Indian Courts has let down Indians

 

The art and science of picking winning teams

In a world of performance data, human judgment is more vital than ever, says former England cricket selector Ed Smith in the FT

The fast bowler Jofra Archer, a brilliant talent new to cricket’s world stage, stands at the top of his run-up, flicking a white cricket ball nonchalantly in his hand. With 30,000 fans in the ground already drunk on drama, and 1.6bn watching around the world, Archer knows what’s coming. The next five minutes, his next six balls — a “Super Over”, the final way to determine a tied cricket match — will decide whether England or New Zealand win the 2019 World Cup. 

“It’s so on a young man,” the TV commentator sighs about the decision to give the 24-year-old Archer the final act. “It’s a big call.” About a hundred yards to Archer’s right, I am watching on with my fellow England selector, as helpless as everyone else in the ground. 

Just before the tournament, right at the eleventh hour, the decision had been made to add Archer to England’s World Cup squad. There had been plenty of public debate about the decision — England, already the top-ranked team without Archer, had been preparing for the World Cup for four years, and a popular player had been dropped to make way for him. Why take the risk? 

Because Archer was exceptional. And we knew with an unusual degree of confidence that he was exceptional. Archer’s early career was unique because he’d played so much cricket in the Indian Premier League (IPL), where every match is televised. And every action in televised cricket leaves a clear data footprint — the precise speed, trajectory, bounce and revolutions of every ball bowled. This is exactly the kind of information decision-makers love to have — an X-ray of the match. And the data from the IPL was unequivocal: Archer not only merited a place in England’s 15-man squad, but also in the best XI. In fact, the data implied he’d be England’s best fast bowler. And he was, taking 20 wickets (an England record) in the tournament. 

But the data only gets you so far. The moments before the Super Over proved that, too. England’s captain, Eoin Morgan, stood alongside Archer — chatting lightly, relaxed, open, a hint of mischief — a moment to enjoy. It was a masterclass in defusing pressure. So what might have been a “big call” turned into an obvious decision — thanks in part to the way Morgan handled things. Archer got his decisions spot on, and England won the World Cup. 

Selection and decision-making are often framed in terms of “art versus science”, with the assumption that, in our digital age, “science” is increasingly marginalising the human factor. But making decisions — and this applies in any area, not just sport — demands weighing and reconciling different kinds of information, and drawing on differing types of intelligence. In the age of data, the question remains: where does the human dimension fit in? 

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The role of England’s chief cricket selector — which I held from 2018 to 2021 — stretches back to 1899. It was once seen as sport’s ultimate establishment position. A sober, grey worsted suit was woven into the job — folded Telegraph in one hand, black umbrella in the other. Cricket persisted with selectors — where football, for example, centralised power in the manager or head coach — partly because formal coaching arrived relatively late in cricket (England’s first head coach was appointed in 1986). Since then, cricket has mostly retained shared responsibility between selectors, coach and captain. 

After all, who is on the field — and here sport is like all industries — has the greatest bearing on winning and losing. That’s why the richest and most advanced sports teams — in football and American sports — have invested heavily in data-informed recruitment, seeking an edge in identifying talent. 

I was 40 when I became England selector; my co-selector, James Taylor, was 28. Our combined age was about the same as some individual England selectors from earlier decades. The impertinence of youth was compounded by the perception that our new selection system leant heavily on data and algorithms. Cricket is a conservative sport. Far from being reassuringly old-fashioned, the new selection panel was often dubbed “left field”. Innovation and tradition rubbed shoulders. That is, of course, a tricky balancing act, with risks on all sides, and while I did not know it at the time, that was probably the attraction. 

Was England cricket now trying to “Moneyball” its selection strategy? Many people thought so. But the analogy is problematic. Moneyball, Michael Lewis’s classic book about the Oakland A’s baseball team, is only partly about data, and significantly about price. One way that Oakland punched above their weight was by buying undervalued players and selling over-valued ones. But for a national sports team, of course, there is no transfer market. You can’t pit your wits against other teams by trading players with, say, the old rival, Australia. England cricket has its talent pool, and that’s that. 

But selectors can — and this is close to the heart of the matter in all professions — diverge from conventional wisdom about where they perceive value. And here, of course, better data is extremely helpful. If you can measure player impact more accurately, then you are getting nearer to identifying “talent that whispers”, not just “talent that shouts” (in the excellent phrasing of Rasmus Ankersen, who was co-director of football at Brentford before moving to Southampton). 

This is not to suggest that data holds all the answers (the theme of many recent sports books) and that human judgment is on the road to oblivion. Yes, sport is in the midst of a data revolution, and you’d be insane not to seek better information to inform decisions. But rather than using data instead of human intelligence, the challenge is using data in tandem with the human dimension. 

And here decisions in sport reflect decisions in life. “What the data says” is too often a convenient way of passing the buck. Better to come out in plain sight: it’s a judgment. 

Risk is the job 

“Creative solutions, please — but nothing that’s too clever by half!” This is a recurrent framing of what people ask for from decision-makers. Wanted: upside outcomes without downside risk. That is impossible. As soon as decisions diverge from consensus, they inevitably come with the threat of a downside. The American investor and thinker Howard Marks has written a superb series of memos on this theme, “Dare to be Great”. 

“By definition, non-consensus ideas that are popular . . . are an oxymoron,” Marks writes. “And in the course of trying to be different and better, they [investors] have to bear the risk of being different and worse.” 

This is the challenge facing strategists in sport. Whenever your decisions diverge from conventional wisdom, you clearly discern value that most people don’t see. So a degree of intellectual loneliness is a necessity. 

One of the most unconventional decisions England cricket made during my time was selecting three spinners and three all-rounders for the 2018 Test series against Sri Lanka. We won the series 3-0. For the next Test match, we also picked an unconventional mix of players in the West Indies and got smashed. “Too clever by half!” 

Perhaps we became more risk-averse after that moment — which I think was a mistake. Because if you stop diverging from consensus, then what are you doing? Someone who makes decisions which merely reflect the average of opinion is not adding any value. 

David Swensen, who headed the Yale endowment fund, said superior decision-making demanded “uninstitutional behaviour from institutions”. The same challenge exists inside sport. Every leading sports organisation is now a huge machine, and that brings its own dangers — diluting a sense of mission, the temptation to keep everyone happy, watering down good ideas and the rush to compromise. 

