Nate Silver: evaluation

Transcript context

…But, examples. Let’s say it increases your variance, so the good examples will look really good, but as a predictor, how hard should we be selling it? What’s the average impact, the marginal impact? You talked a little bit before about how hard it is to be marketed, so there’s a little bit of this, too, in sports. Actually, a colleague of mine, Ben Lindbergh, just wrote a book that’s not published yet, but that I was reading about. [The Only Rule Is It Has to Work is available in May. — Ed.] He and Sam Miller, another baseball stathead, were given, basically, ownership of a minor league team in Sonoma, California, for a year. They kind of had carte blanche, but they encountered baseball culture in a very head-on way, and yeah, the team did pretty well. It was a very obscure minor league, but if the baseline is making half of your decisions right, and you make 55 percent of your decisions right, or 53 percent right, because you’re using analytics, that’s a pretty big gain at the margin. Yet, in a sport as noisy as baseball, it’s going to take a lot of time to show up. Basketball is less noisy, I will grant you, but in general, I think the Spurs are fairly analytics friendly, and the Rockets and the Warriors. Basketball is probably the best example. Let me ask you about a sport which I find totally baffling, soccer. [laughter] There’s not much of a natural time unit. That’s why it’s hard to squeeze in commercials, and not many points. There are assists, not many. They’re not always well defined. Defense, my goodness, more confusing to this American than cricket, yet market salaries of soccer players are determined. There’s some papers on market salaries. The small amount of data we have seem to predict those salaries very well. The fact that soccer behaves in normal ways, does this mean A, we can still get it all done with limited data, or does it mean B, having more data doesn’t really help us that much, and all of sports is a bit like soccer, and we’re ultimately just throwing up our hands and saying, “My goodness, it might as well be cricket”?…

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