Category: Sports
How nepotistic are we?
In just about every field I looked at, having a successful parent makes you way more likely to be a big success, but the advantage is much smaller than it is at the top of politics.
Using the same methodology, I estimate that the son of an N.B.A. player has about a one in 45 chance of becoming an N.B.A. player. Since there are far more N.B.A. slots than Senate slots, this is only about an 800-fold edge.
Think about the N.B.A. further. The skills necessary to be a basketball player, especially height, are highly hereditary. But the N.B.A. is a meritocracy, with your performance easy to evaluate. If you do not play well, you will be cut, even if the team is the New York Knicks and your name is Patrick Ewing Jr. Father-son correlation in the N.B.A. is only one-eleventh as high as it is in the Senate.
Emphasis added by me. And this:
An American male is 4,582 times more likely to become an Army general if his father was one; 1,895 times more likely to become a famous C.E.O.; 1,639 times more likely to win a Pulitzer Prize; 1,497 times more likely to win a Grammy; and 1,361 times more likely to win an Academy Award. Those are pretty decent odds, but they do not come close to the 8,500 times more likely a senator’s son is to find himself chatting with John McCain or Dianne Feinstein in the Senate cloakroom.
That is all from Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.
How good a marginal rebounder are you really?
Maybe this is too strange and squirrelly an example to deserve mention on MR, but I found it fascinating. It starts with this:
This year’s rebounding leaderboard, at least in terms of rebounds per game, is topped by DeAndre Jordan and Andre Drummond, who also finished 1-2 last season. In a bygone era, you’d simply say they are the league’s best rebounders at this time. Yet it might not be that way at all.
There seems to be a huge oops:
Both the Clippers and Pistons have better defensive rebound rates with their star rebounders on the bench. How is that possible?
This is a big topic, but one possible reason could be the simple fact that neither Jordan nor Drummond is particularly concerned with boxing out…Drummond blocks out on the defensive glass just 5.97 times per 100 opportunities, lowest in the league among centers with at least 500 chances.
Jordan is a little better at 9.64, but that’s still the 11th-lowest total.
In other words, what really matters is marginal rebounding prowess, adjusting for how many rebounds you take away from the other players on your team. Maybe an individual can pull in the ball more often by positioning himself to grab the low hanging fruit rebounds — often taking them from other team members — rather than boxing out the other team for the tough, contested rebounds.
Measurement really is changing the world. The article is here, by Bradford Doolittle, ESPN gated. Here is more on DeAndre Jordan, also ESPN gated. That is one media source I pay for gladly.
What sport should your kid play?
After I requested requests, Trey Anastasio asked me:
If a parent were to pick a sport for their child to play competitively, what would you suggest? (factoring in cost, commitment, personal development, opportunities provided in life)
I take this to refer to stardom in high school or college, but not beyond.
I am inclined to select tennis. It doesn’t cost so much, and you can play for most of the rest of your life, without needing a team to back you up. It is unlikely to injure you very seriously, although arguably it cultivates an attitude of selfishness. Various areas of track would be reasonable picks too. If this is restricted to major team sports, I say baseball, mostly to minimize risk of injury or violence.
That said, my overall sense is that levels of competition in all of these areas have become higher than is socially optimal. Little League success will suffice for a lot of the gains in terms of learning leadership, discipline, and teamwork. So I would not wish any of these upon a child. These endeavors have become academic fundraisers where levels of competition are pushed as high as the talent allows, and too often they have become all-consuming pursuits, in violation of Aristotle’s edicts about moderation. Sports have gone from a very cheap way of educating your child to a very expensive way, yet another example of unmeasured declining productivity in education.
From the comments: how to restructure basketball (and other sports?)
Kevin Erdmann writes:
I think basketball would be vastly improved if after the 3rd quarter, we just added 20 points to the higher score, and said, first team to that score wins.
Or, for that matter, make it score based instead of time based. It’s halftime when one team gets to 30, and the game is over when one team gets to 60.
It gets rid of all the fouling and time outs at the end of close games, and it means that it doesn’t serve any purpose for the winning team to drain the clock. And, it means that a team that falls far behind has more of a chance to catch up – like in baseball.
Of course this would not maximize ad revenue, which tends to increase with close games as the number of timeouts rises. Furthermore perhaps people do not enjoy the outcome as much if they do not have to wait a bit for it. Nonetheless an interesting idea.