How can the bureaucracy fight against the risk-averse tendencies of bureaucracies? Even when you’re on the inside, can you retain an outsider’s sense of independence and boldness, before all the compromise gets priced in? That’s central to the task — and inevitably comes with tension. 

 ‘Accepting a negative metric’ 

“Whenever someone innovates in business or in life,” argues the former poker player Caspar Berry, “they almost inevitably do so by accepting a negative metric that other people are unwilling to accept.” 

When the NBA’s Houston Rockets began taking a higher proportion of (long-range) three-point shots, they were accepting the negative metric that they would miss more often. The pay-off was that shots they did convert came with a built-in premium. The trend was initially ridiculed — before being folded into orthodoxy. In 2015-16, only six out of 30 NBA teams took three-pointers in at least a third of their attempts. By 2020-21, 28 teams were doing it. 

Spain’s triumphant football team of 2008-12 sometimes lined up without a striker. Neglecting to select a specialist goalscorer brings risks — as pundits regularly reminded us by imploring Spain to pick a big strong lad up front to bang in the goals. In 2012, Spain preferred the extra midfielder — expanding creative opportunities, while tolerating the negative metric of not selecting a player focused exclusively on scoring. Spain won the final of the 2012 Euros 4-0, their third major title inside four years — revealing a shrewd trade-off. 

In England’s T20 cricket team, we moved towards an ultra-aggressive batting order, with star batsman Jos Buttler moving from the middle order to opening batsman. But didn’t England need Buttler at the end, when the game was on the line? Ideally, yes. But not if it meant restricting Buttler’s ability to shape the contest by keeping him out of the action until it might be too late. 

All these decisions were initially controversial, before they shifted the consensus and became part of a new orthodoxy. That journey is never smooth. So while innovation can draw on data-informed insights, it stands or falls on courage and resilience. There will always be bumps in the road; can you hold the line? Data might illuminate the solution. But it’s going to take personal conviction to get it done. 

Look for ‘Lego’ players 

The NBA player Shane Battier was dubbed “Lego” by his manager because when he was on the court “all the pieces start to fit together”. Battier’s individual stats were moderate, but the team’s overall performance improved. 

Ranked by the team’s win-loss ratio for games in which they played, the three “winningest” England players in the five-day Test matches when I was selector (in order) were Keaton Jennings, Sam Curran and Adil Rashid. All three players faced frequent media pressure about their individual place in the Test team; their contribution to overall success was often overlooked. 

Team success, of course, doesn’t and shouldn’t guarantee an individual’s selection indefinitely, whatever their form and confidence. But collective output should always be part of the mix in assessing an individual. The “Lego” concept is a useful reminder that the ultimate goal is team success. 

 “Choose the best player for every position,” argued Johan Cruyff, “and you’ll end up not with a strong XI, but with XI strong I’s.” Teams that punch above their weight — such as the Premier League football club Brentford FC — consistently recruit players who are undervalued. That skill can be separated into two distinct parts — not only ranking players better (“how good is ‘X’ relative to ‘Y’?”), but also identifying the team’s needs and how to meet them. The way things fit together can be as important as the pieces themselves. 

In assembling the overall puzzle, it helps to have a point of difference. In cricket, left-arm bowlers, for example, outperform their right-arm counter-parts (on average) because they benefit from being unusual. And even the right-arm bowlers in the team benefit, because opposition batsmen have to switch constantly between different angles of attack, increasing the likelihood of being caught off-balance. 

You’re going to have to think, not just compute 

On one level, there is nothing new to be said about the boundaries of rational decision-making. In 1936, the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott co-wrote a book about a systematic approach for betting on the Derby, A Guide to the Classics. (The title was a very Cambridge in-joke.) There is a limit, as Oakeshott wrote in another piece, “beyond which there are no precise rules for picking the winner, and . . . some intelligence (not supplied by the rules themselves) [is] necessary”. You’re going to have to think, not just compute. 

Nearly a century later, even after the explosion of a lucrative sports analytics industry, that is loosely the position of Daryl Morey, former general manager of the Houston Rockets, whose innovations have transformed the NBA (and who called Shane Battier “Lego”). “You have to figure out what the model is good and bad at,” Morey argues, “and what humans are good and bad at.” 

No system, in other words, is so good that it can survive without good judgment. You can’t box off a perfect process. Understanding the data can embolden better risk-taking, but it can’t absolve decision-makers from responsibility. 

In the best decision-makers I’ve observed, I’ve sensed they could live with uncertainty and yet still make good (or above-average) decisions. Conversely, an opposite type finds it hard to cope unless they “know for sure”. And yet this second group never can know — so their thinking gets sucked into trying to reduce anxiety rather than searching for better solutions. 

In most interesting aspects of life, there usually is no perfect or complete answer. And yet there is still better and worse. Wise people know this. But admitting it is in danger of falling victim to the craving for convenient certainty — including the expedient use of “what the data says”. Rationality should allow for healthy scepticism about how much can ever be completely known and understood. 

When I started as selector, the optimist in me wanted to believe we could harness data towards “optimising” England selection. In retrospect, I see more clearly that it will always be a highly human challenge founded, above all, on the primacy of judgment. Just as well, too. Because human value lies where things are most unquantifiable and most uncertain.

The paradox that leads professionals into temptation

 Andrew Hill in The FT

Before her first ward-round as a medical student, Sunita Sah watched as the consultant leading the group stuffed his pockets with branded pens and notepads from a hospital cart piled with drug company freebies. 

Noting her astonishment, he remarked, “these are the only perks of the job”, and continued to stock up. “I couldn’t help but think: ‘What’s the end-effect of this?’” Sah told me. 

She found part of the answer to that question when she moved from medicine into management consulting and started analysing how every interaction between healthcare companies and doctors had an impact on their prescribing habits. 

Now a professor at Cornell University and an honorary fellow at Cambridge’s Judge Business School, Sah has filled in more gaps with a new study that sheds light on the dark side of professionalism and how to avoid it. 

Her findings are stark and surprising. The greater a manager’s sense of professionalism, the more likely he or she is to accept a gift or bribe. Worse, high-minded professionals may be more susceptible to unconscious bias towards gift-givers, precisely because they are convinced they think they know how to ignore their blandishments. 

