Warriors vs Rockets 2018 WCF: A Meta-analysis
One of my favorite guilty pleasures is binge-reading about sports on the internet. I rarely watch games themselves, but love how they become the source material for millions of fans to generate their own hilarious content. Of the various sports discussion boards across the internet, the NBA subreddit is my favorite. Boasting over 1.5 million content-creating users, they ask the important questions like “why can’t 4 Warriors starters lock arms and form a ring around Steph Curry, so he can take open shots?”.
In addition to being hilarious, this subreddit is atypical in being a place where fans of different teams will interact with each other in a civil manner. This is rare on the internet, as forums usually self-segregate into groups who largely agree with one another, or quickly devolve into flame-fests. This property makes it a great place to understand how discussions between opposing groups play out. Although the banter is often friendly, there are still accusations and generalizations of opposing teams’ fans thrown about. Let’s look at the comments from the post-game threads for last year’s Warriors-Rockets semi-finals series and see what implications we can draw for political conversations, using the power of analogy™.
People are more likely to see viewpoints that match their own
As I followed the NBA semi-finals, I noticed that the tone of each post-game thread seemed to differ drastically depending on the result of the game. Was this, as some redditors suggested, because people were quick to change their mind depending on the result of each game?
To find out, I scraped the comments from all the post-game threads, identified unique users, and sorted them into either Rockets or Warriors fans, depending on their flairs (ignoring users who were neither). With this, I was able to count the number of fans of each team that commented when their team won or lost. The results were as follows:
Post-game threads for Warriors wins had far more Warriors than Rockets fans.
And Rockets wins were skewed toward Rockets fans.
It seems that rather than individuals being inconsistent, it would be more accurate to say that different people chose to comment depending on who won the game. This is an example of sampling bias and confirmation bias. Rockets fans were more likely to comment in and read post-game threads following Rockets wins, leading them to see proportionally more pro-Rockets/anti-Warriors comments and believe that others share the same viewpoints as themselves.
Let’s extend this reasoning to a political issue, like gun control in the US. As in sports, there are supporters on both sides who believe their “team” is more righteous than the other. These opinions are reinforced largely by the same sampling and confirmation bias we saw earlier, where people tend not to see the opinions of people who disagree with them.
Although school shootings are horrifying to all, they are also a bitter-sweet vindication for those who hold pro-gun-control views; yet another piece of evidence that gun bans are necessary. In the same way that post-game threads after Rockets wins are filled with more comments from Rockets fans, articles about school shootings are more likely to be commented on by those with an pro-gun-control viewpoint.
Meanwhile, the story of a homeowner defending himself from home intruders validates the anti-gun-control viewpoint, inviting comments from those who believe guns are needed as deterrents against crime. If we only follow news that supports our viewpoints, it can be easy to think that everyone holds similar beliefs to ourselves. Furthermore, we may fall prey to the fallacy that those who disagree with us are ignoring the truth.
The “other side” is not a single homogeneous group
Before the Western Conference Finals began, fans roughly fell into one of two camps: the “sweepers” who believed the Warriors would overwhelm the Rockets and win in a sweep or 5 games at most, and the “ekers”, who thought the Rockets would put up a good fight and maybe eke out a win. After the Warriors won Game 1, some of the “sweepers” expressed their exasperation that the “ekers” had doubted the outcome of the series.
None were more despondent than former star and current analyst Charles Barkeley, who had this hot take:
No. They’re not going to win a game…. Hey, I picked the Warriors in five. I’m taking the Warriors in three.
However, a couple of days later the Rockets won Game 2 in a surprise blowout. In the post-game thread, the “ekers” giddily mocked the “sweepers”.
Other meta-comments focused on the difference in tone between the Game 1 and Game 2 threads, implying that redditors changed their opinions too easily.
While it may seem that the subreddit does “overreact” to new information, a key point to remember is that it’s not necessarily the same people who are making the contradictory comments. Especially on the internet, a silent majority is invisible, leaving only the most extreme and passionate opinions visible.
Let’s go back to the NBA game threads and try to understand what’s closer to the truth. Do users really change their minds that easily? Or is it perhaps different users commenting in different threads? To answer this, we’d like to know how often users actually participate in multiple threads. The analysis for this was pretty easy, I just counted the number of threads that each user posted in.
The vast majority of participating users commented in just a single game thread (not to mention those who read but don’t write comments). This shows the relative unlikelihood of engaging with and having a substantive conversation with any specific person through a series of threads[1]. It is also further evidence that accusations of inconsistency can largely be explained instead by non-homogeneity.
Let’s look at another political example to see how this applies to the real world. Consider the widely reported phenomenon of Regrexit, which posits that many of those who voted for Brexit now regret it, and would cast their votes differently. Updated polling from November 2018 supports this, showing that “voters would now back staying by 54 percent”, compared to around 48 percent in the original referendum. If one were anti-Brexit, it would be tempting to look at this phenomenon and smugly point out how quickly Brexit supporters changed their minds when they got what they wanted. However, as British election expert John Curtice puts it,
“What lies behind [the newest poll results] is actually is an awful lot to do with turnout,” he said, adding that leave voting areas were seeing swings even though not many leave voters, especially older voters, were actually changing their minds.
The swing in poll results came mainly from those who did not vote the first time around! In other words, the narrative that there are many who voted for Brexit and now regret it is not backed by data. This pattern of supposed inconsistency being caused by non-homogeneity happens often in politics, and can sneak by us if we’re not paying close attention.
Okay, so what?
If we’re aware of our own biases and tendencies, we can proactively counteract them by not following the path of least resistance. Picking on seemingly inconsistent arguments of those who disagree with us may be fun, but if we want to get closer to an understanding of the truth, we should seek out the strongest evidence that makes us uncomfortable and runs counter to the narratives we are familiar with. This is especially important for those who have causes they strongly believe in and want to convince others of. The strongest points are made by those who have considered opposing evidence and done their best to to understand it.
On the other hand, actively looking for evidence to counter our beliefs can be exhausting, and not something we have time for. Nobody has the energy to stay fully informed about every topic. Instead, it’s probably enough to maintain a healthy skepticism of our own viewpoints, knowing that our opinions are formed on partial truths. We should still fight for the things we believe are right, but keep open minds and listen. Hopefully, this will in turn inspire those different than us to consider our views as well. Maybe, if we can all learn to communicate respectfully with people we disagree with, we’ll one day find out if Lebron James would still be the best player in the league if he had to wear sandals all the time.
Appendix
All Reddit-scraping was done with Praw and simple Python scripts.
[1]. Exactly 17 users commented in all 7 post-game threads: ‘ImAroosterAMA’, ‘preserved_fish’, ‘maalbi’, ‘RunningTall’, ‘chrisskreagerUPS88’, ‘mems1224’, ‘Kazekid’, ‘jt358’, ‘packersSB53champs’, ‘exasperated_dreams’, ‘Bladex10’, ‘Sim888’, ‘jeric13xd’, ‘FBI_Taco_Truck’, ‘YungFurl’, ‘Twoweekswithpay’, ‘DoctorZzzzz’. Props.
