiiir-baaaaalllll!”

Duke rebounded the Yonakor miss and scored. 4-0, Duke. UNC again went back into the Four Corners and eventually Yonakor got the ball again, shot again, and missed everything again. “Aiiiiiir-baaaaalllll!” Duke subsequently made a free throw and got the ball back with about four minutes left in the half, leading 5-0.

At that point, then Duke Coach Bill Foster took a page out of Dean’s playbook and ran his own version of the Four Corners for the remainder of the half. It was a classic move designed to troll the hated rivals. Duke held the ball before scoring just before halftime to lead at the break, 7-0. A first half shutout (and Carolina hadn’t even drawn iron).

Ironically, the second half was played at a feverish pace – each team scored 40 points and Duke won by the first half margin, 47-40. That was sweet.

Unsurprisingly, after the game, Smith stood up for his strategy, claiming that it was important to take the crowd out of the game. Naturally, he said his approach had failed merely due to impatience and poor execution. Foster was bemused. “I’ve been doing this a long time,” he said, “but during the first half last night, I began to think maybe I’ve been doing it for too long. I thought Naismith invented basketball, not Dean Smith.” That was snark worthy of a Dukie.

Sitting in the student section at Cameron on game day, it seemed obvious that Dean was an arrogant blow-hard who sanctimoniously talked down to opponents, intimidated officials, and got all the calls. Of course, now that Coach K is well ahead of him on the all-time wins list, I’m more willing to be gracious. Even so, I’m still perfectly willing to argue that Dean — while terrific at recruiting, team development and game preparation — was overrated as a game coach.

This kind of thinking is surely to be expected. We are prone to any number of behavioral and cognitive biases. We rarely set out objectively to review the evidence and reason to the best available conclusion, even when we think we are or set out to do so. Instead, we are usually engaging in an effort at indoctrination by example, often of ourselves.

We exhibit confirmation bias and thus reach our conclusions first and only thereafter do we gather facts, but even then it’s only to support our pre-conceived notions and not to undertake anything like careful analysis. We then take our selected “facts” and cram them into our desired narratives (e.g., “Carolina sucks”), even when they don’t fit very well, because narratives are crucial to how we make sense of reality. They help us to explain, understand and interpret the world around us. They also give us a frame of reference we can use to remember the concepts we take them to represent.

Perhaps most significantly, we inherently prefer narrative to data — often to the detriment of our understanding. Trying to keep one’s analysis and interpretation of the facts and data reasonably objective – since analysis and interpretation are required for facts and data to be actionable – is really, really hard even in the best of circumstances.

As I have said before, on our best days, when wearing the right sort of spectacles, squinting and tilting our heads just so, we can be observant, efficient, loyal, assertive truth-tellers. However, on most days, all too much of the time, we’re delusional, lazy, partisan, arrogant confabulators. Evidence is what should really matter, of course, but with respect to persuading those we wish to persuade, confidence is at least as important as competence, and emotion matters even more. It’s an unfortunate reality, but reality nonetheless. Indeed, Snopes would not exist without our propensity for not letting facts get in the way of a good story (in a bit of delicious irony, this idea is often falsely attributed to Mark Twain).

By this point, every investment professional and would-be professional has at least a passing knowledge of behavioral finance and is aware that confirmation bias is its lead actor. Sadly, people will resist abandoning a false belief unless and until they have a compelling alternative explanation – in other words, a better story. We inherently prefer a false model of reality to an incomplete or uncertain but more accurate model.

Confirmation bias comes in three primary flavors. Its standard expression, as noted above, is our tendency to notice and accept that which fits our preconceived notions and beliefs. The current political climate provides daily examples. We routinely accept or explain away the foibles of those we support while jumping all over those of the opposition. My daily Twitter feed is conclusive evidence of this unseemly reality. One person’s depravity and slander is another’s obvious fact. Each side thinks they have chosen the right hero in a fraught morality play with the highest of possible stakes.