“I NEVER turn down something for free that I know isn’t going to kill me!” retorted one manager in response to Sah’s survey. “A free lunch from someone? Go for it! If the guy is fool enough to think his free lunch/dinner/use of cabin, etc, is going to influence me, he doesn’t know me at all! People don’t influence me beyond what I, and I alone, allow!” 

In the study for the Academy of Management Perspectives, Sah equates this “professionalism paradox” to the Dunning-Kruger effect, according to which poor performers lack even the ability to recognise their own hopelessness. 

Sah’s study is based on surveys of managers, but some of the pernicious real-world effects of her paradox are clear. In the extreme case of the opioid epidemic, books such as Empire of Pain and Dopesick (now also a television series) have chronicled the way respected physicians were dragged into the overprescription of painkillers after receiving free gifts and conference invitations from manufacturer Purdue Pharma. 

Yet their ability to self-regulate against conflicts of interest is still many professionals’ first line of defence when watchdogs and legislators start threatening to curb their autonomy with new rules. 

One problem is that we are all professionals now. The term used to be almost the exclusive domain of lawyers, doctors, teachers, accountants, and others who had laboriously acquired specialist knowledge, shown integrity, and deserved an elevated status. Now the same status is loosely claimed by everyone from salespeople to, yes, journalists. The currency has been debased. 

In law, behaving professionally and ethically is “part of your training, it’s part of your identity, it’s what makes you tick — which isn’t necessarily true elsewhere”, David Morley, former senior partner at Allen & Overy, says. But the head of a professional services firm adds that professionalism “can’t be an excuse or a cover story” for a lack of underlying principles. 

These senior leaders are describing the difference between what Sah calls “deep” and “shallow” professionalism. 

Deep professionals should recognise the risk of undue influence and avoid exposing themselves to it in the first place. Her parallel is Odysseus plugging his ears with wax to avoid falling for the sirens’ song, or, more prosaically, managers who decline all gifts, rather than relying on a corporate threshold to protect them. It is “easier for individuals to rationalise and morally disengage the acceptance of [small] gifts”, Sah writes, or even to stop noticing them altogether. 

Deep professionals should embrace continued ethical training, to help embed principles, and embrace an understanding that they may be prone to bribes and influence-seeking. They should also continue to practise their values, just as a concert pianist goes on rehearsing scales. 

Professionalism “isn’t an individual characteristic, or a feeling”, says Sah. Instead, she would like to redefine it as “repeated behavioural practices that demonstrate a deep understanding of the concept”, backed by appropriate rules and codes. In that form, anyone can aspire to deep professionalism. 

“The law as a profession doesn’t give you some status or standing: you have to earn that,” the senior partner of another law firm told me. “We shy away from [the attitude] ‘It’s OK, we’re professionals’.” In fact, professionals who catch themselves saying or thinking anything similar should be on their guard. They may be in the ethical shallows and about to run aground.  

Who to let die and who to keep alive - On the Nice guidelines

The coronavirus pandemic response is normalising the notion that some lives are disposable writes Frances Ryan in The Guardian 

 

‘In a health crisis, it is not only the virus that risks infecting society but our prejudices.’ Photograph: James Tye/University College London (UCL)/AFP via Getty Images


In a pandemic, triage starts long before some of us get sick. A new document issued by the British Medical Association (BMA) has set out guidance to ration treatment if the NHS becomes overwhelmed with coronavirus cases.

The BMA suggests that in cases where ventilators are scarce, those facing poor prognosis could have the life-saving equipment taken away from them – even if their condition is improving – with younger and healthier patients given priority instead.

We are already seeing this play out. Last week, one man tweeted that his brother, who lives in a care home with limited mobility and a cognitive disability, went to hospital with a chest infection but didn’t make “the pandemic-led prioritisation cut”. He died a week later.

Meanwhile, it has been reported that a GP practice in Wales issued “do not resuscitate” (DNR) forms to a small number of patients, ensuring that emergency services would not be called should they contract coronavirus and their symptoms worsen. One adult social care provider has said that three of their services have been contacted by GPs to say that they have deemed the people they support should all be DNR. One woman who has received the form so far is in her 20s.

These stories of disabled and older people being denied care have been emerging for weeks as the virus has struck hospitals around the world, but have generally failed to find attention outside the disability community until now.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) was forced to make a U-turn last week on their advice for the NHS to deny disabled people treatment, but only after disability groups threatened legal action. Nice had told doctors they should assess patients with conditions such as learning disabilities and autism as scoring high for “frailty” - thereby meeting criteria to be refused treatment - based on the fact they need support with personal care in their day-to-day life.

In a health crisis, it is not only the virus that risks infecting society, but our prejudices. It’s a slippery slope of ethical compromises in a culture and medical system that already struggles to support people with disabilities. Research shows that an estimated 1,200 people with a learning disability die avoidably every year due to poor care, while the terms “learning disabilities” or “Down’s syndrome” have been given as the reason for “Do not resuscitate” orders.

In the coronavirus pandemic, doctors are having to make difficult clinical judgments: would a medical intervention help a patient or does their underlying health condition prevent them from benefiting? Is it better to facilitate a peaceful death rather than administer a futile and distressing treatment?


However, judgments based on the efficacy of treatment are not the same as judgments based on the quality of a disabled person’s life. That might be falsely equating support needs with “frailty”, or adopting a blanket policy that withdraws treatment from a whole group of people rather than basing decisions on each individual’s needs and choices. That isn’t healthcare, it’s discrimination. 

These are complex issues and we are in deeply difficult times; medics are risking their own lives for the NHS and will face impossible choices as even oxygen and face pumps run low. But that should not mean abandoning debates around key decisions. Indeed, in an emergency it is more important than ever to question our attitudes and responses.

It is worth considering why the default position is to deny life-saving treatment to some disabled people rather than to ask why a wealthy nation that had months to prepare doesn’t have enough resources in the first place. It is worth considering whether talk of “limited resources” is excusing and normalising the long-held idea that disabled lives are disposable.

In recent days, I have seen disabled people take to social media to list their achievements, as if trying to make the case that they are worth saving. A disabled person who has their ventilator removed during this crisis may have gone on to cure cancer. But then, they may have just been loved. A mum with heart disease who always burns her daughter’s birthday cakes. An accountant born with muscular dystrophy who watches Dr Who every Sunday. Disabled people, like all minorities, are only fully human when we are permitted to be as wonderfully average as anyone else.

