I also like the analogy, letâs run with it. Suppose Iâm reasoning from the point of view of the movement as a whole, and weâre trying to put together a soccer team. Suppose also that there are two types of positions, midfield and striker. Iâm 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] Iâll 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 youâre 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.
Thatâs not to say that you should fill your entire team with wannabe strikers. When you select your team youâll 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 youâd want training for the role leans more towards the high-skillcap positions.
There are all sorts of ways this analogy doesnât 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 doesnât 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 donât 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 âreal worldâ, you donât 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 also like the analogy, letâs run with it. Suppose Iâm reasoning from the point of view of the movement as a whole, and weâre trying to put together a soccer team. Suppose also that there are two types of positions, midfield and striker. Iâm 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] Iâll 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 youâre 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.
Thatâs not to say that you should fill your entire team with wannabe strikers. When you select your team youâll 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 youâd want training for the role leans more towards the high-skillcap positions.
There are all sorts of ways this analogy doesnât 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 donât 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 âreal worldâ, you donât 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 youâve both taken the ball and run with it ;)