Posted on by Gotamist

And right away, an example where individuals determined the outcome

ENG (1) – ARG (2) in the second semifinal today.

The England-Argentina semi today, in contrast, was about individual brilliance. But this only came into play because both teams were already great as teams.

Messi on the Argentina side was critical for both goals with talented teammates to help convert the opportunities to goals. In the case of Argentina, no special strategy decision had to be made because they were down in the 55th minutes in an elimination match. What choice other than to press and go on full attack? And they did.

But the individual of the day was England’s manager Thomas Tuchel who basically led the Three Lions to a defeat. He determined that with 35 minutes to go, the best strategy was to defend the narrow 1-goal lead, sit bak and not attack, lest it leave an opening in defense – a plan that made sense to nobody else, it seems. A wave of substitutions took out attackers and replaced them with defenders. England formed a wall around their goal and barely left their own penalty box. This freed up Argentina to try again and again with little fear of a counter. Argentina had most of the possession after 55′ (88%, said the folks on TV!).

Everybody knows that you cannot score without ever taking shots and no further explanation is needed for what happened. The thing I wanted to point out, though is that England is also phenomenal as a team. And has plenty of attacking firepower and spirit. But when one leader sets a wrong strategy, he can lead a fantastic team off a cliff, or to an ignominious ending. Yet, they ended the night with no honor, unlike Switzerland’s exit, Cape Verde’s, Egypt’s or Belgium’s. So…talent, great teamwork and good leadership to set the right strategy.

I am reminded today of the tragic incident from 2022 in Uvalde, Texas. A highly capable team, capable individually and capable of perfect coordination, sat around in cowardice when they could have almost certainly pulled off a much more glorious outcome – just following bad decisions of leadership. Of course, these two inciddents are in completely different leagues. One is just a game and the second is a massive national tragedy, but the parallel is that trying to avoid all risk is a losing strategy – suffocating in your own coffin of dishonor.

Posted on by Gotamist

A star team beats a team of stars

Spain 2 – France 0 in the World Cup Semifinal today

Billed as “the final before the final,” Tuesday’s World Cup semi-final at Dallas Stadium promised a collision of two juggernauts. Instead, it delivered a lesson. France arrived with perhaps the most dazzling collection of individual attacking talent in world football — Kylian Mbappé playing some of the best soccer of his career, his eight goals tying Lionel Messi atop the Golden Boot race — flanked by Dembélé, Olise, and the precocious Doué. Spain arrived with something rarer: a team. The 2-0 result was less an upset than a demonstration that integration beats accumulation.

The distinction was visible in every phase. Spain’s opener came in the 22nd minute, when Lamine Yamal drew a foul from Digne in the box, and Mikel Oyarzabal calmly dispatched the penalty. Yet even that flash of individual brilliance was the product of collective machinery: Yamal received the ball in dangerous positions because, as one passage of play late in the match showed, Merino, Pedri, and Cucurella worked in concert to keep possession and feed it to him on the right.

The second goal was pure “system football”. In the 58th minute, Pedro Porro — a right-back, played a give-and-go with Dani Olmo before side-footing past France’s goalie Maignan. A one-two between a fullback and a playmaker, executed at speed in the final third, is the signature of players who understand each other’s movements instinctively. It’s a goal a “team of stars” rarely scores, because it requires trust in the pass rather than faith in the dribble.

Meanwhile, France’s galaxy of forwards was reduced to noise. Spain’s defense restricted Mbappé, Olise, Dembélé, and Doué to just 0.3 expected goals from ten shots — a suffocation achieved not by one great defender but by eleven players compressing space as a unit. In the 38th minute, coordinated high pressure forced a giveaway, and tight one-touch play between Yamal and Olmo nearly set up Fabián Ruiz at the near post. On both attack and defense, Spain acted collectively.

France’s response revealed the weakness of the individualist model. Deschamps shuffled his stars — Koné for Rabiot at halftime, then Doué for Barcola in the 57th minute — and a minute after that second change, Spain scored again. When your plan is “get the ball to the great players,” an opponent who removes those players from the game removes the plan entirely. Spain, by contrast, has now conceded only one goal in six matches — cohesion as a tournament-long identity, not a one-game mood.

I myself find France’s attacking style quite a bit more exciting to watch than Spain’s possession-style, sometimes called “death by a thousand passes” (sometimes, to audiences too, not just opposing teams). However, being exciting is different from getting the job (winning) done. Somewhat related are the words of John W. Gardner, a former US Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, “The world loves talent, but pays off on character”. In this case, we’re talk about team character, not personal integrity, of course.

