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Misidentifying talent

danluu.com

101–110 of 167 posts

Re: Misidentifying talent

#101
post #61

Moneyball (book 2003, movie 2011) describes how Oakland Athletes build their baseball team in 2002 based on statistical analysis of player performance. Then around 2008-2009, Houston Rockets, and Golden State Warriors (Oakland) started to apply similar analysis to basketball, and started to find the value of having quickly moving players who throw precisely, to score 3 point shots, even if these players are not as ta…

Previously (same author):

http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/

Re: Misidentifying talent

#102
post #61

Moneyball (book 2003, movie 2011) describes how Oakland Athletes build their baseball team in 2002 based on statistical analysis of player performance. Then around 2008-2009, Houston Rockets, and Golden State Warriors (Oakland) started to apply similar analysis to basketball, and started to find the value of having quickly moving players who throw precisely, to score 3 point shots, even if these players are not as ta…

The analytics revolution wasn't about short players specifically, the 3-point revolution aspect was mainly about selecting shots based on the expected value of the shot. The warriors in this aspect was very far behind the curve compared to Houston. The main takeaway for them was taking shots from farther behind the three point line, but they didn't have an emphasis on corner 3s (which are closer to the basket) or de-emphasis on mid-range shots (between the 3 point line and outside of 8 to 10ish feet from the basket). They (along with the rest of the league) were trending towards Moreyball during their championship years (particularly in 2015-16 if I remember correctly) but there were years where they mainly had extraordinary shooters.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has this revolution happened in European football yet? It seems like a harder to quantify sport (less episodic, more flowing, so harder to quantify positions)

There's been much more data-driven decision making / data science applied to the sport, but no huge watershed moment like in baseball or basketball. I think that has to do with the fact that compared to the mentioned sports, soccer doesn't really have any single pivotal roles, that can make or break a match, which you can then optimize for/around. Fundamentally speaking, soccer is a pretty slow moving game as far as…

I don't think it is quite the same and I don't have any hard data to point to, but it seems players are being judged by the number of game speed minutes on their legs more than they have in the past. IE, a 26 year old who has been playing since he was 19 might be a star, but will not be worth as much as a he might have been 10 years ago when it was assumed he was just entering his prime.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#104
post #61

Moneyball (book 2003, movie 2011) describes how Oakland Athletes build their baseball team in 2002 based on statistical analysis of player performance. Then around 2008-2009, Houston Rockets, and Golden State Warriors (Oakland) started to apply similar analysis to basketball, and started to find the value of having quickly moving players who throw precisely, to score 3 point shots, even if these players are not as ta…

Good discussion around the topic with Daryl Morey who, as you linked, started that at the Huston Rockets. I know absolutely nothing about basketball and found it very interesting, nevertheless.

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/03/15/138-...

Re: Misidentifying talent

#105

It’s striking that so many stories about the triumph of metrics over intuition involve games. I’m convinced that you should put statisticians in charge if your goal is to win a game. I’m not convinced that related behaviors, like constructing a game adjacent to the problem you’re actually trying to solve and treating game performance as a proxy (like LeetCode interviews! Or KPIs!) are helpful. It’s also interesting t…

Statisticians are not going to win a game. They may win more than the average but then, when everyone is a good statistician, the mean changes and money leads again.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#106
post #46

Pure stats work in circumstances that are repeatable, easily quantifiable and where you have a huge dataset to learn from past experience. That's why baseball is such a perfect example. It's just not so easy to measure how good someone is at solving novel problems, compared to how well they can hit or throw a ball in perfectly repeatable circumstances.

Also, work is not a contest, or a competition.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#107
post #51

the one theory i read about on the correlation between height and managerial position is that, people's confidence correlate highly with height when they were teenagers (I am assuming that people's height when they are teenagers also highly correlate with their final, adult height), and in a corporate environment, marginally more confident goes a long way -- way more than marginally better at programming or building…

Hard disagree. Being a large, attractive person who confidently states positions that are stupid and incorrect will garner the support of ignorant and stupid people - just look at politics. It helps you gain the support of people who can't tell either way whether you're right or wrong, so they just follow whoever seems to have higher social status or is nicer to look at. But it usually leads to disastrous decisions which the short nerdy person in the corner of the room was trying to tell everyone about, but nobody would listen, because they were small and unattractive and didn't have a big booming voice.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#108
post #9

I'm on a pretty small team, we don't have enough people or time to do a robust interview process, but we started contracting devs for a week before hiring them, and it has been a much better experience than any interview I could have done in 1-2 hours. Plus, they get paid and we get a little bit of work done even if things don't work out.

This eliminates everyone currently employed but looking for another job from your hiring process. Seems like you're severely limiting yourselves with this tactic.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#109
post #31

I wonder if some small part of the problem lies in the word "talent" . The implication is that developers are born with some sort of innate ability to write software well rather than coding being something you can learn with practise. Calling people "talent" suggests recruitment is a hunt for some person with a rare underlying ability rather than just looking for someone with a skill they've learned. This could also…

I can speak from the chess world, as a coach. I used to believe there was really no such thing as talent largely based on my own experience as I started relatively late, don't consider myself talented, and reached a reasonably high level at the game. I kind of still do think there's no such thing as talent, but that comes with a bunch of asterisks. If you take two people and expose them to normal training regimens, d…

What's fascinating to me is that the article makes no mention of female performance in chess whatsoever, which has historically been underwhelming compared to men, seeing how the strongest female player ever never made it into even top-4 of the Candidates tournament, let alone played for the Championship.

Since height and athletic ability plays almost no role in chess, can you perhaps explain why women have underperformed?

Also, I have no idea why WGM (Woman Grandmaster) title is even a thing, since I cannot possibly think of a more discriminatory "consolation prize" type of title in a field where men don't have an inherent physical advantage. Curious to hear what is your take on this as well.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#110
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can speak from the chess world, as a coach. I used to believe there was really no such thing as talent largely based on my own experience as I started relatively late, don't consider myself talented, and reached a reasonably high level at the game. I kind of still do think there's no such thing as talent, but that comes with a bunch of asterisks. If you take two people and expose them to normal training regimens, d…

I think there's a massive difference between coaching people to play competitive chess and teaching people to be good developers. For a start, in chess you only really start making good money from it when you're exceptionally good. Most chess players only ever play for their own satisfaction. The same is absolutely not true for developers. You might well need talent to be a chess player who makes a living from chess,…

That depends on your definition of good money.

I've heard Ben Finegold say that 30 years ago only about top-30 could make anything resembling a decent living in a developed nation, while nowadays, even adjusted for inflation, the prize pools are much bigger and one of the biggest chess channels on YouTube is a player who's not even a GM.

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