Month: April 2020

Numbing Numbers

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On Epidemic, Ronald Klain talked about how long a shutdown may last.
“I’m asked this question when I’m on TV all the time, what’s the date, what’s the date? But this discussion about the date is the wrong discussion, the question is, what are the preconditions that we need to have in place before we can reopen large swaths of economic activity?”
That’s a harder question. The CoVid19 situation is like a Sudoku board with very few numbers filled in. If that’s a nine this might be a four which makes that a two—shit that can’t work. There are so many interchangeable parts it’s easier to ask, ‘what’s the date?’ To get away from ‘what’s the date’ questions we can add one more small step, asking why. ‘Why’ gets us to answer. For example, why is social distancing six feet? Is this a case like a power law where the bulk of the results come from one source? For example, when researchers looked at what size particles passed through what size fabrics, “0.02 micron Bacteriophage MS2 particles (5 times smaller than the coronavirus)“, a surgical mask stopped 89% of the particles, a vacuum bag 86%, and a cotton blend t-shirt stopped 70%. Not bad. But when they doubled up, masks improved to stopping 89% and shirts to 71%. Small relative increases. Is social distancing like that? Six feet is like wearing a mask made from a cotton shirt? Maybe not. The gas cloud research rather than aerosol or droplet research—the six feet origin work was done in the 1930’s—hints that viruses could travel twenty-seven feet in the air. It’s hard to not recommend something other than ‘when we hear numbers we should ask why‘ but there’s so much ambiguity that’s all we can say with confidence. As for dealing with the here and now, here’s how to gamble with the coronavirus.

When a plan comes together.

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One of my favorite day-time television shows as a kid was the A-Team. Though Mr. T. was the main attraction for most kids my age, I liked Murdock and his crazy-or-crazy-like-a-fox approach which always solved slightly more problems than it created. 

The brains of the group was “Hannibal” who muttered at the 80% mark of an episode, with a cigar in his mouth, I love it when a plan comes together. 

Plans have been top of mind a lot lately. 

  • During a pickleball practice my partner was insistent about a plan for handling lob shots. She wanted the ‘forehand’ player to get three-quarters of the lobs. I wanted to play it by ear. 
  • During the CoVid19 stock market kerfuffle Lawrence Hamtil tweeted, “Have a plan, but adapt to circumstances as they change. Don’t make rash decisions that could harm your long term goals, but also manage your cash covetously.” 
  • During a podcast with Hal Varian and Tyler Cowen, Varian said “In the textbook, there’s more exactitude than might be necessary in real life. There’s this line that no battle plan has survived an encounter with the enemy and when you look at how decisions are made in organizations, they’re often a lot messier than in the textbooks.” 

It was my pickleball experience when the message hit home. Playing with different partners without a plan led to more chaos and uncertainty. More often our team was out of position and lost points in the confusion. 

When I got back with my Planning Partner the game played smoother and not only was the lob defense better but the subsequent shots were too. We were less out of position. And we didn’t always follow the plan because the starting conditions weren’t ‘textbook’. At first I bristeld at the over-emphasis on handling lobs. Now I like the plan as a framework.

Plans are places to start.

One of Richer Thaler’s emphasises about nudging is that there has to be some kind of default. We can have random defaults, we’ve-always-done-it-this-way defaults, or we can have pro-social (nudge) defaults. All have advantages and drawbacks but they all offer a structure for starting. 

Gambling with CoVid19

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Bias warning, My wife and I can work from home, my kids kinda like homeschool (but really miss their friends) and I wiped down the groceries in the garage. 

It’s always helpful to ask, has someone faced my situation before? The answer is often yes. Rory Sutherland thrives at this.

On recent podcasts from Deep Dive (#249) and Wharton Moneyball (April 1, 2020) there were two very good steps to understanding anything with uncertainty.

Wharton Moneyball takes its name from Michael Lewis’s Moneyball. That book shed light on using advanced statistics to find other ways to win baseball games, that walking to first after a full count was actually better than hitting a single to first on the first pitched ball. Moneyball thinking has extended to new areas like basketball, movies, and Jeopardy.

On Wharton Moneyball, Adi Wyner spoke with Alan Salzberg who mentioned that he’s starting looking at CoVid19 deaths rather than cases. The former takes longer to materialize in number form but is better than the former which is mostly a product of testing. It’s trading a sampling error for a time lag.

“It was what we would generally call ‘garbage data’. A confirmed case  might me it was confirmed because someone came to the hospital and was already sick.” Alan Salzberg

Ok, good so far.

