wow really? Did soccer also go through a statistical revolution? I don't watch soccer at all and am pretty surprised to hear this. Did all the teams converge on a winning solution?
because of the structure of soccer (completely different to basketball, it is an invasion sport but statistically very dissimilar), it has completely reversed the ordering of the sport
there is significantly more strategic diversity, and teams that were unable to compete ten years ago are now able to compete effectively with wealthier teams (there is no catchup mechanic in soccer unlike US sports, ffp rules have also played a role but in the EPL at least the primary factor has been smaller teams using their budget more effectively)
the most recent changes have been: premium for coaches (distinct from managers) has increased significantly and a greater focus on set pieces (but this is going back to the future, twenty years ago EPL had a period where teams did this to level the field...today, they are doing this and it appears to be permanent).
it is also worth adding, i would say the majority of clubs that have tried a naive statistical approach have failed. Liverpool tried and are leading but are completely reliant on one player, Arsenal are doing better but reliant on set plays and their recruitment has been poor (they have had a stats team for over ten years at this point), the teams that have done well with stats (Brighton and Brentford) have a hybrid approach (and Brighton is further down the road with this, and have done significantly better...they use non-public resources far better, integrated with sport science, etc.)
if stats in soccer is a 90-minute game, we are still at minute 5
he has changed strategy multiple times based on team composition
possession-based at Barca, more pragmatic at Bayern, first City teams used wing-backs and insane attacking then acquired more defensive players and went back to suffocating opposition
playing out from the back is ludicrous only because teams who are unable to play that way insist on doing it, and the credibility of that strategy as a global minima has already passed (largely due to the issues Burnley had last year and Spurs/Southampton had this year)
this year has proved that there are multiple ways to win. imo, the most boring manager is Arteta who does the defensive stuff without (almost) any attacking players (and is, thankfully, failing...the worst thing would be a manager playing like a Serie A side and winning)
Pretty much all teams play more or less the same style of building up with the goalkeeper because data shows that even though you suffer more goals it's offset by scoring more.
How do you know you're not the midwit? To me it seems quite reasonable that author is the one over complicating everything, and in reality coding interviews are just not that bad.
[edit: they're not that bad in the sense that hiring is a inherently lossy process of projecting something incredibly complicated, like skills, personality, motivation, and situation into a 45 minute interview where only 1 or 2 dimension can be measured. If you increase the time/cost and do hire fast fire fast, then fine, you can get a better interview process, but it's not free. Other industries use stamps and certs to do that sorting, also not cost free. Coding interviews, yes we all hate it, but it's all a tradeoff.]
The author to me is pointing out that coding interviews are random and arbitrary, specially when done by junior engineers or engineers trying to protect their jobs. I’ve seen too many times coding interview given to the junior most engineer on the panel, specially at FAANG adjacent companies since they don’t know how to calibrate coding interviews correctly.
"Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Therefore by their fruits you will know them."
Tangentially, I wonder how people mentally model "too-good-to-be-true"?
"Everything is a tradeoff" is almost a core belief for me, but in the same time, in technology, the "too-good-to-be-true" events does turn out to be real every once a while (I'm using technology here as a general concept).
I do understand GLP-1 does have some downsides, like cost, or in my own experience, nausea. But the tradeoff seems negligible compare to the upside. Part of me feels like that there is some hidden trade-off somewhere that we're not discovering, but part of me also wonders if it's a once in while technology jump, where it is just better.
Anyway, I guess I'm just a bit wary to throw away the "everything is a tradeoff" mental model that has worked quite well for me.
Antibiotic tradeoffs are enormous. They can completely and permanently ruin your microbiome.
Giving them to children has been linked to many conditions such as obesity, allergies, and asthma [0]. They have saved countless lives from infections but their use and overuse has undoubtedly contributed to significant and widespread health problems.
That’s a bit of a straw man. While the benefits of antibiotics are certainly untold millions of lives saved, we’re only now understanding their long term impacts on our gut biome. Let alone their overuse in factory farms.
There are considerable numbers of people who have severe complications with antibiotics, and their overuse over time has left us in a position where the functional pools of antibiotics keeps getting smaller and smaller and the pool of superbugs gets more and more virulent.
Who knows the long term ramifications of this new class of weight loss drugs. This smells to me like the Prozac craze in the 90s when everyone was on it or giving it to their kids. Or the olestra boom until everyone was literally crapping their pants.
Or tangentially, the over proscribing of novel opioids. Look what that has wrought in our society.
Could this new class of drugs be helpful, absolutely. Do we know the long term issues, nope. I think there are people who can use this therapeutically and there are others who use it as a quick fix because they have no self control. In a lot of ways it also feels a little ironic to look at fiction like the food indulgent scenes of “Hunger Games” and South Park and see that happening for real.
> "Everything is a tradeoff" is almost a core belief for me, but in the same time, in technology, the "too-good-to-be-true" events does turn out to be real every once a while (I'm using technology here as a general concept).
Every once in a while? Our lives are better in so many tangible ways than they were even 100, 200 years ago.
Just for a start - instead of 50% of children dying before the age of 5, we're down to tiny fractions of a percentage.
But sometimes things we're trading off are less relevant and so the equilibrium changes e.g. losing weigh is hard, because humans evolved in low-calorie environment and being able to stock fat was important.
