In the financial world, ex-post analysis is a useful to use previous results in the stock market to predict future results. For example, this upcoming week is a huge earnings week for a broad section of the market, including stocks I own like Boeing, Amazon, Tesla, Apple, Facebook, Google, Honeywell, MSFT, and other companies that make up a huge swath of the S&P500. I can use what I've learned from previous earnings reports to inform how I should react to the earnings reports of those companies. For many of these companies, I've held that long enough now that I know that a disappointing earnings report from any of them (and I mean hugely disappointing, like 7 or 8% down in one session) doesn't necessarily signal that the peak has arrived and it's all downhill sledding from here, I can feel comfortable enough to buy on that dip and feel confident from past experience that it's going to snap right back up, or take longer but eventually get back to gong up steadily.
What I don't like about ex-post analysis is how it's used in the real world: looking back at things that happened to point out mistakes that people made and what they should have done differently, even though we're looking back at it with perfect information as to what eventually happened, no matter how unlikely that event would have seemed to occur beforehand. We do it in analysis of the news, sports, gambling, relationships, how people should have lived their lives, it's an easy trap to fall into. It would be like me going back and looking at why NFLX just dipped 10% after it reported earnings and point to factors like increased competition, people coming out of Covid lockdowns who don't streaming TV anymore, and others to explain why OBVIOUSLY people should have sold the stock before earnings.......but not take the further step of using it to help inform the decision for next time, just using it as a way to criticize others for not having seen it earlier, despite having the advantage of perfect hindsight being after the fact.
One of my least favorite things about fantasy baseball is how often the most unlikely thngs can happen, like a batter who has a lifetime .050 average hits a home run in a key situation, or some other flukey event. Such a huge discrepancy, to not knowing anything about how the world will turn out before something happens, to having complete full knowledge of what occurred after the fact. Even the most unlikely, once-in-a-lifetime Black Swan event like Covid-19 can be accepted easily as "of course that happened" quickly as soon as it does happen. There's no hedging like "oh maybe it went from a 1% chance of happening to 50% chance of happening..." nope, it goes from 1% to 100% immediately, or from 99.999% to 0% immediately. It reminds me of what a certain moral philsopher whom MJ and I both knew who believed in "black and white," or his most famous phrase, "There was always a 100% chance of something happening, or a 0% chance. No in-between." I laughed his statement off at the time as overly simplified and nonsensical, but the more I think about it I kind of understand what he's getting at.
I guess all this relates back to the recent police shootings stemming from the George Floyd killing in Minnesota almost a year ago.....it's almost a daily event nowadays that a police shooting of a black suspect will be in the news and scrutinized using witness reports and body cam footage. Just hours after Derek Chauvin was found guilty of all counts of murder in the 2nd and 3rd degree and manslaughter, a 16-year-old black girl in Ohio was shot by the police. Once again, there was body cam footage, and this time it divided the nation into people who supported the police officer's actions to kill the girl who had a knife in her hand about to stab another black girl, and those in the nation who believed the officer should not have acted as he did and should be punished. I think one thing we forget, no matter which side of the debate we are on, is that we as the viewers have perfect information as to what happens after the officer makes his/her decision to do what the officer did. We know that the girl was actually the one who had called the cops, we know the 4 bullets the officer used would cause her to die at the scene, and we know that the other girl didn't get stabbed. When the officer arrived at the scene, he had about 5 or 6 seconds to assess the scene, yell commands to "Get down" repeatedly, and then make a split-second decision what to do. He doesn't have the body-cam footage that we all now have, he doesn't have the knowledge that everything will calm down. I guess this makes me sound like I'm on the officer's side, but I'm more against the side of people who watch from their screens in the basement and have a knee-jerk reaction to the shooting and post about it making judgments.
As for a proposed solution to the police shootings problem? I've thought of one: Give positive interactions for positive police interactions. Use body camera footage, witness testimony, etc. to go back and check every officer's interactions and give out POSITIVE feedback every time there is a good interaction with black people that didn't involve violence and the officer acted correctly without racial prejudice, and add those points up for some sort of reward, increased pay, extra vacation time, a free meal, whatever it is, to give officers incentive to act in a good one. Maybe they already have those, but don't just stress all the negative interactions. Most parents and child caretakers (and camp counselors) know this: children react better to positive reinforcement, and adults really do too. Show some "good apples" in the street and make them examples, and even "bad apples" might want to model their behavior like them. Right now it just feels like there's too many slaps on the reputation of officers and negative reinforcement that engenders a learned helplessness where no matter what officers do they will be blamed in any situation.
-Robert Yan
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