Author Archives: kevin

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links for 2010-08-15

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  • Hacker News | Ask HN: Learning Web Design
    reference, to send to people who ask. 3. Learn some art-history. You don't have to learn very much, but the more your learn, the more you'll have a grounding in what has been seen/done/discussed/etc. Most importantly, you will be able to be eloquent about form/aesthetics that you like. It is hard to talk about visual things, so in this way, it is imperative to have a good set of words when talking about form. A few great books: Robert Hughes' The Shock of the New, Reyner Banham's Theory & Design in the First Machine Age, Rosalind Krauss' Passages in Modern Sculpture.
  • Like Any Sensible Narcissist, I’m Locking My Twitter Account
    good writing from paul carr - the more we learn about people the less interesting they seem
  • What most free kicks will look like ten years from now
    Flip the ball into the air then volley it. You can get under the ball, way more dip.
  • Moneygolf 2010 - Ancient game, new science. - Slate Magazine
    good series. I wish they'd focused more on the data. Use of short videos is interesting, they're engaging but anything longer than 30 seconds and you lose the audience. Backs up everything DFW said about the vast gap between the pros and amateurs. Consistency is way underrated
  • Expect reactivity not proactivity to be the shape of things to come | Jonathan Wilson | Football | guardian.co.uk
    Interesting how you can succeed if you're willing to be bored in training: "The Premier League side who probably best maintained their shape last season was Fulham, their progress to the final of the Europa League finally gaining Roy Hodgson proper recognition in England. The key to their achievement was long, hard, not particularly interesting work on the training field, working on positional play, and the key to whether Hodgson can enjoy similar success at Liverpool – which is probably the most interesting tactical issue at any Premier League club — is whether he can persuade a higher grade of player similarly to submit to what pretty much every Fulham player admitted was a punishingly boring training regime."
  • Ask HN: All startup websites look the same
    The important stuff in the common design pattern has been tested to death - everyone who matters is using clicktracking, a/b/x testing and deep user analytics. The reason they all look the same is the same reason that all infomercials or porn sites use the same basic structure - that's what testing indicates will convert best. Some people know this empirically, some are just blindly aping the fashion, but there is wads of data backing it. Lots of whitespace improves readability, as does the use of a sans serif font. Deviate from either and a lot of people will hit the back button because they can't easily read your text. A clear call to action massively improves conversion. The rectangular button in a dominant colour will increase signups by 10-20%.
  • Brink Lindsey on politics
    I think the typical view of politics from inside a partisan mindset is to see politics as a battle of the good guys versus the bad guys. Maybe the good guys are on the left, maybe the good guys are on the right, but it’s this Manichean struggle and the way to get progress is for the good side to win and impose their will. Mill sees through that and sees that, in fact, politics is a dialectical process. At any given time truth is partly on one side and partly on the other. It’s more a battle of half-truths and incomplete truths than of good versus bad. The excesses of each side ultimately create opportunities for the other to come in and correct those excesses. Liberalism, in Mill’s view and in mine, provides the basic motive force of political change and progress. It will go astray, it will have excesses, it will make terrible mistakes – and a conservatism that is focused on preserving good things that exist now will be a necessary counterweight to that liberalism.
  • list of discussion boards using stack exchange software
  • The Ballad of Sara and Clare Bronfman
    moe tkacik story about two daughters of a billionaire that get hooked by a cult. large parts profile the cult leader, who started in multi-level marketing and worked his way up. I am fascinated by guys like this, who build power and status and money from nothing, just their own words. Surely if God created humans He would not have let them fall prey to people like this as easily as they do
  • profile of garry shandling
    "I have this very abstract idea in my head," he confides. "I wouldn't even want to call it stand-up, because stand-up conjures in one's mind a comedian with a microphone standing onstage under a spotlight telling jokes to an audience." That kind of comedy is fine, he says, but for him it's in the past. Shandling is striving to exist—and thus to be funny—completely in the moment. "The direction I'm going in is eventually you won't know if it's a joke or not," he explains, describing his new act, which he has been quietly testing in clubs where his name never appears on the marquee. "What I want to happen is that I talk for an hour and the audience doesn't realize it is funny until they're driving home."
  • The Men Who Live Forever
    on running barefoot, eating vegetables only, not getting injuries Tarahumara men have a taste for corn snacks and beer, for instance. They're hard workers, but come downtime, they party like a rap star's roadies. According to one of the few outsiders to witness a tesguinada -- a full-on Tarahumara rave -- women were ripping the tops off each other in a bare-breasted wrestling match, while their husbands watched in glassy-eyed, drunken paralysis. Tarahumara men love sports, booze, and gambling so much, they'll stay up all night to watch a game, down enough beer in a year to spend every third day buzzed or recovering, and support their teams by literally betting the shirts on their backs. Sound familiar? But here's where American and Tarahumara men part company: Many of us will be killed by heart disease, stroke, and gastrointestinal cancers. Almost none of them will.
  • Anne Holland's Which Test Won - which email subscribe button did better
    the one asking for your email address only - to show to people who want to collect tons of data from customers, which reduces their sign up rate 50% or more
  • Memoir by Tony Judt on sex, academia, dating a graduate student

