PatternRecognitionDireWarings

The podcast discusses pattern recognition and its significance in various aspects of life, particularly in American sports. It highlights the use of statistical analysis and data in sports and the enjoyment fans derive from analyzing and debating these statistics. However, the downside of pattern recognition is also mentioned, emphasizing how being wrong can be painful and the importance of considering different outcomes. The story of a football team and their quarterbacks exemplifies the consequences of pattern recognition in sports. The podcast concludes by mentioning the potential grim future revealed by pattern recognition in the context of organized crime. Pattern Recognition The name of our podcast is Nexus of Suspicious Circumstances. A nexus is a causal connection between events. It's not just that they're side by side in time, that there's a power or there's some kind of cause making something happen in the next sequence of events. Usually you'll have numbers of causes, you'll have degrees of causes, and sometimes when you're coming up with rationales, they'll either be more accurate or inaccurate, and between those factors you can have a lot of variation. Pattern recognition, you basically sift the batches and areas that you came out, and you try to sift them down until you can figure out how you can get a specific result. And after you've done that, you'll notice that things change every time, and there could be a different assemblage of the powers that you're looking at, and you could get different outcomes. So you start to weigh those against one another. What you get is sort of a probability index of things that will happen in the future. Might not be true, might not be correct, but it's better than nothing. It has some kind of effect, and the more you work on it, the better it gets. Where pattern recognition has its real heyday is in American sports. If you're a baseball fan, everything you deal with has to do with the percentage. There's on-base percentage, there's batting averages, there's ERAs. Everything is a mathematical number. Every one of them is an instance of a power of power recognition. You just can't get around it. It's everywhere, and we love it. People will argue and argue and argue about what to do and fill out thousands of stats, especially people that probably failed math in school, and they're usually right. It's an amazing thing to see, and the other thing that's strange about it is that people truly enjoy it. Sports fans in all the sports know all the stats, and they know how to bring the scenarios to life with passion and argument, even when they're stone-cold drunk. It's something to behold. It is a spectacle of logical consistency under the most adverse conditions. I personally really, truly love it. However, there is a downside to this. Lots of us like to bet where you're doing exactly the same thing and experiencing the same joys right until you lose and the economics of the situation comes crashing down upon your head. In other words, it can be painful when you're wrong and you're losing, but what you never think about is that sometimes being right can be even worse. Let me give you an example. As a little boy, I was a Redskins fan, and the Redskins had the greatest passer in the history of the game in Sonny Jurgensen. He threw 10 yards out, and the minute people were trying to stop him from doing that, somebody would cut down the field, and he'd throw this beautiful ball that lofted just over the defender's hand and landed softly in the belly of the receiver, who never broke stride. It was a thing to behold, and while the team stunk and had no defense, we could score at any time, at any place, at any amount, and we were always in the game. They were fun to watch, and then one day, Vince Lombardi, the greatest coach in the history of football, decided to leave Green Bay and come to Washington, D.C., and be the coach. We knew our time had come. God had blessed us, and sure enough, that year, they were like 9-7 in a playoff contender, and everybody knew they were somebody to behold, but Vince Lombardi got cancer and died. George Allen, the coach of the Los Angeles Lanternhams, replaced Lombardi. Allen was a defensive genius. He also had a great defense that was over the hill when he was getting out of dodge before the Natives revolted against his defensive tactics. Defense can kind of be boring over a long time, even if you win. Anyway, he brought five of his all-time Hall of Fame players with him that were in their last one or two years, but still had one good year left in them, and improved the Redskins' defense dramatically. His big problem was keeping the old guys off the field as much as possible. If they could keep their playing time down to less than half the game, they could play the whole game and be better than anybody out there. Once you started getting in past 20 minutes, they started to get tired, and their effectiveness waned as a result. So he wanted a ball-control offense, something he'd always favored in the past. He wanted all the time on the offense to be used in eating up the clock, not yards. He didn't need them to score any more than just enough to win. That was a problem. If you want to win a Super Bowl, you need to score some points. So we were pleased we had a good coach, and we were happy about that. We thought the key to everything was that Sonny Jurgensen would be there to score if we ever needed it, and we were a shoe-in for a Super Bowl. We were in for a shock. Early in the year, the Redskins, just before the half, got the ball down on the goal line. Allen had a habit of taking three shots to go into the goal line if he could, and if he didn't get in, he'd just kick a field goal. He was a very conservative coach. He figured that the four-point difference wouldn't help us or hurt us or have an effect, that we'd have three points to the good, and we'd kick off to the other side, and they'd have a long way to go, and the defense would get the ball, and we'd just sit there and eat the time up, so that three points counted. The problem of it is that everybody knew he was going to run it right down the middle in every play, so everybody stopped him all the time. You knew the ball was coming straight off one of the sides of the center, pretty much. There was going to be a big pile, and if you could get enough beef in there, you could stop them, so everybody put everybody right in the middle and ignored the receivers. This went on for years, and Allen was successful with getting his three points and running the time off the clock. At the end of the game, Jurgensen's sitting down there on the goal line, hands the ball off once, gets stopped, hands the ball off twice, gets stopped. He walks up to the line for the third time. He's told to hand the ball off. He looks and sees nobody's watching. The receiver calls an audible and throws a touchdown. That was pretty much the last time Sonny Jurgensen started for the Redskins. After that, George Allen started Billy Kilmer, a guy that was very dependable. He was solid and tough. You couldn't hurt him. He wasn't flashy, but he always made perfect decisions. A lot of us in D.C. hated him. It wasn't fair. He took a lot of torment because of that. As the season rolled along, Allen won a lot of games and headed us towards the Super Bowl. The other quarterback, Billy Kilmer, got pretty popular, but all of those of us that were Sonny Jurgensen fans knew that the Super Bowl was in the balance, that if they didn't let Sonny in the game when we really needed to score, we were not going to win the Super Bowl. We knew this all year long. We all had a problem with pattern recognition, and we did not like the pattern we were seeing. We were also dead bang sure of what was going to happen, and sure enough, that's exactly what happened. We went into the Super Bowl against Miami, the year they had the perfect season. The score was 14-7. The seven points we got were not scored by the offense. They were scored by a defensive player that intercepted a ball and took it back for a touchdown. The offense scored no points. We lost by a touchdown, an extremely boring game. To this day, we hate Billy Kilmer, and we hate George Allen, unless there's those people that were intelligent enough to appreciate that we got into a Super Bowl that we would have never been in if we had not seen this happen. But the warning is out there. When you run your pattern recognitions with the kind of podcast we have looking into organized crime, you might not really like what you see. In fact, the first time that I saw pattern recognition being used, it came up with a vision of the future that was rather grim, where organized crime took over the world. We will start with that and with our first podcast when we talk about iron triangles, which was the name of this particular pattern. Thank you.