Gladwell: Dave Berri, my favorite sports economist

[sp6r=underrated]

This is an old interview but just that sentence kills me and deals more with football than the NBA but what the hell.

Dave Berri, my favorite sports economist, has even shown that there is no correlation between draft position for quarterbacks and pro performance: in other words, a quarterback taken in the first round is no more likely to be a great pro than a quarterback taken in the third or fourth round. He argues -- and I agree -- that the college game is just so different from the pro game that any kind of prediction is impossible. So what should we do? Well, if I were a NFL GM, looking for a quarterback in the next two drafts, I wouldn't even try to figure out in advance who would be the best. I'd put Colt McCoy, Graham Harrell, Chase Daniel, and Sam Bradford's names into a hat, pick one out, sign him to a short term contract and try him out. The only way to tell whether someone can play pro quarterback is to actually let them play pro quarterback. That's consistent with a lot of what I argue in “Outliers,” which is the real reasons for success are so complicated and so unknowable that we have to switch from trying to predict performance to being patience and content with measuring performance.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/28813545

BTW: Berri proved no relationship by excluding all the low round picks who never played in the NFL

[Dr Positivity]

The connection is unsurprising because while Gladwell is a very talented/entertaining writer, the flaws in Berri articles like the above, are unfortunately right in line with the information selectiveness and bias that make up most of Gladwell's books. The difference is Berri appears to be more of the honest fool simply not seeing why his study is wrong, Gladwell appears to be knowledgeable he's publishing deceptive BS, but does it because he feels telling a good story and entertaining his audience and "inspiring" them matters more than the truth. Some quotes in this takedown are revealing http://blog.chabris.com/2013/10/why-mal ... d-why.html :

I am a story-teller, and I look to academic research … for ways of augmenting story-telling. The reason I don’t do things their way is because their way has a cost: it makes their writing inaccessible. If you are someone who has as their goal ... to reach a lay audience ... you can't do it their way.

And as I’ve written more books I’ve realised there are certain things that writers and critics prize, and readers don’t. So we’re obsessed with things like coherence, consistency, neatness of argument. Readers are indifferent to those things.

"The mistake is to think these books are ends in themselves. My books are gateway drugs – they lead you to the hard stuff."

Simply put he has the perspective of an artist more than a scientist. Whereas Berri thinks he's a scientist and is bad at it.

[Doctor MJ]

To paraphrase a famous quote awkwardly:

"I'm not upset that you're wrong, I'm upset because now I know you don't know how to know things"

I didn't have any set opinion about Gladwell back when he first started "making" Berri. I felt vaguely positive about him, and felt like I should probably read him at some point. And then Berri happened. He had walked into a discipline he didn't know and anointed the dumbest guy in the room as the revolutionary. For someone else it would just be embarrassing, but this is what Gladwell DOES, he's an intellectual tourist. Nobody expected him to be the world's expert in every realm he visited, but you'd just kinda expect that he'd be a good traveller, seeking out knowledge on all fronts, and not singling out 1 guy as the genius unless he there was really something clear.

With Berri, he showed me that he's really just looking for someone who makes extremely bold statements with enough of a reputation in some circle that people might think he could be taken seriously. And maybe even worse, I don't think he's looking for this because he's a scam artist (though that would be bad enough), the way he kept touting Berri over time gives me the impression that Gladwell is a professional mark and he doesn't eve know it. It's hard to get more pathetic than that.

[Witzig-Okashi]

Hmm....Comparing Joe Montana to Ryan Leaf.

Nothing like using extremes and cherry picking in an argument to make your case, which he made a frequent use of. Did he mention any of the QBs who did good on the Wonderlic and were good QBs in the league and bad Wonderlic scores to subpar QBS

I'm not too familiar with Gladwell, though. How much of an influence Berri is to him is my question of the day....