1. Ben Casnocha reviews Kling and Schulz.
2. Are better-looking athletes more likely to win?
3. "Mozart was a Red" — Murray Rothbard's satire of Rand, here is the full text. It doesn't seem that funny to me.
4. Portrait of Durrr: an on-line poker player.
5. Seth Roberts interviews me.
Wow, I’m amazed you linked to the blog post about durrrr. He has been an exceptional online player the past 3 years although not quite fitting the mould of the average winner. He was an English major at uni before he dropped out to pursue poker full-time. Most of the top players in online poker come from mathematics, economics and engineering courses.
2. That pro-athletes are better-looking than the average population is conventional wisdom. So what theory is being tested? That among the top of the top, good-looks is correlated with yet another top?
If you think this through, it should either be:
a) obvious
b) absurd
On the empirical side, this study is as rigorous as the scorekeeper at a t-ball game. 30 tennis players yet we already know who the best player is and what he looks like? How would merely removing Sampras have affected the results? We also already know what the best quarterbacks today look like…. Where is the out-of-sample test? What would this study look like during the Ruthian era of MLB? (Don’t forget to include Ruth.)
2. “Quarterback is the position that requires the highest amount of general intelligence,” he says. “What might be happening is that the quarterback passing rating might be reflecting intelligence more strongly than physical athleticism.”
Further study: Why are baseball pitchers less attractive than other infielders?
Why the selection bias toward quarterbacks and tennis players?
“It’s a book for people looking for contemporary insight on the ideas of people like Hayek, Drucker, Schumpter, and Smith.”
I figure there should be two types of people. Those described above and those named Hayek, Drucker, Schumpeter, and Smith.
Here is Kling’s review of Casnocha’s review
“Note that while the ideas of those four may permeate our book, it would be wrong to suggest that our book is the place to go if you want to study Hayek, Drucker, Schumpeter, or Smith. For better or worse, we scarcely mention them. With that caveat, I think that Casnocha’s review is informative, “
That’s not a profile of Durrr, rather of Isildur, the newcomer to the US poker sites who is taking American online poker by storm.
2. my point is: even if the evidence is good, does it really back the hypothesis tested–or does it just seem to? are the top smartest people better looking than than the rest of the best smartest people? if it holds for top athletes, but not for top smart people, yet both athleticism and intelligence are correlated with good looks, what are the implications?
Nutrition affects appearance and I am sure it affects athletic ability. This is probably due more to correlation of a many factors that influence both.
2. come on, people. there must be a math theorum here. if looks are correlated with athleticism, does that also hold true for a subset after you have pre-selected for athleticism?
I can’t imagine a study comprehensive enough to test whether better looking athletes are more successful than their less attractive competitors. I mean, what exactly counts as athletic ability? Golfers are sometimes called athletes. So if it’s a sport, and one is really good at it, is one an athlete? Let’s just say no, at least for now, to exclude stuff like curling (the winter olympics event, not the lifting exercise). I only bring it up to illustrate the point that most of us would probably want to describe the physical attributes a good athlete possesses: strength, speed, agility, etc. OK, so the best quarterbacks tend to be all-american golden-boy types, but what about free safeties? In terms of raw, track and field kind of athleticism, wide receivers and defensive backs are more athletic than quarterbacks. So are we only comparing quarterbacks to other quarterbacks, free safeties to other free safeties? What about the strongest man in the world competition, where humongous (but generally not lean), balding (but otherwise very hairy) men lift incredible amounts of weight? A great strongman would likely be rated less attractive than a poor quarterback. And in terms of being likely to win, what does this mean? Does it mean that better looking QB’s are likely to be on better teams? Or that they’re likely to be better quarterbacks than less attractive ones? Because quarterbacks don’t compete against one another, they compete against people with different kinds of athletic attributes than they have. The moral of the story is, it seems like the results of any study of this nature would have to be expressed in highly precise, qualified language to be meaningful.
The article is about Isildur, a newcomer to the nosebleed online games on Full Tilt, not durrrr (a long-time player in the biggest games online, who made a ridiculous amount of money dominating billionaire Guy Laliberte). Basically from 1st nov until around the 15th Isildur made a bit over 5m. Currently he’s ‘only’ up 500k for the month. Swongs are one thing, as they say.
I’d like to see a longer-range study about good looks and athletic ability. It’s conceivable that being at the top makes people a little calmer or happier or self-assured, and thus a little better-looking.
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