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Comment by m0nty | Hacker News Reader

He basically admits to most of what you have just said.

> this piece is intended as a fun thought experiment, not a definitive ranking, or a scholarly contribution to the field of military history. I believe some of the results from this project, especially Lee and Rommel, provide interesting data points for broader discussions of their tactical abilities. In no way do I claim my analysis provides the full picture, or anything close to it.

So yes, method is sketchy, is incomplete, is simplistic.

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Perhaps we could change the title to something less baity? I'm tempted to suggest "Military-themed toy data science project". But if there is more interest than that in there somewhere, then maybe a title that reflects whatever that may be?

It’s not a proof but it’s a creative way to measure this. I’ve only seen WAR used in baseball. It’s interesting to see it applied to another domain even if there are holes in it.

Well, if it's not a proof, then it's not a proof, right? You see more interest and creativity than I do in the article here, and that's fine. But surely that doesn't affect the fact that the title's claim to have proved Napoleon was "the Best General Ever" is a) a gargantuan overstatement, and b) unhelpfully provocative. People would probably be more charitable to the article if it hadn't totally misrepresented itself in this way.

Can you prove it's a "gargantuan overstatement"?

I think you know that's not a reasonable thing to ask for a "proof" for.

On the other hand, anything which someone claims to have proved is a reasonable thing to expect a proof for.

I'm not the one throwing clickbait headlines around.

If the title were changed to something less baity it would be contrary to all the other articles on HN that go from more sensible titles to something very baity.

It makes me wonder how such a poor article made it to the front page of HN...

Idk, I think it is a pretty interesting thought experiment. Sure it's not focusing on overall tatics or deeper reasoning, but you can't really measure that with data.

The author is just looking at purely combat performance as some sort of way to rank them. Anything deeper wouldn't really work from a data perspective because we really don't have the best records from back then.

Exactly, it's just some dude having fun with sabermetrics.

Sabermetrics works for things like baseball with enormous amounts of data to work with over long timescales and a very well-defined and limited domain with explicit rules and constraints. This hardly applies to war, especially over millenia. If anything, this guy's analysis just proves the point. Reminds me of the tongue-in-cheek "power rankings" people make for granola bars or hot dogs.

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