Information Processing

Steve and Corey talk to legendary NCAA and Olympic wrestler and coach Dan Gable. Gable describes the final match of his collegiate career, an NCAA championship upset which spoiled his undefeated high school and college record. The Coach explains how the loss led him to take a more scientific approach to training and was critical for his later success. They discuss the tragic murder of Gable's sister, and the steps 15-year old Gable took try to save his parents’ marriage. Gable describes his eye for talent and philosophy of developing athletes. Steve gets Gable's reaction to ultimate fighting and jiujitsu.

Transcript

Dan Gable vs Larry Owings - 1970 NCAA Title Match (video)

The Champion (1970 documentary on Gable's senior NCAA season)


man·i·fold /ˈmanəˌfōld/ many and various.

In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point.

Steve Hsu and Corey Washington have been friends for almost 30 years, and between them hold PhDs in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Theoretical Physics. Join them for wide ranging and unfiltered conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.

Steve Hsu is VP for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University. He is also a researcher in computational genomics and founder of several Silicon Valley startups, ranging from information security to biotech. Educated at Caltech and Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Oregon before joining MSU.

Corey Washington is Director of Analytics in the Office of Research and Innovation at Michigan State University. He was educated at Amherst College and MIT before receiving a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in a Neuroscience from Columbia. He held faculty positions at the University Washington and the University of Maryland. Prior to MSU, Corey worked as a biotech consultant and is founder of a medical diagnostics startup.


Added: The wonders of YouTube! A great interview with Chris Campbell -- perhaps Gable's best wrestler!

Steve and Corey talk with Steven Broglio, Director of the Michigan Concussion Center, about concussion risk, prevention and treatment. Broglio describes how the NCAA emerged from the deaths that almost led Theodore Roosevelt to outlaw college football. He also explains recent findings on CTE, why females may be at greater concussion risk, and why sleep is critical to avoiding long-term brain injury. They discuss how new rules probably make football safer and debate why New England is so down on kids playing football. Steve wonders whether skills are in decline now that some schools have eliminated “contact” in practices.

Steven Broglio (Faculty Profile)

Michigan Concussion Center

NeuroTrauma Research Laboratory

NCAA-DoD Grand Alliance: Concussion Assessment, Research, and Education (CARE)


man·i·fold /ˈmanəˌfōld/ many and various.

In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point.

Steve Hsu and Corey Washington have been friends for almost 30 years, and between them hold PhDs in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Theoretical Physics. Join them for wide ranging and unfiltered conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.

Steve Hsu is VP for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University. He is also a researcher in computational genomics and founder of several Silicon Valley startups, ranging from information security to biotech. Educated at Caltech and Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Oregon before joining MSU.

Corey Washington is Director of Analytics in the Office of Research and Innovation at Michigan State University. He was educated at Amherst College and MIT before receiving a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in a Neuroscience from Columbia. He held faculty positions at the University Washington and the University of Maryland. Prior to MSU, Corey worked as a biotech consultant and is founder of a medical diagnostics startup.

This is in the special Sports issue -- just in time for Rio :-)

We Are Nowhere Close to the Limits of Athletic Performance

For many years I lived in Eugene, Oregon, also known as “track-town USA” for its long tradition in track and field. Each summer high-profile meets like the United States National Championships or Olympic Trials would bring world-class competitors to the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field. It was exciting to bump into great athletes at the local cafe or ice cream shop, or even find myself lifting weights or running on a track next to them. One morning I was shocked to be passed as if standing still by a woman running 400-meter repeats. Her training pace was as fast as I could run a flat out sprint over a much shorter distance.

The simple fact was that she was an extreme outlier, and I wasn’t. Athletic performance follows a normal distribution, like many other quantities in nature. That means that the number of people capable of exceptional performance falls off exponentially as performance levels increase. While an 11-second 100-meter can win a high school student the league or district championship, a good state champion runs sub-11, and among 100 state champions only a few have any hope of running near 10 seconds.

... Freeman Dyson speculated that, one day, humans would use genetic technologies to modify themselves for space exploration—making themselves more resistant to radiation, vacuum, and zero gravity, perhaps even able to extract energy directly from sunlight. Insertion of genes from entirely different species, like photosynthetic plant genes, brings a whole new meaning to the term GMO: Speciation seems a definite possibility.

