My newest column for the Athletic was pushed back to Monday, so keep an eye out for that. In the meantime, I did hold my first Klawchat in a while on Friday.
On the Keith Law Show this week, I spoke with Dr. Sian Beilock, author of Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To, an intangible that is actually both tangible and mutable. You can train your brain to do better in high-pressure situations. You can subscribe to my podcast on iTunes and Spotify. I also appeared on the Athletic Baseball Daily show again on Friday.
We’ve cleared over $800 raised to help Afghan refugees resettle in this area, money I will donate to Jewish Family Services of Delaware when I receive it. You can buy your “I’m just here for the #umpshow” T-shirt here to support the cause.
I’ll resume the email newsletter this weekend, now that things are calmer and less COVID-y around the house. And, as the holidays approach, I’ll remind you all every week that I have two books out, The Inside Game and Smart Baseball, that would make great gifts for the readers (especially baseball fans) on your lists.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: The New York Times Magazine looks at how one Dominion Voting Systems employee became the bogeyman for the election deniers, destroying his life in the process.
- A fringe medical group calling itself the Frontline Covid Critical Care Alliance is the major reason a bunch of American morons have started eating horse dewormer, even in the face of every major scientific and medical body saying it doesn’t work. Marisa Kabas investigated the group for the Huffington Post.
- A new paper in Nature Immunology examines better communication techniques to boost vaccine acceptance.
- Right-wing dark money groups’ next target? Local school boards, using fears of critical race theory to try to get their puppet candidates elected. Even if you live in an area where you think this couldn’t happen, make sure you pay attention to your next school board election.
- Hey, there’s a pre-print out with the results of an RCT that shows that masks are an effective mitigation strategy against COVID-19. They’re best when used with other mitigation strategies, such as vaccines, but they do help. That sound you hear is anti-maskers moving the goalposts.
- Ah, Texas, or should we just call you Gilead? NPR and Teen Vogue look at the state’s effort to turn back the clock 50 years, including the deleterious effect the state’s de facto abortion ban will have on women’s health. Plan C is trying to spread the word about how to get abortion pills online. The Nation points out how the right is concern-trolling everyone with bogus eugenics objections, when this is really about making religion into law. An enterprising programmer wrote an iOS shortcut to spam the Texas Right to Life group’s whistleblower site with junk reports, while GoDaddy is telling them to find another hosting service.
- The NY Times has an oral history of Y Tu Mamá Tambien, twenty years after the film, directed by Alfonso Cuarón and starring a terribly young Gael García Bernal, was first released.
- The Alabama coal miners strike continues to get very little mainstream media coverage, but one independent journalist has been on the ground with the strikers for several months.
- Why did Louisiana use forced prison labor to fill sandbags before Hurricane Ida hit – and then return those prisoners to their cells rather than evacuate them?
- Board game news: First watch this Shut Up & Sit Down review of the game 1819 Singapore, and then read this for more information.
- WILD: Serengeti looks like it has incredible artwork, if nothing else, and it’s on Kickstarter now.
- Also, The Price of Coal, a game about labor rights, is funded but is still on Kickstarter. I backed this one because I love the theme and concept.
HBS professor Willy Shih on the global chip shortage,
https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/31/22648372/willy-shih-chip-shortage-tsmc-samsung-ps5-decoder-interview
Love that he calls for investment in basic science research.
Love the #umpshow shirt! Purchased.
The school boards issue is scary. I grew up in a solidly blue MA town and even though the critical race theory protesters are very much in the minority, they’re so loud and so unhinged that the normal people don’t want to hold positions. It’s tough to blame them when all they get for dealing with the constant harassment is like a 5k stipend.
I’m in a fairly progressive college town that was ~65% Biden (albeit in a deep red state), and we had thinly veiled white supremacists running for the school board. Even if you don’t have kids, make sure to vote in those low-turnout local elections. And try to turn up at the public meetings to at least thank the school board members and let them know that the crazies are just a loud minority.
