2704 Words on Logic and Putting

Yeah, pretty much that.

I remember someone telling that, whenever I got the chance, I should watch a greyhound run — that there’s very little in this world more beautiful than watching an animal do what it was bred to do.

In that vein, getting back into some real analytic philosophy last week felt damn good. I studied hard for three years in college to be able to bring you “guy who’ll pay you ‘torture’ you on the street.” While putting that out, some good stuff (I think) ended up on the cutting room floor. So I’m going to keep running with this.

Last week, while going into the transitive property, I offhandedly mentioned the reflexive property. It’s a perfect paradigm case for a “property” that’s so flamingly obvious that you question why it even exists. That something is the same as itself — yeah, ok cool, who the hell cares?

First, a quick foray back into the transitive property. It might’ve seemed like I[1] debunked the transitive property or something like that. I promise you, that’s far from the case. There’s a good reason that things broke down there, and it’s worth getting into.

We’ve established that these weird, nebulous cases involving a street torture artist can cause the transitive property to break down. However, it’s still enjoys some solid run as a mathematical property. So what gives? Clearly, it has less to do with the property itself than the circumstances in which it’s used.

If there’s one thing I learned in philosophy class that I still use every day, it’s formal logic. Logic, formally speaking, is a way of creating and arranging statements such that, if some of them are true, others must be true. For instance:

1) All dogs are cute.

2) Olive is a dog.

3) Therefore, Olive is cute.

In this case, if (1) and (2) are true, then it’s impossible for (3) to be false. If Olive (my dog) is a dog, then she’s going to be cute, because all dogs are cute. To argue that Olive is not cute, you’d have to start by suggesting that Olive is not a dog (difficult) or that not all dogs are cute (debatable).

Let’s try to make a formal argument around the transitive property, here:

4) For all cases which behave by simple mathematical laws, the transitive property holds.

5) In the torture case, the transitive property fails.

6) Therefore, the torture case does not behave by simple mathematical laws.

I think this covers things reasonably well. The real heavy lifting is done by the “behave by simple mathematical laws” bit, especially “simple.” But I think it’s alright. Consider something like mineral hardness: on the Mohs hardness scale, fluorite is a 4, quartz is a 7, and diamond is a 10. Harder minerals can scratch softer minerals. Quartz scratches fluorite; diamond scratches quartz; you’d be damn sure diamond scratches fluorite. When you can assign numerical values to things, and when those values do a good job at describing the real system, the transitive property tends to do a good job.

If you have any experience with formal metaphysics, you might notice that I’m venturing into some horribly dangerous waters. The whole “simple mathematical rules” bit tries to make a distinction between simple physics problems and [something else][2], and a whole bunch of debates about human rationality, free will, religion, entropy, and nihilism hang in the balance.

The easiest positions to take are the absolutes: either it’s all math and you’re just too dumb to see that, or none of it is math and you’re just too dumb to see that it’s a construct we’ve built in our heads. Neither works all that well. [3] But bloody wars have been fought on this land for hundreds or thousands of years, and it’s rhetorically safer to stay in one absolutist fortress or another.

Some guy’s weekly newsletter isn’t going to do shit to solve any of this. In fact, getting involved with any of this is the rhetorical equivalent of charging a machine gun turret with a whiffle ball bat: if I’m lucky, I might get a good bonk in on someone, but I’ll be taken care of pretty quickly if anyone cares enough to do so. But hey, we’re having fun.

We’re 850 words in and you still don’t know why I’m talking about any of this, so I’ll offer a teaser of an argument. It’s not so much whether these laws fail that’s interesting, when we talk about things like minerals and torture and whatever. It’s far more interesting to consider what those laws failing says about the things themselves.

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I’ve started waking up early to putt. Really, I’m not sure if “started” is the right word — I woke up early to putt on Monday and Tuesday, burnt out a bit and missed it on Wednesday and Thursday, and I did it again today, Friday. I intend to go again tomorrow, Saturday, but I guess we’ll see how late I’m up getting this letter out.

