RowJimmy If you're running the club you need to be a pure Bayesian.
Yeah, look, Bayesian inference sums up a maximal rationality, but priors are still priors and not more, no matter how you believe you are optimising them. What you believe is the distribution of possibility is no more than a logical extension of events you've already seen happen. As Bergson puts it in "The Possible and the Real":
That one can insert reality into the past and thus work backwards in time, I have never claimed. But that one can lodge possibility there, or rather that possibility is at every moment lodging itself there, that is indubitable. As reality creates itself, unforeseeable and new, its image reflects behind it into the indefinite past; it finds itself having been, for all time, possible; but it is at this precise moment that it begins to always have been possible, and that’s why I said that its possibility, which does not precede its reality, will have preceded it once its reality has appeared.
The stuff that happens transforms your understanding of the stuff that could happen, but the way in which things can happen invariably exceeds this understanding. That's what Ayache is on about in THE BLANK SWAN.
In the case of this title victory, it's just as you say. You can have one or two numbers you measure, points and goal difference, and say "Oh well Arsenal have had good points and goal difference for several seasons" so evidently things were going in the right direction—without even knowing the names of the coach and the players. You can have 1,000 numbers you're tracking and you're still in the same boat ontologically. You're confabulating the logical extensions of a rationality grounded in hazard.
This is why the affirmable power of Bayesian rationality is consolation, being able to feel okay when reality doesn't match your predictions and that's what "[staying] rational through the bad moments" means. It means adopting a model of reality that isn't open to certain kinds of events, just writing them off as a "bad beat" because you are so sure you have your model correct.
In the case of Arteta's tenure, I've always tried to pay attention to unmeasurable or unstructured stuff, the vibes. When Arteta sacked Auba, my question was "How does the dressing room seem to feel about it?" and when the players were evidently close to one hundred per cent behind the coach, for me that was a huge vindication for Arteta. No xG, no territorial domination, no nett spend, no points or goal difference measured in that vindication. We don't yet claim to have the numbers on dressing room sentiment, but I bet we will eventually.
This season however, there have been times where the likes of Rice and Saka have looked close to self-harm out there on the pitch, and it's had me worried. Rice was lashing out at himself and others at one point: "it's always the same." Those vibes concerned me.
So it's all well and good to say you're staying rational and trusting some numbers that say nothing about these things, but if we'd had one or two kicks different and we'd not scraped over the line a fourth time in a row … you can't tell Arsenal wouldn't have been in all kinds of turmoil over the summer. And rightly so.
Anyway, my overall point is I agree with you, and I'd say again you're the one who actually deserves the crown for the force of your irrational advocacy of Arteta around here. 👑
