Nate Silver: belief

Transcript context

…There are too many three-point shots, I would say. Maybe a little bit, but if you go watch footage of a game from the ’90s or something, this is more aesthetically appealing. It shows off some of the athleticism, I think, but the fact that you have less variety — this is true in poker too, by the way. There are fewer different varieties of loose-aggressive versus “Tight Aggressive” poker players. You can’t get away as much with having a flawed, eccentric strategy and then making up for it in other ways, which is a shame. Maybe in the long run it means we’re not exploring different branches of the tree as well, and that can be problematic. But it’s a bad time — when things get hyper-efficient, then maybe the quirky players . . . I saw a video yesterday about Major League Baseball batting stances, and there used to be guys that had very, very funky batting stances and things like that. Those have largely disappeared. If it cost you two-hundredths of a point of batting average — so you hit .289 instead of .291 — then there’s enough money on the line, and enough resources and training, and enough sports science where that’ll probably get beat out of you, potentially. Will Joel Embiid ever win a title?…

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