I got a call last night from Marc to ask why I hadn’t claimed my fantasy baseball team in our league. That’s not unusual. That’s one of the ways my anxiety manifests itself. I have made progress and thought I was past that. I am. I never got the email telling me the team was ready to be claimed on the ESPN website. We have no idea why. I didn’t check, maybe it’s in my spam folder. The thing is that the draft is today, and I only found out last night. I did prep before the March opening day, but everything has changed since then. We have gone from an auction to a draft. I had less than 24 hours to prepare a full draft list, the order I rank players. I got 100 done last night, the clicked on something that took me off the ESPN draft prep page. I hit the back button and all my work was gone. I had to start again this morning.
I’m doing very cursory research, I had several lists of player rankings, took the average of two of them, and used the third to tweak the results. It’s still not a fast process. While I was doing this my laptop keyboard stopped working. When I hit a key there was a clicking noise, but nothing was typed. The touchpad still worked so I could navigate. I did what everyone does when the computer does something weird, I rebooted the computer. When it started up I tried to log in. They keyboard wouldn’t work so I couldn’t enter the pin. I got clever and hit the accessibility option and chose the onscreen keyboard. I could type my PIN with that. But that is not a practical way to use a computer. It would take me forever. I googled on my phone for help but couldn’t find anything. I did the next thing that everyone does, I called a geek-in-law, Joe. He is a techie, a friend, and gave me this computer. He couldn’t help me but went to his team to find if somebody knows something. I kept searching. While he did that I kept looking on both the computer’s help section and google. I found the solution. I had somehow put the keyboard filter on. I didn’t even know there was a keyboard filter. I’m not the only one to do so as the solution started with, “If you found that you somehow put on the filter and don’t know how you did it, here is how to get out of it.” If this happens to you the solution is simple, you hold the right shift key down for eight seconds. You’ll hear a beep. After that you are good to go. What a strange interface. You will never find that by chance.
What I’m proud of is that even with the time pressure that I didn’t have a panic attack. I had anxiety and had to meditate to bring my heartrate and blood pressure down, but that was after I solved everything, and it was just a matter of minutes. Therapy works. I just got a touch of anxiety as I wrote about it. I could feel the tightening in my chest. Two Buddha breaths made it manageable. I could probably do with a full meditation, but I’d rather write and eat dinner before my league’s draft. I can do that because I finished my prep. As I did no outside research I might do some stupid things. If I do, I do. I have excellent sources so I should be OK.
The next thing I have to take care of is contacting musicians about the virtual Budgiedome. I heard back from less than half the musicians I wrote so I’ll have to follow up. I’m not the only one that’s not great about returning emails. The biggest name I invited has always been bad about these things, from before she was a big name. I’ll get it done even though I’m not going to get some of the help I was hoping for.
A few years ago, Pew Research did an enlightening study, Distinguishing Between Factual and Opinion Statements in the News. This is not knowing if things are true or false, it’s knowing if something is provably true or false versus opinion. Factual doesn’t mean true, it means capable of being proved or disproved. The sky is fuchsia is factual, though not true. Fuchsia is the most beautiful color is opinion. Seems like this should be simple. When given five factual statements, all of which were true, only 26% of the people could get them all right. When given five opinions only 35% could correctly classify them. Those are facts. This is scary is my opinion. Last night I came across someone who couldn’t tell the difference and was vehement about it. I’m in a baseball trivia and statistics Facebook group. Here is a section of the group rules.
FACTUAL TRIVIA QUESTIONS OR POSTS DIRECTLY RELATED TO STATISTICS AND TRIVIA ONLY–ALL OTHER POSTS WILL BE DELETED!!!
A trivia question has a specific, factual answer (or answers; please, no more than 12 answers to a question). General baseball discussion is welcome on many other pages, including this one: https://www.facebook.com/groups/482104805270682.
You can see how this relates to the Pew study. We’ve been getting many opinion posts of late, which are clearly against the rules, and clutter the group. Someone new posted, “Is Jackie Robinson the Greatest Player Ever?” I copy and pasted the rule I showed you. The poster responded with, “This is a statistic and it’s a fact.” He’s one of those people that can’t tell the difference. Because it was his opinion he felt that made it a fact. This has nothing to do with it being a ridiculous opinion. I love Jackie and he was one of the most important players ever. But I have never seen any ranking that puts him in the top ten. But that’s not what matters. If the poster had said, “Is Babe Ruth the greatest player ever?” It would equally break the rule. The fact that it’s an opinion that has lots of evidence behind it and is the consensus opinion doesn’t make it not an opinion. One respected list put Willie Mays at the top. Saying that Ruth has the highest Wins Above Replacement is a fact. Saying that he is the greatest player is an opinion. I’m proud of myself for not arguing with him. My effort to not feed my anger is showing some results. I did not respond to his rejoinder. It helped that I knew that by the rules the post would be removed. It was.
Now I have to quickly make dinner and get to my draft.
Wise Madness 