pieces.
McConnell was an obstructionist who got in Obama's way just to win political point. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi get somewhat more sympathetic treatment. But they’re sort of presented as fixed personalities as well. Pelosi is giving him grief from the left. Reid can’t get the Senate to be helpful with any reliability.
Obama as an intuitive reader of men doesn’t seem to come through at all. At least not to me when I listened to it.
Is it Michael Lewis fault?
So Moneyball was a best seller when it came out.
I remember seeing it on all sort of lists of books that smart people were supposed to read (I think I remember it being on a Harvard Business School reading list).
I think we might have learned the lessons from Moneyball too well.
There are certainly domains where the lessons are correct. Do you need to decide when to pull pitcher? Study it, count it up, do the science.
Lots of politics happens with a significant degree of statistical sophistication. Obama’s national campaigns should certainly be included in this.
Perhaps we’ve become so reliant on giving up out intuition that we’ve lost the ability where intuition does come in handy.
(Its worth keeping in mind, that for all LBJs gifts, he has a pretty checkered legacy of his own)
Ok, that's what I got, hopefully that was high enough effort to count as a high effort post and that gets us to 3 submissions.
(I love the concept of this competition, I hope we get more of this sort of thing, I wish I was a talented enough writer to contribute something better)
Thanks
Pitt19802
1mo ago
It's not and it won't.
It's one of the many really poor habits that formal education engrains in you.
With all due respect, I think you're being quite Panglossian about the education you received.
Pitt19802
6mo ago
Bit of googling came up with this article about athletes and online classes - https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2019/12/23/online-classes-keep-football-players-out-of-academic-fray/40878105/
"Heisman Trophy winner Joe Burrow is a hero on LSU's Baton Rouge campus, but he hasn't seen much of it because he took graduate courses online. Justin Fields rarely has to step inside an Ohio State classroom building because he also does most of his school work online to accommodate his grueling football schedule.
...
Of the 46 Power Five conference schools that responded to an AP survey, 27 have no limits on how many online courses athletes may take. A dozen others have few online course offerings or limit how many athletes may take. Just six have no online offerings or prohibit athletes from taking them, including private schools Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Southern California, Texas Christian and Notre Dame. Michigan is the only public school among the Power Five conferences that doesn't offer online learning."
(Article is pre-Covid)
I suspect they still spend a lot of time with the academic support tutors, especially the younger athletes.
Pitt19802
6mo ago
Yeah, it seems if anything so far the NIL has increased the parity in the sport, which has been nice, parity is one thing college football hasn't historically always done all that well.
As to the academic logistics of being a student athlete, I have no firsthand knowledge, but I'd be curious to know what ratio of online classes athletes sign up for these days.
That was barely a thing when I went to school, I wouldn't be surprised to find that the flexibility some online classes provide are fairly essential lynchpins of making the logistics of being a student athlete these days work. I suspect there are a fair number of athletes who are almost never in physical classes. Especially sports like basketball with middle of the week travel (especially in conferences with across the country schedules).
Pitt19802
7mo ago
How much of Barkley success do you want to give him vs his situation?
Between him and McCaffrey...
I mean, it's a team sport, everyone looks better when give them better teammates.
Both those guys did a lot of good work on not particularly good teams, stick them on a strong team.
idk, both are fun guys to watch when they get it going, I'm glad they both found good situations.
I'm not sure it changes the narrative around how to value RBs as much as people might suggest. (as much crap as the Giants are getting for it, I still think that was a fairly reasonable decision).
Pitt19802
7mo ago
A federal judge on Tuesday denied Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia's request for a temporary restraining order that would grant him another year of eligibility https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/42367444/vanderbilt-qb-diego-pavia-denied-tro-request-added-eligibility
Pitt19802
8mo ago
Deserves some credit for scrambling around long enough to buy time for everyone to get down there, but yeah, once it left his hand ....
Good to be lucky.
Pitt19802
2yr ago
Seconded, love a list of Twitter accounts you think would be good to follow (or I guess Discords)
Seems like my Twitter feed has been overtaken w/ "Everyone is using GPT wrong! I've put together how to use it right! Retweet and I'll DM you! (Must be following)"
Guess I must have fallen for it enough that I got sucked into this particular version of Twitter hell
I don't think leaping the pile is the way to stop that play.
