Mike's notes.
January 14, 2020. Double Jeopardy Daily Double: Jeopardy is incredibly instructive. It has come up a number of times on the blog. The best summary is the June 2021 NPR Planet Money podcast. First, Jeopardy is not a trivia game. Jeopardy is a television show. It’s a game within a game within a game within… Continue reading The many games of Jeopardy
The first breakthrough in swimming was imitation. Like with high jump, seeing a new way to do things helped. The second breakthrough was underwater footage. What’s next? Adi Wyner asked, is there anything beyond video helping with swimming improvements? It’s a good question. Let’s get some sweet advanced analytical fruit from the random forest up… Continue reading USA Swimming Analytics
On May 12, 2021 Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio announced a one million dollar vaccination lottery. Teens were eligible for a college scholarship. Two days after the announcement Ohio doubled its vaccinations-per-day figure to thirty-three thousand people. Success! Maybe. “States with lottery programs,” noted the Boston Globe “are not doing any better compared to states… Continue reading Ohio’s Vaccine Lotto
How much should new information matter? Or, is this time different? Because sometimes it’s not. “Merlin (Heidemanns) said that essentially the polls gain more weight. It’s not that we construct a model and weight the polls. We don’t take a weighted average of the polls, we estimate latent parameters and the polls are data. That… Continue reading 3 prompts to being Bayesian
“I’ve grown accustomed to this type of (probabilistic) thinking because my background consists of experience in two disciplines; sports and poker, in which you’ll see pretty much everything at least once. Play enough poker hands and you’ll make your share of royal flushes. Play a few more and you’ll see your opponent has made a… Continue reading Poker’s Appeal?
This idea is related to Tyler Cowen’s idea of ‘meta-rationality’ which you read about in this pay-what-you want pdf. Perhaps there’s no better time to see, sort, and participate in over reactions than week one of the NFL. Though I only watch a full game or two a year, there are a lot of lessons… Continue reading An easy way to change your mind.
It was a nice coincidence that on the same day I bought BRKB stock I learned about the optimal foraging equation. What’s great about this is the ability to tweak different variables to affect the value.
Well before he won The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, Richard Thaler wrote The Loser’s Curse. Along with co-author Cade Massey (well before he hosted the Wharton Moneyball podcast), they found that NFL teams tend to trade too many assets to choose higher in the draft. With the idea… Continue reading Thaler, Massey, and Losers
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… Continue reading Jeopardy: Paradox of Skill
Recently on Twitter there’s been a trend of “it’s not that bad” tweets gong around. One said that half of Italy’s CoVid19 fatalities were people with three or more existing illness while people with no other illnesses existed in less than one-percent of deaths. Among the ‘maybe it’s not that bad’ list are Elon Musk,… Continue reading Disagreeing in a Crisis
The Waiter's Pad 