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Lectures for Basketball Coaches: Fatigue is Entirely a Mental Phenomenon

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The last three summers I've coached at the best basketball camp in the East Bay. One big part of camp are the "defense" and "skills" lectures. I've wanted to do this for a while, but I'm not at camp, and I'm a way better writer than I am a motivator, so I'm posting my lectures here. This is Part I in a series of posts. Close your eyes. I want you to raise your hand if you think pain is a good thing, if it's good that the world has physical pain. Okay, you can open your eyes. Now I want you to describe what a world without pain would be like. Your mom is cooking dinner and tells you to bring a pan from the stove to the table. The pan is burning hot, but you can't feel pain, so you grab it and bring it to the table. When you look at your hand, it's red and covered in blisters. Or you are playing around with a friend and he starts twisting your arm. Usually if it hurts too bad you would say "Uncle," but you can't feel it hurt, and you keep fighting until he twists your arm out of its socket. I could go on - you step on a sharp object in bare feet, etc. If we didn't have pain, we might end up doing a bunch of silly things and have no idea that we were hurting ourselves. So pain is our body's way of telling us that we need to stop what we're doing because if we keep doing it, there could be long term effects. Okay, now think about fatigue. Raise your hand if you think getting tired is a good thing. Okay. Well, let's imagine that you never got tired. You're on the track team and running a marathon. Because you don't get tired, you feel great and practically sprint the whole thing. You're in first place by a mile, all the way until mile 20, when your muscles collapse from lack of energy and you fall in a heap on the track. Even though people compete and exercise all day, it's pretty rare that someone collapses because their muscles fail. Why? Because we get tired and stop long before we get to the point where our muscles fail. So fatigue is our body's way of saying, "you need to keep some energy in the tank," because it was hard to tell when you'd need those spare reserves. Imagine being the most tired you've ever been, two hours into a practice, running sprints, when suddenly a tiger bursts into the gym, and you need to run for your life. Your brain is trying to make sure you have enough energy left to outrun the tiger. Well as it turns out, our brain is actually extremely conservative. That means that your brain starts telling you that you're tired way before you actually get tired. Scientists have done studies of people on treadmills. They'll take measurements of people who are exhausted - unbelievably tired, and what they find is that their muscles are actually fine, that they could keep going in theory. Their muscles aren't holding them back, their brain is holding them back. So what does this mean? When you get tired, your body is still ready to go. You have way more potential energy sitting inside you, ready to be tapped if you can will yourself to do it. The biggest enemy is your brain. It's tough but you can train yourself to overcome your limitations, with practice. You have to push yourself every day a little further, and a little harder, than you did the day before. When you start hurting, tell yourself that you're not tired and go harder. It's not something everyone can do, which is why you have to practice every day and push yourself to your limits.

