The Problem with Trump

When you've spent 50 years behaviorally undisciplined, it's very difficult to overnight become the poster boy for behavioral discipline. Before getting to the thrust of this entry, I'd like to briefly explain my peanut gallery history.


Trumpster Fans

I grew up in southeastern Pennsylvania. Between the New York and Philadelphia tabloids and the National Enquirer, we were treated to Donald Trump stories on a regular basis, some of which he phoned in himself. He was a larger than life character who we tried to keep celebrity tabs on.

When the Trump Taj Mahal opened in Atlantic City (1990), my friend John and I rented a car and drove from Penn State for the opening. Along the way, we listened to a books-on-tape biography of Trump written by a Trump intern whose family members were gambling machine moguls. I had already read the book, but I was happy to see John's reactions as the author kept trying to present Trump in a bad light. Trump, while still married to his first wife, tells young interns that Marla is a 10, maybe more than a 10. When Trump attends the opening of a presser for his casino's new VIP lounge, he is appalled by the low ceilings. In front of the assembled press, he goes on a rant. Why are the f****** ceilings so low? Who the f*** designed these ceilings!?! And so on regarding the ceiling height, even though Trump had signed off on the architect's design (evidently without looking at it too closely). The author kept trying to make Trump sound obnoxious and bullying and bad, but at each juncture, he succeeded only in making Trump somebody with whom John and I wanted to have a beer.

John and I were also Howard Stern fans, and we enjoyed Trump's occasional guest appearances. Stern would ask him all kinds of inappropriate questions, and Trump would answer them. Trump was a rockin' circus dude. John loved his raw capitalism. And how could I not love a guy who built mega-casinos and talked sex on Howard Stern? It never occurred to John or me that one day our rockin' circus dude would wind up as president. But here we are. Here also is COVID-19. And we are in trouble.


The Main Issue

The problem with Donald Trump as our president here and now is not about policy. It's mainly about who he has shown to be and how he has behaved. This man is now a role model. He is the biggest role model on the American stage. And if Americans emulate his style and the personal characteristics he has exhibited during the previous 50 years, we are all looking at a disaster that will be worse than it needs to be.

The first basic issue with Trump-as-role-model during this pandemic is that the federal government is asking us to prioritize the health of others over our own wants and needs. The elderly, those with pre-existing conditions, and those with weakened immune systems are most at risk, with virus mortality rates several times higher than the general population. This means, basically, that the health and lives of this segment are really at the mercy, in this moment, of the rest of America. Every healthy young asymptomatic COVID-19 carrier has a kind of generalized power over the vulnerable. They hold the fate of the vulnerable in their hands. If they limit their exposure to others, they can help "flatten the curve." If they choose to put others at risk, they have the ability to do so. This power is probabilistic, not obvious or necessarily direct, so it is easy if you are young and healthy to ignore the risks that you can impose on the vulnerable. Proof of individual transmission is a murky road, so spreading illness and death is essentially a crime without consequences.

What is required to minimize the COVID-19 damage is empathy and putting others' health ahead of your own needs, wants, and impulses. We can choose to be bullies and do what we want, or we can choose to be team players and treat everyone like family.


The Wrong Role Model

I don't know Donald Trump, the man. But his public persona has not featured demonstrations of great behavioral discipline and treating everyone like family. He has said what he pleases, regardless of factual content or who gets hurt. He has done whatever he's wanted. He has lacked behavioral discipline. He is arguably the first American president to have the public persona of a pop culture villain.

In 2020, Americans are going to require more discipline than these generations have ever exercised. We are going to spend months on behavioral lockdown, led by a man who simply has not shown the ability or inclination to lock down his own behavior.

It's a tough spot for him, and a tougher spot for the American people.


March 18, 2020
Bob Dietz

The Albatross of American Exceptionalism

American hubris is occasionally charming, sometimes entertaining, and usually a source of befuddlement. What is it that allows Americans to smugly ignore experts, do whatever they please, and then feel good about it? The United States, I predict, is going to have a terrible time limiting COVID-19 transmission because of this inherent sense of American exceptionalism.