But confirmation bias also includes seeing what we expect to see (as when we proofread something and read right over an obvious error) and seeing that which is in our interest to see. Upton Sinclair offered perhaps its most popular expression: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

In 2006, researchers randomly mixed and labeled news stories from a single, separate news source as coming from four different outlets – Fox, CNN, NPR, and the BBC – and showed them to a random sampling of readers. Significantly, the very same news story attracted a substantially different audience depending upon the network label. Thus, for example, conservatives chose to read stories labeled as being from Fox while liberals ignored them, no matter their actual source and content, and vice versa. In other words, the exact same story with the exact same headline was deemed readable or not solely based upon its apparent source. The conclusion is obvious and unsurprising: “people prefer to encounter information that they find supportive or consistent with their existing beliefs.” Therefore, people generally “wall themselves off from topics and opinions that they would prefer to avoid,” irrespective of the evidence.

The Americans, the 1980s Cold War spy drama of a few years ago (available via Amazon) about the complex marriage, family, and work of two Soviet spies living as Americans in suburban Washington, DC, and which was the best show on television, illustrates this point beautifully. On an episode back in 2015, the FBI agent played by the wonderful Noah Emmerich is asked about his backstory on another case — three years undercover with white supremacists — by another agent.

     “What did it take to fool them?”

“Telling them what they wanted to hear over and over and over again.”

     “That’s it?”

“People love hearing how right they are.”

All of which is a helpful predicate to a perfectly obvious conclusion: people are human. We can act irrationally in the best of situations and fans can be downright bonkers. If we are exceedingly prone to various mental biases in life generally, when we’re in fan mode we readily go off the rails entirely (a guy behind us at Wednesday’s UVA game complained about every whistle and kept insisting that Duke got “all the calls”). And when we’re in fan/rivalry mode, almost anything is possible.

You remember the 2020 election, right?

We Dukies hated Dean Smith back when I was a student and loved to see him get what we saw as his comeuppance. But with more than 40 years of perspective from my school days, I can now see what a great coach and a great man Dean was. Still, the objective facts demand that we hold Dean in high regard. He won a then-record number of games and (apparently) did it “the right way.” More importantly, he was instrumental in the fight for racial justice even at a time when he didn’t have all that much clout.

On the other hand, when Coach K was named Sports Illustrated magazine’s 2011 Sportsman of the Year (along with Tennessee’s Pat Summitt), that honor was met with more than a bit of skepticism and consternation by many Carolina fans. After the news broke, I couldn’t help but take a peek at the fan-site Inside Carolina‘s message boards for a bit of reaction, since internet message boards, like social media, tend to take typical fan insanity and ratchet up the level of loony more than a few notches.

I was not disappointed. Some representative, “Carolina Crazy” comments follow.

• “CongRATulations to coach summit.”

• “To be fair, that Sweet 16 finish with the pre-season #1 last year was a pretty solid accomplishment.”

• “Really. Amazing!!  I guess it is sportsman-like to curse like a sailor at officials. I guess it is sportsman-like to teach players to flop to fool referees. I need a new definition.”

• “Coach Rat would’ve been my 1,875,643,325,875,432…th choice.”

• “Leave it to the rat to turn The SI Sportsman of the Year Award, a previously prestigious award, into just another cheesey award.”

• “Does dSPN [for the uninitiated, that’s a common meme for Carolina fans – ESPN being the dook – intentional misspelling and small “d” – Sports Programming Network] own SI too?”

• “Sports Illustrated [long-time home of noted college basketball writer and Carolina alum Curry Kirkpatrick, who loved Dean Smith] has hated us for years.”

Here’s my favorite: “I guess it makes sense, if the definition of sportsman is ‘a d-bag who denigrates referees’. K is like the WWF (the environmental group): both make more money than they deserve, both are rotten to the core, but somehow both are believed to be saints.”

As fans, the more reasoned among us at least try to “put some lipstick on the pig” and gussy-up our nuts with perfectly rational-sounding reasons why we are better than them, even though we have long-since decided that it is so, facts notwithstanding.

The Carolina fans I quoted above likely believe that they are being cool and objective about Coach K in just the same way that I thought I was being objective about Coach Smith all those years ago. If only.

We all are and remain biased, ideological, and inherently tribal. It can be dangerously difficult to bear in mind that we are rarely as right and our motives as pure as we tend to assume. We like to think that we are like judges, that we carefully gather and evaluate facts and data before coming to an objective and well-founded conclusion. Instead, we are much more like lawyers, grasping for any scrap of purported evidence we can exploit to support our preconceived notions and allegiances.