The preference for potential
Here is a piece by Tomala, Jia, and Norton:
When people seek to impress others, they often do so by highlighting individual achievements. Despite the intuitive appeal of this strategy, we demonstrate that people often prefer potential rather than achievement when evaluating others. Indeed, compared with references to achievement (e.g., “this person has won an award for his work”), references to potential (e.g., “this person could win an award for his work”) appear to stimulate greater interest and processing, which can translate into more favorable reactions. This tendency creates a phenomenon whereby the potential to be good at something can be preferred over actually being good at that very same thing. We document this preference for potential in laboratory and field experiments, using targets ranging from athletes to comedians to graduate school applicants and measures ranging from salary allocations to online ad clicks to admission decisions.
Here are some ungated copies. For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis, who sent me the link in response to my earlier post on age discrimination.
Do smart sports writers actually dumb down the games they cover?
In a Ramsey model this can be true.
I went to see a Thunder-Clippers game with Kevin and Robin, and as usual parts of the live experience were rather distasteful to me, including the noise, the arena announcer, and the cheerleaders. These features of sports have, overall, become worse over time.
That said, NBA basketball largely succeeds in appealing to both high-status and low-status men. (Roller derby and pro wrestling can’t quite bridge that gap, NASCAR is doing this more than it used to. On arena strategies for making everyone feel exclusive, try this interesting piece.) Neither group goes away from the experience fully happy, but each receives something of value.
High-status men receive ancillary products related to the NBA, such as statistics and clever analytics, from say Bill Simmons or fivethirtyeight or Zach Lowe. These make the experience of watching the game more high brow and also more satisfying. In response to that improvement, some other aspects of the experience can be dumbed down, without the high-status men defecting. The stupid promotions and halftime shows, for instance, becomes less suited to what the high status men might be looking for. But you can ignore them when you’re happy to sit there and think through PER for this year’s Kevin Love, whether the Wizards should take so many long twos, or why the Atlanta Hawks were such a surprise.
And thus we have another unintended consequence: making an experience smarter, as do the clever sportswriters, can also contribute to making part of that same experience more stupid.
Addendum: Watching the game, I also learned that the Thunder have a deeper team than I had thought, and that Chris Paul is no longer a quick point guard.
Super Bowl art museum landscape betting lending markets in everything
Seattle Art Museum and New England’s Clark Art Institute are wagering temporary loans of major paintings based on the outcome of Super Bowl XLIX between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots. The masterpieces that have been anted up showcase the beautiful landscapes of the Northwest and the Northeast respectively.
Consumer rating sentences to ponder
“Highly specific pools of reputation information will become more useful in aggregate,” said Mr. Fertik, co-author with David C. Thompson of “The Reputation Economy,” a guide to optimizing digital footprints. “If you’re a really good Uber passenger, that may be useful information for Amtrak or American Airlines. But if you add in your reputation from Airbnb plus OpenTable plus eBay, it starts to get useful globally.”
There is more here, interesting throughout. But will there be errors in these measurements? As I wrote to Ashok Rao, fresh regressions are a public good.
“Let’s Play Two”
Very sadly Ernie Banks — the baseball player for you foreigners out there — has passed away.
Oddly, I have taken to quoting him lately. If you are going out to eat with a small group, I recommend two stops. No, don’t eat any more food than usual, but distribute your meal across two restaurants. Have a few appetizers in one, and then leave and move on to another. (This is easiest to do in Eden Center, with its wide selection of small-dish Vietnamese eateries, but other methods will work.) Of course you must sequence your meals properly, the Greek eggplant must become before the Sichuan noodles, not vice versa.
This approach will improve the conversation at your table, if only by breaking up the original seating plan. It also makes you more aware and more appreciative of what you are eating.
If you are going out to a movie, see two. There is a fixed cost of attending, whether in terms of the traffic, the babysitter, or simply the will to spend time away from Facebook. “Let’s Play Two.”
I have the impression that consumers “do fewer doubleheaders” than when I was growing up, I am not sure why. Perhaps we have grown too impatient.
Banks’s obituary described him as “an unconquerable optimist whose sunny disposition never dimmed in 19 seasons with the perennially stumbling Chicago Cubs…”
Here are other quotations from Ernie Banks. He said “The only way to prove you are a good sport is to lose.”
A simple theory of some current basketball surprises
Apply a dose of science and big data to a team sport such as basketball. The big gains will come in cooperation. Who should take the next shot?, when is a “corner three” worthwhile?, who should play with the second unit, how good is the pick and roll against this opponent?, and so on. Big data also will bring some gains at the individual level, such as from better training regimens, but those moves were easier to spot in the first place. The issues involving cooperation are those where simple intuitive observation, of the old school style, will miss a lot of potential improvements.