Utilitarian calculations over the value of certain people’s lives may appear pragmatic right now, but they cost us a part of ourselves. In the coming days, it is inevitable Britain will lose more lives. We need not lose our humanity too.

Do not blame accounting rules for the financial crisis

Hans Hoogervorst in The Financial Times

Ten years after the outbreak of the financial crisis, there are still persistent arguments about the role that accounting standards may have played in its genesis.

Some critics of International Financial Reporting Standards argue that they gave an overly rosy picture of banks’ balance sheets before the crisis and are still not prudent enough despite improvements since then. These same critics also argue that excessive reliance on fair value accounting, which reflects an asset’s current market value, has encouraged untimely recognition of unrealised profits.

They want to require banks to make upfront provisions for all expected lifetime losses on loans and, presumably, a return to good old historical cost accounting, which values assets at the price they were initially purchased.

Though superficially appealing, these changes would weaken prudent accounting, rather than strengthen it.

The British bank HBOS, which collapsed and was taken over by Lloyds Banking Group during the crisis, has been presented as an example of failing pre-crisis accounting standards. The truth is that HBOS met bank regulators’ capital requirements, and its financial statements clearly showed that its balance sheet was supported by no more than 3.3 per cent of equity. For investors who cared to look, the IFRS standards did a quite decent job of making crystal clear that many banks had wafer-thin capital levels and were accidents waiting to happen.

However, the crisis did reveal that the existing standards gave banks too much leeway to delay recognition of inevitable loan losses. In response, the International Accounting Standards Board developed an “expected loss model” that significantly lowered the thresholds for recognising loan losses. The new standard, IFRS 9, requires banks to initially set aside a moderate provision for loan losses on all loans. This prevents them from recognising too much profit up front. Then if a loan experiences a significant increase in credit risk, all the losses that can be expected over the lifetime of the loan must be recognised immediately. Normally, that will happen long before actual default.

In developing this standard, the IASB did consider whether to require banks to recognise full lifetime losses from day one. We rejected this approach for several reasons.

First, accounting standards are designed to reflect economic reality as closely as possible. Banks do not suffer losses on the very first day a loan has been made, so recording a full lifetime loss immediately is counter-intuitive. Moreover, in bad economic times, when earnings are already depressed, banks would have an incentive to cut back on new lending in order to avoid having to recognise large day one losses. Just when you need it most, the economy would probably be starved of credit.

Second, future losses are notoriously difficult to predict, so any model based on expected losses many years later would be subjective. Before the crisis, Spanish regulators required their banks to provision for bad times on the basis of lifetime expected losses. But their lenders underestimated and were still overwhelmed by the tide of bad loans. This kind of accounting also tempts banks to overstate losses in good times, creating reserves that could be released in bad times. That may seem prudent at first but could mask deteriorating performance in a later period, when investors are most in need of reliable information.

Critics also allege that IFRS has been too enamoured of fair value accounting. In fact, banks value almost all of their loan portfolios at cost, so the historical cost method remains much more pervasive.

Fears that fair value accounting lead to improper early profit recognition are also overblown. IFRS 9 prohibits companies from doing that when quoted prices in active markets are not available and the quality of earnings is highly uncertain. Moreover, fair value accounting is often quicker at identifying losses than cost accounting. That is why banks lobbied so actively against it during the crisis.

This does not mean that the accounting standards are infallible. Accounting is highly dependent on the exercise of judgement and is therefore more an art than a science. Good standards limit the room for mistakes or abuse, but can never entirely eliminate them. The capital markets are full of risks that accounting cannot possibly predict. This is certainly the case now, with markets swimming in debt and overpriced assets. For accounting standards to do their job properly, we need management to own up to the facts — and auditors, regulators and investors to be vigilant.

Philosophy can teach children what Google can’t

Charlotte Blease in The Guardian


At the controls of driverless cars, on the end of the telephone when you call your bank or favourite retailer: we all know the robots are coming, and in many cases are already here. Back in 2013, economists at Oxford University’s Martin School estimated that in the next 20 years, more than half of all jobs would be substituted by intelligent technology. Like the prospect of robot-assisted living or hate it, it is foolish to deny that children in school today will enter a vastly different workplace tomorrow – and that’s if they’re lucky. Far from jobs being brought back from China, futurologists predict that white-collar jobs will be increasingly outsourced to digitisation as well as blue-collar ones.

How should educationalists prepare young people for civic and professional life in a digital age? Luddite hand-wringing won’t do. Redoubling investment in science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) subjects won’t solve the problem either: hi-tech training has its imaginative limitations.

In the near future school-leavers will need other skills. In a world where technical expertise is increasingly narrow, the skills and confidence to traverse disciplines will be at a premium. We will need people who are prepared to ask, and answer, the questions that aren’t Googleable: like what are the ethical ramifications of machine automation? What are the political consequences of mass unemployment? How should we distribute wealth in a digitised society? As a society we need to be more philosophically engaged.

Amid the political uncertainties of 2016, the Irish president Michael D Higgins provided a beacon of leadership in this area. “The teaching of philosophy,” he said in November, “is one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal to empower children into acting as free and responsible subjects in an ever more complex, interconnected, and uncertain world.” Philosophy in the classroom, he emphasised, offers a “path to a humanistic and vibrant democratic culture”.

In 2013, as Ireland struggled with the after-effects of the financial crisis, Higgins launched a nationwide initiative calling for debate about what Ireland valued as a society. The result is that for the first time philosophy was introduced into Irish schools in September.

A new optional course for 12- to 16-year-olds invites young people to reflect on questions that – until now – have been glaringly absent from school curriculums. In the UK, a network of philosophers and teachers is still lobbying hard for a GCSE equivalent. And Ireland, a nation that was once deemed “the most Catholic country”, is already exploring reforms to establish philosophy for children as a subject within primary schools.

This expansion of philosophy in the curriculum is something that Higgins and his wife Sabina, a philosophy graduate, have expressly called for. Higgins’ views are ahead of his time. If educators assume philosophy is pointless, it’s fair to say that most academic philosophers (unlike, say, mathematicians, or linguists) are still territorial, or ignorant, about the viability of their subject beyond the cloisters. If educators need to get wise, philosophers need to get over themselves.

Thinking and the desire to understand don’t come naturally – contrary to what Aristotle believed. Unlike, say, sex and gossip, philosophy is not a universal interest. Bertrand Russell came closer when he said, “Most people would rather die than think; many do.” While we may all have the capacity for philosophy, it is a capacity that requires training and cultural nudges. If the pursuit of science requires some cognitive scaffolding, as American philosopher Robert McCauley argues, then the same is true of philosophy.