Chris Jones did that last night, had Hurt behind the line of scrimmage, then got pushed over the first down.
You don't have any power once you've left your feet.
I think you need to meet force with force, I would line your two biggest defensive tackle over the ball, then your next two biggest tackles behind them to push on their back. And try to get your 4 biggest guys trying to push the center back into Hurts' lap. (I would put an Offensive Lineman out there if I thought they were 1 of my top 4 force generators)
Maybe put 2 more guys behind them, but at some point you have to guard against them pitching the ball wide.
Pitt19802
2yr ago
Do we have 2 submissions right now? Do we need a third by the end of the day to trigger the competition? I tried to outline a submission last week, and hated what I put together.
If we need another just to trigger the competition, I let the fingers fly and submit something.
Pitt19802
2yr ago
So now that the Eagles have made the Super Bowl,
Any thoughts on how this post played out?
Good job predicting 13-14 wins!
From this vantage point they seemed to have gotten pretty good luck with their playoff draw, between a Giants team that seemed like a good matchup, then a 49ers team that promptly ran out of QBs.
I guess the Eagles were a 2.5 point favorite going into the 49ers game, were you motivated to short them on that line? (fwiw, I was somewhat favoring the 49ers going into that game, not a sports bettor generally though, so my wallet wasn't behind my thought processes).
Looks like the Super Bowl opened as a pick 'em, and moved to Eagles by 1.5.
You motivated to short the Eagles now? Have they converted you?
Pitt19802
2yr ago
Seconded, came here to say the same thing,
Having voted in a few of these, I notice that I recognize several of the names, and struggle to detach my opinion of the comment from my preexisting impression of the user.
Other observation, if the comment is a response to another comment, sometimes the context of the comment I'm supposed to be judging is tricky to parse, it might be useful to include the original comment for context (understanding that some people will screw up which comment they're supposed to judge).
Anyway, just my thoughts from having voted for a few of these, take them for whatever they're worth.
Pitt19802
7mo ago
The Raiders and Giants were bad with Barkley and Jacobs, they're still bad without them.
"The flipside of this is a good blocking and offensive team that has a bad RB who is carried by his environment. Najee Harris maybe? Not a lot of examples come to mind."
'bad RB' is sort of an odd category, the list of low resource acquires, considerable success, and then replaced by another guy with considerable success, just within the various branches of the Shanahan coaching tree is long (start with Terrell Davis), (even this year the 49ers have gotten 700 yards at 5.1 yards a carry out of Jordan Mason), and fairly central to skeptical valuation of RBs.
Pitt19802
8mo ago
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Rv0t_S7bl0I&pp=ygUJcWIgc2Nob29s
Interesting breakdown of a similar play by the Colts defended differently by the Texans.
At 27:12
Yeah, I agreed with all that (although I would give the same advice to Tomlin or Belichek) (I didn't actually start watching until the coverage flipped over for the last couple of plays)
So did you startle your relative when it happened?
It was one of those games that they changed over to at the end where I was, I was kind of half watching while washing the dishes while my daughters were on their devices.
It definitely got an involuntary "Whoa!!!" out of me that startled my daughters lol
https://x.com/joe_abdo/status/1850688286022406264
Lets pretend your Bears head coach Matt Eberflus. How should you handle Tyrique Stevenson?
For some background, he's a second year player, was a 2nd round pick a year ago (so still on a rookie contract).
He's a starter now (with fairly middle of the road PFF grades), (so his value relative to his contract is pretty high).
He's already expressed contrition on social media - "To Chicago and teammates my apologies for lack of awareness and focus .... The game ain't over until zeros hit the clock. Can't take anything for granted. Notes taken, improvement will happen. #Beardown" https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/42043231/tyrique-stevenson-taunts-commanders-fans-seconds-bears-lose-hail-mary-td
The twitter comments I read last night indicated that he needed to be cut immediately to send a message to everyone else on the team.
I think this is a space that understands that if twitter comment declare one thing, the wise man should probably do the opposite.
Indulge me the opportunity to knock down the straw man for a second.
I think if Eberflus is smart, he'll do the opposite, he won't publicly blast him, he won't privately blast him in front of the rest of the team either.
I think this is one of those deals where you either destroy your credibility by searching for scapegoats, or build a lot of trust by conspicuously not calling out obviously available scapegoats.
