NFL Playoffs — FiveThirtyEight vs. the Bookies

January 10, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

The 49ers are a 7-point favorite tomorrow over the Vikings. According to FiveThirtyEight’s Elo rating, they’re only five points better.

Elo — named for Arpad Elo, a physicist who used it to predict chess matches — is a “power rating,” which takes into account a team’s record, the records of the teams it played, the margin of victory, and some other team variables. Power ratings are common in sports. Elo, as you would expect from something at FiveThirtyEight, is a bit more statistically complicated. For example:

We created a multiplier that gives teams (ever-diminishing) credit for blowout wins by taking the natural logarithm of their point differential plus 1 point. This factor also carries an additional adjustment for autocorrelation, . . .the tendency of a time series to be correlated with its past and future values. [Source]

Can you use Elo to make money betting on the NFL? Is that two-point difference tomorrow enough to warrant a bet on Vikings getting seven points? Below is a chart showing wins and losses for each level of difference between the Elo spread and the actual betting line. I set the minimum difference at 1½ points.

For example, in the last week of the regular season, the bookies had Broncos as 4-point favorites over the Raiders. Elo rated them 5½ points better. So according to my system, that 1½-difference means bet the favorite. As it turned out, the Broncos won, but by only one point. So we Eloists and other Broncos bettors lost.

So far this season, there has been an Elo-vs-bookmakers difference of exactly 1½ points in 37 games. If you had bet accordingly, you would have won 19 bets and lost 18. Unfortunately, most bets require the bettor to give 11-10 odds. You bet $110 to win $100. So on these thirty-seven 1½-point games, you would have lost a little (4%).

(Click for a slightly larger view.)

As the chart shows, Elo as a betting guide does not improve as the rating differential increases. If you had bet $110 on each game where the Elo rating differed from the betting line by 1½ points or more, you would have wound up winning 70, losing 81 — a net loss of $1100. Increasing the size of your bet as the differential increased might have made a small improvement.

In any case, here’s how Elo and Las Vegas see the games this weekend.

Favorite	Las Vegas Line	Elo	Underdog
49ERS	7	5	Vikings
RAVENS	9½	13	Titans
CHIEFS	9½	11	Texans
PACKERS	4½	7½	Seahawks

Elo likes the Vikings as underdogs. In the other three games, it thinks that the betting line is underestimating the strength of the favorite. That’s not an accident. As their methodological post at FiveThirtyEight says, “We found that, in the NFL playoffs, favorites tend to outplay underdogs by a wider margin than we’d expect from their regular-season ratings alone.”

UPDATE: Here are the Elo picks and their outcomes in the actual games.

1. Elo liked the Vikings + 7. They lost by 17 (27 - 10). A loss for Elo.

2. Elo liked the Ravens - 9½. They lost on the field. Badly (12-28). Nobody saw that one coming. A loss for Elo.

3. Elo liked the Chiefs - 11½. They won and covered (51-31). A win for Elo.

4. Elo liked the Packers - 4½. They won by 5 (28-23). A win for Elo.

Two up, two down. With Elo as a guide, if you had bet of $110 to win $100 on each game, your net would be -$20.

Impostor Syndrome, an Idea Whose Time Has Come . . . Again

January 8, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

The impostor syndrome is the dancing partner of pluralistic ignorance. That was the point of the previous post. In pluralistic ignorance, each person thinks that others are doing better at living up to cultural ideals. On campuses where “hook-up culture” rules, most students think that everyone else is having more sex and better sex than they are. Two axioms from Goffman account for this misperception. First, norms require that people present more or less idealized versions of themselves and keep contradictory, self-damaging information to themselves. Second, absent any contradictory information, we accept and ratify the self that the other person presents. These norms make it easy for real impostors to go unchallenged for so long.*

Unless we are playing Humiliation (see the previous post or David Lodge’s novel Changing Places), we don’t tell our colleagues which classics in our field we haven’t read. Instead, when the conversation turns to Weber’s Economy and Society, we nod and keep our silence, assuming that most of the others in the room have read it at least once. Maybe we make a tangential comment, or ask a general question, and the others for their part, observing our wisdom, assume that we too have made our way through all 1700 pages. We, meanwhile, feel like an impostor. (And by we in this paragraph, I mean me. And maybe you.)

The phrase in the seminal 1978 article** was “impostor phenomenon,” but “impostor syndrome” quickly became the more popular choice. It was a phrase just waiting to be coined.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

The sharp increase of “imposter syndrome” in print did not reflect an increase in the thing itself. It was already widespread; it was just hiding in plain sight. It was the feeling that could not speak its name. But once someone did speak its name, people were seeing it everywhere.

Did impostor syndrome have a precursor? It did indeed. In the 1920s and 30s, “inferiority complex” followed a similar trajectory.

The person most responsible for putting the concept in play was psychoanalyst Alfred Adler. He used the term “inferiority feeling,” but in the same way that phenomenon gave way to syndrome with imposter, Adler’s feeling was soon swamped by complex. Wikipedia describes it as “feelings of not measuring up to standards, a doubt and uncertainty about oneself, and a lack of self-esteem.” Which sounds a lot like impostor syndrome. The “inferiority complexes” was popular in the 1940s and 50s, but nowadays, it’s hard to find anyone who has one, sort of like a Studebaker.

From the sociological perspective, the trouble with both these versions is that they emphasize the individual. That’s obvious with “inferiority feelings,” which assumes that these are a matter of individual psychology. But even the studies that look at gender, class, or race take these as permanent characteristics of the individual. What these ignore are the structural, situational conditions that make the feelings more likely or less likely.  And these conditions may matter far more than the psychological or demographic characteristics of the individual.

I hope to explore this idea in a later post.