Kevin – same, though I’m not sure how solidly blue it really ever was…. Following along with some Western Mass school board drama for/against mask mandates in schools is showing me just how easily things can be swayed one way or another.
Re the Bangladesh study on masks, the study shows specifically that *surgical grade* masks reduce transmission by around 9% (wow, 9%, yippee!) and that the masks we all buy from CVS or Walgreens, or the ubiquitous homemade cloth masks are a different story altogether. Quoting the article:
“The study does not quite claim to be the final word on masks. The authors found that while cloth masks clearly reduced symptoms, they ‘cannot reject’ the idea that unlike surgical masks, they may have only a small effect on symptomatic coronavirus infections, and possibly none at all.” Uh, huh. And possibly none at all.
You want some classic double-talk? Check this out from Yale economist Jason Abaluck, who helped lead the study:
“The results ‘don’t necessarily show that surgical masks are much, much better than cloth masks, but we find much clearer evidence of the effectiveness in surgical masks,’ he said.” So you find much clearer evidence, but not necessarily much clearer evidence. Got it, Jason.
Do masks help prevent Covid. Sure, just like Keith says.
Masks help prevent Covid when combined with other mitigation — like vaccines.
And Cheerios help prevent heart attacks, when combined with proper diet and exercise.
Forget the masks and get vaccinated, folks — especially if you’re old or obese. You’ll live longer, and you might even help to protect someone you care about. And remember, you can’t spell “mistake” without mask.
Arrogant certitude is the enemy of good science — I would not trust any scientist who spoke as you wish they would.
This has continuously been a very weird hill to die on. I haven’t seen any serious scientists arguing for masks over vaccines, but instead for masks as part of layered mitigation (and especially for schools with children that cannot be vaccinated yet). As a parent of young children, I would not turn down a 10% decrease in risk of my children contracting COVID in schools.
But he said you can’t spell mistake without mask. That’s better than any RCT.
You can’t spell mistake without mask, but you would have a tie leftover. And if you’re wearing your mask like a tie, that would make a mistake.
“ You can train your brain to do better in high-pressure situations”
How does this square with the idea that “clutch” is not a thing?
Maybe selection bias. By the time you get to the professional ranks, athletes are all “clutch” with little to no drop off in ability during high pressure situations.
The myth of the “clutch hitter” is that such a player raises his game in high-pressure situations – and that it is an innate characteristic. If you read Dr. Beilock’s book, she doesn’t use the word “clutch,” but explains how “choking” – faring worse in high-pressure situations because your brain doesn’t follow its typical process – is a natural phenomenon, and one that you can train yourself to avoid. It’s like saying a player who wasn’t clutch became clutch, and we never hear that kind of language.
But don’t you think “clutch” is really just anti-choking? So if choking is possible than by logic clutch exists.
And I refuse to believe that every major leaguer is identical in terms of mental strength (or anti-choking). So even if everyone with mental strength of say 20-50 on the scouting scale gets weeded out in the minors, you still have a range of 60-80 among big leaguers meaning there is at least some distinction. Just like any other skill
I can definitely buy that there’s choking and anti-choking, with major chokage being weeded out. I think there’s less spread in chokage than most other measurable skills, which along with small sample sizes means there’s too much noise to find signal in the majority of cases.
The myth of the clutch player is that such a person can play better in high-pressure situations than in other situations. There’s no evidence such a player exists.
Also, none of this is innate or immutable. The idea that a player is “not clutch” is meaningless if it can be altered with a modicum of training.
Rick Ankiel, Chuck Knoblach and Steve Sax take issue with the idea that mental/physical issues are “meaningless” and easily fixed.
Dr. Beilock addresses Knoblauch specifically. You should read her book.
Also, I never said mental/physical issues were “meaningless.”
Mike – The ‘30 for 30’ short on Mackey Sasser was *really* interesting.
In Western Massachusetts, the school mask mandate is being discussed on a podcast that only a few days prior played host to Dr. “Andy” Wakefield. So who knows what anything is anymore.