Loved the article, everything from the sports, to "how do we measure good decisions?". I purchased the Strengths Analyzer. Heard you on a datacamp podcast, now I'm going through all your content and devouring it!
The “eternal regular” season rings true. I have always taken issue with the “burn the ships” risk everything mentality. Sure you have to make decisions and move forward and not waffle back and forth - but I think risking everything with no way of return is often not necessary.
Great post! Footnote #1 seems to run a little counter to one of the key points of the entire post, though, doesn't it? I feel like Annie Duke has done a great job of trying to describe this by referring to the fallacy of “resulting”—using the benefit of hindsight to declare if a decision was a good one. You made a lot of points in the post that seem to support this, right? If you could flip the 50% heads coin or the 53% heads coin, it's entirely possible that, on one flip, the 50% coin would come up heads and the 53% coin would come up tails. You can regret that you didn't select counter to the odds (although you might be better off appreciating your momentary omniscience, in that you suddenly have knowledge of the counterfactual), but you still made the "right" *decision* based on the incomplete information that you had. No?
Okay, but the thing about going for it on 4th is that coaches seem to be ceding their decision making to the models when the data is useful for heuristics but doesn’t actually tell you exactly what you should do. Quite obviously, there’s not enough data to get to stat sig on that exact score/time/teams. You can say “the data seems to say teams should go for it more when down by 4 with 5 mins left” but if you have a great kicker and you’re playing the best 4th down defense in the league and you have a good record of making stops and getting to 35 yard line, you specifically might not have that edge in this situation. Like you still have to think. I don’t know much about that specific Lions situation but I there’s still plenty of room to shout at NFL coaches even if you respect data
Loved, "Don’t use data to get good at something we do a lot; use data to figure out what we’re good at, and then do it more often."
Loved the article, everything from the sports, to "how do we measure good decisions?". I purchased the Strengths Analyzer. Heard you on a datacamp podcast, now I'm going through all your content and devouring it!
The “eternal regular” season rings true. I have always taken issue with the “burn the ships” risk everything mentality. Sure you have to make decisions and move forward and not waffle back and forth - but I think risking everything with no way of return is often not necessary.
Great post! Footnote #1 seems to run a little counter to one of the key points of the entire post, though, doesn't it? I feel like Annie Duke has done a great job of trying to describe this by referring to the fallacy of “resulting”—using the benefit of hindsight to declare if a decision was a good one. You made a lot of points in the post that seem to support this, right? If you could flip the 50% heads coin or the 53% heads coin, it's entirely possible that, on one flip, the 50% coin would come up heads and the 53% coin would come up tails. You can regret that you didn't select counter to the odds (although you might be better off appreciating your momentary omniscience, in that you suddenly have knowledge of the counterfactual), but you still made the "right" *decision* based on the incomplete information that you had. No?
Okay, but the thing about going for it on 4th is that coaches seem to be ceding their decision making to the models when the data is useful for heuristics but doesn’t actually tell you exactly what you should do. Quite obviously, there’s not enough data to get to stat sig on that exact score/time/teams. You can say “the data seems to say teams should go for it more when down by 4 with 5 mins left” but if you have a great kicker and you’re playing the best 4th down defense in the league and you have a good record of making stops and getting to 35 yard line, you specifically might not have that edge in this situation. Like you still have to think. I don’t know much about that specific Lions situation but I there’s still plenty of room to shout at NFL coaches even if you respect data
Great application of your perspective, Benn!