Cooperative gains are more fragile, however, because everyone has to get the strategy right to reap the benefits (think of Michael Kremer’s O-Ring model). So the previous champion, San Antonio, has fallen off dramatically because Leonard is injured and Tony Parker is playing like his age (32). Atlanta suddenly had all the pieces gel, and they now, to the surprise of almost everyone, have the best record in the East. (They have learned the ball movement and shooting style which San Antonio perfected last year during their championship run, but Atlanta has no big stars.) Golden State is a positive surprise too, with the best record in the league. Cleveland has attempted to do “cooperation” (ha) on the terms of its stars, not on the terms of the data, and that experiment has fallen flat.
In Panama I watched an old Lakers game from the 1980s (vs. Portland) and was struck by how tall everyone was, compared to today. There were fewer surprises that year, and I believe those facts are related. The three-point shot has made players shorter and more cooperative and arguably increased the value of the coach and his assistants.
Some of these arguments should apply to areas other than basketball, so perhaps a higher value for data-driven cooperation will mean more surprises in the world in general.
How judges, loan officers, and baseball umpires overcompensate for past decisions
The actual title is “Decision-Making under the Gambler’s Fallacy” (pdf) and the authors are daniel Chen, Tobias J. Moskowitz, and Kelly Shue. Here is one short bit from what is more generally a very interesting paper:
We test our hypothesis in three high-stakes settings: refugee court asylum decisions in the US, a field experiment by Cole et al. (2013) in which experienced loan officers in India review real small-business loan applications in an experimentally controlled environment, and umpire calls of pitches in Major League Baseball games. In each setting, we show that the ordering of cases is likely to be conditionally random. However, decisions are significantly negatively autocorrelated. We estimate that up to 5 percent of decisions are reversed due to the gambler’s fallacy.
To make that more concrete, if a baseball umpire first calls a ball, the next pitch he is more likely to then call a strike. Of course this may plague your paper refereeing decisions, whether or not you finish your next book, and your dating life.
The original pointer was from Cass Sunstein on Twitter.
Is the Great Stagnation soon over?
The method, which extracts drugs from bacteria that live in dirt, has yielded a powerful new antibiotic, researchers reported in the journal Nature on Wednesday. The new drug, teixobactin, was tested in mice and easily cured severe infections, with no side effects.
Better still, the researchers said, the drug works in a way that makes it very unlikely that bacteria will become resistant to it. And the method developed to produce the drug has the potential to unlock a trove of natural compounds to fight infections and cancer — molecules that were previously beyond scientists’ reach because the microbes that produce them could not be grown in the laboratory.
Studies on people will start in about two years, the NYT article is here. Here is the underlying Nature article.
Alternatively, here is a claim that James Harden is the future of basketball.
I thank numerous MR readers for related pointers.
Modal markets in everything
Accrington Stanley, who would have faced Manchester United in the FA Cup third round had they beaten Yeovil in the previous round, are selling commemorative tickets for the game that will never happen for £20.
The article does not specify which means of payment they will accept.
The pointer is from Simon Koppel.
Model this (online dating fact of the day)
According to forecasts from Match.com and Plenty of Fish, two of the country’s largest dating sites, the single most popular time for online dating — the window when the most people sign up, log on and poke around — will be Jan. 4, from roughly 5 to 8 p.m. Zoosk, another data-focused dating site, backs that estimate up; in 2014, it’s most trafficked time was on the Sunday after New Year’s.
The full article is here, via Ninja Economics. Might it mean that a) online dating is a kind of palliative against holiday depression? Or that online dating is a kind of New Year’s resolution, a willingness to undergo a brutal experience for a supposed potential long-run benefit? Or a bit of both? Personally, I engage in some of my least productive work on Sunday evenings.
Your model, by the way, should not neglect these corollary facts:
Interestingly, this cycle doesn’t just play out on dating sites — in fact, it’s far broader than that. Researchers have also observed a post-holiday spike in searches for porn, for instance, and a 2012 study by Facebook’s data team found that people are far more likely to change their relationship status in January or February than they are at any other time of year. Offline, the holiday season tends to see a jump in both condom sales and conceptions.
Basketball average is over?
So in May, the team [Milwaukee Bucks] hired Dan Hill, a facial coding expert who reads the faces of college prospects and N.B.A. players to determine if they have the right emotional attributes to help the Bucks.
The approach may sound to some like palm reading, but the Bucks were so impressed with Hill’s work before the 2014 draft that they have retained him to analyze their players and team chemistry throughout the current season.
There is more here. How well does this model retrodict various successes and failures, relative to underlying levels of talent? How about if we apply the model to economists? Potential graduate students? Mates? Where else? File under speculative.