Robots are leaving the factory floor and heading for your desk – and your job


Philosophy is difficult. It encompasses the double demand of strenuous labour under a stern overseer. It requires us to overcome personal biases and pitfalls in reasoning. This necessitates tolerant dialogue, and imagining divergent views while weighing them up. Philosophy helps kids – and adults – to articulate questions and explore answers not easily drawn out by introspection or Twitter. At its best, philosophy puts ideas, not egos, front and centre. And it is the very fragility – the unnaturalness – of philosophy that requires it to be embedded, not just in schools, but in public spaces.

Philosophy won’t bring back the jobs. It isn’t a cure-all for the world’s current or future woes. But it can build immunity against careless judgments, and unentitled certitude. Philosophy in our classrooms would better equip us all to perceive and to challenge the conventional wisdoms of our age. Perhaps it is not surprising that the president of Ireland, a country that was once a sub-theocracy, understands this.

Greek debt crisis is the Iraq War of finance

Guardians of financial stability are deliberately provoking a bank run and endangering Europe's system in their zeal to force Greece to its knees.

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Telegraph 6:29PM BST 19 Jun 2015  

Rarely in modern times have we witnessed such a display of petulance and bad judgment by those supposed to be in charge of global financial stability, and by those who set the tone for the Western world.

The spectacle is astonishing. The European Central Bank, the EMU bail-out fund, and the International Monetary Fund, among others, are lashing out in fury against an elected government that refuses to do what it is told. They entirely duck their own responsibility for five years of policy blunders that have led to this impasse.

They want to see these rebel Klephts hanged from the columns of the Parthenon – or impaled as Ottoman forces preferred, deeming them bandits - even if they degrade their own institutions in the process.

If we want to date the moment when the Atlantic liberal order lost its authority – and when the European Project ceased to be a motivating historic force – this may well be it. In a sense, the Greek crisis is the financial equivalent of the Iraq War, totemic for the Left, and for Souverainistes on the Right, and replete with its own “sexed up” dossiers.

Does anybody dispute that the ECB – via the Bank of Greece - is actively inciting a bank run in a country where it is also the banking regulator by issuing this report on Wednesday?

It warned of an "uncontrollable crisis" if there is no creditor deal, followed by soaring inflation, "an exponential rise in unemployment", and a "collapse of all that the Greek economy has achieved over the years of its EU, and especially its euro area, membership".

The guardian of financial stability is consciously and deliberately accelerating a financial crisis in an EMU member state - with possible risks of pan-EMU and broader global contagion – as a negotiating tactic to force Greece to the table.

It did so days after premier Alexis Tsipras accused the creditors of "laying traps" in the negotiations and acting with a political motive. He more or less accused them of trying to destroy an elected government and bring about regime change by financial coercion.

I leave it to lawyers to decide whether this report is a prima facie violation of the ECB’s primary duty under the EU treaties. It is certainly unusual. The ECB has just had to increase emergency liquidity to the Greek banks by €1.8bn (enough to last to Monday night) to offset the damage from rising deposit flight.

In its report, the Bank of Greece claimed that failure to meet creditor demands would “most likely” lead to the country’s ejection from the European Union. Let us be clear about the meaning of this. It is not the expression of an opinion. It is tantamount to a threat by the ECB to throw the Greeks out of the EU if they resist.

This is not the first time that the ECB has strayed far from its mandate. It forced the Irish state to make good the claims of junior bondholders of Anglo-Irish Bank, saddling Irish taxpayers with extra debt equal to 20pc of GDP.

This was done purely in order to save the European banking system at a time when the ECB was refusing to do the job itself, betraying the primary task of a central bank to act as a lender of last resort.

It sent secret letters to the elected leaders of Spain and Italy in August 2011 demanding detailed changes to internal laws for which it had no mandate or technical competence, even meddling in neuralgic issues of labour law that had previously led to the assassination of two Italian officials by the Red Brigades. It demanded changes to the Spanish constitution.

When Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi balked, the ECB switched off bond purchases, driving 10-year yields to 7.5pc. He was forced from office in a back-room coup d’etat, albeit one legitimised by the ageing ex-Stalinist EU fanatic who then happened to be president of Italy.

Lest we forget, it parachuted in its vice-president – Lucas Papademos – to take over Greece when premier George Papandreou merely suggested that he might submit the EMU bail-out package to a referendum, a wise idea in retrospect. That makes two coups d’etat. Now Syriza fears they are angling for a third.

The creditor power structure has lost its way. The IMF is in confusion. It is enforcing a contractionary austerity policy in Greece – with no debt relief, exchange cushion, or offsetting investment - that has been discredited by its own elite research department as scientifically unsound.

The Fund’s culpability in this fiasco is by now well known. As I argued last week, its own internal documents show that the original bail-out in 2010 was designed to rescue the EMU banking system and monetary union at a time when it had no defences against contagion. Greece was sacrificed.

One should have thought that the IMF would wish to lower the political temperature, given that its own credibility and long-term survival are at stake. But no, Christine Lagarde has upped the political ante by stating that Greece will fall into arrears immediately if it misses a €1.6bn payment to the Fund on June 30.

In my view, this is a discretionary escalation. The normal procedure is to notify the IMF Board after 30 days. This period is a de facto grace period, and in a number of past cases the arrears were cleared up quietly during the interval before the matter ever reached the Board.

The IMF could have let this process run in the case of Greece. It has chosen not to do so, ostensibly on the grounds that the sums are unusually large.

Klaus Regling, head of the eurozone bail-out fund (EFSF), entered on cue to hint strongly that his organisation would trigger cross-default clauses on its Greek bonds – 45pc of the Greek package – even though there is no necessary reason why it should do so. It is an optional matter for the EFSF board.

He seems to be threatening an EFSF default, even though the Greeks themselves are not doing so, a remarkable state of affairs.

It is obvious what is happening. The creditors are acting in concert. Instead of stopping to reflect for one moment on the deeper wisdom of their strategy, they are doubling down mechanically, appearing to assume that terror tactics will cow the Greeks at the twelfth hour.

Personally, I am a Burkean conservative with free market views. Ideologically, Syriza is not my cup tea. Yet we Burkeans do like democracy – and we don’t care for monetary juntas – even if it leads to the election of a radical-Left government.

