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Pure stats work in circumstances that are repeatable, easily quantifiable and where you have a huge dataset to learn from past experience. That's why baseball i
by spupe 5y ago
Pure stats work in circumstances that are repeatable, easily quantifiable and where you have a huge dataset to learn from past experience. That's why baseball is such a perfect example. It's just not so easy to measure how good someone is at solving novel problems, compared to how well they can hit or throw a ball in perfectly repeatable circumstances.
- pfortuny 5y agoAlso, work is not a contest, or a competition.
- dan-robertson 5y agoI think that the lesson from baseball is that people spent a long time basing decisions on measurable but irrelevant things like the shape of a player’s bottom, and they thought they were being clever and reasonable and making good decisions. Lots of software development isn’t solving particularly novel problems but it can be quite varied, and certainly performance can be hard to measure and output can be dependent on things outside of one’s control (eg if an experimental project doesn’t pan out). But I don’t think that should mean that one should give up and judge people based on things that seem reasonable but don’t work (eg apparently algorithms style questions) or actually irrelevant things like (probably) height or (presumably) the shape of someone’s bottom.