AFF's Doublethink

JVL has posted a followup explaining in further detail why Malcolm Gladwell’s recent piece on Davids, Goliaths, and the full court press is so off:

5) As it happens, there are two basketball strategies which underdogs have used throughout the ages to to alter the rules of the game. Gladwell mentions neither of them.

The first is the Four Corners. The four corner offense–spreading the ball in the half court and taking as much time off the clock as possible–was used all through the ’60s and ’70s and parts of the ’80s by underdog teams to give themselves a chance at upsetting better teams. Because if you’re an underdog, you could win a game 20-18; but if the score got into the 60s, your chances diminished. The NCAA eventually fought this strategy–because it was so effective–by instituting the shot clock.

The second is the zone defense. The zone presupposes this: The further you get from the basket, the smaller the difference in shooting percentages between good and bad teams. That’s generally (though not always) true. So overmatched teams often pack into a zone determined to cut off any shots closer than 10 feet on the assumption that they have a better chance dueling with outside shots where the differential between good and bad is most often no more than 10 percentage points.

Why ignore these strategies? To fit the story to one of Gladwell’s broader arguments:

It seems obvious that Gladwell fixed on the full-court press because he thought he could use it as a stalking horse for his Outlierscontention that great people (or in this case, teams) aren’t really great–they just had the luxury of getting 10,000 hours of practice, or having rules tailored for their traditional success, or whatever. Gladwell’s middle-school girls let him tell his readers that the ability to work hard is what’s rare, not physical talent. Using statistcs-based strategies (like the four-corners or the zone or even Princeton’s back-door weave) wouldn’t allow him to make that claim.

I think JVL is almost spot on, at least in the example of the girl’s basketball team. The other examples that Gladwell cites in the piece — the computer programmer who came up with a naval strategy that beat traditional thinkers in a board game; Lawrence of Arabia’s strategy — are better data points that more persuasively make his overall point: thinking outside the box is the only chance a huge underdog has of winning a decisive victory. So why rely on the girl’s basketball team as the primary anecdote? Because the story is so damn cute. Gladwell’s a sucker for cute stories. A great anecdote is more valuable than an accurate anecdote. This is why his books are of limited utility: They’re great reads, but they’re not terribly useful if you’re trying to get a sense of how the world actually works.