As it happens, Edmund Burke would have found the plans presented to the Eurogroup last night by finance minister Yanis Varoufakis to be rational, reasonable, fair, and proportionate.

They include a debt swap with ECB bonds coming due in July and August exchanged for bonds from the bail-out fund. They would have longer maturities and lower interest rates, reflecting the market borrowing cost of the creditors.

Syriza said from the outset that it was eager to work on market reforms with the OECD, the leading authority. It wants to team up with the International Labour Organisation on Scandinavian style flexi-security and labour reforms, a valid alternative to the German-style Hartz IV reforms that have impoverished the bottom fifth of German society and which no Left-wing movement can stomach.

It wished to push through a more radical overhaul of the Greek state that anything yet done under five years of Troika rule – and much has been done, to be fair.

As Mr Varoufakis told Die Zeit: “Why does a kilometer of freeway cost three times as much where we are as it does in Germany? Because we’re dealing with a system of cronyism and corruption. That’s what we have to tackle. But, instead, we’re debating pharmacy opening times."

The Troika pushed privatisation of profitable state assets at knock-down depression prices to private monopolies, to the benefit of an entrenched elite. To call that reforms invites a bitter cynicism.

The only reason that the Troika pushed this policy was in order to extract money. It was acting at a debt collector. “The reforms were a smokescreen. Whenever I tried talking about proposals, they were bored. I could see it in their body language," Mr Varoufakis told me.

The truth is that the creditor power structure never even looked at the Greek proposals. They never entertained the possibility of tearing up their own stale, discredited, legalistic, fatuous Troika script.

The decision was made from the outset to demand strict enforcement of the terms agreed in the original Memorandum, which even the last conservative pro-Troika government was unable to implement - regardless of whether it makes any sense, or actually increases the chance that Germany and other lenders will recoup their money.

At best, it is bureaucratic inertia, a prime exhibit of why the EU has become unworkable, almost genetically incapable of recognising and correcting its own errors.

At worst, it is nasty, bullying, insistence on ritual capitulation for the sake of it.

We all know the argument. The EU is worried about political “moral hazard”, about what Podemos might achieve in Spain, or the eurosceptics in Italy, or the Front National in France, if Syriza is seen to buck the system and get away with it.

But do the proponents of this establishment view – and one hears it a lot – really think that Podemos can be defeated by crushing Syriza, or that they can discourage Marine Le Pen by violating the sovereignty and sensibilities of a nation?

Do they think that the EU’s ever-declining hold on the loyalty of Europe’s youth can be reversed by creating a martyr state on the Left? Do they not realize that this is their own Guatemala, the radical experiment of Jacobo Arbenz that was extinguished by the CIA in 1954, only to set off the Cuban revolution and thirty years of guerrilla warfare across Latin America? Don’t these lawyers – and yes they are almost all lawyers - ever look beyond their noses?

The Versailles victors assumed reflexively that they had the full weight of moral authority on their side when they imposed their Carthiginian settlement on a defeated Germany in 1919 and demanded the payment of debts that they themselves invented. History judged otherwise.

BCCI - Time for an overhaul

Sambit Bal in Cricinfo

To grasp the true significance of the seminal verdict handed down by India's Supreme Court in the IPL spot-fixing case, we need to look beyond the immediate. Beyond N Srinivasan, who has grabbed the headlines; beyond the improprieties, both alleged and proven, that were under scrutiny; and beyond the turf wars within and surrounding the BCCI, which resulted in this case being filed.

The central message delivered by the court is a simple but powerful one: sport, cricket in this case, is sustained by the faith of the fans, and administrators are only custodians of that faith. It's a principle the BCCI has observed mostly in the breach, and the highest court of the land has started a process of redressal.

Over the last few years the BCCI has been presented, through a series of controversies and scandals, several opportunities for course correction and institutional reform but each of these has been spurned due to a combination of hubris and self-interest. The Supreme Court has now decided that the BCCI is neither capable of cleaning up its own act, nor can it be trusted with the job.

The cloud over Srinivasan's re-election as BCCI president has dominated the immediate news agenda but the most consequential part of the judgement is that the board has now been brought within the ambit of judicial scrutiny that public and state bodies are subjected to. Simply put, the BCCI can no longer be a law unto itself under the guise of being a private organisation.

The tenor of the judgement is unequivocal and unambiguous: with governance must come accountability and propriety, and responsibility doesn't end with protecting the bottom line; the fiduciary obligation of a sports organisation extends beyond the bottom line to protecting the integrity and credibility of the game.

For these alone, it is a profoundly groundbreaking judgement. To quote:

"[The] BCCI's commercial plans for its own benefit and the benefit of the players are bound to blow up in smoke if the people who watch and support the game were to lose interest or be indifferent because they get to know that some business interests have hijacked the game for their own ends or that the game is no longer the game they know or love because of frauds on and off the field. There is no manner of doubt whatsoever that the game enjoys its popularity and raises passions only because of what it stands for and because the people who watch the sport believe that it is being played in the true spirit of the game without letting any corrupting influence come anywhere near the principles and fundamental imperatives considered sacrosanct and inviolable."

The immediate fallout of the judgement will be felt most severely by Srinivasan, who has remained cricket's most powerful figure despite being off the BCCI throne. He has been given the clear option of choosing between the BCCI presidency, a position he dearly covets, and ownership of Chennai Super Kings, the highly successful IPL franchise that he has assiduously nurtured.

It's a decision he ought to have taken months ago when it became demonstrably apparent - in case it hadn't been at the time of his acquiring the franchise - that his two hats were irredeemably incompatible. It wasn't so much a matter of his complicity in the wrongdoings of his son-in-law as it was the mere perception of him being in a position of influence when matters relating to his own franchise came up for adjudication.

In striking down the controversial amendment to the BCCI's constitution that allowed Srinivasan to buy CSK, the court said it violated "a fundamental tenet of law that no one can be a judge in his own cause''.

But while Srinivasan's adversaries in the BCCI publicly rejoiced in his discomfiture once the judgement was delivered, few of them can escape culpability. The truth is that the judgement is an indictment of the system. That includes those - Sharad Pawar, Shashank Manohar, IS Bindra and Lalit Modi included - who were party to the constitutional amendment that institutionalised conflict of interest, and then there has been the majority, who have been complicit through their acquiescence. It bears noting that Srinivasan was re-elected unopposed and unanimously even while this case was being heard.