Human athletic ability might follow a similar trajectory. The nature of athletes, and the sports they compete in, are going to change due to new genomic technology. Will ordinary people lose interest? History suggests that they won’t: We love to marvel at exceptional, unimaginable ability. Lebron and Kobe and Shaq and Bolt all stimulated interest in their sports. The most popular spectator sport of 2100 might be cage fights between 8-foot-tall titans capable of balletic spinning head kicks and intricate jiu-jitsu moves. Or, just a really, really fast 100m sprint. No doping required.

How good is high school talent scouting for football? The star system used in college recruiting seems to have good validity in predicting an NFL career.

SBNation: ... The chance of a lesser-rated recruit being drafted in the first round is nowhere close to what it is for a blue-chipper.

Consider this: While four- and five-star recruits made up just 9.4 percent of all recruits, they accounted for 55 percent of the first and second round. Any blue-chip prospect has an excellent shot of going on to be a top pick, if he stays healthy and out of trouble.

For those who don't like percentages, here are some more intuitive breakdowns based on the numbers from the entire 2014 draft:

A five-star recruit had a three-in-five chance of getting drafted (16 of 27).
A four-star had a one-in-five chance (77 of 395).
A three-star had a one-in-18 chance (92 of 1,644).
A two-star/unrated recruit had a one-in-34 chance (71 of 2,434).

Compare to standardized testing and intellectual achievements later in life:

Success, Ability, and all that: ... In the SMPY study probability of having published a literary work or earned a patent was increasing with ability even within the top 1%. The "IQ over 120 doesn't matter" meme falls apart if one measures individual likelihood of success, as opposed to the total number of individuals at, e.g., IQ 120 vs IQ 145, who have achieved some milestone. The base population of the former is 100 times that of the latter!

In other words, if you find similar numbers of IQ 120 and IQ 145 individuals achieving some milestone (e.g., CEO of tech-focused startup or STEM research tenure; roughly speaking, 120 and 145 might be equally likely for those populations), then the odds ratio at an individual level is ~ 100 to 1 in favor of the 145s.

David Epstein's new book The Sports Gene is getting a lot of attention. For example, this New Yorker review is quite good, as are these interviews: NPR, Atlantic.

Atlantic: ... I lost so much sleep over this. I literally almost backed out of writing this book, because the issues of race and gender got me so nervous. Eventually my agent and one of my colleagues convinced me to just do it, in the best way I could.

But I remember being at the 2012 American College of Sports Medicine Conference, talking to the head of the physiology department at a major research university. The head of the department was telling me that he had data on ethnic differences in response to a certain dietary supplement during an exercise program, and that he would never publish it. He didn't want to get into that issue.

I heard this a number of times: He was worried it would be extrapolated into saying somehow that there were also innate intellectual differences between black and white people. When I heard that, I said, "That is a huge problem. That means science could be disappearing into the filing cabinet, into the garbage cans, because people aren't willing to take this on."

And that's when I thought, I have to do this. I'm not going to do that same thing and leave it on the cutting-room floor.

Of course, it's all been covered on this blog already: 10,000 hours rule is nonsense (Epstein's example of the former basketball player turned high jumper who barely trained yet won the world championship is excellent), myostatin mutation, etc.

"Horses ain't like people, man, they can't make themselves better than they're born. See, with a horse, it's all in the gene. It's the fucking gene that does the running. The horse has got absolutely nothing to do with it." --- Paulie (Eric Roberts) in The Pope of Greenwich Village.

The last post, entitled To the brainy, the spoils, linked to an Economist article about management consulting. It would appear that in the public sector, the highest paid employees tend to work in a tax-exempt sports-entertainment complex that is, for strange historical reasons, hosted by the higher education system. (Via UOMatters)

Q: How does Oregon football compete against the top teams in the country (four BCS appearances in the last four years) with recruiting classes that almost never break the top 10, and are usually ranked below 20? (In today's 2013 rankings, they're at 42!)

A: Great coaching by Chip Kelly and his staff. This video explains some of the basic concepts behind the Oregon spread offense. See also The zone read option game for Kelly's extremely well-written explanation of the Oregon running attack. Even a casual investigation reveals that football is by far the most complex sport in terms of coaching and game strategy. Too bad its days are numbered.





One of the big adjustments I had to make in coming to Michigan State was to Big 10 football. The offensive execution reminds me of high school play ;-)  Does any team squander more athletic talent year after year than Michigan? (As usual: currently #5 recruiting class, but will probably have another mediocre season next year!)

All dopers? Or just a minority? I had friends in high school who took steroids. At the time, many coaches, doctors and "sports scientists" claimed the drugs didn't work (placebo effect, they said). But it was obvious that they did. I distinctly remember this as the point at which I became very suspicious of statements by medical and "scientific" authorities. If they were wrong about something as simple as this, what else could they be wrong about?

