Logic

So,
I follow NCAA basketball a little bit, and this time of year everyone who follows NCAA basketball (and many who don't) fill out a bracket for the NCAA tournament, picking who wins each game. (I don't think there is an SLMF bracket yet, but if anyone out there wants to start one, I'll join).

I offer this as context to this story from the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/sports/ncaabasketball/15score.html?ref=ncaabasketball . This article explains that people are very bad at picking upsets, and that in aggregate, people would do better just picking the higher seeds to win every game in the NCAA tournament, because in general these higher seeds are most likely to win (somewhere between 75-90%, most of the time).  The easiest example they provided is choosing whether a weighted event will occur-like say, guessing if a random card drawn from a deck will be a heart or not a heart.  Most people will pick not a heart about 75% of the time, and a heart 25% of the time, attempting to get every card right, but they end up picking less than 75% right, when if they just picked 'not a heart' every time, they would get 75%.  Same with upsets in the NCAA tournament.

This is very much true.  But there is a gaping logical hole in their argument: when picking a bracket, no one is trying to beat the average. They are trying to win (most bracket groups have between 1 and 3 winners). And in order to win, you have to take the risk of picking upsets, increasing the variance in your potential outcomes. If you want to maximize your correct number of picks, then picking all top picks is a useful way to do that (or, pick by who the gamblers in Las Vegas think will win, which usually beats picking just by the seeding), but if you want to win a bracket group, you have to lower your odds of doing the very best you can, to increase the odds of beating everyone else.

I mention this in this space for two reasons-one, huge logical fallacies by major national newspapers make me sad.

Second, I think there may be a bit of a parallel to our lives as Christians well.  There are some times when it is best to be conservative-to make the choices that maximize our own success, aiming for somewhere above average.  But in cases where there is a zero sum outcome-where consistently coming in above average will simply mean that you will definitely loose to fewer people, but will never win, then we have to make riskier decisions.  The trick is knowing which kind of situation is which, and probably blending the techniques to get the best of both worlds. 

So that is the question-as individuals or as a congregation. Do we want to chart a comfortable path most likely to lead to acceptable above average success, or do you dare for something tremendous, and increase the risk of failure and ridicule?

Grace and peace,
Samuel