I recently heard Friedman speak at our fine learning institution (on Public Radio rebroadcast) on the topics he covers in his new book on why we aren't beating China. The way Friedman understands the world is a quite amazing. He used the following nugget to get some cheap gasps: apparently 20% of the Chinese applicants to Grinnell College have perfect SAT math scores.
Being Thomas Friedman, he didn’t use this as a chance to bash the fact that our college admissions system is endlessly obsessed with confusing form for substance. Instead, he argues that American students need to do better on the SAT. The fact that we’ve subsumed our entire education system (and in many cases, career hiring and advancement) into tests that can be taught and gamed whooshes straight over Friedman’s head. Don’t challenge the test, Friedman says. Just do better on it.
If you’re interested in applying Miracle on Ice thinking to national economies and want to hear that the key to winning a made-up competition is simply trying harder, this book will probably appeal to you. It’s also the perfect illustration of the obliviousness of the Friedman-Gladwell paint-by-buzzword worldview, in which the world is completely explainable by journalists whose only authority is their access to important people and world travel and their arrogance to imagine a world that is completely explainable.
The world, to Friedman and his predecessors and followers, is a knowable place in which success is defined as doing better than the next guy, or the next country, on the requisite standardized tests or performance reviews or whatever form has devoured the substance in the particular field. This is the prevailing view that schools tell students, that admissions tells applicants, that interviewers tell candidates, that CEOs evangelize from their Segway pulpits. It takes a Thomas Friedman to argue that the key to success is spewing buzzwords and doing better on tests in the fucked up world that his way of thinking created.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Monday, August 22, 2011
Some thoughts on internet skepticism and PZ Myers
Most PZ Myers arguments I've seen make a fundamental assumption that the people who believe in bad ideas should be attacked using the logic of the scientific system that they don't use. I disagree.
Some people (who also tend to be people who don't think very critically about the world we live in) view all possible solutions on an equal footing. They do this because they don't understand (or they have a radically different concept of) what makes one solution better than another. Essentially, they say (or even if they don't explicitly say it, their mind operates to say) that science is just one way of belief among many.
Why do they do this? Because the very way that we objectively test effectiveness of solutions (such as science) is science. To me, objective truth means truth that has been tested by the scientific method. But if you don't believe in the method, what you call objective truth isn't the same thing that I call objective truth. It would be nice if there were some oracle of science that could tell you and me what the objective truth is. But you can't go up to a quasar and ask it whether 2 + 2 = 4. The universe doesn't care about objective truth; it's a manmade idea that exists only to the extent that humans decide that it does. Truth may no more than truth, but as a side effect of its tie-in with humanity, it also requires belief and consensus.
This is why Myers draws so much ire from those who disagree with him. He essentially makes scientific arguments against the non-scientific to people who, at the very least, view science on equal footing with things like meditation, prayer, homeopathy, etc. Science is more objectively correct than those things, but only within the universe of people who believe that science is the arbiter of objective correctness. The people in those other universes, who place other ways of acquiring knowledge on equally high (or higher) pedestals, may be stupid, they may be wrong, but they don't think the same way as Myers and I do. But Myers engages them in scientific terms; if I were an ambassador of science as he is, I would not.
I don't have a prescription for telling people that they should reconsider the way that they decide what amounts to truth. Not because I doubt science, but because I don't think there's a ready answer. I'm fairly certain that the answer is not, as PZ Myers seems to suggest, to say "look at the science!" in varying degrees of detail, anger, and outrage. At the very least, using a system of argumentation against people who explicitly don't agree with that system is a waste of time. Perhaps a better way would be to engage people in a discourse about how their ways of belief operate and why they believe them. I understand that this is well outside the purview of biology professors from Minnesota-Morris, and I don't blame Myers for taking his tack, I just don't think it does anything useful. Myers rails against homeopathy, his supporters cheer, his opponents produce their unscientific counterarguments, the sun rises in the morning.
I will conclude with an unscientific postscript. Many people who believe the things that Myers rails against are underprivileged and undereducated. (Yes, it's true that there is a large swath of rich suburbanites who believe this stuff too, but in general, the average person in the world who "believes in science" probably has an almost otherworldly amount of privilege compared to the average person who doesn't "believe in science.") The idea that "we believe in science, you believe in stupid" can operate to create a scientific reason why the educated and privileged are objectively better than the undereducated and underprivileged. We should still argue for what we think is right, and this has nothing to do with the merits of those arguments. But people need to be very careful before treading in this area; we need to realize that many times, the only reason that we believe the way we do is because we were given the opportunity to believe that way based on advantages that others never had.
