Buy Low Model Week 12

Tangles and the power of narratives

The Buy Low for Week 12 is up, but I’m told it is only accessible via the PFF app. That app is only available on iOS, so you need an iPhone to view it. I do not have an iPhone.

Unfortunately I have zero control over how the article is delivered to readers. My understanding is that later in the week you can view it on the website, but when that occurs is opaque to me. I apologize. (Maybe it’s an organizational tangle, see below.)

Let’s talk a bit about last week. For the sixth time in 10 weeks of writing this strange artifact of math and game theory, a receiver on the Buy Low was in the Milly Maker winning lineup. Who was it? It was REDACTED. I still can’t believe my GD eyes.

Image from Rotogrinders

I don’t think I’ve ever been this owned. It’s not just that REDACTED was in the lineup — I’ve come to terms with the idea that I add almost no value by redacting players. In fact I think my player blurbs may add net negative value. (More on that later.)

Instead what really puts sand in my underwear is that REDACTED scored just 7.3 points. He was garbage. And yet, here we are.

This got me thinking about tangles. Venkatish Rao defines tangles as complex things that are efficient but not orderly. One of the devices he uses to illustrate a tangle are the ways you can efficiently pack a quantity of squares inside another square. When we look at Milly Maker winning lineup we expect to see something that looks like this:

We expect to have the lineup tell us a story. The story should tell us about the person who designed it (the why of their thought process) and it should tell a story about how the team ultimately won (the how of the outcome). We do not see much of that in isupol’s tournament winning lineup. Instead we see something like this:

A tangle. A place where our narrative-loving brains go to die. Something efficient, though we can’t see how. Something that won, yet we can’t see why.

Some players on the Buy Low fit a convincing narrative. They look like they will slide nicely into a lineup that looks a lot like the first box full of boxes. Efficient and orderly. Elegant, almost beautiful.

But sometimes players will end up on lineups that look much more like the second box of boxes. Since that’s true, requiring that a player fit into a neat narrative about why and how is actually harmful. It’s a leak in our approach to the game.

I think that’s why I’d often rather use the blurbs to make jokes, or comment on some meta-analysis of the Buy Low. I’m pretty sure I’m leading people astray by pointing out my pet narratives, even if they seem reasonable. Instead, the winning move is probably to create a story for yourself that allows for the possibility that the correct answer will be something that can’t be reasoned to, or reasoned about.

Happy thanksgiving.