Nothing is as it seems

Sorry it's been a while since I've blogged anything here...busy busy in recent weeks, but it's been enjoyable and exciting and lots of fun things all at once.

Something that I wanted to talk about is the idea that nothing is as it seems. I would have called this post "Through the looking glass" if I didn't already have a post with that title, but the general idea is that we can't really take anything at absolute, pristine face value. Anyone with half an idea of how I operate within this universe knows that I think everything is relative. Now before you throw counterexamples at me, let me qualify that. I know that every time I take two of something and add two more, I'll have four. What I mean is that with higher-order stuff, the implications of reality are something that are never absolute. An example of this - for my math thesis, I wanted to mess around with GPA and come up with some all-encompassing formula that takes into account circumstances such as overall courseload, general difficulty of an individual class, when that class meets...and many other variables. (Editor's Note: I'm not sure if I've ever talked about this on my blog before, and since it hasn't come to me immediately, I'm wagering that I haven't here.) Let's say you get an 82% on a given test. On one hand, you got 82 percent of the possible points. But that's not to say that you would get an 82 on that test every single time you took it. Let's say that you had another test in a more important class to study for, and let's say that you had a cold that week, and that you were in a fight with your best friend from home. In that case, an 82 looks pretty good - in more favorable circumstances, you might end up with something north of a 90. Nothing is absolute.

There's a quote from an ESPN the Magazine article about a prospect in the Los Angeles Angels farm system a few years back, and all of the hype surrounding this player (no, it wasn't Mike Trout).

"We plan for the future by averaging our expectations - 30% chance of rain, 20% chance of catching a spade on the river, 50% chance [the player would be an All-Star] - but we play it out only once. You never catch 20% of a spade. So [the player] was never going to be worth an average. He was going to be worth one thing, and that one thing could conceivably be anything."

I think it's a really cool example of how things either happen, or they don't. As much as I love statistics and numbers and analysis, things either happen, or they don't. And even when they do (or don't), we can't take that for granted. Despite all of the percentages and likelihoods, what we get is what we get, and what's important is what we do with it.