Some people (who also tend to be people who don't think very critically about the world we live in) view all possible solutions on an equal footing. They do this because they don't understand (or they have a radically different concept of) what makes one solution better than another. Essentially, they say (or even if they don't explicitly say it, their mind operates to say) that science is just one way of belief among many.
Why do they do this? Because the very way that we objectively test effectiveness of solutions (such as science) is science. To me, objective truth means truth that has been tested by the scientific method. But if you don't believe in the method, what you call objective truth isn't the same thing that I call objective truth. It would be nice if there were some oracle of science that could tell you and me what the objective truth is. But you can't go up to a quasar and ask it whether 2 + 2 = 4. The universe doesn't care about objective truth; it's a manmade idea that exists only to the extent that humans decide that it does. Truth may no more than truth, but as a side effect of its tie-in with humanity, it also requires belief and consensus.
This is why Myers draws so much ire from those who disagree with him. He essentially makes scientific arguments against the non-scientific to people who, at the very least, view science on equal footing with things like meditation, prayer, homeopathy, etc. Science is more objectively correct than those things, but only within the universe of people who believe that science is the arbiter of objective correctness. The people in those other universes, who place other ways of acquiring knowledge on equally high (or higher) pedestals, may be stupid, they may be wrong, but they don't think the same way as Myers and I do. But Myers engages them in scientific terms; if I were an ambassador of science as he is, I would not.
I don't have a prescription for telling people that they should reconsider the way that they decide what amounts to truth. Not because I doubt science, but because I don't think there's a ready answer. I'm fairly certain that the answer is not, as PZ Myers seems to suggest, to say "look at the science!" in varying degrees of detail, anger, and outrage. At the very least, using a system of argumentation against people who explicitly don't agree with that system is a waste of time. Perhaps a better way would be to engage people in a discourse about how their ways of belief operate and why they believe them. I understand that this is well outside the purview of biology professors from Minnesota-Morris, and I don't blame Myers for taking his tack, I just don't think it does anything useful. Myers rails against homeopathy, his supporters cheer, his opponents produce their unscientific counterarguments, the sun rises in the morning.
I will conclude with an unscientific postscript. Many people who believe the things that Myers rails against are underprivileged and undereducated. (Yes, it's true that there is a large swath of rich suburbanites who believe this stuff too, but in general, the average person in the world who "believes in science" probably has an almost otherworldly amount of privilege compared to the average person who doesn't "believe in science.") The idea that "we believe in science, you believe in stupid" can operate to create a scientific reason why the educated and privileged are objectively better than the undereducated and underprivileged. We should still argue for what we think is right, and this has nothing to do with the merits of those arguments. But people need to be very careful before treading in this area; we need to realize that many times, the only reason that we believe the way we do is because we were given the opportunity to believe that way based on advantages that others never had.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Randomness and prediction in sports
Numbers-oriented sports fans have this tendency to see players as black boxes of number production. You chuck a baseball at Jim Thome X times and event Y happens Z% of the time.
I'll illustrate with perhaps the simplest and most uniform individual skill in sport: shooting a free throw. You give Dwight Howard 100 of them and he's going to make about 60. Ray Allen will probably make 30 more. We know this with near certainty because they've each taken thousands of free throws, the results of which we can check out on Basketball Reference any time we want.
But in order to know this, our minds process the statistical idea of a free throw in binary terms. Did the ball go in the hoop or didn't it? Thing is, the act of shooting a free throw is not binary, because the reason that the ball went through the hoop is not binary. The ball did what it did because of a complex mental and biomechanical action that was either done correctly (in which case the ball went through the hoop) or incorrectly (in which case it probably didn’t, but the ball can still go through the hoop when the action is done incorrectly, as we've all experienced on the hardcourt).
When we're looking within past data, any conflation between binary success/failure and correct/incorrect biomechanical action has no effect. The data captures the full ambit of the thoughts and actions that the free throw shooter used in the attempt to put the ball through the hoop. If we pick a random free throw in Dwight Howard's career, there is a 57.8% chance that the ball went through the hoop. That's tautological. But does every next free throw have a 57.8% chance of going in?