Der Spiegel: Angel Heredia, once a doping dealer and now a chief witness for the U.S. Justice Department, talks about the powerlessness of the investigators, the motives of athletes who cheat and the drugs of the future. 

He had been in hiding under an assumed name in a hotel in Laredo, Texas, for two years when the FBI finally caught up with him. The agents wanted to know from Angel Heredia if he knew a coach by the name of Trevor Graham, whether he carried the nickname “Memo”, and what he knew about doping. "No", "no", "nothing" – those were his replies. But then the agents laid the transcripts of 160 wiretapped telephone conversations on the table, as well as the e-mails and the bank statements. That’s when Angel "Memo" Heredia knew that he had lost. He decided to cooperate, and he also knew that he would only have a chance if he didn’t lie – not a single time. “He’s telling the truth,” the investigators say about Heredia today. 

SPIEGEL: Mr. Heredia, will you watch the 100 meter final in Beijing? 

Heredia: Of course. But the winner will not be clean. Not even any of the contestants will be clean. 

SPIEGEL: Of eight runners ... Heredia: ... eight will be doped. ... 

Heredia: Yes. When the season ended in October, we waited for a couple of weeks for the body to cleanse itself. Then in November, we loaded growth hormone and epo, and twice a week we examined the body to make sure that no lumps were forming in the blood. Then we gave testosterone shots. This first program lasted eight to ten weeks, then we took a break. 

SPIEGEL: And then the goals for the season were established? 

Heredia: Yes, that depended on the athlete. Some wanted to run a good time in April to win contracts for the tournaments. Others focused on nothing but the trials, the U.S. qualification for international championships. Others cared only about the Olympics. Then we set the countdown for the goal in question, and the next cycle began. I had to know my athletes well and have an overview of what federation tested with which methods. 

SPIEGEL: Where does one get this information? 

Heredia: Vigilance. Informers. ... 

SPIEGEL: What trainers have you worked together with? Heredia: Particularly with Trevor Graham. 

SPIEGEL: Graham has a lifetime ban because he purportedly helped Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery, Justin Gatlin and many others to cheat. Who else? 

Heredia: With Winthrop Graham, his cousin. With John Smith, Maurice Greene’s coach. With Raymond Stewart, the Jamaican. With Dennis Mitchell ... 

SPIEGEL: ... who won gold in the 4 x 100 meters in 1992 and today is a coach. How did the collaboration work? 

Heredia: It’s a small world. It gets around who can provide you with something how quickly and at what price, who is discreet. The coaches approached me and asked if I could help them, and I said: yes. Then they gave me money, $15,000 or thereabouts, we got a first shipment and then we did business. At some point it led to one-on-one cooperation with the athletes. 

SPIEGEL: Was there a regimen of sorts? 

Heredia: Yes. I always combined several things. For example, I had one substance called actovison that increased blood circulation – not detectable. That was good from a health standpoint and even better from a competitive standpoint. Then we had the growth factors IGF-1 and IGF-2. And epo. Epo increases the number of red blood cells and thus the transportation of oxygen, which is the key for every athlete: the athlete wants to recover quickly, keep the load at a constantly high level and achieve a constant performance. 

SPIEGEL: Once again: a constant performance at the world-class level is unthinkable without doping? 

Heredia: Correct. 400 meters in 44 seconds? Unthinkable. 71 meters with a discus? No way. You might be able to run 100 meters in 9.8 seconds once with a tailwind. But ten times a year under 10 seconds, in the rain or heat? Only with doping. Part III: “If he maintains he is clean, I can only answer that that is a lie.” 

SPIEGEL: Testosterone, growth hormone, epo – that was your combination? 

Heredia: Yes, with individual variations. And then amazing things are possible. In 2002 Jerome Young was ranked number 38 in the 400 meters. Then we began to work together, and in 2003 he won almost every big race. 

SPIEGEL: How were you paid? 

Heredia: I had an annual wage. For big wins I got a $40,000 bonus. ...

From 2008: Phelps, shmelps -- Bolt is the man!

That was a pretty impressive final: 9.63, 9.75, 9.79, 9.80

Phelps may be a 1 in 100 million talent (maybe not), but Bolt is 1 in a billion and possibly 1 in 10 billion.


 

Sorry if this is a bit late. It's even funnier than the SNL video I linked to earlier.