And it can also be argued that while Srinivasan sought and obtained the organisation's sanction for acquiring a commercial interest in the IPL, it is not the first or only instance of a conflict of interest in the BCCI. The father-in-law of Pawar's daughter had a stake in Multi Screen Media, which owned broadcast rights to the IPL; and an affidavit filed by Srinivasan in April 2014, during the hearing of this case, pointed out that Bindra's son had been an employee of Nimbus, the company that owned BCCI television rights between 2006 and 2014, while the company negotiated, and obtained, a discount of nearly US$50 million from a BCCI committee on which Bindra was a member.

The judgement is, however, the beginning of a process that will be now be taken forward by the three-member committee entrusted with the critical task of deciding the punishment for Gurunath Meiyappan - who, it has now been established, was a Super Kings official for all purposes, and who was found to have been betting for and against his own team, and chillingly, in one instance, bet on his team scoring within a range that was one run off the eventual total - and Raj Kundra, a shareholder in Rajasthan Royals. The committee is also tasked with examining the allegations against the conduct of Sundar Raman, the chief operating officer of the IPL, and with overseeing the forthcoming BCCI elections.

But potentially the most far-reaching part of its job will be to examine and recommend institutional reforms for the BCCI. Prima facie, the mandate seems all-encompassing: it covers the role and eligibility of administrators, regulations to resolve issues of conflict of interest, amendments that might be necessary to carry out the recommendations of the Mudgal Committee, and this open-ended mandate:

"Any other recommendation with or without suitable amendment of the relevant Rules and Regulations, which the Committee may consider necessary to make with a view to preventing sporting frauds, conflict of interests, streamlining the working of BCCI to make it more responsive to the expectations of the public at large and to bring transparency in practices and procedures followed by BCCI."

Shortly after the judgement was delivered, the BCCI released a statement welcoming the end of the uncertainty and offering its "unstinted co-operation" to the committee. It must now match its words in both deed and spirit. A combination of circumstances and entrepreneurship have handed it the leadership of world cricket through financial might. But real leadership can only be earned through credibility.

For the BCCI, all the battles outside have been won; the world has been conquered; past slights, real and perceived, have been avenged. It's time to look within.

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Teaching philosophy to children? It's a great idea

Studying philosophy cultivates doubt without helplessness, and confidence without hubris. I’ve watched children evolve to be more rational and open-minded because of it

• 
• • Michelle Sowey
  • theguardian.com, Wednesday 20 November 2013 22.23 GMT

'I quickly saw that kids, too, have the capacity to enquire philosophically from an early age'. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Recently I’ve seen a spate of articles along the lines of "what philosophy can do for you", focusing on the high results that philosophy students score on standardised tests, the marketability of philosophical skills, and the impressive earning potential of philosophy graduates. I’ve even seen pitches like: "If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an MBA. Study philosophy instead." I find this strange, because career advancement and commercial success are the most peripheral of the benefits of philosophy.

In my university days, still uncertain of my future directions, I came across an unforgettable quote by Alex Pozdnyakov, a philosophy student on the other side of the world: “I have this strange phrase I use when people ask me why I chose philosophy. I tell them I wanted to become a professional human being.”

Perfect, I thought. That’s what I want to be.

Since then, training in various jobs has made me into various kinds of professional, but no training has shaped my humanity as deeply as philosophy has. No other discipline has inspired such wonder about the world, or furnished me with thinking tools so universally applicable to the puzzles that confront us as human beings.

When I started running philosophy workshops for primary school children, I quickly saw that kids, too, have the capacity to enquire philosophically from an early age. They’re nimble in playing with ideas and deft in building on each other’s arguments. They’re endlessly inquisitive, wondering about values (“What’s the most treasured object in the world?”), metaphysics (“Is the earth a coincidence?”), language (“If cavemen just went ‘ugh-ugh-ugh’, how did we learn to speak?”) and epistemology (“Since you can have dreams inside dreams, how can you know when you’re dreaming?”).

In small groups, they’ve discussed artificial intelligence, environmental ethics, interspecies communication and authenticity in art. They’ve contemplated the existence of free will, the limits of knowledge, the possibility of justice and countless other problems from the history of philosophical thought. By continually questioning, challenging and evaluating ideas, the children have been able to see for themselves why some arguments fail while others bear up under scrutiny.

Studying philosophy cultivates doubt without helplessness, and confidence without hubris. I’ve watched kids evolve to be more rational, sceptical and open-minded, and I’ve seen them interact in more fair-minded and collaborative ways. As one 10-year-old said, “I’ve started to actually solve arguments and problems with philosophy. And it works better than violence or anything else.”

Over 400 years ago, the French writer Michel de Montaigne asked: “Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it?” We urgently need to ask ourselves the same question today.

The central place of Theory of Knowledge in the International Baccalaureate (a globally recognised high school diploma) reflects a worldwide appreciation for the importance of philosophy – a discipline that underpins all other academic disciplines. A growing international movement is inviting young children to philosophise in primary schools in the USA, the UK and elsewhere – but Australia is lagging.

Although philosophy features on the high school curriculum in most Australian states, only a very few primary schools dedicate class time to broad philosophical enquiry or to the explicit teaching of critical and creative thinking.

If it were more widely embraced, the practice of philosophical enquiry in primary schools could make schooling a lot more meaningful and engaging for students. It would certainly promote the development of reasoned argument and higher-order thinking – skills which underlie learning in most other domains (including literacy and numeracy) and which are essential for responsible civic engagement.

By setting children on a path of philosophical enquiry early in life, we could offer them irreplaceable gifts: an awareness of life’s moral, aesthetic and political dimensions; the capacity to articulate thoughts clearly and evaluate them honestly; and the confidence to exercise independent judgement and self-correction. What’s more, an early introduction to philosophical dialogue would foster a greater respect for diversity and a deeper empathy for the experiences of others, as well as a crucial understanding of how to use reason to resolve disagreements.

The benefits to students would be there for the taking, if only philosophy educators in Australia could access appropriate funding and institutional support. Such support is provided by charitable organisations like the Philosophy Foundation in the UK and theSquire Foundation in the USA, which lead the way in embedding philosophy in primary school curricula. Unless funding is made available here to pay expert philosophy practitioners or to provide classroom teachers with rigorous training, our kids are condemned to forgo the many rich rewards that philosophy promises – or to suffer from the variable level of professionalism that characterises many volunteer-run educational programs.

