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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35553 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Do you actually not believe height is an advantage in basketball. That's ridiculous. As is using free throws as your measure of talent.

I dunno if height as as much of an advantage because the other players are tall , so it's like a Red Queen problem, or being taller makes for actually better players. I think the evidence is mixed in the latter. Smarter people obviously make for better engineers, but shorter basketball players may still be competent at basketball.

here we see plenty of examples of successful short basketball players

https://www.quora.com/Can-you-be-short-and-good-at-basketball

So even if the mean is 6'5 or so, being 5'7 is at least three standard deviations lower than the mean basketball player height, yet some short players are still very good, good enough to play at D1 college or NBA level. That would be in IQ terms like having an IQ of 85 and being a top mathematician, which you would never see. So I think basketball admits for more variance than maybe assumed by the mean height alone.

As is using free throws as your measure of talent.

I also doubt that heigh is much of a disadvantage to shooting free throws. Instead, I would guess that poor free throw shooting doesn't necessarily rule someone out if they're a 7-footer that can block shots, but if you're 6 foot flat, you'd damned well better be a marksman. There are too many examples of tall guys shooting free throws well, even really goony tall guys like Big Z, for me to think that it's a big effect. There might be something there, but I think it's mostly just selection bias.

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