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Misidentifying talent

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Re: Misidentifying talent

#61

Post by sampo »

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 tall. Now it's called the 3-point revolution.

https://www.thestar.com/sports/basketball/raptors/2008/03/13...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Morey#Houston_Rockets

https://ageofrevolutions.com/2019/02/25/data-science-and-the...

It hindsight, it feels like a long delay from the success of Moneyball, until others applies similar thinking to other sports.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#62

Post by caffeine »

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…

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)

Re: Misidentifying talent

#63

Post by caffeine »

jackblemming wrote: post #23

I strongly agree with this. Every programmer who became "upper management" also happened to be 6'1"+. Shocking. Funny enough, the shorter programmers were generally much more competent from having to actually earn their place. If you have to pick a doctor or lawyer on looks alone, I recommend picking the shorter guy (or the woman!)

Let’s imagine hypothetically there is some circuit genetically encoded in every human’s brain that gives +10% probability of agreeing with someone if they are a tall male.

Let’s also imagine hypothetically that in many situations, the speed and strength of consensus itself has value beyond the quality of the decision reached, so eg. quickly reaching a strong consensus on the 2nd-best solution would be better than fighting a drawn-out battle to reach a strained consensus on the best solution.

In this (very hypothetical) world, it’s optimal to favour, by some amount, tall males over higher-performing non-tall-males.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#64

Post by sampo »

caffeine wrote: post #62
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…

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)

Basketball now uses SportVU tracking data. A camera system records the game, and computer vision algorithms extract the locations of the players, and the ball, at high space and time resolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SportVU

https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.07030

SportVU was originally developed with European football in mind, but I don't know whether it has found use there or not.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#65

Post by openfuture »

re6fae5Wied5tha wrote: post #36
greatpostman wrote: post #5

Funniest thing is that the companies with the most extreme leetcode interviews, Facebook, roblox, etc also fell the hardest in the most recent sell off. There’s even a quote by kieth rabois, one one the top VCs, that FB hired and built their culture around optimization, which has failed. They can’t innovate because innovative type people weren’t let into the company.

> They can’t innovate because innovative type people weren’t let into the company. I am starting to think this is a broader trend in human societies and is probably the primary failure mode of human enterprise more broadly. People who aren't inclined to creative rational problem solving must still produce labors for the masters if they do not want to starve in the street like the examples we leave there to suffer pub…

They also face denial of service attacks in the form of all sorts of nitpicks of presentation and ofc all funding sources have strings attached.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#66

Post by thaumasiotes »

dmurray wrote: post #59
thaumasiotes wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of comparing yourself to arbitrary thresholds, use the raw metric as a KPI instead. Use "minutes until airborne" as the KPI. That you can optimise indefinitely, and it is an honest representation of your current process, not how it compares to a number someone threw out at some time. This is an example of a more general phenomenon - when you have outcome buckets, it's generally better to do your modeling on…

> Use "minutes until airborne" as the KPI. Average minutes to airborne? Median? Mode? 90th percentile? 99th percentile? Optimizing for each of those would result in a different process, different outcomes, and quite possibly worse outcomes for the stakeholders than "proportion under 30 minutes" which is just a sixth way to slice the same data.

Did you mean to respond to my parent comment?

Re: Misidentifying talent

#67

Post by ghaff »

MattGaiser wrote: post #16
ewuhic wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean one would find themselves in an environment surrounded by bright innovative minds should they go for IBM?

IBM might actually find some. I doubt they could keep them. I have met a bunch of great ex-IBM people. But they measured their stays in months.

On the other hand, I know very smart people who have been at IBM for decades. It's a big company.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#68

Post by ksec »

>Deciding who to "hire" for a baseball team was a high stakes decision with many millions of dollars (in 2022 dollars) on the line

This is similar to Football ( Soccer ), Man Utd £80 million Signing.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#69

Post by ssharp »

dijit wrote: post #50
zhdc1 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are we assuming that short term changes in share price have anything to do with underlying fundamentals? Meta prints money. They brought in $40B in net income off of $115B in revenue last year. Income attributable to Facebook + WhatsApp + Instagram doubled from 2019 to 2021. They spend more on research and development than they do on expenses attributable to their core business. Yes, they're no longer growing. Th…

> Why are we assuming that short term changes in share price I don't think the parent is making a strong claim in this direction, moreso that Facebook/Meta has very few new innovations and prefers to acquire them. Other companies are also quite profitable or have strong market caps but are also not innovating and prefer to acquire new innovations (Oracle being a prime example).

I read the comment as being critical of Facebook. "Not being able to innovate" seems like a critical statement, indicating a failure on their part. However, they are an incredibly successful company. If Facebook is successful not innovating, why would they want to hire innovators? Their hiring process should be specifically geared towards hiring the people that will execute the way Facebook wants to execute. Given that, they seem to have a successful hiring process.
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