{"id":638,"date":"2010-07-06T22:49:21","date_gmt":"2010-07-07T04:49:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.talyarkoni.org\/blog\/?p=638"},"modified":"2010-07-06T22:49:21","modified_gmt":"2010-07-07T04:49:21","slug":"this-year-i-backed-new-zealand-to-go-all-the-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/2010\/07\/06\/this-year-i-backed-new-zealand-to-go-all-the-way\/","title":{"rendered":"this year, i backed new zealand to go all the way"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jerry Coyne<\/a> ponders whether the best football\/soccer team generally wins the World Cup<\/a>. The answer is clearly no: any sporting event where games are settled on the basis of rare events (e.g., only one or two goals per match), and teams only play each other once to determine a winner, is going to be at the mercy of Lady Luck a good deal of the time. If we really wanted the best team to come out on top reliably, we’d probably need teams to play multiple games at every stage of the Cup, which isn’t very practical. Coyne discusses an (old) paper demonstrating that the occurrence of goals during World Cup matches is well fit by a poisson distribution, allowing one to calculate the probability of various unjust outcomes taking place (which turn out to be surprisingly high).<\/p>\n

The curious thing, I think, is that it’s not really clear that sporting fans really do<\/em> want the best team to come out on top. We don’t want outcomes to be determined by a coin toss, of course; it would kind of suck if, say, New Zealand had as much chance of lifting the cup as Brazil did. But it would also be pretty boring if it were a foregone conclusion that Brazil was going to win it all every time around. We want events to make sense, but we don’t want them to be too<\/em> predictable. I suppose you could tell an interesting prediction error<\/a> story about this kind of thing–e.g., that maximally engaging stimuli may be ones that seem<\/em> to occur systematically yet defy easy explanation–but it’s probably more fun to sit around and curse at the television set as the Netherlands make short work of the Samba Kings<\/a> (I don’t know if anyone actually uses that nickname; I just picked it off Wikipedia to make it look like I know what I’m talking about). Go Oranje!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jerry Coyne ponders whether the best football\/soccer team generally wins the World Cup. The answer is clearly no: any sporting event where games are settled on the basis of rare events (e.g., only one or two goals per match), and teams only play each other once to determine a winner, is going to be at … Continue reading this year, i backed new zealand to go all the way<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[390,387,389,391,386,392,388],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pEZxN-ai","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=638"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":640,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638\/revisions\/640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}