Football Freakonomics: Tackling the Old Defense-Wins-Championship Cliche
We all know the cliché. Go ahead, put on your best John Facenda voice and say it with us:
DEFENSE. WINS. CHAMPIONSHIPS.
What’s that even supposed to mean? That defense is more important during the playoffs than the regular season? That defense is generally more important than the offense?
Or is the saying maybe the collective echo of some grizzled defensive coordinator in a long-ago championship game, trying to fire up his troops during halftime? “Men, you and I know that our teammates on offense are good men, tough men, talented men. And they helped get us here. But let me be clear, gentlemen: DEFENSE WINS CHAMPIONSHIPS!”
What’s that even supposed to mean? That defense is more important during the playoffs than the regular season? That defense is generally more important than the offense? Read More »
Latest Posts
TV’s Relationship to Mental Retardation and Autism
TV is bad for children. Wait, no it’s not. Yes, it is! And it’s really bad for their hearts!
Here’s the latest paper on the topic, from Michael Waldman, Sean Nicholson, and Nodir Adilov. Using a natural experiment to rule out the possibility of reverse causation, the authors find “a strong negative correlation between average county-level cable subscription rates when a birth cohort is below three and subsequent mental retardation diagnosis rates, but a strong positive correlation between the same cable subscription rates and subsequent autism diagnosis rates.” Read More »
All Hail the Stand-Up Meeting!
I’m so pleased to see that stand-up meetings are gaining ground (or at least exposure, in the Wall Street Journal). I am on the record as someone who dislikes meetings in general; I also work much of the day standing up (at a great adjustable desk that Ikea unfortunately no longer makes).
As Rachel Silverman writes:
Read More »Stand-up meetings are part of a fast-moving tech culture in which sitting has become synonymous with sloth. The object is to eliminate long-winded confabs where participants pontificate, play Angry Birds on their cellphones or tune out. …
How to Get Your Kid to Do Chores
There’s a new iPad app for parents to incentivize children to do chores. HighScore House! sets up a market for parents and children to assign points to chores and exchange those points for rewards.
Co-founder Kyle Seaman tells us that they’ve tracked 150,000 tasks from about 6,000 users in their beta version (full version will launch in a couple months).
HighScore House! shared some data with us: 43 percent of their users are kids between 5 and 9 years old, with an average task completion rate of 54 percent. Girls have a 2 percent higher completion rate than boys. In general, kids seem to favor low-hanging fruit: lower value tasks (usually easier ones) have a higher completion rate. Read More »
“Never Follow Your Dreams”: Mark Cuban Answers Your Questions
Last week, we solicited your questions for Mark Cuban — serial entrepreneur, Dallas Mavericks owner, and blogger, who recently published an eBook called How to Win at the Sport of Business.
Here now are Cuban’s answers. A lot of answers. Granted, most of them are short but Cuban can pack a lot into a terse words (unlike a few million politicians and businessfolk we know). He has some strong words on financial engineering and, if you read carefully, lots of good career advice. My hands-down favorite: “Never follow your dreams. Follow your effort.” Read More »
The Least Fun Way to Predict a Super Bowl Winner
From Elizabeth Stanton at Bloomberg:
The New England Patriots will win the Super Bowl by at least three points even though the New York Giants have the appeal of “a cocktail party stock,” according to a quantitative money management firm that’s correctly picked the team covering the point spread for eight consecutive years.
Analytic Investors LLC in Los Angeles has documented a tendency on the part of Super Bowl bettors to overestimate the chances of the team that rewarded them more during the regular season — the team with the higher alpha, in investment parlance. In 2008, that was the favored Patriots, who lost to the Giants 17-14. This year, it’s New York.
“Everyone thinks the Giants are rolling right now, a lot of people in my office even,” said Matthew Robinson, a portfolio analyst for global and Japanese equities at Analytic and the author of this year’s analysis. “They like the Giants, but they have faith in the model as well.”
On the other hand, do I label this “the least fun way” because I have a Giants bias and am blind to my blindness?
At least this is less ridiculous than the Super Bowl Indicator.
Bad Names for Online Dating
New research by Jochen E. Gebauer and two co-authors, summarized in the BPS Research Digest, analyzed data from a German dating website and found that an unpopular name will lessen your chances of getting a date in the online dating universe:
The main finding here was that people with unfashionable names like Kevin or Chantal were dramatically more likely to be rejected by other users (i.e. other users tended to choose not to contact them). A user with the most popular name (Alexander) received on average double the number of contacts as someone with the least popular name (Kevin) … However, the researchers also found that people with unpopular names were more likely to smoke, had lower self-esteem and were less educated. What’s more, the link between the popularity of their name and these life outcomes was mediated by the amount of rejection they suffered on the dating site – as if rejection on the site were a proxy for the amount of social neglect they’d suffered in life.
Apparently, Kevin really is more than a name.
The Politics of Political Prediction Markets
For years, I have argued that the best way to track what really matters through election season is to follow the political prediction markets. The one difficulty is that these markets aren’t really available to the general public. Sure, the University of Iowa runs a market, but because it’s for research purposes, the maximum bet is set at only $500. And while I track InTrade closely, they’re based in Ireland, and are frowned upon by American regulators. Likewise, Betfair won’t deal with American customers. But all that may be about to change. Read More »
A Great Example of Bias Within Academia
It is amazing how good we are — even the smartest, most rational people among us — at not recognizing our own biases. (Danny Kahneman
We recently put out a podcast called “The Truth Is Out There … Isn’t It?” about how people decide what to believe about everything from global warming and nuclear risk to UFO’s. It was inspired by the research of Dan Kahan and his colleagues at the Cultural Cognition Project; they have found that we systematically filter our beliefs through our personal and political filters. In other words, we allow our biases to influence what we think about theoretically non-ideological issues, but we aren’t aware of that influence. Read More »
Save Me From Myself: A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast
Our latest podcast is called “Save Me From Myself,” and it’s about the use of commitment devices. (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live via the media player above, or read the transcript below.)
This is a topic we’ve addressed quite a bit over the years, including in a Times column. (Weirdly enough, the Wikipedia entry on commitment devices leads with our definition. I don’t know whether to feel proud or, a la Groucho Marx*, even more nervous about Wikipedia. FWIW, Wikipedia has gotten so, so much better than when I lodged this complaint years ago.)
A commitment device is essentially a clever means to help you commit to a course of action that you know will be hard. For an individual, this might mean losing weight, quitting smoking, or anything else involving willpower. Read More »
Jacky Kaba Keeps Writing Interesting Papers on Race
I blogged a few years ago about Amadu Jacky Kaba under the headline “A Scholar to Keep Your Eye On”:
Amadu Jacky Kaba is a Liberian-born striver who first came to Seton Hall University as a basketball player and, several degrees later, has returned as an assistant professor of sociology and anthropology. Like our friend Roland Fryer, Kaba is a black scholar who studies a lot of racial issues with a perspective and a latitude that is unavailable to white scholars.
If indeed you had kept your eye on Kaba, you would have seen that he keeps writing lots (and lots) of interesting papers. Read More »
, which downplays the America-is-in-decline meme; meanwhile, Latin America 
(Good WSJ review 
and 
. You can also watch it on 