There have been and currently are a number of factors in play here. Let's start with the very odd idea that what happens to human beings in other countries will somehow not happen the same way or worse in the United States. China has a lethal pandemic? Won't happen here. Italy having catastrophic issues. Well, they struggled in the Second World War, too. Iran suffering tremendous loss of human life? It won't happen in the States; we're culturally very different.

This irrational denial of a common vulnerability has fueled a false sense of preparedness and a delusional perception of how it will all turn out. When the quarantines are imposed, and they will be, will Americans respect the probabilistic nature of the science, or will they behave like adolescents at band camp after lights out? Will symptom-free Americans accept not only the threat to themselves, but that untested asymptomatic carriers are a dire menace to others? Will those without symptoms constrain their behavior? Will U.S. citizens have the behavioral discipline to follow expert-designed protocols in this era of expert bashing?

I suspect that the patchwork state-by-state responses are only adding to the problem. Ohio has imposed x and y, but Texas has not. Will Ohio residents feel cheated of their exceptionalism because their rules are more stringent than Texas? Will this be a motive to cheat?

What happens when people must face the reality that some aspects of American culture cannot cope with mass hospitalization as well as somewhere like South Korea? Will the United States adjust on the fly or will it adhere to current American cultural practices because, after all, Americans know best?

This sense of exceptionalism has contributed to science policies not in step with the rest of the Western world. As Tom Nichols explored in his The Death of Expertise, Americans take an almost gleeful joy in ignoring the cumulative advice of experts. We have arrived at a juncture when that advice must be followed.

In some ways, the U.S. is more poorly equipped to deal with COVID-19 than most other countries. There seem to be early indications that obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure are risk factors. Americans don't rate particularly well on these. We may be in real trouble.

Can U.S. citizens subordinate their sense of exceptionalism to follow and enforce the protocols that will ameliorate COVID-19's impact, or will a sense of exceptionalism weigh Americans down like an anchor around our necks? That is the million-lives question.


March 16, 2020
Bob Dietz

Coronavirus and Stress

Professor Robert Sapolsky wrote a fascinating and ominous piece published March 13 on CNN. The article, "Our brains on coronavirus," examines the effects of stress on human decision-making and general behavior.

With a rise in baseline stress, Sapolsky reported, we can expect people to react in ways differing from their norm. General stress generates hormones that dampen critical thinking and patience by affecting the pre-frontal cortex, while the same hormones amp up basic emotional responses from evolutionarily older parts of the brain. Rational thinking is reduced and impulsivity is increased. In addition, humans revert to habitual past responses instead of applying new information to create different behavioral strategies. We revert to routine because our normal routines have been interrupted.

The feedback loops here are insidious. Emotional impulsivity can obviously lead to emotional and impulsive reactions from others. Loss of our routine has us tightening our behavioral responses into more rigid routines. These behavioral effects are themselves almost viral in nature as they self-replicate.


Stress Speculation

Back in the 70's and 80's, when personality theorists such as H.J. Eysenck explored stress effects, researchers examined stress/performance curves. People varied greatly as to what degree of stress generated optimal performance on various tasks. Some did best under low-stress conditions; others did better on some tasks when stressors were relatively high. Well, now we are approaching situations where we are all going to be operating under high stress conditions, and we'd best start leaning on those who can process and handle high stress best.

American culture as a whole came into the COVID-19 event nursing a deep seated political dichotomy. Hundreds of dissertations will be written on the Trump years in the decades ahead, and I am not qualified to make any complex observations. Superficially, one could make the point that a robust economy and low unemployment heading into the pandemic have helped keep general American stress low. Conversely, one could argue the other side, namely that racism and class division have created increased stress for most of the general population.

Stepping away from both of those views, one could also argue that political divisiveness has never been worse, and that this has created a high base stress level for most who are engaged in the "culture wars." On the other side of that argument is the idea that insularity and tribalism have created social groups that interact only with the like-minded, thereby reducing the contact and stress of dealing with "the other."