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Theory of conversation, part 2

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Last week I noted Scott Adams' thoughts on how to make good conversation. Making conversation is a skill that I need to work on. Good
  • Tell a story, if you are a good story teller, or funny
  • Create something from nothing; it's hard to describe this category, but think about standing in a nondescript environment but I'm thinking of inventing a nickname/story, accuse someone of something, being funny without telling jokes, saying something in a funny/cocky way, etc. Often this is where the most memorable in-jokes and stories are made. I'm extremely not-good in this area. Pickup artists are extremely strong in this area.
  • Along the same lines, conversations about risky or sexual topics
  • Gossip, if you're careful not to shit where you eat
  • Asking the other person to describe an accomplishment or event, because people like talking about themselves and it's a way to raise their status
  • Give a compliment, if you are not too obvious about it
  • Outline choices you've made and the reasons for doing so
  • Describe why you spend your time the way you do
  • Describe productivity hacks
  • Describe a problem and then collaborate on a solution
Bad
  • Checking your email or answering your phone while we're talking. This drives me nuts.
  • Asking yes/no questions
  • Terse factual questions
  • Silence/Having nothing to say - depends on how well you know the person, situation but generally you should have some stuff to talk about.
  • Speaking during a momentous occasion, like standing on a mountain watching the sun set.
  • Commenting on how awkward silence is
  • Apologizing - just don't do it
  • Continually bringing up a past failing to signal to the other person how apologetic you are - again, just don't do it
  • Trying to be funny if you are not funny
  • Telling a bad story. Most things that don't involve staring at your computer can become good stories if you tell them well enough but I'd estimate about 2% of the population possesses this skill.
  • "You had to be there" events, as Adams says
  • A youtube video, unless you can actually watch it in a quiet room
  • Hijack the conversation to talk about yourself
  • Interfere with an on-going conversation between funny people
  • Gossip, if you are shitting where you are eating and provoking your partner to wonder what you say about her behind her back.

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Play up the difficulty of genius to preserve your own impressiveness

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Two podcasts I listened to on BART this morning both addressed the same topic: the differences between successful and 'average' people. On Radiolab, Malcolm Gladwell talked about how we're comfortable saying that there's some innate difference between average people and geniuses, but how it's very uncomfortable to say geniuses are just people that love what they're doing more than everyone else. He cited Gretzky, who watched hockey games when he was 2 and cried when they were over, as someone who was so passionate about the game that that was all he could think about, and that's what made him so good - he always wanted to practice more and try out new things, because hockey was his life. Then on This American Life this guy was discussing how we the people expect startups to have some mythical creation story and to be founded out of adversity. There's a lot of emphasis on building something out of a garage, or building a newer, better tool because getting something done, like uploading a video, was too hard before YouTube. While people should get excited to hear that there aren't vast differences between themselves and so-called geniuses, many people get very uncomfortable, because it makes their own lack of accomplishments even more unimpressive. That's especially grating when you've built a career around doing what you're doing, and you spend the majority of your waking hours working in that area.

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Have interesting conversations

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Solid advice from Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert, on how to have interesting conversations:
As a general rule, the more dangerous or inappropriate the conversation, the more interesting it is. You'll have to use your judgment to know when you've crossed the line. Also as a general rule, conversations about how people have or will interact are interesting, and conversations about objects are dull. So steer toward topics that involve human perceptions and feelings, and away from objects and things. You also want to avoid any topic that falls into the "you had to be there" category. For example, if someone is describing a vacation, avoid asking about the food. Nothing is more boring than a description of food. Ask instead if the person answered email from the beach. That gets to how a person thinks, and how hard it is to release a habit. And it could provide an escape route to move the conversation to yet another place. Sometimes it takes two or three bounces to get someplace of mutual interest. You've heard of the Kevin Bacon game, where every actor is just a few connections away from Kevin Bacon. Likewise, you almost always have something interesting in common with every other person. The trick is to find it. As with the Kevin Bacon game, you'd be surprised at how few questions it takes to get there.

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Why do directors end movies ambiguously?

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Last night I watched A Serious Man, which ends with lots of loose ends that haven't been tied up. I was startled and annoyed at the ending. Why do filmmakers do it? 1) If you know you're not going to resolve the film's ending, as a director your incentives change. You can make it as complicated and then just leave everything for the viewer to figure out. 2) The filmmakers know how the story would end but just aren't telling us, which is condescending. 3) It's possible that I just don't like it because I'm not expecting it and if my expectations change I will like it more. 4) Not having the movie end is a device to allow filmgoers to signal their artyness, and also shut off the movie to the large majority of the population.

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Coaches at the World Cup: Conservative and stuck in their ways

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I’ve blogged before about how football coaches are risk-hating morons. The World Cup’s made me realize that soccer coaches can be moronic, too. Here are 4 examples of coaching stupidity.

