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Yes. It may be funny to observe that a phrase literally means the opposite, or is meaningless, etc., but generally there is a real meaning which everyone under

• ugh 17y ago
  There is a point, though, to the professor’s criticism, and it’s a subtle one. The teleported soccer fan probably wouldn’t be able to pass the ball to any player at all. No problem, he says, I will just imagine myself in the same physical condition as the scolded player. But would that be enough? If you want to be good at playing soccer you need to know about tactics and strategy, you need the experience of hundreds of games. Can the soccer fan just imagine himself having all that and still be sure whether he would have passed to a different player? Probably not. Why would all those changes to his brain keep the part intact with which he just decided which would have been the best pass? I might be committing a fundamental attribution error by concentrating too much on the brain side of things, though. Situation can be the other and maybe even more straightforward reason why the teleported soccer fan would probably fare not much better than the player. The fan has a bird eye’s view, multiple camera angles and instant replay, the player doesn’t. The fan is sitting in the pub, the player is running around. And so on. You might want to be careful when using this phrase, then. Maybe yell something like: “The optimal pass which maximally increases the chance of scoring a goal would have been to pass to that other player, you idiot!”