Whatever the reality and demography of American stress levels, we are entering a war-time level of general population stress. Unlike all wars of this and the preceding century, this is a war fought squarely on American soil. Americans' ability to deal with stress is going to be challenged in a way that existing generations simply have not experienced.


Gambler's View

The most frightening aspect of all of this, from my point of view, is what Sapolsky emphasized in "Our brains on coronavirus." I'm concerned that American responses will be increasingly emotion-driven and reliant on routinized behavior. I worry because emotion-driven means not math-driven.

The United States is not terribly math conscious to start, and has isolated itself as perhaps the least science-driven of the Western democracies when it comes to policy. If the decisions made in the weeks ahead are not placed in the hands of scientists, we face a worse outcome than the current situation in Italy. It is time for demagogues to step aside and allow science to take hold of both the reins and the checkbook. Quite frankly, if we do not, the United States faces ruination ironically reminiscent of what befell the Martians in H.G.Wells' The War of the Worlds. Our technology, the greatest in the history of mankind, is only as good as our ability to make science-based policy decisions.


March 15, 2020
Bob Dietz

COVID-19 -- Gambler's Questions

Revisiting some of yesterday's themes, I have to ask some basic questions.

If the speed of the virus transmission has been a surprise in Italy, Iran, and elsewhere, why wasn't the likelihood of a high percentage of asymptomatic transmissions taken more seriously sooner? A large percentage of asymptomatic transmission seems to be the most likely evidence-based conclusion, and it's the conclusion that merits the most caution and the quickest, most disruptive but most potentially effective, action. If bureaucracies, whether state or federal, are going to err one way or the other on the percent of asymptomatic transmission, shouldn't they err by presuming the worst? That "lean" would save the most lives and circumvent the most dire economic outcomes.

Why err on the side of lowballing the number of asymptomatic transmissions? How did the CDC come to use the lowballing language with the degree of certainty that it did? And why? Who specifically was responsible for that language?

I have no real answers for this; I don't even have any reasonable speculations. I leave this to those who know much more about the machinations and priorities of state and federal governments.


The Wynn Casino

Returning again also to the situation at the Wynn casino, did Wynn management really think through the temperature-taking? Did they truly believe this would have some effect on disease spread? Or was it a cynical halfway step to keep the doors open and the public mollified? Did the Wynn really think that asymptomatic transmission wasn't a major problem?

I don't want to come down too hard on the Wynn. The Wynn was basically copying protocols various international banks had already instituted weeks ago, taking temperatures of all visitors. The Wynn strategy was dated, but the Wynn probably isn't used to making quick, flexible decisions. Besides, the federal government's missteps far outstrip the Wynn's.


Airports -- March 14/15

Americans returning from other countries are stuck in long lines waiting to be screened at major airports, including Chicago O'Hare. People are trapped in lines for up to seven hours in close proximity to others, and all being screened as a high risk group. Airports are under federal jurisdiction. What is going on? How could this happen? How could the feds not anticipate this? Somebody must have done the capacity math? Right?

The airports may, in all probability, be causing more COVID-19 transmission than the travel ban is preventing.

In previous gambling columns, I have often commented on the fact that what appear as superficial solutions may create situations inimical to those solutions. Multi-step thinking, in other words multi-step math, must be done to avoid short-sighted "solutions" that are anything but. How can the feds, with access to all of the math tools and personnel in the world, not do the math?

I do not mean to make light of life-and-death situations by analogizing them with their gambling world parallels. I actually think, however, that keeping math in mind with its cost/benefit context overriding political spin and hunches and wishful wannabe projections, is useful and even necessary. Hard, rational protocols need to be applied to practical matters.

The sudden travel restrictions and the speed of the outbreak have created nightmare airport scenarios that quite likely are doing inestimable harm. These should have been anticipated. The math exists to do just that.


March 15, 2020
Bob Dietz

Gambler's Eye: Coronavirus

I was reading CNN online today, March 14, when I stumbled upon a story, "People without symptoms may be driving spread." I was surprised, not by the title, but that this wasn't a given.