1. Failing to adjust to high altitude conditions
Johannesburg is 5,500 feet above sea level. Pretoria, Polokwane and Rustenburg are all roughly 4000 feet above sea level. High altitude means that the oxygen in the air is more thinly spread, making it harder to recover and harder to sustain sprints than when you’re playing at sea level. It also takes time for the body to adjust to these conditions, which is part of the reason Mexico is so good when they play in the Azteca; it’s 6000 feet above sea level and visiting teams only have a few days to adjust before they have to play. Bolivia are horrible, but beat Brazil and Argentina in qualifying at their home stadium of La Paz, 11,000 feet above sea level.

Coaches knew about the altitude, and they knew what stadiums they were going to be playing in, including the US, who played every game at high altitude. Yet many still conducted their training camps at sea level, including the US, who held theirs in Princeton, despite the seeming availability of Colorado Springs (10,000 feet above), where every US Olympic athlete trains. To their credit, they arrived two weeks early, unlike some teams, who waited for a few days before their first game to show up in South Africa and undoubtedly suffered.

Another wasted high-altitude opportunity: Because of the altitude goalies were kicking the ball 20 yards further than at sea level. This meant that they were routinely landing the ball around the opponent’s penalty box. Why on earth did no one treat every single punt and goal kick as a scoring opportunity? Why were forwards routinely underestimating the distance the ball would travel, letting the opposing keeper gather it? When your goalie collects the ball, put six guys on the opponent’s penalty box, chuck the ball in there and who knows what could happen. The only reason the ball was previously going into midfield was because goalies couldn’t punt the ball further.

2. Horrible tactics
Coaches have been making horrible tactical decisions all tournament. It’s possible that they have been doing so in previous tournaments, but now thanks to sites like Zonal Marking, we can get the full measure of their incompetence. Germany are good, but they’re not good enough on paper to be beating other teams by 3 and 4 goals. But every team they’ve beaten for 4 has displayed tactical rigidity/incompetence, either failing to pick up Ozil, or packing the middle and leaving the wing backs open.

In the club game, if you don’t have a left-footed fullback, you go out and buy one. If your country doesn’t have one, you have to adjust and play different tactics. There have been more varied lineups in the World Cup than in club soccer and the majority of coaches haven’t been able to adjust. To his credit, Bob Bradley was one of the few who made tactical adjustments and whose teams looked much better in the second half than the first.

3. Not being aggressive enough
Going into the final group game, Algeria could have advanced, but needed to win by two goals. From a strategic perspective, they were completely indifferent between winning 1-0, tying 3-3 and losing 10-0. As an underdog needing a low-probability outcome, they should have employed a high-variability strategy – throwing players forward, committing everyone to the attack. Instead, they chose to pack it in, ensuring that they went home. Only in the 91st minute did they show any sort of tactical boldness, sending enough players forward to be vulnerable at the back. Of course this led to the US counterattack and goal, but you have to gamble to score, and as I mentioned above they should have been indifferent between a tie and a loss.

Also, when you’re down a goal, you have two considerations: A) scoring, and B) giving up a second goal and probably the game. A always dominates B, especially as the game winds down, but coaches will wait until the 90th minute to bring on a striker for a defender, throw players forward, or otherwise give themselves a chance to win. I’m amazed that teams aren’t trying crazy formations and waiting to bring the defenders/goalkeeper forward until the very last minutes. In this world cup, no teams have yet scored on an empty net, I don’t think, because the goalkeeper was trying to get forward into the attack. Risk losing in the 80th because you gambled and lost, instead of playing conservatively and losing because you only gave yourself three minutes to try and score.

4. Not having your goalkeeper wear bright colors
In one study, players were twenty percent more likely to miss penalty kicks when the goalkeeper was wearing red. It’s well known that people will focus on brightly colored moving objects. When an attacker has to focus on the movement of the ball, navigate through ranks of defenders, he might get one tenth of a second to look at the goal. In that brief snapshot, if you’re the defense, you’d love for the striker to aim at the brightly colored object – the goalkeeper. And yet, during the crucial elimination game against Ghana, Tim Howard was wearing – of all colors – BLACK. Which would have been fine if Ghana was really bad at soccer, or if this wasn’t the World Cup. When the stakes are this high and you’re passing up opportunities like this to improve your odds, you’re a moron.

