Does exactly what it says on the tin.
And in the process explains how our best and brightest consultants naming F1 fantasy teams after their employer proves we need regulation of AI right now.
Oscar Howie
Karma: 1,423
Thanks for reading, and especially for commenting!
There are a few reasons for training on golf:
Biographical. I was introduced to golf as a teenager, not chess, and I spent thousands of hours since then playing and watching it. Maybe there are stories like Rory’s in chess, grand masters who persevered through a decade of struggle to overcome the odds and themselves, in which case I’d like to read those stories too.
Social. As far as I can tell Rory is much more famous than any chess player, and therefore faced greater social pressure to perform. Stress does strange things to us, and it’s useful to study people in high-stress environments. (And I expect his fame makes his story more likely to get clicked on, which also helps if your goal is to be an on-ramp.)
Environmental. There are some “real life” environments more like chess, and there are some “real life” environments more like golf. One difference is the highly chaotic nature of golf. It isn’t amenable to being solved algorithmically, at least not with the algorithms we currently have. Imperceptible differences in stance, swing, contact, and so on and so on, can be the difference between a slice, a hook, or a peach. (And how you get from conscious thought to motor control via the nervous system is its whole own thing.) Its vagaries are one reason why in some important respects it’s a more accurate model of the hardest problems we face than chess is, and why it’s a better teacher even than other sports of the humility, patience, and self-acceptance we’ll need to solve those problems.
This is art.
Saudi Arabia are also trying to buy Mo Salah, which I only realize is an EA tie-in now—after having written a personal essay about all the counterfactual lives he saved. Thank you for joining the dots.
The layers! I promise you this is the question I asked before I knew this bit of the bit:
Success is a mess.
Golf, if you allow it, teaches forbearance.
Doing hard things is hard. One of the hardest things to do is hit a tiny ball in a tiny hole hundreds of yards away. Tiny errors cause terrible outcomes. Control is a phantom. The promise and perils don’t bear thinking about.
When it all comes together, though, my goodness, it’s a hell of a party.
If it’s worth going where you’re aiming, there’ll be no straight line from here to there. Next time you’re stuck, remember Rory and what we went through with him.
Over on my blog, I wrote about prediction models, replacement value, and how I was taught about saving lives for pennies on the pound.
So long Mo Salah, and thanks for all the lives you saved.
Thanks for reading, and especially for commenting! I’m not sure we disagree much, but I think the emphasis matters.
For sure you’re right, there were many, many forces at play in the revolution. It’s a book-length story (tempting), and it wouldn’t be able to contain itself to hoops: there’s no Daryl Morey without Billy Beane (and there’s no Beane without Jonah Hill, and there’s no Jonah Hill without Bill James…). Morey says the Rockets owner pitched him they were looking for a Moneyball type, and the owner says it was reading the Lewis book that made him overhaul his organization by injecting analytics (they tried to hire Beane before Morey). Curry is no less a product of his environment than anyone else, and that environment was shaped by these guys from the inside, and by Nate Silver and Benjamin Morris and the rest of the blogosphere from the outside.
And I still want to defend the position that Curry was singularly responsible for inflecting the curve in the mid-2010s.
By the time of Steph’s breakout in 2014⁄15, Morey had been in post long enough to become the face of the nerds (it was his name Barkley was yelling, right before the bit about not getting any girls in high school), and not long enough to have won anything (which isn’t necessarily shade: it takes time to build things, especially when you’re the insurgency and you don’t have a cheat code). Despite eschewing the midrange and shooting more and more threes, his Rockets’ offense topped out at 4th and their net rating at 7th. They shot more threes than anyone else for the first time in 2014, and their offense was 7th. They’d won one playoff series in seven seasons. The reason Barkley could punch down at him was because he hadn’t succeeded rising up.
Steph is different. He could stand out while fitting in: far from being a self-consciously nerd-coded outsider pointing at spreadsheets and telling OGs they don’t know their own business, he’s the son of an NBA shooter out there shimmying the shimmy. And he proved the doubters wrong in terms they couldn’t fail to comprehend: not if you know where to look our offense overperforms its underlying talent level, but you can torch everyone in your path shooting threes and look irresistibly cool doing it.
It’s not just that Steph won over fans. He won over everyone, including all the decision-makers not called Daryl who’d been resisting the revolution. He made it crystal clear that people in positions of power had been looking for edges in the wrong places. That, according to me at least, is why the league-wide curve shoots up from 2015, not from when Morey gets his gig in 2007 or when he trades for Harden in 2012.
I think this matters. EA already has lots of people running the Morey playbook, optimizing their own decisions within their own organizations. What we don’t have are many Stephs, getting out there and performing the new way of thinking so successfully and so joyfully that it changes everyone else’s behaviour.
A couple of things on the local level:
Placing as much emphasis as you do on illegal screens seems kinda wild to me. Not that it wasn’t a thing at all (I don’t really know), and they certainly set a trend in setting so many off-ball screens, but it seems unlikely to me that them moving a bit was more impactful than them being set in the first place, or that they were being set for—and by! - the Splash Brothers. Ben Taylor at Thinking Basketball is great on this.
