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Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

longform.asmartbear.com

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Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

#111

Post by skeeter2020 »

npteljes wrote: post #102
gadders wrote: post #100

Eric Sink from Source Gear made a similar point in a 2005 (I'm so old) essay explaining competition and business topics to developers via sports/game metaphors: https://ericsink.com/articles/Game_Afoot.html "The thing I find most interesting about Ping Pong is that you can often win without doing anything fancy or aggressive. A lot of players think the way to win is to slam the ball really hard. The problem with this…

Very good metaphor. I score similarly in Rainbow 6 Siege, an online FPS game. On the level I play, the game can be very fast paced. Often I score simply because I'm more patient, not because I click more accurately or faster.

This is what professional poker players do, and if the goal is winning it works. It also changes what was originally a pleasurable social activity into a grinding job, which I don't want for things that I currently find fun, like ping pong.

Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

#112

Post by viggity »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #110

So the advice is "don't make so many small mistakes that it kills you"? and 20% of the time "don't make a fatal mistake". I just don't find this very helpful. Anyone who's worked at a startup already knows (1) it is a daily grind, (2) you don't die as often as you enter a zombie state.

"zombie state". I love that. I was the CTO of a healthcare startup for 6 years. Would have been a wonderful business for like 1-2 people to own but we raised venture funding. We made good money, had ok growth (attrition was high because well, that's what happens when your patient population is 70yo and have heart problems). I liked to phrase it as "a mediocre success is worse than a failure". You just get strung along, looking for a breakout, but are stuck with 10% growth.

Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

#113

Post by jprete »

I think the sports analogy is bad. Using table tennis as an example, a point can look blundered from the outside, but really the opponent hit a very difficult shot to return and the player did their best to do so. There's also the ongoing factor of one's position relative to the table and one's read of the opponent's likely next shot. These aren't factors that can be judged just with a simple measure of whether the player's return hit went wide.

Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

#114

Post by smartbear »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #44

A better way to read this is "80% of a not losing strategy". The author agrees with this but buries the lede at the very end of the piece: "Is this a fail-safe path? Of course not. Even in chess. The rest of the game does matter." I also think his framing is somewhat misleading, since the default mindset (Despite his hedging) is that you will win (Or have higher chances) if you don't blunder. The problem is that winn…

As the author of the article, I really like your counter-point here.

Because I do agree -- in all startups most "stuff" is being executed poorly (if at all), with issues everywhere, and yet when you get the right 1-2 things _really_ right, that can overwhelm all those problems.

So, perhaps the charitable view is that this piece is a fun way of getting at the usual ideas of things which derisk a startup -- e.g. talking to customers rather than coding in a hole -- and indeed many of these things will surely be a net-positive.

And yet, the "80% of winning" might indeed be correct for amateur chess and amateur tennis, yet it's not "80%" for startups, and that bit is rhetorical.

Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

#115

Post by skeeter2020 »

chplushsieh wrote: post #53
ycombinatrix wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

link please

Not GP, but perhaps this is the post: https://longform.asmartbear.com/two-big-things/

This is such a simplistic, winner-take-all viewpoint. Example: having an awesome marriage can open a bunch of doors and afford you the time, energy & space to DO a lot more things. Same with a family & friends. It must be sad to go through life viewing every course of action as work that eats limited capacity.

Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

#116

Post by nradov »

taneq wrote: post #98
otterley wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve learned at Amazon that writing about what you want to build, and why, and why not do something else - in a way that others can clearly comprehend, and before ever touching a line of code - helps you think even more clearly.

Maybe it does for some people but based on all of the functional specifications I've implemented over the years, they are by far the exception. Maybe designing and documenting first is OK if it's done by people who've already learned how systems work by building and maintaining a lot of them, though.

The documents used in Amazon at that lifecycle stage aren't functional specifications. The point is to justify launching a few project to management. You should be able to clearly explain why it's worth expending resources.

Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

#117

Post by smartbear »

joss82 wrote: post #70

This only works where the number of moves is finite, and you can only iterate in lockstep with your opponent: tennis and chess are good examples. If you are a startup, you don't have to wait for your competitors to play before making a move, you can (and must, to survive) make as many moves as you possibly can, to get ahead. A blunder is not as bad as not making enough great moves.

(Author of the article)

I agree with your counter-point. The finiteness and lock-step are interesting characteristics; I wonder what the set of characteristics are, for when this "rule" is especially applicable.

And then we could ask: Is a startup like that? Are some kinds of businesses like that, but some are not? (e.g. a one-person accounting service vs a "change the world" startup?)

I do agree that often with startups it's whether you find the 1-2 things that REALLY matter, and execute those REALLY well.

Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

#118

Post by pratclot »

koonsolo wrote: post #56

Once he started talking about chess, I knew it was going to be a limited view on things. There are 2 kinds of games: those that punish mistakes very badly, and those that reward exploited opportunities very richly. I was never good at games like chess because of this exact same reason: I don't cover all my bases and lose from a stupid oversight. However, I'm pretty good at poker, because I know how to exploit an oppo…

I really like this comment, chess sucks.

Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

#119

Post by gizmo »

noxvilleza wrote: post #107
gizmo wrote: post #97

The author seems to be at Elo 1100. At this level players don't think even a single move ahead and blunder their queen every other game. Slightly better amateur players realize that they should trade pieces once they're ahead to get to a winning end game. Avoiding blunders only works at chess at the lowest levels. It's the same for tennis. Complete amateurs can win just by returning the ball but at higher amateur lev…

It's "Elo", not "ELO" (it's not an acronym).

You're right. Fixed.

Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

#120

Post by topaz0 »

I think this is a case where doing the automated analysis on a large dataset is misleading, because the automated analysis is based on an automated evaluation of how good a move is. Another way of saying "don't blunder" in this context is "choose a move that is not much worse than the best move". That is hardly more useful advice than "choose the best move". The advice "don't blunder" only becomes useful when you can also give advice about how to recognize blunders: "check whether your pieces are hanging", "check whether your opponent has mate in 1", "check for forks". Probably many of the blunders in that dataset are simple things like this, but others are long forcing lines or counterintuitive sacrifices that are difficult to recognize both for you and for your opponent. The computer doesn't distinguish, but it's much easier to improve by focusing on the former than the latter. (obviously to continue to improve you have to do both, but "not hanging pieces" is a lot less work).
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