This isn’t to say Spain lacks stars. It has them, and a deep bench of them too. But the character of the team is such that even their global stars know that the moving the team forward is how they achieve success. Take Lamine Yamal as an example. He is a fantastic goal scorer, but has scored only one goal in this tournament , against Saudi in a group stage match. Does that mean he isn’t having a good tournament? Far from it! He has made huge contributions. The talented teen makes some important plays, draws defenders and draws fouls, such as the one that set up penalty today – an opportunity that few would have created. And he also performed some excellent defensive work in the last quarter*.

Spain heads to Sunday’s final in New Jersey sixteen years after winning its first World Cup — who doesn’t remember 2010, another vintage defined by collective identity and a year that made tiki-taka a household term globally? The lesson from Dallas travels well beyond soccer: extraordinary individuals make a roster; a genuinely integrated team, where every part amplifies every other, plays in a league of its own.

Notes: * – we can start referring to quarters now… hydration breaks are here for good, unfortunately.

— Meanwhile, the leading goal scorer, Mikel Oyarzabal is from Real Sociedad, a great club team in Spain, no doubt, but not at the eliteness of Barcelona and Real Madrid. Perhaps there is a parable here about not focusing on recruiting for your team/workforce from the most elite schools. But I’ll refrain from developing that theme here. After all, the theme here is that individual goal scoring records ought not be the focus.

Posted on by Gotamist

What should technologists do?/Is a liberal arts education better?

I was struck by a tweet from Sci-Fi author and engineer Devon Eriksen that a friend mentioned to me. I disagree with this Devon almost entirely (except for the fact that people need to learn to make their own judgements from data – even this I disagree that teaching it in school is the way to get there). 

This is the classic argument we have seen for some 70 years from (generally) leftists who have been vehemently pro college-is-the-solution-for-all despite being the party of the working class.  It’s part of their general pantheon – worship work-from-home, the 4-day workweek, ever more benefits, ever fewer hours and fewer demands on workers.  They mock professional education whether blue collar or white collar as code monkeys etc (and ask Elon Musk to stay in his lane as a technologist and out of politics) while glorifying art, literature, social work, poetry.

Here is a typical statement/wish/argument used as a criticism of AI, for example. It’s about what someone wants out of AI and technology.  The tweet forgets what that AI must be made – by human beings. And that the usual process for all products entering the market is that inventors /producers create the product and put it out on the market with people deciding only whether they want it or not.  While they try to tap into latent demand or long standing wishlists of society, it rarely ever starts with innovators being commissioned by “thought leaders” to go out and invent this or that. 

They want technical people to be workers who produce all the conveniences.  They, as the literary and intellectual class, will then appropriate all the goods of innovation using an equally-for-all argument.  Further, they will decide the direction of society by force because they can “critically think” while technologists need to shut up and continue working.

Back to Eriksen’s tweet, Harari’s point was just this – back then, you knew what skills you needed to be better off than without them, regardless of whether you conquered the Mongols or the Mongols conquered you.  Today, you don’t.  Devon Eriksen’s reading of  “servant” into this is wrong.  If you were a servant, you learned sheep-shearing.  If you were a lord, you learned horse-riding and archery (and you were decidedly not a servant).  

The lords were lords because they had coercive power (to inflict pain/death) and were thus able to make other people do the work for their basic needs while they had the luxury to enjoy fine things and also pursue arts and poetry. They did NOT become powerful through the pursuit of poetry and arts, but by the sword.

Those ages were decisively put to an end by the industrial revolution.  The new middle class were all people with an actual skill – the professional in a town lives better than a landlord in a village. As for the new lords, they are those who understood technology and were able to marshall others’ labor (own companies) or invest in them in a non-managerial capacity.

The warrior class is no longer wealthy and is not feared by their own population – still very much respected for their blood sacrifice, but only that.  All the richest in the world today are skilled technologists or business builders (descendents of these).  The only old guard members still rich are the ones investing in companies shrewdly (eg. British and Saudi Royal families).

Finally, to Eriksen, I say that one of the pieces of education that the unproductive leftist intellectual class says with great pride they impart to people in the humanities is “we TEACH critical thinking” while technologists don’t have that.

For some reason, all political science departments are full of leftist profs and students.  The only reason they can see why 50% of the population supports the other side is “well, they’re stupid”.  That doesn’t seem like a whole lot of critical thinking to me.

What do I think gets one ahead? – producing things or services that other people value, that you can trade in a consensual market.

Whether they are high art or basic necessities.  Kids learn math, grammar, sales (persuasion) or be excellent at entertaining (singing, painting, sports), learn to build things that people want to buy or employ you for.  These are hard enough that character building is an automatic side effect from the failures and restarts you’ll inevitably have to do.