Confirmation bias explains how, as cognitive psychologist Eryn Newman explains, “smart, sophisticated people” can go astray on matters of fact. Newman’s research has shown that the less effort it takes to process a factual claim, the more accurate it seems, which fits nicely with our seeing what we want to see.

In one classic study, for example, people were more likely to think a statement was true when it was written in high color contrast as opposed to low contrast. Easy-to-pronounce ticker symbols (such as KAR) perform better in the markets than their difficult-to-pronounce counterparts (such as RDO), even after just one day of trading. And, astonishingly, claims attributed to people with easy-to-pronounce names were deemed more credible than those attributed to people with difficult-to-pronounce names.

As summarized by one analyst: “When we fluidly and frictionlessly absorb a piece of information, one that perhaps snaps neatly onto our existing belief structures, we are filled with a sense of comfort, familiarity, and trust. The information strikes us as credible, and we are more likely to affirm it — whether or not we should.”

Due to our affinity for like-minded people, we seek out people like us to provide echo chambers for our claims, claims that perpetuate themselves every time we hear them reverberated back to us. Carolina fans go to Inside Carolina while Duke fans go to The Devil’s Den. We are thus neuro-chemically confirmation bias addicts. Megan McArdle sums things up nicely.

“We like studies and facts that confirm what we already believe, especially when what we believe is that we are nicer, smarter and more rational than other people. We especially like to hear that when we are engaged in some sort of bruising contest with those wicked troglodytes — say, for political and cultural control of the country we both inhabit. When we are presented with what seems to be evidence for these propositions, we don’t tend to investigate it too closely. The temptation is common to all political persuasions [and every branch of fandom], and it requires a constant mustering of will to resist it.”

Carolina fans, I’m looking at you. But I’m trying to look at myself, too.

My youngest (who took me to Charlottesville this week), a Berkeley grad who also played football at Cal, made a telling comment about this tendency, made only half in jest: “I think you’re 100 percent right, except in regards to Stanfurd [those familiar with the rivalry will surely recognize that this spelling is not a typo]. Cal fans aren’t irrational at all about them.”

As a Duke fan, I’m resigned to the reality that lots of people (and especially those wearing the wrong shade of blue) are going to think that Coach K is evil, that Duke gets all the calls, and that the Cameron Crazies are a bunch of over-privileged poseurs no matter what a truly objective analysis of the facts might show. It’s both human as well as all but inevitable (especially when rivals play).

It's perfectly okay to be utterly irrational about your favorite team, however. We’re fans — as in fanatics — after all. And one more thing: Go Duke (and go to hell Carolina).

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Totally Worth It

This is the best thing I saw or read this week. The fattest. The saddest. The bravest. The most trenchant. The most tragic. The most ridiculous. The most powerful. The most insightful. The most painful. The least surprising. The best troll. The worst editing. The narrative fallacy and tribalism combine to defeat truth. What could go wrong? Totally plausible. CNN screws up again.

Feel free to contact me via rpseawright [at] gmail [dot] com or on Twitter (@rpseawright) and let me know what you like, what you don’t like, what you’d like to see changed, and what you’d add. Praise, condemnation, and feedback are always welcome.

Don’t forget to subscribe and share TBL. Please.

Of course, the easiest way to share TBL is simply to forward it to a few dozen of your closest friends.

Please send me your nominees for this space to rpseawright [at] gmail [dot] com or via Twitter (@rpseawright).

The Spotify playlist of TBL music has been divided in two. A Christmas music edition has been split off from the regular version so you needn’t listen to Christmas music in February – not that that’s a bad thing. The regular TBL playlist now includes more than 200 songs and about 14 hours of great music. I urge you to listen in and sing along, with the volume way up.

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Benediction

This week’s benediction is a classic old gospel song, performed by Carrie Underwood, supported by some great pickin’ and terrific harmony-singing.

To those of us prone to wander, to those who are broken, to those who flee and fight in fear – which is every last lost one of us – there is a faith that offers grace and hope. And may love have the last word. Now and forever. Amen.

Thanks for reading.

Issue 103 (February 25, 2022)