I had been following the COVID-19 story fairly closely since January, partly because I had a trip to Las Vegas scheduled to cash tickets and scout March Madness futures. I vetoed a trip immediately after Chinese New Year, when Las Vegas is a major international destination, and decided instead to duck in and out of Las Vegas February 24th to the 29th. I have been quite aware of the coronavirus issues and debates.

From everything I've read in the first two months, I'm somewhat surprised that people thought the asymptomatic were contributing little to the spread of the disease. I just automatically drew the conclusion, based on the explosions in Italy and Iran and the length of the potentially asymptomatic incubation period, that much if not most of the transmission was coming from individuals without many symptoms. It seemed obvious to me that this was the likely scenario. Yet the CDC, evidently, has used rhetoric suggesting that asymptomatic transmission is a small percentage contributor to disease spread. Today's CNN piece revealed that multiple studies, some not yet peer reviewed, point to asymptomatic transmission as not only quite common, but accounting for the majority of the cases in particular clusters.

Two days ago, the Wynn Casino in Las Vegas began temperature-screening guests. If you have a temp above 100.4, you are denied admittance. I read this and immediately asked, "What good does that do if most transmission is from people without clear symptoms?" It made no sense to me. Well, it turns out the Wynn was probably using CDC statements to design policy to keep their doors open, and those CDC statements are misleading if not outright incorrect.

The Wynn policy actually accomplishes very little. Similarly, I was baffled early this week when President Trump, who was asked why he hadn't been tested, answered that he felt great and had no symptoms. Did nobody explain asymptomatic transmission to him? How could anyone following the story of the swiftness of COVID-19 transmission blithely assume that asymptomatic transmission is a rarity? Isn't that counter to what one would expect?

Then I stepped back and realized that what I expect as a layman, given a certain volume and quality of information, may not be what most laymen expect. And this difference may be due to what I call a "gambler's perspective," which I explored a long time ago in an essay published in The Humanist called "Scientists, Gamblers, and Magicians:  Allies Against the Irrational."

That essay aged fairly well and may have some useful ideas, mainly because irrationality has found a real home in 2020. So what I'll be exploring in the weeks ahead is what a gambler's perspective may have to offer in interpreting COVID-19 information (partial as it is), handling the uncertainty, coping with stress, and dealing with responsibilities and risks usually left for those in the military.


March 14, 2020
Bob Dietz

XFL: Some Final Thoughts

I like the XFL. I like it because it's legitimate, high-quality professional football with some useful rules adjustments. The problem is that, with just four games each week, when one or two of those games are dreadful, the league takes an interest hit that is difficult to overcome. The NFL has a couple of clunkers, sometimes four or five, each and every week, but airtime on sports highlight shows is devoted to the competitive contests. Audiences never get the sense that the NFL as a whole is peddling quagmire games. The XFL, with just four games a week, doesn't have the luxury of televising multiple clunkers without losing viewers.

As I've mentioned previously, sometimes what superficially appears as a solution may instead turn out to be a problem.


Play Clock

As Alabama coach Nick Saban said two years ago, college football must decide if it wants to be a continuous action sport or football as it's been historically played. The XFL, by shortening the play clock, has leaned into the side of more plays and something resembling forced continuous action. More plays, however, does not always mean more offense. When the play clock is shortened to such an extent that the ball is routinely snapped within two seconds of clock expiration, that is no boon to the offense.

Like jockeys in horse racing or NBA players with a shot clock, defensive football players have a fairly accurate stopwatch in their heads. They know when the play clock is down to three, then two seconds, and being able to time the snap is an enormous defensive advantage. Play clock reduction in the XFL has gotten to the brink of creating offensive disadvantages in the name of generating x number of overall plays. What seemed superficially to be an aid to exciting offense and more yards may instead be a metronome enabling defenses to time their responses to snaps more easily.


Entertainment versus Sport

The WWE is an entertainment product with a top-down vertical deisgn. Everyone is on the same page, more or less, to provide consistent, seamless, exciting entertainment for each and every WWE event. Unless you're The Rock, nobody really has their eye on prizes beyond the WWE.

