Pitt19802
1yr 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.
lol, curious as to how far you are through the LBJ books.
Have you gotten to the point of Kennedy winning the 1960 Democratic nomination? I'm going trust that I don't need to give spoiler warnings for a historical event that happened 60 years ago.
An interesting take away, is that even by 1960, LBJ might have been someone who's gifts were past their time. At least in terms rising to the Presidency.
LBJ thought he could stay out of the primaries, and that all his backroom senate connections would get him the nomination at the convention. He thought Kennedy was a political lightweight who hadn't done anything of any real note during his time in the Senate.
But Kennedy was already the beneficiary of TV and 'big speeches', by then he was a staple of the Sunday morning political shows, for all LBJs Senate accomplishments, Kennedy was better known to the voters.
The comparison between Kennedy and Obama is an interesting one. I suspect you're right. By the time he arrived in Washington, he was already a possible Presidential nominee, 2 years later, he was literally running for the nomination. He never had time to build political alliances as anything other than a possible President.
One area I was trying to go in my post (not sure I got there, I was running out of steam by the end), is that might just be an odd product of our time. We don't reward that sort of political intuition, so we don't get leaders who have it.
To start with, its almost a dirty word to have been a DC politician for any stretch of time. Before Biden, between Bill Clinton, W, Obama, and Trump, we had 28 years of presidents with a total of 4 years of inside the beltway political experience before becoming President. Hillary had some line about "the most qualified candidate ever", but for the most part, deep Washington connections is almost never a selling point for Presidental candidate.
If anything, its almost the opposite.
You can market change, can you market the opposite?
Beyond that, I'm not sure we believe in that sort of intuition at all.
I singled out Lewis, but there's a large bookshelf of books about how our intuition sucks and we shouldn't trust it. I would put the Freakonomics, Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow, Cass Sustein's Nudge (who Obama worked with at U of Chicago and hired into the White House), most of the Less Wrong universe of stuff including SSC, all fit into that category.
I think that shelf has a lot of good insights, and its useful to sort of be careful about the limits of intuition, and where it can lead us astray.
I also think its somewhat antithetical to LBJs sort of intuition. The sort of leaders we aspire to be, and choose, after reading that stuff. Can't do the things that LBJ did.
Or at least that's 1 theory of the universe.
Thanks for the car adapter tip, not sure why it hadn't occurred to me that there might be a solution to my setup, but that's seems like something I should own. Purchased.
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
The year is 2003, the Redsox haven't won the World Series since 1918. Now they're in Game 7 of the America League Championship against the New York Yankee. Grady Little is their manager, he has a choice to make.
How long should he let Pedro Martinez pitch? This year Martinez has finished 3rd in the Cy Young voting, he's won 3 Cy Young awards in the previous 6 years. Without recapping his entire career, let just posit that he is really good. If you wanted to bet on 1 particular guy, with everything on the line, he is a guy you would want to bet on.
Through 7 innings, that works great, at the end of 7 innings Martinez has thrown 100 pitches and the Redsox led 4-2. Is 100 pitches enough? Should Little call it a night for Martinez and turn it over to the bullpen? Or should he keep rolling the dice with the 1 particular guy you want to bet on?
The Redsox score another run in the top of the 8th to make it 5-2. Little decides to bet on Martinez. That works out less great. 23 pitches later the game is tied and Martinez's night is over. In the 11th inning Aaron Boone homers to win the game 6-5 for the Yankees. The curse lives on. Who knows, maybe next year will be the year. It won't be this year.
The year is 2016, the Cubs haven't won the World Series since 1908. Now they're in Game 7 of the World Series. Joe Madden is their manager, he has a choice to make.
How long should he let Kyle Hendricks pitch? This year Kendricks has finished 3rd in the Cy Young voting. Let not recap his entire career either, but let posit that while he is not nearly as decorated a pitcher as Pedro Martinez was, he has been quite good this year, with everything on the line, he isn't a bad guy to bet on.
Through 4 innings that works great, when it's Hendricks time to pitch in the 5th inning the Cubs led 5-1, Hendricks gets the first 2 outs of the 5th, then he walks a batter. What to do?
