What Gladwell is Missing: Institutional Memory | Hacker News Reader

What Gladwell is Missing: Institutional Memory

billmill.org

31 pointsllimllib15 comments

All of these criticisms miss Gladwell's point. The point isn't the full court press. It's that the teams that were beaten by the full court press thought it broke some sort of unwritten rule of youth basketball that supposedly reads, "don't full court press".

The whole point of the article is that in areas of competition or warfare, very often, one side lives (and sometimes dies) by obeying rules that don't actually exist. Goliath thought that, win or lose, the battle should happen hand to hand and David knew to use a sling and a rock to his advantage.

When one side is playing by a certain set of rules that the other side doesn't have to acknowledge, then the side with fewer rules has an advantage. That's the point.

As someone who has coached basketball I call B.S. You don't put on a press because if you are playing against a team that knows how to beat it you will get destroyed because they will run you into the ground. It's a suboptimal strategy because of this.

What he is essentially saying is that in any two team dynamic system you can gain a short term advantage by playing the suboptimal strategy. In this case it's not going to work next year, because most teams will train how to beat it.

It's like telling your military to charge the opposition. This may surprise them, and you might win, because the opposition isn't expecting it. But next time don't expect it to work.

I'm talking about the original Gladwell article. In the original article, Gladwell points out that there are rules that competitors limit themselves to despite the fact that they aren't explicitly laid out. The coaches of other teams were upset at this particular team because, as they put it, it's unfair to keep using a full court press against 12 year old girls.

The other example Gladwell referenced was of a naval simulation primarily played by people well versed in military strategy. While most players used traditional strategies seen throughout history, one player found that the optimal strategy was something that would never work in real life, but was totally feasible within the rules of the game. The other players cried foul because he went against the "spirit" of the game, despite not breaking any rules.

Again, the point of the article: The best way to win is to not limit yourself by rules that don't exist.

[edit] I realize we're talking about two different things. I don't really have an opinion either way in regards to running the full court press more often at other levels of competitive basketball. I still think people are missing the point of the original article, and Gladwell isn't helping himself by going on about the full court press thing.

There are two ways you can interpret this:

- rules that competitors limit themselves to despite the fact that they aren't explicitly laid out

- don't train to defend against the suboptimal strategy

While the correct answer may be the first, logic suggests it's the latter, as it's much simpler.

I think that in jumping from his evidence to his conclusion he missed the point.

I don't understand why Gladwell seems to be the only person that gets a free pass to make totally illogical arguments, but have hundreds of smart people say "oh, well sure, the argument sucks, but you're missing the point".

Gladwell's article says that the underdog can win by using unorthodox tactics. One of his examples is a team of undersized, unskilled 12 year old girl basketball players that made it to the Nationals by employing the full court press and running the other teams into the ground. The emphasis in their training was in conditioning. Another example was T E Lawrence's use of mobility to defeat the Turks in WWI.

Mill criticizes the article by saying that no team has made it to the NBA championships by using the full court press. It seems that Mill has missed the whole point of the article: if you are going to lose, do something different. You can beat the incumbents by introducing disruptive technology.

> if you are going to lose, do something different.

Rather, I say if you're going to lose, build for the future. Don't optimize for seventh instead of ninth place, try to win the championship a few years from now.

That is true in a place like the NBA where equality among competing organizations is a goal of the governing body, i.e. the draft hypothetically helping the losers become equal to the winners. Just keep plugging along and eventually you will be bailed out.

In something like business, or in Gladwell's example lower level sports, this is not the case. Small schools will always be small, they will always have fewer kids to pick from for their team and thus need to get unorthodox to gain an edge.

In the business world, if I'm competing with 20 people vs 20,000 people I need to get unorthodox to shake things up, even if my solution isn't perfectly optimal.

There's also more opportunity to invent a whole field in business than there is in NBA basketball. Totally agreed.

Nonetheless, I think my point in the conclusion holds: if a company is not optimizing what you think they should be optimizing, you're more likely expecting the wrong goal than they are failing to optimize for the goal you expect.

He didn't miss the point at all. What he said was that the Warriors aren't trying to win a few marginal games this year, they are trying to build themselves back into the kind of team that can win championships, and you don't get there by training a team to press.

Dean Oliver used to write "The Journal of Basketball Studies" (http://www.rawbw.com/~deano/ ), and I recall him making the point that the press basically randomizes games. If you are a poor team, that _will_ help you win more games. But perhaps developing a culture that randomizes games isn't going to lead you to championships.

Not sure I buy the argument, but it deserves more thought, and is certainly better than you are making out.

Judging by the comments around here, quite a few of you seem to really want Gladwell's analogies to work.

However, the story of David and Goliath is not one of trying new techniques after failed attempts with old ones, it is the story of an act of God (and possibly technology.)

Additionally his basketball example doesn't work.

I think his point is as simple as: "when what you're trying doesn't work, try something new."

Terrific!

But the objection is with the clarity of his examples.

Actually, Gladwell's basketball analogy does work, it just doesn't work the way folks seem to think that it does.

The basketball team didn't win because it decided to use a full court press.

Reread the story. The kids trained so they could run a full court press the whole game. The other teams didn't have the athletic ability to keep up.

You can't just play the game differently. You have to do what it takes to be successful playing the game differently.

So you're saying people misinterpreted Gladwell's argument?

So his argument was unclear?

I read it while suffering from the flu, meaning I was a bit out ofit, and that is the takeaway I had - not just the full court press, but the training, and the wearing the other team out.

He says it explicitly.

The guy who trained his girls to do it says it explicitly. "I have them running around for hours" etc. and that other coaches A) don't train their kids to have that level of athletic endurance, and B) don't respond to the use of the strategy by changing their routines.

If people miss it, they are either bad at reading comprehension or deliberately wanting to misunderstand to lampoon Gladwell.

I'm not a huge Gladwell fan. I felt totally ripped off by Blink. But I was pleasantly surprised by the essay.

> So his argument was unclear?

I didn't think so. Then again, I read the story as written instead of treating it as a basketball lesson and changing the facts to fit my world view.

I've no doubt that a full court press can be broken with sufficient skill and althetic ability and that a broken press is worse than no press. (I suspect that that's why NBA teams rarely use the press.)

However, if your opponents don't have that skill/ability, using the press apparently does put them at a disadvantage. That disadvantage may be sufficient to make up for other advantages that they have.

I find the "optimal" talk somewhat amusing.

We're talking about playing an opponent that has made certain decisions. You can win by taking advantage of those decisions. It doesn't matter what would happen against a different opponent until you run into said opponent.

That's especially true of perfect opponents. The fact that one strategy would fail worse than another against a perfect opponent doesn't matter unless you're playing a perfect opponent. Since they rarely exist and you're going to lose anyway, worrying about them seems dumb.

In some sense, there are no points for approximating optimality.

You're rarely playing an optimal opponent and there are no points for "optimality".

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