GW 12: Three Unanswerable Questions

The Premier League may have taken last weekend off, but here at the Fortress, dilemmas have been brewing—and this is the episode where we bring them to the fore. To start, we revisit the idea of selling Haaland by exploring other permutations that the extra cash can fund. Regular listeners will know that we’re a very interdisciplinary podcast; accordingly, Jiayang references Hegel’s assertion that changes in quantity may eventually result in changes in quality as a metaphor to question how close managers are to actually committing to the act. Soon afterwards, we arrive at our first unanswerable question: How much weight should we be putting on small nuggets of information—like the fact that Haaland will likely be facing Dragusin instead of Van de Ven? Our second Dilemma Deliberation centers around a case study of Jiayang’s team: is it worth it to bring in Palmer for a -8 hit? To answer this question, we spontaneously decide to do something unprecedented: we transplant our captaincy segment right into the heart of our Dilemma Deliberations. In the process, we stumble across our second unanswerable question: What’s the tradeoff between sample accuracy and sample size, particularly at this point in the season when only 11 games have been played? After much grappling, we finally land on our third unanswerable question: Is intentionally creating sunk costs a winning strategy? Though definitive conclusions remain elusive, we hope the act of posing and confronting such questions are continually advancing the game forward. There is beauty in trying.