Here’s what I do. I wake up at 6:30, I throw on golf clothes, eat some overnight oats out of the fridge, make myself an iced coffee, and drive to the course. Once there, I bring my putter, an alignment stick, and a backpack over to the putting green.

I’ll throw down the putting mirror. First I make sure I’ve found a straight putt — I had such a knack for setting up the whole mirror thing and finding that I’d picked a left-edge putt that I got a mini stimpmeter to keep in my bag. Once I’ve got a straight putt, I’ll throw the mirror down, and I’ll add tees as putter gates: the classic Tiger gates at the ball, plus two more about 10” in front of and behind impact to make sure the stroke is square all the way through. Then I’ll put a smaller gate a foot in front of the ball, barely big enough for a ball to get through, to make sure I’m hitting my start lines.

With all of this set up, I’ll put the alignment stick down alongside the mirror. I’ve measured out where my feet should be in relation to the ball, and I’ve marked these points in tape on the stick so I set up to it the same every time. Then a towel goes alongside the stick for me to stand on, to make sure I’m not damaging the green by standing in the same spot.

The last thing, a recent addition: I have a device that attaches to my grip with Velcro and lays a stick across my forearms. The stick needs to be pointing along the target line, ensuring that my forearms are both on the same plane line as the putter.

(As I hope is clear: I’m not getting paid by anyone to post about this thing — you can be sure of this because I’m not getting paid by anyone for posting anything at all. But, if you’re a ~6-8 cap or better and looking to improve your putting technique, I think this thing is about as good a north star as you’re ever going to find [aside from the mirror, which is a classic for a reason]. That said, to the 18-caps and funky-stroke-savants: technique worries will probably do more harm than good, and just keep doing you!)

The goal here is variable control. For instance: if you drew a line perpendicular to the back of the ball and another perpendicular to the inside of the ball, then the intersection of those lines — on the bottom right corner of the ball, if you will — is exactly where my left eye sits on the mirror. Sometimes it drifts inside the ball. The mirror is to make sure that doesn’t happen.

And so I’ll hit a bunch of putts through the gate, trying to feel everything super square. If I miss anything, there’s abundant feedback: I’ll hit a tee with the putter and feel it, or the ball will hit the gate and bounce off to the side. I tend to hang the putter face open and hit the right ball gate, a push. I tend to drag the putter across the line and hit the inside putter gates. With the feedback in front of me, I don’t have to guess how I’m doing. I know for sure.

At another hole nearby, I’ll grab a Ziploc bag of ten tees. The tees have the numbers 1-10 written on top. I’ll lay out these tees in a random order and stick them around the hole: 5 in a circle at 3’; then, in the gaps, 3 at 5’ and 2 at 7.5’. If I’m starting to roll it well, I’ll bump the distances up to 4’, 6’, and 10’. The goal is simple: keep going through the order, 1 through 10 and back to 1, until you’ve made 10 in a row.

What pro golf is all about, so I’m told, is finding out what works for you and making it as simple as possible. I’m finding that good technique and fundamentals are really, really important. In my golf swing, it’s hand path. When my hands make a big loop, I have to spend all my athleticism just putting the bat on the ball. When my hands go straight up and down, I set myself to make a confident, athletic move at the golf ball and focus on hitting targets.

At some point last year, I switched to a skinny putter grip. I’d been a Super Stroke user for twelve years or longer, but I’d kept going skinnier, from the 2 to the 3 to the 1.0. I picked up a skinny grip, liked the feel of it, and put it on my putter. I didn’t think much of it.

After a year of struggling with the putter, I realized that I actually couldn’t hold the putter properly with that skinny grip. Looking around Tour, I couldn’t find one guy who putt left-hand-low who used a skinny grip. And so I switched back to a Super Stroke, and things have been looking up.

But here’s the interesting part: the problem with the skinny grip, as far as I felt it, wasn’t so much the stroke but the reads. I felt like I was rolling the ball fine. But, when I bent down to read a putt, I had absolutely no idea where it was going. I tried picking start lines, entry points, apexes, gates, spots to roll it over — nothing worked. It’s like I was flying blind.

