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Misidentifying talent

danluu.com

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Re: Misidentifying talent

#151

Post by borroka »

TrackerFF wrote: post #84
caffeine wrote: post #62

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…

Even at the semi-professional soccer level, coaches are making use of analytics. For example, they get information about where other teams are - or who is - losing the ball. Then, the game was pushed toward extreme (and boring) control of ball possession largely by analytics. When I played at a decent level, it was considered "criminal" to pass the ball in close proximity (up to 20 yards) to the net while being "pressured" by the other team. Nowadays, it is very rare to see a team that gives up possession easily.

AC Milan had been using "Milan Lab" since the early 2000s and it was whispered that it used neural networks to predict the probability of injury. It was a largely unsuccessful experiment at the time-players were very often injured (also, Milan's head of the medical/performance team, Meersseman https://www.jpmchiropratica.it/en/studio/jeann-pierre-meerss..., was pulling players' teeth because he believed that some teeth could give postural problems and thus increase the likelihood of injury, see Seedorf).

The analytics/data science revolution has already arrived in soccer, but the reasonably large effects have been, due to the nature of the game, less visible than those in American football and baseball.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#152

Post by dan-robertson »

albrewer wrote: post #108
mattwad wrote: 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.

Being employed also makes candidates more attractive. If you don’t have many resources, why waste them trying to compete for the same subset of the pool of good candidates as everyone else when you can get better efficiency going for the candidates which the competition undervalues?

Re: Misidentifying talent

#153

Post by dan-robertson »

albedoa wrote: post #96
3pt14159 wrote: post #91

I'm sorry if this is off-topic, but why do people make websites with 250+ characters per line? Like, I can copy the link into Safari and press the "Reader View" button there to make it actually readable but I'm more wondering that if someone puts so much effort into writing content why don't they take the ~1 hour for some very basic CSS to get the default experience to be enjoyable?

Literally the reason why he won't fix it is because typographers were condescending to him: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1228042394727149568

That seems like an incorrect reading of the thread. Seems more like ‘I like long lines and found little evidence that they are bad.’ I think I believe that he’s read roughly all the studies and that they are unconvincing. That doesn’t mean they’re aren’t people for whom the formatting is problematic. I think it’s also a bit of countersignalling about the nature of the blog.

There are also easy workarounds like making your window narrower or using your web browsers built-in ‘reader mode’ or opening up the inspector and adding a single style to the body element to set a max-width, so I’ve never really understood this problem.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#154

Post by borroka »

dan-robertson wrote: post #149
somenameforme wrote: post #53

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 liked this essay regarding the nature of talent. http://rittersp.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Chambliss-Mun... Like much social science, one should be careful to not assume that any results would generalise to more cases, but I still think some of the ideas are interesting: - When people talk about talent, it is some relatively immutable quality people have inside themselves that creates excellence. When people t…

"Talent of the first kind is mostly not a thing (but eg some people may be predisposed to certain kinds of athleticism)."

- Statements like this work reasonably well on HN and stupendously on the very receptive New York Times audience, but fail miserably when the first real-life punch lands (figuratively) on the speaker's jaw. "Talent" or "genetic quality" or "genetic predisposition" when considering a skill or activity is a fact of life and has been demonstrated in countless studies of twins. I studied fish and birds for a long time and even there the main confounder when studying the effects of environment on life histories or physiological functions was "individual quality", the fact that just about everywhere certain individuals do much better than others for reasons other than "lucky breaks".

I've also seen people run very fast (much faster than me), draw very well (I draw houses and people the same way), tune their guitar by saying la-la (whereas I can't tell the difference between a piano and a church bell).