The XFL, however, is very different. The majority of the players and coaches have their eyes on opportunities in the NFL. For almost all XFL participants, from coaches to coordinators to players to trainers, the NFL hangs over the XFL like some wish-fulfillment Sword of Damocles. The NFL is always there, watching.

The XFL is not scripted. This creates an organizational stress since there is no guarantee that fans won't see a string of six or seven consecutive noncompetitive games or contests with paint-drying action. The fact that each game stands alone sequentially provides viewers many chances to decide that the product is not their cup of tea. I'm not sure that many people appreciate how NFL broadcasts, with their continuous updating of other scores and fantasy stats, are able to prop up noncompetitive games. The XFL does not have this luxury.

While the WWE can impose a top-down control of its product, the XFL teams are composed of individuals whose primary goals are competing and winning, not entertaining per se. When it comes to football games, this same entertainment management therefore does not have real control of its product. It must be very difficult for management used to tightly controlled vertical cohesion to deal with this every single day.

I hope that the XFL discovers ways to overcome some of these stealth issues and enjoy great success. I wish it the very best.


March 11, 2020
Bob Dietz


Note:  due to coronavirus, the XFL today suspended operations for 2020, but pledges that it will back in 2021.

XFL: Drinking the Air Raid Kool Aid

I'm going to once again emphasize that sometimes things that superficially make a lot of sense do not really withstand closer examination. I'm Monday morning quarterbacking, but I think it's reasonable to do so.

The XFL knew it would need razzle dazzle offense to generate interest, so it wasn't surprising that it turned to some experienced names who have sold themselves for decades as offensive football revolutionaries.

Dallas has Bob Stoops as head coach with Hal Mumme, one of the "Air Raid" offense originators, as offensive coordinator. June Jones, the highest profile active run-and-shoot teacher, is head coach at Houston. Kevin Gilbride, who helmed the run-and-shoot offense of the Warren Moon-led Houston Oilers, is head coach of New York. Seattle is coached by Jim Zorn, not an air raid or run-and-shoot specialist, but certainly an advocate (in his playing days) of winging the ball all over the field. Norm Chow, the offensive coordinator of the LA Wildcats, also has a reputation as a pass offense Mensan. I feel that Chow is more conservative in his approach than those previously mentioned, but his public profile is still that of a pass offense gunslinger. Tampa Bay is helmed by Marc Trestman, the CFL offensive guru who discovered via his stint with the Chicago Bears that the NFL is not the CFL.

Thus, six of the eight XFL teams feature offenses that figured to fire the ball all over the field on virtually every down. Placing these coaches in their XFL positions should, superficially, guarantee shoot-'em-ups with plenty of offense. Well, it should if this were most college conferences or the CFL. But the XFL is not.

Before criticizing XFL ownership for drinking too much of the Air Raid Kool Aid in search of an exciting product, I want to point out the context in which decisions were made. Throughout 2019, ESPN, USA Today, and virtually every sports media outlet continually published lengthy pieces highlighting these kinds of offenses. Feature stories included the origin of the Air Raid (with Hal Mumme references), Washington State's Mike Leach's idiosyncrasies and coaching history, and analyses suggesting that the Patriots are actually succeeding because of  Air Raid principles. Pass offense puff pieces filled the 2019 sports pages.

The truth, however, is that the majority of the time, these offenses have not done well at the NFL, or even the SEC, level. Defenders are too fast, the field is too constricted given the players' size and quickness, and while yardage between the twenties is easy to come by, wins are not. The same applies to the Trestman offenses, born in the longer, wider fields of the CFL, with the CFL's slower players.

Additionally, the run-and-shoot itself has certain specific needs. Since most routes can be adjusted on the fly, experience between quarterbacks and receivers is a big deal. Nothing is more potentially disorganized on the college level than a run-and-shoot offense breaking in new receivers and a new quarterback. You can't, however, expect run-and-shoot coaches to emphasize the blind man's fire drill aspect of their offenses during job interviews.

It's easy to understand why the XFL made the decisions it did in terms of who it hired and what consequences were expected. Superficially, it all made sense.


March 9, 2020
Bob Dietz