Imagine this scenario. Dwight steps up to the line. If Dwight makes this freebie, your degenerate, gambling-obsessed buddy says, I'll pay you seven bucks. If he misses, you pay me twelve. Pretty fair odds. To your delight, Dwight unleashes a beautiful Rick Barry-style free throw that swishes through the net. You collect your seven bucks and watch Dwight swish the next in the same manner. Any chance your friend takes those odds the next time Howard goes to the charity stripe? What if Dwight steps to the line and, clearly favoring his right wrist, clanks a left-handed shot off the back iron? Are you taking the original odds on him making the next one? Obviously not.
Put in these extreme terms, it's easy to see how even massive sample sizes of very static statistics must be disregarded in certain circumstances. But obviously each next free throw Dwight Howard takes will not have a 57.8% chance of going in, and anyone with half a brain will realize that. So here's a thought experiment to further illustrate (we'll call it the Wilt Chamberlain argument).
Imagine that there is a player named Wilt Chamberlain who has taken over 10,000 free throws and has made exactly 50% of them. Our hypothetical Wilt is an exact coinflip from the stripe. Sometimes (but not every time) when Wilt goes to the line, he is thinking about women or basketball. Whenever he thinks of women, he misses. Whenever he thinks of basketball, he scores (lol funny joke). He thinks about each an equal amount of the time, and no external factors affect which one of the two he is thinking about at any given time. When Wilt thinks about anything else, he is a natural 50% free throw shooter.
Whenever Wilt steps up to the line, he had a 50% chance of making his shot. But we have two causes for the makes: "thinking about basketball" and random successes. And we have two causes for the misses: "thinking about women" and random failures. Replace the ridiculous terms with things like "moving your elbow too much" or "holding the ball on different seams" or "thinking about free throw mechanics instead of clearing your head" and you can see how this actually might matter. A really bad shooter might have a 50% chance of missing a free throw, but there are reasons for those misses beyond "this dude makes half of his free throws in the long term."
So what's the purpose of all this? Well, we all know that underlying probabilities can change over time. Jose Bautista seems pretty unlikely to average 11 HR per year anymore, doesn't he? We all know that players get better or worse, sometimes with age, sometimes with experience, sometimes with mechanical improvement. But we also need to realize that trends within sports numbers aren't the same as a penny that comes up tails a bunch of times. When we say that Dwight Howard makes six of ten free throws, the statement encompasses a lot more than what we think. Dwight Howard, trying to put the ball through the hoop from the line, makes about six of ten, because he performs the complex action that he does to accomplish that task right X% of the time and wrong Y% of the time (and Z% of the time, when he does it wrong, the ball still goes in).
Sports leaves room for the possibility that players sometimes try harder, concentrate more, get in the zone, see the ball better, slow down the game in their heads, visualize their shots better, and all that other "clutch" mumbo jumbo that we dismiss as uninformed garbage, and that it actually affects performance.
The problem is that numerically, we have discovered no way of distinguishing "being in the zone" from "random six-shot streak against Charlotte." So we don't know if these things exist (and we have, in fact, discovered that players on a hot streak tend to miss more than their fair share of their next shots, probably because they think they're "in the zone" and take worse shots accordingly). And even if they do exist, they may not be useful (unless you can train Wilt not to think about women on the court, the reason that he misses free throws doesn't matter).
Even the simplest and most seemingly binary action in sports – the free throw – is not binary at all. We perceive it as a binary event because doing so is a very meaningful and useful approximation. But when we use this approximation to predict, we must be aware of all of the inherent assumptions in the approximation itself, lest we think that every next free throw that Dwight Howard takes has exactly a 57.8% chance of going in. This is the long way of saying that the stuff of sports is in large part random, but not in the same sense as a coinflip.
I'll illustrate with perhaps the simplest and most uniform individual skill in sport: shooting a free throw. You give Dwight Howard 100 of them and he's going to make about 60. Ray Allen will probably make 30 more. We know this with near certainty because they've each taken thousands of free throws, the results of which we can check out on Basketball Reference any time we want.
But in order to know this, our minds process the statistical idea of a free throw in binary terms. Did the ball go in the hoop or didn't it? Thing is, the act of shooting a free throw is not binary, because the reason that the ball went through the hoop is not binary. The ball did what it did because of a complex mental and biomechanical action that was either done correctly (in which case the ball went through the hoop) or incorrectly (in which case it probably didn’t, but the ball can still go through the hoop when the action is done incorrectly, as we've all experienced on the hardcourt).