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* Frank Abegnale, the impostor played by Leo DeCaprio in “Catch Me If You Can,” once got a university adjunct position in sociology. He said he was a sociologist, and nobody tried to prove him wrong. He moved on after a semester, probably to keep ahead of the law. But apparently his student evaluations were good. The department chair asked him to stay for another semester.


** “The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention,” by Dr. Pauline R. Clance and Dr. Suzanne A. Imes, Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice. 15 (3): 241–247.

Impostor Syndrome and Cultural Rules

January 6, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

Many years ago, I was talking with a successful business consultant. He had a PhD in business from a prestigious school, was on the faculty of another pretigious business school, and for several years now, corporations were paying him large sums to come in for a day or two. Still, he didn’t feel secure. “I keep thinking, What if they find out?”

I remembered that conversation when a thread on impostor syndrome showed up in my Twitter feed. What set people off was this tweet in response to someone who had tweeted about her own feelings of being an impostor.

True, it’s the individual’s problem, not society’s. Society doesn’t suffer if you feel like an impostor. But that doesn’t mean that social factors are irrelevant. What if impostor syndrome is more prevalent and more persistent among women than men? That would certainly suggest that the causes are social and not just psychological. In fact, many of the responses to this tweet argued that a person’s race, class, gender, age and other social variables might affect the probability that they would feel like an impostor. Or as Nathalie Olah in the Guardian (here) put it, “what seems more likely is that impostor syndrome is a rather natural reaction of anyone from a working-class, disadvantaged or minority background to the various biases they face on a daily basis.”

The studies on these variables are far from unanimous, if only because there’s no standardized way of measuring the crucial variable of feeling like an impostor. But I’d like to throw in one more variable — culture. My guess is that impostor syndrome is more prevalent and more deeply affecting in societies that emphasize success, societies like, oh I don’t know, the United States.

The British, by contrast, seem not so obsessed by success. In some instances, not being a success and not having the right stuff can put a person one up on the others in the room. I’m thinking here of Humiliation, a party game played by literature professors in Changing Places by British novelist David Lodge. Each person has to name a literary work, preferably one in the canon, that they have never read. You get a point for every other player who in fact has read it. The winner will be the one who has not read the classics that a lit professor would be expected to be familiar with — in other words, the biggest impostor.

Presumably, for the British and for less success-obsessed Americans the game is just a bit of fun. But for Howard Ringbaum, a success-driven American professor, the game creates an unresolvable conflict. “He has a pathological urge to succeed and a pathological fear of being thought uncultured, and this game set his two obsessions at war with each other, because he could succeed in the game only by exposing a gap in his culture.”

Ringbaum and Humiliation are fictions invented by a novelist. But Kate Fox is an anthropologist, and in Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, she describes a similar game of “competitive self-deprecation” when real Brits talk about their home-improvement projects.

When showing visitors the results of your DIY efforts . . . a strict modesty rule applies. Even if you are highly skilled, you must always play down your achievements, and if possible play up your most embarrassing mistakes and blunders...  ‘I managed to burst three pipes just laying the carpet!’  ‘We bought an expensive carpet, but I ruined it by cutting it four inches short, so I had to build some bookcases to cover the gap.’ ‘You think that’s bad: it took me an hour and three cups of tea to put up a coat-hook board, and then I found I’d hung it upside-down!’

Here’s more British fun: In a dinner-party scene in the film “Notting Hill,” the competition involves not a specific area like literature or home-improvement but more or less the total self. Except for the newcomer in their midst – a famous actress (played by Julia Roberts), the guests all know one another well, and as the the host says, “I've long suspected, that we really are the most desperate lot of under-achievers.” At dessert time, there’s one extra brownie, and the host says he will award the brownie to “the saddest act here.”

The video is nearly four minutes long, but it’s worth watching.   

I can’t think of anything similar in American novels or films. Maybe such scenes exist, and in any case, the connection between cultural fictions and real life is not always clear. But the larger point is that impostor syndrome depends on the rules of the game. Where the rules of everyday life allow for the disclosure of personal flaws,  people will be less likely to feel like an impostor and that feeling will be less salient.

I Do Not Like Thee, Dr. Phil

January 4, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’ve had that title in my head for years now, but I’ve never written the blog post that goes with it. That’s partly because I don’t think that many people know this nursery rhyme.

I do not like thee Dr. Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.

Exactly right. I do not like Dr. Phil, yet I would be hard pressed to articulate the reason why. In order to do so, I’d have to watch a lot of his TV segments, and since I don’t like him, I’d find that unpleasant, so I don’t. Which is the other reason I never wrote that post.

But now we have this photo of the dining room in Dr. Phil’s house.

(Click for a larger view.)

Would you refer a friend to a therapist whose dining room featured cartoonish animal statuary and a wall display of a dozen military-style guns? It’s not a decision you’ll have to make. Dr. Phil has not been licensed to practice since the earlier part of this century.

Also, there are some minor factual quibbles, which William Hughes at AVClub (here) raises and dismisses.

McGraw does not currently live in the California estate, which is now owned by the family trust and occupied at present by McGraw’s son. And there’s no evidence that he had any impact on its decoration, beyond, presumably, footing at least some of the cash for its eclectic collection of guns, “FUCK” paintings, and big giant lips. And yet, we have to assume that McGraw has at least stood in this building in its current state, muttering approvingly of the dining room gun wall, the gaudy Star Wars art, and, in what has quickly become our favorite touch, the legion of small Lego-ish bears scattered around the home, including two who are dressed up like Batman and the Joker, because hey, fuck it, that’s fun.

The larger point is first that sometimes your initial impression of a person, immediate and without rational thought, is right; and second, that you may have to wait a long time — until you see their dining room decor — to know that you were right.