I have some fun conspiracy theories about putting in the early morning. Basically, I have a real hunch that there’s more to it than just waking up early and putting the work in. There’s a real confidence in being the first pro at practice in the morning. But I think there’s more to it than that. If you pressed me, I’d tell you that chemicals in your body have a half-life — that they don’t just flush out all at once, but that they go away over time. And, given how well I’m visualizing putts after this morning practice, I’d tell you that maybe — just maybe — some residual hormones from REM sleep are still in your brain at 7:30am, and that there’s a little psycho-chemical magic going on that gets the memory of putts rolling end over end deep into your long-term memory. But that’s only if you pressed me.

But the big takeaway — the real, indisputable truth of my time spent putting — is that, when my technique is good, I read putts better. It makes sense, when you think about it: if you see the ball roll on its line a lot, and you get used to the visual of the ball rolling on that line, then you can better visualize how the ball will break off that line.

That’s the simple truth. I’ve been spending all this time getting away from mechanical perfectionism and left-brained thinking, trying to visualize things better. As it turns out, you need both. Yes, the visualizing is the more important part when the rubber hits the road in competition, but it’s good fundamentals that let that visualization happen. That’s it. It doesn’t get much more simple than that.

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Live-time Connor here with a confession to make. I keep notes on what I’m planning to write about each week. That way, I can keep track of how far along my ideas are, and I can work on putting things together mentally when I’m away from the computer.

About every 3 weeks, I’ll sit down and realize I don’t have nearly enough notes to get a good letter out. This usually isn’t a big problem: it means I have more work ahead of me than normal when I sit down to write, but I usually do a good job figuring things out on the fly. I know this because, I can almost promise you: your favorite newsletter of mine started as one of these.

About every 6 weeks, I run into a different problem: I have way too many notes. This is BAD. These are weeks when I have a topic I’m really excited about, and I think of all these cool angles I can go, and each of these threads multiplies into more threads, and I’m left with this massive hydra of an idea where two heads pop up every time I cut one off. That’s what we got this week — and a pretty vicious version of it, too.

The good news is that I’ve picked three dead heads off the ground and thrown them in a note, and next week’s letter looks pretty sweet if it decides to behave itself. The bad news is that it’s 10pm, I’m 2500 words in, and I still haven’t gotten a letter out to you.

You come to ITW for golf stuff, for other stuff, and for watching how it all wraps up at the end. I take pride in this last one being my real value proposition. The problem is, wrapping things up the way I intended here would involve cannibalizing next week’s letter, when I intend to do all of that properly. It also involves introducing you to David Lewis, the personite problem, and what a “four-dimensional mereological sum” is. So we’re going to table that for now, and, in the meantime, I’ll see if I can flip it at the bottom—

It's funny, how confusing this game can be, and how simple and obvious it can be in hindsight. Sure, I hadn’t putt great for about a year after switching putter grips. To be honest, I hadn’t putt all that great beforehand, so I hadn’t thought much of the grip change. While it’s not strictly sound, in a formal logic sense, it seems pretty clear in hindsight: if there isn’t a single Tour player putting left hand low with a skinny grip, maybe there’s a reason.

Beyond the paradigm examples, formal logic by itself doesn’t do much for you: it’s the way you utilize it that yields the results. But there’s a real clarity and confidence in knowing that, if you accept these things as true, you’ll be right.

• If I get my fundamentals dialed in, I putt well.

• I’m waking up at sunrise to dial in my fundamentals.

I think the future looks fairly bright.

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[1] I should be clear — I’m really not doing much with any of these examples. I’m pulling them from paradigm examples we used in my classes, and those examples came (usually) from papers written by card carrying philosophers. Trust me: if I ever come up with something I can take personal credit for, you’ll hear about it.

[2] I thought about calling these “real-life natural systems” just to get a couple sweater-wearers flaming mad, but it’s so egregious that the philosophy council would probably come to my apartment, revoke my degree, and shoot me in the head.

[3] I think there’s a good bit of kayfabe here: obviously the world is complex and weird and the truth is somewhere in the middle, and the argument churns on by people dinging each other on technicalities instead of moving on with their lives.