When we're looking within past data, any conflation between binary success/failure and correct/incorrect biomechanical action has no effect. The data captures the full ambit of the thoughts and actions that the free throw shooter used in the attempt to put the ball through the hoop. If we pick a random free throw in Dwight Howard's career, there is a 57.8% chance that the ball went through the hoop. That's tautological. But does every next free throw have a 57.8% chance of going in?
Imagine this scenario. Dwight steps up to the line. If Dwight makes this freebie, your degenerate, gambling-obsessed buddy says, I'll pay you seven bucks. If he misses, you pay me twelve. Pretty fair odds. To your delight, Dwight unleashes a beautiful Rick Barry-style free throw that swishes through the net. You collect your seven bucks and watch Dwight swish the next in the same manner. Any chance your friend takes those odds the next time Howard goes to the charity stripe? What if Dwight steps to the line and, clearly favoring his right wrist, clanks a left-handed shot off the back iron? Are you taking the original odds on him making the next one? Obviously not.
Put in these extreme terms, it's easy to see how even massive sample sizes of very static statistics must be disregarded in certain circumstances. But obviously each next free throw Dwight Howard takes will not have a 57.8% chance of going in, and anyone with half a brain will realize that. So here's a thought experiment to further illustrate (we'll call it the Wilt Chamberlain argument).
Imagine that there is a player named Wilt Chamberlain who has taken over 10,000 free throws and has made exactly 50% of them. Our hypothetical Wilt is an exact coinflip from the stripe. Sometimes (but not every time) when Wilt goes to the line, he is thinking about women or basketball. Whenever he thinks of women, he misses. Whenever he thinks of basketball, he scores (lol funny joke). He thinks about each an equal amount of the time, and no external factors affect which one of the two he is thinking about at any given time. When Wilt thinks about anything else, he is a natural 50% free throw shooter.
Whenever Wilt steps up to the line, he had a 50% chance of making his shot. But we have two causes for the makes: "thinking about basketball" and random successes. And we have two causes for the misses: "thinking about women" and random failures. Replace the ridiculous terms with things like "moving your elbow too much" or "holding the ball on different seams" or "thinking about free throw mechanics instead of clearing your head" and you can see how this actually might matter. A really bad shooter might have a 50% chance of missing a free throw, but there are reasons for those misses beyond "this dude makes half of his free throws in the long term."
So what's the purpose of all this? Well, we all know that underlying probabilities can change over time. Jose Bautista seems pretty unlikely to average 11 HR per year anymore, doesn't he? We all know that players get better or worse, sometimes with age, sometimes with experience, sometimes with mechanical improvement. But we also need to realize that trends within sports numbers aren't the same as a penny that comes up tails a bunch of times. When we say that Dwight Howard makes six of ten free throws, the statement encompasses a lot more than what we think. Dwight Howard, trying to put the ball through the hoop from the line, makes about six of ten, because he performs the complex action that he does to accomplish that task right X% of the time and wrong Y% of the time (and Z% of the time, when he does it wrong, the ball still goes in).
Sports leaves room for the possibility that players sometimes try harder, concentrate more, get in the zone, see the ball better, slow down the game in their heads, visualize their shots better, and all that other "clutch" mumbo jumbo that we dismiss as uninformed garbage, and that it actually affects performance.
The problem is that numerically, we have discovered no way of distinguishing "being in the zone" from "random six-shot streak against Charlotte." So we don't know if these things exist (and we have, in fact, discovered that players on a hot streak tend to miss more than their fair share of their next shots, probably because they think they're "in the zone" and take worse shots accordingly). And even if they do exist, they may not be useful (unless you can train Wilt not to think about women on the court, the reason that he misses free throws doesn't matter).
Even the simplest and most seemingly binary action in sports – the free throw – is not binary at all. We perceive it as a binary event because doing so is a very meaningful and useful approximation. But when we use this approximation to predict, we must be aware of all of the inherent assumptions in the approximation itself, lest we think that every next free throw that Dwight Howard takes has exactly a 57.8% chance of going in. This is the long way of saying that the stuff of sports is in large part random, but not in the same sense as a coinflip.
Friday, July 9, 2010
The LeBrons
LeBron's "Decision" was tacitly and uncomfortably apologetic, almost like the anticipated fallout of its own scandal.