For Maddon, that is enough, he pulls Hendricks at this point. That turns out to work, ehh, not exceptionally great. Before the inning is over the score is 5-3, at the end of the 9th inning the score is 6-6. The Cubs wind up scoring 2 runs in the 10th inning and win 8-7. Their curse is over.
Alright, anyway, intuition.
What exactly are we talking about?
Where these decision made on intuition? What does it even mean to make a decision on intuition?
To be straightforward, I'm almost certain that Maddon's decision wasn't made on intuition, its less clear to me whether Little decision was.
Moneyball was published in 2003. I'll probably butcher this synopsis, but roughly, it documents how the A's won a lot of games in the early 2000's by replacing the intuitive judgements of baseball scouts and managers with statistical analysis that didn't rely on human intuition.
For a few years after it was published, which method was better was a sports radio debate topic. Before long, it ceased being one, the teams that embraced the statistical method simply won too frequently. It is no long a question of whether you should rely on human intuition or statistical analysis, its how do you win the statistical analysis arms race.
Back to the pitching decision, by the time Maddon was making his decision, this was a studied question, Maddon was almost certainly aware of analysis that indicated that by the time pitcher see a batter for their 3rd time in a game, the pitcher's effectiveness drops considerably. Glossing over particular details of each situation, broadly speaking, the science was with Maddon.
Its hard to know exactly what the Redsox internal analytics department had produced by 2003. It seems likely to me that Little didn't have the benefit of this analysis in 2003. He may of had to rely on his intuition to make his decision in 2003.
Is this what we mean by intuition? This seems like a pretty crappy definition. Is every decision we make that hasn't been mathematically calculated an intuitive decision? I don't think that's what we mean.
Does it mean a decision we haven't thought out previously?
If Little sat in his hotel room the night before the game with his pitching coach, and spent several hours discussing exactly how long to keep Martinez in the game, and had agree that as long as they were winning he would go 8 innings, they were sticking with Martinez, would it have been an intuitive decision?
It seems like it would have been the opposite, it would have been a decision that they analyzed, and analyzed wrong. Nothing to do with intuition.
One of the suggested prompts to this question involved "how can we improve intuition."
Having read a few Malcolm Gladwell books in my life, my first instinct is "put in your 10,000 hours".
When to pull a pitcher isn't exactly a "haven't thought out previously" situation.
Complete games are quite rare, making this decision is actually something very close to an every game occurrence. Little should have had plenty of the practice needed for his intuition to be on-point.
(This is oversimplifying. While pulling pitchers in an every game occurrence, pulling pitchers in game 7s of playoff series is not. That comes with a set of end game considerations that the regular season decisions do not. For example, in the regular season you need to keep your pitchers well rested enough to pitch the rest of the season in a way that you don't at the end of the playoffs.) (But I think we're getting too far into the weeds here.)
Let's just posit that Little relied on his intuition, and his intuitions screwed the decision up. What should he have done to improve his intuition?
It seems really tempting to dismiss this as a totally idiotic framing of this question.
Baseball over the past 20 years is really clear about the answer to this. He should give up.
He should turn this question over to statistical analysis, and then listen to the analysis when it gives him an answer.
He should quit trying to get his intuition to tell him things that can be looked up.
Its sort of cold and windy outside right now, I just walked outside, here's guessing its 42 degrees.
Looking at my phone, my phone thinks it 40.
Not bad.
How good can I get at this game?
Can I develop my weather guessing intuition?
Every hour, I'll walk outside, make a guess, then check my phone.
I bet I could get pretty good and intuiting the weather.
What's the point though? I can just look at my phone, why develop weather intuition that's no better than taking 2 seconds to look at my phone?
I mean, I'm fairly certain my phone gets it from the National Weather Service or something. Are you afraid of BIG Weather Service?
It seems almost anti-science.
I recently listened to Robert Caro's books about LBJ.
One big theme of the books is the degree to which LBJ had a great intuitive sense for the one on one convincing part of politics.
There are several descriptions of LBJ abilities as "a reader of men". I'll quote one at some length -
From Master of the Senate, pg 136 -
"While Lyndon Johnson was not, as his two assistants knew, a reader of books, he was, they knew, a reader of men - a great reader of men. He had a genius for studying a man and learning his strengths and weaknesses and hopes and fears, his deepest strengths and weaknesses: what the man really wanted- not what he said he wanted but what he really wanted- and what it was that the man feared, really feared.
