To annoy everyone with a sports analogy, the defense and midfield positions are every bit as important as the glamorous striker positions, and if you’ve got a team made up primarily of star strikers and wannabe star strikers, that team’s going to underperform.
But the marginal impact of becoming a star striker is so high!
(Just kidding – this is a great analogy & highlights a big problem with reasoning on the margin + focusing on maximizing individual impact.)
I also like the analogy, let’s run with it. Suppose I’m reasoning from the point of view of the movement as a whole, and we’re trying to put together a soccer team. Suppose also that there are two types of positions, midfield and striker. I’m not sure if this is true for strikers in what I would call soccer, but suppose the striker has a higher skillcap than midfield.[1] I’ll define skillcap as the amount of skill with the position before the returns begin to diminish.
Where skill is some product of standard deviation of innate skill and hours practiced.
Back to the problem of putting together a soccer team, if you’re starting with a bunch of players of unknown innate skill, you would get a higher expected value to tell 80% of your players to train to be strikers, and 20% to be midfielders. Because you have a smaller pool, your midfielders will have less innate talent for the position. You can afford to lose this however, as the effect will be small compared to the gain in the increased performance of the strikers.
That’s not to say that you should fill your entire team with wannabe strikers. When you select your team you’ll undoubtedly leave out some very dedicated strikers in favor of someone who trained for midfield. Still, compared to the percentage that end up playing on the team, the people you’d want training for the role leans more towards the high-skillcap positions.
There are all sorts of ways this analogy doesn’t apply directly to the real world, but it might help pump intuitions.
[1] For American football, the quarterback position definitely exhibits this effect. The effect can be seen clearly in this list of highest-paid players.
There are all sorts of ways this analogy doesn’t apply directly to the real world, but it might help pump intuitions.
Yeah, I think this model misses that people who are aiming to be strikers tend to have pretty different dispositions than people aiming to be midfielders. (And so filling a team mostly with intending-to-be-strikers could have weird effects on team cohesion & function.)
Interesting to think about how Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, etc. manage this, as they select for very high-performing recruits (all strikers) then meld them into cohesive teams. I believe they do it via:
1. having a very large recruitment pool
2. intense filtering out of people who don’t meet their criteria
3. breaking people down psychologically + cultivating conformity during training
I found it interesting to cash this out more… thanks!
Ah, so like, in the “real world”, you don’t have a set of people, you end up recruiting a training class of 80% would-be-strikers, which influences the culture compared to if you recruited for the same breakdown as the eventually-selected-team?
But the marginal impact of becoming a star striker is so high!
(Just kidding – this is a great analogy & highlights a big problem with reasoning on the margin + focusing on maximizing individual impact.)
I also like the analogy, let’s run with it. Suppose I’m reasoning from the point of view of the movement as a whole, and we’re trying to put together a soccer team. Suppose also that there are two types of positions, midfield and striker. I’m not sure if this is true for strikers in what I would call soccer, but suppose the striker has a higher skillcap than midfield.[1] I’ll define skillcap as the amount of skill with the position before the returns begin to diminish.
Where skill is some product of standard deviation of innate skill and hours practiced.
Back to the problem of putting together a soccer team, if you’re starting with a bunch of players of unknown innate skill, you would get a higher expected value to tell 80% of your players to train to be strikers, and 20% to be midfielders. Because you have a smaller pool, your midfielders will have less innate talent for the position. You can afford to lose this however, as the effect will be small compared to the gain in the increased performance of the strikers.
That’s not to say that you should fill your entire team with wannabe strikers. When you select your team you’ll undoubtedly leave out some very dedicated strikers in favor of someone who trained for midfield. Still, compared to the percentage that end up playing on the team, the people you’d want training for the role leans more towards the high-skillcap positions.
There are all sorts of ways this analogy doesn’t apply directly to the real world, but it might help pump intuitions.
[1] For American football, the quarterback position definitely exhibits this effect. The effect can be seen clearly in this list of highest-paid players.
Yeah, I think this model misses that people who are aiming to be strikers tend to have pretty different dispositions than people aiming to be midfielders. (And so filling a team mostly with intending-to-be-strikers could have weird effects on team cohesion & function.)
Interesting to think about how Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, etc. manage this, as they select for very high-performing recruits (all strikers) then meld them into cohesive teams. I believe they do it via:
1. having a very large recruitment pool
2. intense filtering out of people who don’t meet their criteria
3. breaking people down psychologically + cultivating conformity during training
I found it interesting to cash this out more… thanks!
Ah, so like, in the “real world”, you don’t have a set of people, you end up recruiting a training class of 80% would-be-strikers, which influences the culture compared to if you recruited for the same breakdown as the eventually-selected-team?
I really enjoy the extent to which you’ve both taken the ball and run with it ;)