To the media - "I know Tyrique is really embarrassed by what he put on tape there, its obviously not what we want to be doing, and its a brutal way for that to end, its hurts for all of us, hurts for me, hurts for Tyrique, hurts for every guy in the locker room who put in the work to get a W. It was 1 play though, in a game with 120 (or whatever the actual number is) plays. Those 119 other plays were also opportunities to make the plays we needed to get the W. Tyrique learned a hard lesson in a hard way, he'll get better from this. Everyone else in that locker room will get better from it as well"
To the team - (in a calm none yelling voice) "Hey guys, Tyrique made a mistake there, it on you guys to learn from what he did, this a good reminder that we're out there in front of 70,000 fans with smartphone every second, everything you do is something that will be captured. It only take a second to put something on tape the will define you to people who don't pay attention to each play. The margins for winning and losing are small, let's all be better from this".
At least that's how I would advise handling it, it'll be interesting to see how Eberflus actually handles it.
Pitt19802
2yr ago
Funny thing, before that pattern occurred to me as spam, I'd only get a DM maybe 1/4th of the time, 0/x of the time was it something worth the engagement
Pitt19802
2yr ago
Wanted to start off by saying I really enjoyed your submission. I think the model of intuition you laid out is largely one I agree with.
Yeah, I found it to be a difficult topic, which is ok.
I was mostly motivated to submit something because I really like the competition model.
I find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Prize_Foundation pretty fascinating.
I really like the idea of scaling it down, both to try and shape a nascent internet community (does this internet community still count as nascent???) you're part of, and even just to generate insights into something that's just bothering you.
I really like it conceptually, so I felt like I should submit something, if nothing else, to support it as a model of something I think we should get more of.
I'm not sure I had any particularly fantastic insight into the topic, certainly none I would have thought to share if FiveHourMarathon had posted 'hey, how do you think intuition works?' in a Small-Scale question thread or something. (Reading over the posts, I think this is somewhat reflected in that my submission seems to do the worst job of staying on the topic).
I think that's sort of what makes the competition model cool though. If nothing else, its a way to break people out of their shells. If there's a particular topic you want to mine the board expertise about, this seems like a good model.
I like it enough that I think I might found a 2nd competition on a different question.
If people have any thoughts about shaping the competition in a way that works well, I'd be interested in that. This topic was pretty broad, would a narrower topic work better?
"I think people judging our essays might be very quick to criticize and say: why didn't the writer mention X? how didn't the writer connect Y with Z? (it's obvious)"
Again, I enjoyed yours quite a bit.
Not sure writing generates these sorts of responses unless its good enough to be engaged with. I would take any such response as a perverse form of flattery.
"then of course the time limit doesn't help (although without it I probably would have delayed the work even more than I did)."
I'll just speak for myself as someone who submitted the final, without the deadline, I wouldn't have gotten around to generating a submission.
"the end result might not necessarily be a reflection of your thoughts on the subject, which are probably evolving as we speak (the very next day I had yet another insight that I feel should be worthy of writing about)."
fwiw, I had the same experience, if anything, I think that's one of the real values of getting it out of my head and into the real world, thoughts that are sort of 80% formed, you can keep 80% formed for a long time in your head, exposing them to light forces them to evolve.
The Commanders have had a good year, they did make the playoffs, they are in the 2nd tier of playoff teams in their conference, they will likely be the underdog in whichever playoff game they play. The 'don't follow it at all' thing to know about them is that they have a young QB Jayden Daniels who looks very promising, will almost certainly win rookie of the year this year, and if things go well, will be the Commanders QB for a very long time.
The Super Bowl will be some weekend early to middle February, as it will likely be every year for the foreseeable future.
Life is too short to pretend to have knowledge about things you don't care about.
My advice in these situations, is to not fake it, but be respectful that the universe of things to know and care about is big, and the things that you care about don't necessarily have priority.
In general, you are not going to read any cliff notes version of football and 'blend in' with people who actually care about it, similar to any subject.
I don't follow superhero movies at all.
I've gotten a lot of mileage out of "Oh, I don't really know that much about it, what happened?"
Giving the people who do care about it some space to show off their expertise will nearly always result in a reasonably smooth social encounter.
Which groups do you have in mind here? Tammany Hall era Irish immigrants? That process took the better part of 100 years.
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