We need good data (walks instead of hits) but then Alan goes too far. The virus is mostly airborne and mostly won’t bother someone if it lands on a surface someone might touch and then finds a path into their body. That’s a lot of ifs. “Is that enough,” Salzberg wonders, “It stays for a little while, but in my mind I don’t think that should be a worry. I think you should wash your hands, and I’ve been doing that and I try not to touch my face a lot. But I think being ridiculously uptight about it is kind of crazy.”

Ok, that’s fine if we had better data.

But we don’t. Instead of six feet we might heed caution and stand at least twenty-seven feet apart. What’s the R0? How long is someone infected and asymptotic?

Ok, those are good questions.

There’s a lot of unknowns here and on Deep Dive, Matt (@PlusEVAnalytics) talked through what we can do when there are so many unknowns.

Think of Tom Brady’s 2020 over-under passing line of 4,256 passing yards, or 266 yards per game. His last four years totaled; 4057, 4355, 4577, and 3554. But with Tampa Bay he’s got better receivers. And he wants to prove to everyone that he’s still got it! And he wants to do it without Belichick!! Yeah!!!

But how much do those things count for? Like how much we know about CoVid19, we don’t know. Matt gives us a guide though. Do the things we don’t know make one outcome more likely? With age, ambiguity, competition, injury and so on, the unknown makes the under much more likely.

Matt credits much of this thinking to Taleb but the concept of sports and gambling make it clear. It seems like the unknown parts of the CoVid19 pandemic tilt the outcomes in favor of what’s much worse. Good data is a necessary start but ambiguity must be considered too.

Latest book: Idea Trails, 50 ideas from blogging the last four years.

Jeopardy: Paradox of Skill

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Michael Mauboussin introduced the Paradox of Skill as a condition where as skills improve luck becomes more important to determine who succeeds. For example, combine many very talented basketball players and you get something like Kawhi’s shot.

The simplest way to think about the spectrum of luck to skill is to ask, ‘can I lose on purpose?’ If so, it’s more skill and the chance for the paradox.

So what about Jeopardy? Ken Jennings spoke with Nate Silver (of 538) about what his original run was like, what the GOAT challenge was like, and some of the logistics of playing.

Jennings explained that there were four aspects of Jeopardy that made him become the GOAT.

  1. Trivia knowledge.
  2. Buzzer skills.
  3. Game board strategy.
  4. Luck.

Let’s go through those and see where the Paradox of Skill exists and where it doesn’t. Given Mauboussin’s theory, we’d expect it to be present less often given Jennings long run of success.

Trivia knowledge. Ken Jennings is smart in Jeopardy question terms but so is everyone else in Jeopardy question terms. Everyone on the show has self-selected to be there and has passed a quiz to demonstrate their acumen.

“Most of the players know most of the answers most of the time,” Jennings told Silver.

Buzzer skills. The biggest advantage is winning because it means you’ve experienced the game. Unless there is a break to check an answer, Jeopardy is filmed in nearly real-time. Each game is followed by a break to change clothes and onboard new contestants before filming immediately begins again.

Like a basketball player getting into a rhythm, Jennings synced his buzzer cadence with Alex Trebek’s voice. When the buzz-in window opened, Jennings was first in line. (This is also the reason he attributes to Watson’s success).

Game board strategy. It was James Holzhauer who took strategy to its ultimate mathematical end. Jeopardy James figured that if he had the most experience buzzing in, but his competition probably also knew the answer, his best chance was ‘shock and awe’. That meant going for large clues and finding Daily Doubles.

Which are not quite randomly hidden. Jennings said, “The Daily Doubles are not placed randomly. A human physically looks at the gameboard, reads through some clues, and sees what type of clue might be Daily Double friendly. They try to scatter them but pseudorandomness is not actually randomness.” This same thing occurred with Spotify, Ben Cohen told Barry Ritholtz (22:25).

Luck. Ken admits he got lucky. There were probably dozens of categories he could have gotten bounced on. But they didn’t come up or didn’t come up at a bad time.

Ok, so is Jeopardy a game of mostly luck or mostly skill?

Trivia knowledge is a wash with similar competition. Buzzing is a hard skill (once Jennings really got going new contestants were offered longer training sessions to find the rhythm). Strategy is a wash too, now at least. Luck, is, well, just luck.

When Jennings was asked if Jeopardy is a sport, he pauses. It doesn’t really seem like a sport, but it’s the coverage by sport writers that feels the most accurate to him.

Like Jeopardy? We’ve written more about James Holzhauer and Watson. There’s also my ebooks.

Edit, the first version of this post had goofed up formatting. Have fixed.