I agree Steve Kerr is not an analytics guy, but it seems like he is an elite model builder in his own way, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence Steph breaks out in Kerr’s first season. Based on his map of the court, filled in with what he’d learned as a shooter in Phil Jackson’s Triangle, and from taking over as Suns GM towards the end of Seven Seconds or Less, he could see clearly enough to know the best bits of each to borrow and blend to get the most out of Steph, and that wasn’t asking him to be like Jordan or Nash. He knew the power of the open three, and of cutting and screening, and he could imagine an offense not being dependent on the midrange or the pick and roll, and that a superstar with Steph’s gravity could be more effective off the ball. He had the credentials (and the soft skills) to get people to go along with something new. And he was willing to stick his neck out to try it even though he’d look silly if it failed.
Morey and the Rockets contribute to the first league-wide uptick in threes from 2010-15, but Moreyball only takes its extreme final form post-Steph. Maybe they would have got to five-out spacing anyway, without the Death Lineup doing switchy small-ball first, and Harden would have found his way to all the iso stepbacks anyway, and they would have spent a Game 7 missing 27 straight threes anyway, who knows. Their counterfactual trajectory is lost to history because after 2016, every roster-building move and tactical tweak they made was geared towards beating the greatest team ever assembled at their own game.
Being right is not enough
I agree with lots of this, to the extent that I’m in the process of starting a new blog/newsletter with a view to reaching a new audience (online sports nerds like me) with a new frame (analytical principles you already know work in sport also unlock hidden value in other—more important—domains).
(I’m Chief of Staff at CEA and co-authored some of our posts linked to in your post. I’m currently on parental leave so not directly involved in CEA’s other ongoing marketing and comms efforts; I do think things like our stories campaign were working along the lines you recommend.)
Having your mutually beneficial trade proposals turned down flat because the other side believes the world is a zero sum game sure is…a relevant lesson in the live environment.
The best auction leagues allow for weekly waivers and free agency, so there’s much more ongoing decision-making than is optimal under the one-transfer-per-week regime. (The demands of being on top of this, combined with us all being on the wrong side of the age curve, were among the things that made us decide it was time to call it a day for TWFC.)
I’m retired, rip.
I played the official FPL for years unseriously, and then started a draft league (the Theo Walcott Fan Club) with friends, before turning it into an auction league. I highly recommend getting yourself in an auction league if you aren’t already. (Draft leagues are also way better than official FPL, because each player can only be owned by one manager; auctions are the pinnacle of the game.)
Fantasy auctions are about the most fun you can have (tonight, I am Billy Beane!), and about the best way to practice rigorous analytical thinking (cost-effectiveness! Ever-changing counterfactuals! Emotional attachment to my own public predictions!). Some might dread to think how many hours I spent building and refining my player pricing model over the 9 years TWFC existed. But I don’t regret them: I carry the lessons I learned with me every day, and they’re one of the main sources of inspiration for my new Blog with No Name (working title). There will be blogs about this! Like and subscribe!
Maybe blogging will get me back in the game..
Legend. Love that you went for it! Looking forward to learning why I was wrong to ignore The Franchise Universes..
Peak Andy. Applying discount rates to pledge shortfalls is delightful on so many levels. Thanks for writing this!
I might just take my own
footnoteidea seriously and start writing a sports blog for impact reasons, and because you only live once.We can have all sorts of fun learning from sporting rigour and the glory of randomness. Sporting competitions and complex collaborations. Sporting politics and power structures. Sporting regulations and unwritten rules. Sporting incentives and ingenious-to-idiotic strategies.
You can get ahead of the curve by subscribing here, if you’d enjoy reading headlines like these ones I just found on the back of an old envelope:
You don’t have to stick to your picks
Solving the most pressing problems starts with updating your preseason predictions
Kicking the ball in the goal is not what makes goalscorers great
From shot selection to cause prioritization
The referees are not the problem
Regulating AI is the handball rule and the offside rule in a trenchcoat
EA adjacent, but not like that
You’re right that CEA (including EA Funds) is the last project remaining within EV.
We are spinning out to build an entity structure optimized for an independent CEA. Among the lessons we learned from the EV experience were that entity structures and associated regulatory requirements can be complex, especially when operating in multiple jurisdictions, and that getting our structure right matters in many ways. To take one example: the EV structure requires two CEOs (in the US and the UK), whereas our new CEA structure will require only one.
CEA grew the number of people engaging with our programs in 2025 by 20–25% year-over-year, beating our targets of 7.5–10% without increasing spending, and reversing the moderate decreases in engagement with our programs during 2023–24.
We were joined in January by two new Directors: Loic Watine, who will lead EA Funds, and Rory Fenton, who will lead our new Strategy and M&E function.
You can read our full 2025 progress report here.
Give my Blog a name!
At long last, a way to save lives cost-effectively and get your name on the building.
A younger me was on record saying he’d sooner sit in a bath of beans than run a marathon. Sacrificing a portion of dignity still seems preferable to sacrificing both knees. These days, though, I’m more based, so I’m putting something more precious than my knees or my dignity up for sale to the highest bidder.
Blind auction. All proceeds to GiveWell. Deadline day Sunday, 26 April.