Here’s something to think about on World Philosophy Day: while academic achievement, career advancement and financial success are no trifling things, they’re simply visible husks that may grow around a philosophical life. The hidden kernel is made of freedom, clarity of thought, and a professional mastery of what it means to be human. These are qualities we should seek for all our children, no matter what they grow up to become.

The DRS problem: it's not the humans stupid

Kartikeya Date 

The controversial Trott decision: what many observers don't get is that it wasn't actually the third umpire who made the final call  © PA Photos

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The DRS is a system in which umpiring decisions can be reviewed by players. Events on the field can also be reviewed by umpires in some circumstances before a decision is made. A widely held view about recent problems with the system is that while the DRS is fine, the way it is used by players, and on occasion by umpires, has caused difficulties.

I hold the view that the problem, if there is one, is with the system, not with the way it is used. The way the system is defined strictly determines the way it is used.

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The DRS system I refer to is described in detail by the ICC in its Playing Handbook (pdf). It is worth clearing up a few misconceptions at the outset.

The TV umpire does not overturn a decision under the DRS. The TV umpire is explicitly prohibited from discussing whether or not a particular appeal should result in an out or a not out. Further, there is no standard in the DRS requiring "conclusive evidence to the contrary" to overturn a decision, as many commentators are fond of telling us.

The rules make only three points. First, the TV umpire must limit himself to the facts. Second, if some of the evidence requested by the umpire on the field does not permit a conclusion with "a high degree of confidence", the TV umpire should convey to the umpire on the field that a conclusive answer is not possible (the conclusion in this case is not the decision itself but about individual points of fact potentially influencing it). Finally, if some information is not available to the TV umpire, he is required to report this to the on-field umpire. He is also required to provide all other evidence requested by the on-field umpire. If we go by the ICC's DRS rules, at no point in the review process is the TV umpire required to provide a definitive conclusion by putting together all the evidence.

The Guardian reported that the ICC did admit to a protocol error in the way the umpires addressed Australia's review in Jonathan Trott's first-ball lbw dismissal in the second innings at Trent Bridge. The ICC has declined to say what the protocol error was, citing a long-standing policy of not revealing communication between umpires. A number of observers think that the absence of one Hot Spot camera angle should have automatically meant that the outcome of the review should have been inconclusive, allowing Dar's original not-out decision to stand. I think this is a misreading of the ICC's DRS rules.

Let's reconstruct the case of Trott. Umpire Erasmus in the TV umpire's box would not be asked "Is Trott LBW?", or even "Did Trott hit the ball with the bat?" Going by the ICC's rules, he would be asked a different series of questions. Does Hot Spot show a touch? No. Does the replay show a touch?Inconclusive. No clear evidence of a deviation. (Some people have argued that there was evidence of deviation on the replay. I disagree. As did Michael Atherton on live commentary.) Does the square-of-the-wicket Hot Spot show a touch? This angle is unavailable. Can you hear any relevant sound on the stump microphone? Inconclusive. Did the ball pitch in line? Yes. Did it hit the pads in line? Yes. Does the ball-track predict that it would have hit the stumps?Yes.

According to the rules, Erasmus would be prevented from providing probabilities or maybes. It would have to be yes, no, or can't say. After getting all these factual responses from Erasmus, Dar would have to make up his mind. Did what he heard from Erasmus merit reversal? As we know, he decided that it did. The protocol error could have been that Erasmus neglected to mention that one of the Hot Spot angles was unavailable. It could also have been that Dar weighed all the facts Erasmus provided to him incorrectly and reached the wrong conclusion, though it is difficult to construe this last possibility as a protocol error, since the protocol explicitly requires the on-field umpire to exercise judgement, which is what Dar did. "The on-field umpire must then make his decision based on those factual questions that were answered by the third umpire, any other factual information offered by the third umpire and his recollection and opinion of the original incident" (See 3.3[k] of Appendix 2 of the Standard Test Match Playing Conditions, ICC Playing Handbook 2012-13).

This is the central faultline in the understanding of the DRS. To some technophiles, it promises an end to interpretation; that, with the DRS, there is to be no more "in the opinion of the umpire". Technology will show everything clearly - make every decision self-evident.

Not so. Under the DRS, a judgement has to be made about whether or not evidence is conclusive. A judgement also has to be made about whether all the evidence (often conflicting, due to the limitations of the technologies involved), taken together, merits a reversal. There have been instances where outside edges have been ruled to have occurred, though there was no heat signature on the bat.

The ICC has consistently insisted that the idea is not to render umpires obsolete. It is right, but in a convoluted way. What the DRS does is allow umpires a limited, strictly defined second look at an event. But it does so on the players' terms. Umpires are currently not allowed to review a decision after it has been made on the field. The "umpire review" element of the DRS takes place before the decision is made on the field in the first instance. Simon Taufel, who has wide experience of both DRS and non-DRS international matches, has questioned whether this is reasonable.

So far, the DRS has been badly burnt in the ongoing Ashes, and has received criticism from some unexpected quarters. Add to this a recent report that a few boards other than India's also oppose it. I suspect that the DRS will not survive in its present form for long.

The ICC is experimenting with real-time replays, which it says will allow TV umpires to initiate reviews. The ICC has long claimed that this is currently not done because it will waste time. The ICC's statistics suggest that in an average DRS Test match, 49 umpiring decisions are made (a decision is said to be made when an appeal from the fielding side is answered). Let's say an average Test lasts 12 sessions. This suggests that on average about four appeals are made per session of Test cricket when the DRS is employed. These numbers don't suggest that allowing umpires to initiate reviews will result in too much extra wasted time, do they? It should be kept in mind, though, that the ICC assesses time wasted relative to the progress of the game, and not simply as a measure in seconds or minutes.

The most damaging consequence of the DRS is off the field. It has now become a point of debate among professional observers of cricket about whether dismissals are determined by the umpire. The idea that the umpire is an expert whose role it is to exercise judgement, and whose judgement is to be respected, is now only superficially true. Time and again, eminently reasonable lbw decisions are reversed for fractions, and as a result are considered clear mistakes. Cricket has lost the ability to appreciate the close decision, the marginal event. It has lost the essential sporting capacity to concede that an event on the field is so close that perhaps a decision in favour of the opposition is reasonable.