Re: Misidentifying talent

#155

Post by thaumasiotes »

boveus wrote: post #100
kqr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everything you say except the bit where the failure rate is a fantastic KPI. It has room for improvement. > they have a requirement in most areas to be airborne within 30 minutes when called. [...] "percentage of the time where maintenance can't get an aircraft ready to be flying missions in less than 30 minutes". The problem with this KPI is that it's completely arbitrary. Why does it have to be 30 minu…

30 minutes is not arbitrary in the context of search and rescue. When someone has fallen overboard on a Naval vessel in most parts of the world's oceans their survival time is as short as 30 minutes: https://ussartf.org/cold_water_survival.htm In rare circumstances the water can be much colder than average and this drops below 30 minutes, but for the most part the military operates in waters with survival time no low…

That makes no sense. If survival time is 30 minutes, and it takes 28 minutes just to get into the air, nobody will ever be successfully rescued.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#156

Post by thaumasiotes »

bagacrap wrote: post #116

I don't know why it's taken for granted that the face of a potential pro ball player doesn't matter at all. Obviously no one thinks a strong looking nose helps one throw the ball farther. Could be that franchises are looking for popular heroes that can sell jerseys.

There are other considerations. Didn't Barry Bonds take so many steroids that he dramatically changed his own facial structure?

Re: Misidentifying talent

#157

Post by BlackFly »

softwarebeware wrote: post #136

There is actual peer-reviewed research about what makes a good software engineer which you can find easily with the right tools. This 2015 paper using a sample set of 59 Microsoft engineers across different divisions is one such study: https://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/papers/Li2015GreatEngine... My experience in the industry is that no one in charge of either hiring or promotion is aware of the research, and have…

Practical science in software engineering is generally disappointing, and this article fits that mold.

In their own words,

> The lack of specificity in our understanding ... Our understanding also lacks breadth: ... We took a first step in addressing these gaps

This doesn't represent established science, it represents a probative study. Moreover:

> Of the 152 engineers we contacted, we interviewed 59

That's pretty bad from a perspective of statistical strength, they size of the response bias is larger than the resulting sample itself. The sample is also quite small. In these days where the replication is well known, one should take the concrete results with a grain of salt. It's a good study, but much more is necessary to be actionable advice.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#158

Post by dan-robertson »

borroka wrote: post #154
dan-robertson wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked this essay regarding the nature of talent. http://rittersp.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Chambliss-Mun... Like much social science, one should be careful to not assume that any results would generalise to more cases, but I still think some of the ideas are interesting: - When people talk about talent, it is some relatively immutable quality people have inside themselves that creates excellence. When people t…

"Talent of the first kind is mostly not a thing (but eg some people may be predisposed to certain kinds of athleticism)." - Statements like this work reasonably well on HN and stupendously on the very receptive New York Times audience, but fail miserably when the first real-life punch lands (figuratively) on the speaker's jaw. "Talent" or "genetic quality" or "genetic predisposition" when considering a skill or activ…

Yeah I meant to mention that that opinion is likely something that was east for the author to read. I think it is also personally useful to believe it and therefore that one is somewhat responsible for one’s successes and failures.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#159

Post by derbOac »

cxr wrote: post #101
sampo wrote: 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/

This section in that piece about undervaluing training ("trainingball") is priceless.

I worked somewhere where someone constantly brought up Moneyball as a way of getting an edge in hiring. They later became head of the unit, and it became clear they had absolutely zero ability to manage other people, because they thought of them as consumable goods. They would level scathing reviews of people working under them that they were "poorly mentored" as if this was an attribute of the employee in question, not at all recognizing the irony in what they were saying.

Moneyball was an interesting observation, but it's also telling because it is implicitly based on a number of assumptions that plague modern workplaces, such as treating people as fixed, unchangeable objects rather than as persons that can learn and adapt.

The comment by that author about "trainingball" is noteworthy because it points to the importance of training but also potential as a selection factor. And not just "potential" in the sense of "new and undeveloped" but in the broader sense of "this person has the attributes and background to be what we need if we just work with them." I think that attitude was much more common in the past maybe, but I wasn't alive then.

There's also a different and many understudied problem, which is institutions failing to acknowledge and/or recognize when there have been significant changes in the institution, and when the employees aren't communicated with about these things. Sometimes training isn't so much training as it is just communicating with people.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#160

Post by riknox »

5cott0 wrote: post #98
treis wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it applied to golf?

https://www.geekwire.com/2017/meet-pga-tours-geekiest-golfer...

Not just this, but the prevalence of strokes gained being the key metric to focus on for players has opened up a new understanding of what it takes to score well and win tournaments.
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