This is the NBA's strange ring-worshiping culture in all its insane glory, magnified and warped into unintentional self-parody. Because everyone knows that post-Jordan eliteness in the Association is all about how many times you win a ring. Unless it's not, because you won it with teammates who are too good. Unless that doesn't matter, because you were still the best player. Unless you weren't, but were still a big enough name that it adds to your legacy. You're selfless if you take less money for a ring (Bosh, Wade), unless you're not (LeBron). You're selfish if you agitate to get away from a team that can't get you a ring (2007 Kobe), unless you're not (post-Gasol trade Kobe). If you play for a mismanaged small-market team, you're heroic and applauded when you win elsewhere if you stick it out like KG but you're reviled if you leave while you still have ACLs like LeBron.
If I were Rick Reilly, I'd say basketball's unwritten Legacy Rules rival only the Collective Bargaining Agreement in exceptions.
These crazy rules made LeBron's Decision seem half a tone-deaf tribute, half an unstated apology. But the general rule of the NBA seems to be that Championships Trump All, so it seems likely that James will be vindicated if he manages to win an acceptable number of rings. Maybe that's his reasoning behind all of the apparent sacrifices in reputation, money, and top-dogness. It sure does leave us fans in a weird place, though. How can we go forward?
First, we can't pretend that the Cavs did anything but bungle this whole situation. They entrusted LeBron's best chances to win a champsionship to a rookie coach and a GM who was basically a greedy algorithm, acquiring moderate upgrades in the short term while compromising the team's long-term success. The Cavs not only left LeBron bereft of championships, they left themselves with a boatload of big bad contracts attached to non-champsionship players. Then they fired their coach and GM and failed to score any upgrades in free agency or trade. Even with LeBron, they had no clear path forward.
The thing we need to realize is that they had no connection back, either. LeBron's interviews forced us to confront one central question about his time with the Cavaliers: Did Cleveland build anything when he was there? Did Cleveland ever find the players who could equate the mythological emplotment of LeBron's championship quest with the franchise, the way that Chicago managed to do for Jordan or LA for Kobe? More practically, did anyone matter on the team besides LeBron? Did the franchise give him something to be a part of, something to be proud of, something to be sentimental for? Even if there was no way forward, did looking back give LeBron a reason to stay?
It didn't. The Cavs made lots of expensive moves for players who, ultimately, just weren't good enough. They didn't develop young players alongside LeBron. They paid market and above-market rate for guys like Mo Williams and Antawn Jamison instead of showing the steady-handed patience to acquire that necessary second star. In the end, the Cavs were not LeBron's team. They weren't really a team at all. They were a group of undertalented mercenaries brought in to hopefully not fuck up LeBron's title.
Sure, the Cavs couldn't offer LeBron a clear path forward. But more importantly, Cleveland failed to build anything, to develop anything, to change anything that went on around James. LeBron had no connection back to the franchise, and he left.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
ytmnd
Im a bee.
Rihanna's pedestal.
Since I actually accomplished several things today, I allowed myself the pleasure of making these ridiculous sites.
Rihanna's pedestal.
Since I actually accomplished several things today, I allowed myself the pleasure of making these ridiculous sites.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
golf
I really enjoy golfing, watching golf, thinking about golf, getting better at golf, practicing golf, playing video games about golf, and probably several other golf-related things that I can't think of right now.
This may seem to contradict my long-professed fascination with style, since golf is one of the most mellow activities around, and golfers are understated athletes. Not so! Here is some downright menacing style by the best golfer out there:
This may seem to contradict my long-professed fascination with style, since golf is one of the most mellow activities around, and golfers are understated athletes. Not so! Here is some downright menacing style by the best golfer out there:
Sunday, January 31, 2010
good song
This track was woefully underplayed.
The vocals are great, the flow is great, and the noise just sounds great coming at you. It's so much more chill and clean than a lot of recent pop/rap hits. Which isn't to say that those aren't good songs, though I'm not sure that Lil Wayne knows how much the sound profile of "Transformer" resembles that of a garbage disposal.
Oh yeah, and this song is damn funny.
Kanye is a fantastic producer, and this track is a perfect example of how he can work with simple lines just as well as complex ones.
The vocals are great, the flow is great, and the noise just sounds great coming at you. It's so much more chill and clean than a lot of recent pop/rap hits. Which isn't to say that those aren't good songs, though I'm not sure that Lil Wayne knows how much the sound profile of "Transformer" resembles that of a garbage disposal.
Oh yeah, and this song is damn funny.
Kanye is a fantastic producer, and this track is a perfect example of how he can work with simple lines just as well as complex ones.
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