5. High coaching turnover
Looking for a reason African teams underperformed at the World Cup? Nigeria and Ivory Coast replaced their managers within three months of the World Cup, and Cameroon and South Africa changed coaches less than a year before the tournament started. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you’re not familiar with the personnel, the culture, or the people who hired you, you’re going to find it extremely difficult to succeed. In their classic book Hard Facts, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton cite a study showing that it took about 15 years for studio heads to find the sweet spot on the job, and that virtually no one had instant success. Granted, running a soccer team is easier than a multibillion dollar company, but the principle applies. Football associations read too much into a game or tournament’s results – the US and Ghana were essentially neck and neck through 90 minutes, but the result is that one team had a wonderful tournament and the other didn’t meet expectations. Great coaches from medium teams might have a really tough group, lose two games and have an above-average tournament. There’s too much noise in the space of three or four games to get a feel for a coach, but they’re all expected to resign if they go out early.

Chalk another one up for the status quo bias. My hunch is that referee performance has improved more than coaching tactical performance at the World Cup; a coach from 1970 in the modern era would do better with his team than a ref from 1970 would do with his performance. An inept coach can still win against other inept coaches, but everyone notices when referees blow it.

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BART thoughts

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  • People have been asking me why I don't drive, which shows that they haven't considered the question. In dollar terms it's not that much more expensive than driving ($11 vs. $8 or so), and when I take BART I gain an hour and twenty minutes of Internet-free reading time. If my time's worth $17 an hour, then I'm gaining around $22 every day by riding BART. Plus I just don't have that many good podcasts and I hate sitting in traffic. I don't think people seriously consider the effects of having someone else drive you places; it frees up all of that time you would have spent behind the wheel. This is a reason for government-subsidized public transit that I hadn't considered before.
  • BART riders are amazingly literate; pretty much everyone reads books, newspapers or Kindle. The rest play games on a smartphone or text. Forget about asking whether Google will save newspapers, ask whether BART will. It's a great place to pick up girls.
  • If I make a website with really bad usability, like you can't even figure out where the "Add to Cart" button is or learn what the product does, then it'll hurt my bottom line, because users won't spend time trying to figure out how to use it, they'll just use a different website to get their shopping done. If the government makes something with bad usability, so that you're confused about what is and isn't legal, their profits go up, not down, because they get to fine everyone that didn't figure it out. This is onerous and gives the government totally perverse incentives; adding a usability-clarifying sign might cost them $200,000 in revenue. Avoid lock-in whenever you can.
  • When I'm parking I have a simple heuristic that gets me the best spot, every time: I go up and then park in the first available spot. Minimizing driving time is smarter than minimizing walking time. Plus it takes the stress out of trying to find a spot that's closest to the stairs. So from now on, simple rule; park in the first spot you see.
  • Also, always buy your ticket for the next day, or next week, when you're leaving BART at night. You're less stressed then than in the morning, and there's no crowd around the ticket machines.
Last but not least, never run for trains.

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What evidence would a person accept to change their mind about their religious beliefs?

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One of the core principles of rationality is an ability to update your beliefs based on new evidence. Thus a good heuristic for a person's intellectual honesty, or rigor, is whether they've stated conditions which would lead them to change their beliefs. A rational person in favor of social promotion, for instance, should be willing to change her mind if evidence shows that social promotion is damaging to the schools where it's practiced. Reading through Eliezer Yudkowsky's FAQ page today got me thinking about what evidence would convince someone to change his mind about religion. If I was an atheist I would consider the ability to read my thoughts or determine information that I've never shared with anyone as good evidence, but then it's possible that technology will develop to the point where we can read minds easily. Maybe the ability of a prospective deity to answer scientific or historical questions that we don't have answers to in a logically consistent way, or the ability to control nature, cleave a playing card with a thunderstrike or something. Those aren't great tests, and they're also vulnerable to a jump from, "I can't explain this event" to "an all-knowing or all-powerful being must have done it." What evidence would a rational religious person have to accept to believe that there is no god? I'm not really sure, as much of religious belief is based on faith. I suspect you could get a good answer by asking people why they believe in their god and not in, say, Thor or Zeus.

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