He tried to teach his young assistants to read men-"Watch their hands, watch their eyes," he told them. "Read eyes. No matter what a man is saying to you, it's not as important as what you can read in his eyes"-and to read between the line: more interested in men's weaknesses than in their strengths because it was weakness that could be exploited, he tried to teach his assistants how to learn a man's weakness. "The most important thing a man has to tell you is what he's not telling you," he said. "The most important thing he has to say is what he's trying not to say." For that reason he told them, it was important to keep the man talking; the longer he talked, the more likely he was to let slip a hint of that vulnerability he was so anxious to conceal. "That's why he wouldn't let a conversation end," Busby explains. "If he saw the other fellow was trying not to say something, he wouldn't let it [the conversation] end until he got it out of him." And Lyndon Johnson read with a genius that couldn't be taught, with a gift so instinctive that a close observer of his reading habits, Robert G. (Bobby) Baker, calls it a "sense"; "He seemed to sense each man's individual price and the commodity he preferred as coin." He read with a novelist's sensitivity, with an insight that was unerring, with an ability, shocking in the depth of its penetration and perception, to look into a man's heart and know his innermost worries and desires."
So my audiobook setup is a bit odd, I like to listen in my car, we have two cars, one new with an USB port where I can listen to Audible books through my phone, hence the LBJ books, an old older car without any of this new fangled technology like USB ports, so I have to go to the library and check out physical CDs.
Around the same time I was listening to the LBJ books. The physical CD book I was listening to was Barack Obama's memoir, A Promised Land.
This is almost certainly a fool's errand. But I would like to keep political nature of Obama's legacy out of this analysis.
Anyway, with that terrible set up. Listening to these two book side by side, it struck me that Obama didn't sound anything like LBJ.
I was struck by how in the Obama book, all the key players seemed like fixed political pi
Pitt19802
1yr 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
1yr ago
I suspect you're correct.
I've had a number of friends who have interned with congressmen and the like, and a common report of the experience is returning constituent mail, with the common theme being the general thanklessness of it, and how it was basically useless work pawned off on interns.
Earlier this year I read Path to Power, the first book in Robert Caro's series about LBJ.
I guess LBJ became a congressional staffer pretty shortly after college.
Apparently he attacked constituent mail with particularly uncommon zeal.
If you were writing your congressman about veteran's benefits, or something, and your letter happened to show up on LBJ's desk, you were in luck, he made a point to figure out who the best person to talk to cut through the government bureaucracy help you out.
The book is modestly handwavy about the exact mechanics of it, but I guess in the fanaticism he showed handling constituent mail, he was able to build a reputation as a helpful person in Washington to take your problems to, and various business people are always on the look out for people to take their problems to.
And those people wound up being the key supporters LBJ needed for his rise...
Anyway, I guess that's one of the big themes of Caro's book, that LBJ had something of a gift for see the potential for power, where other people didn't.
Pitt19802
1yr 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
1yr 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.
I'm not especially convinced that there's that much of a shortage of Americans who want to work dogmatically hard.
I'm just not sure American culture filters those people to glass factories in Dayton, OH.
In America those people tend to get filtered into industries like Tech, Finance, Medicine, Law, Entertainment, Sports.
Comparative advantage being what it is, glass manufacturing appears to be something to aspire to a bit more in China than it is in America, shrug, so it goes.
Within a couple days of watching American Factory I watched a short 20 or so minute documentary about various supply chains in China, after failing to find it in half hour or so of internet searching I've given up, but most of the factories were of cheap plastic trinkets, the pace of work seemed pretty comparable to the Americans in Dayton.
Even in China, I imagine there are hierarchies of where people are motivated to work, and which places attract the motivated workers, they're just different than they are here.
At one point the Arena League had a rule where the clock would stop in the last minute if the ball didn't cross the line of scrimmage, to eliminate end game kneel downs.
"For most of the league's history, any play that did not advance the ball across the line of scrimmage also stopped the clock; this prevented teams from kneeling to run out the clock. (This rule was repealed in 2018.) It also rewards defensive play, as a tackle for loss automatically stops the clock."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-minute_warning
Obviously wouldn't have affected the play last night as the runner was past the line of scrimmage (but I guess would have affected Mahomes subsequent kneel downs).
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