Pseudo-Chinese gibberish -- didn't Shaq do the same to Yao Ming when he first came in the league? I think Yao Ming played it off: "Chinese is hard!" or something like that.

Wikipedia: ... Lin has regularly heard bigoted jeers at games such as "Wonton soup", "Sweet and sour pork", "Open your eyes!", "Go back to China", "Orchestra is on the other side of campus", or pseudo-Chinese gibberish.[7][155][157] Lin says this occurred at most if not all Ivy League gyms. He does not react to it. "I expect it, I'm used to it, it is what it is," says Lin.[155] The heckling came mostly from opposing fans and not as much from players.[160] According to Harvard teammate Oliver McNally, a fellow Ivy League player once called Lin the ethnic slur chink.

This is an interesting statistical analysis of the significance of Jeremy Lin's performance in his first 4 games. As Magic said during the Lakers-Knicks half-time show: "Jeremy Lin is FOR REAL"!

His 20 points and 8 assists (but below 50% shooting percentage) last night against the Timberwolves may have elevated him to roughly the 5 streak level. The other factor that needs to be considered is that these were his first 5 games as a starter. As far as that goes he's number one in recent NBA history, beating out Allen Iverson.

It's kind of shocking to think that a phenom like Kenny Anderson turned out to be an "average" NBA player. (Video -- "Greatest guard ever in the history of NYC HS basketball.") But that's what happens in a field that selects effectively from a large talent pool.





Does this look like a future NBA All-Star? (Age 15)

Jeremy Lin, in da house! A Jason Kidd-like performance. I thought he was going to wash out of the league. Lin was not heavily recruited out of HS and played his college ball at Harvard.

[ Unfortunately some of the links below are broken. See updated 2014 version of this post: Talent Selection. ]

Personnel Selection, whether by sports teams, militaries, universities or corporations, is all about identifying statistical predictors of future performance. How good are these predictors?



Let's take college football as an example. Talent evaluation is difficult, but scouts definitely know something. A five star high school football prospect is almost four times more likely to become an NCAA All-American than a four star prospect. (Graphs from this article; NFL draft order related to HS ranking here.)



Oregon, which finished last season ranked #4 in the country (Rose Bowl and PAC-12 champs), and played in BCS bowls each of the last three seasons, landed only one five star recruit this year. Schools like Alabama (3), Texas (3), USC (3) and Michigan (2) landed significantly more.

What about other kinds of talent? Below is an example from psychometrics applied to 13 year olds.

Horsepower matters: Can psychometrics separate the top .1 percent from the top 1 percent in ability? Yes: SAT-M quartile within top 1 percent predicts future scientific success, even when the testing is done at age 13. The top quartile clearly outperforms the lower quartiles. These results strongly refute the "IQ above 120 doesn't matter" claim, at least in fields like science and engineering; everyone in this sample is above 120 and the top quartile are at the 1 in 10,000 level. The data comes from the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), a planned 50-year longitudinal study of intellectual talent. ...

Another example: this graph displays upper bounds on probability of graduating with a physics GPA greater than 3.5 (about .5 SD above the average) at Oregon as a function of SAT-M. Note the blue markers are conservative (95 percent confidence level) upper bounds; the central value for the probability at SAT-M > 750 is around 50 percent. The upper bounds were computed to show that the probability for SAT-M below about 600 is close to zero. The red line is the probability of earning an A in calculus-based introductory physics.

I've always hated Joe Paterno and Penn State's holier than thou sham. Careful scrutiny suggests it's mostly sociopaths at the top.

NYTimes: ... I have a hard time understanding why a 28 year old man, the grad student, did not go straight into that shower and rescue the kid. He is a coward. Law, lawsuits and all the oversight in the world is valueless unless people step up. This creep Sandusky was “caught” several times, in each case the so called men who witnessed it, quietly back away. Shame on them all. Shame on Mr. Paterno whose god status created the environment.

Paterno admits he was told by the assistant mentioned above that he saw former defensive coordinator Sandusky having anal sex with a naked 10 year old boy in the showers. Paterno reports it to superiors but doesn't follow up further and Sandusky retains an office in the athletic complex. The graduate assistant, a former Penn State QB, is now an assistant coach, so Paterno can hardly claim he didn't find the charge credible. This was definitely a coverup that extended over a decade, and JoePa was involved.

I wonder how the Penn State players feel about using the shower facilities in the Lasch Building (football complex).

Sandusky Grand Jury Presentment.


"When we stood at childhood's gate, Shapeless in the hands of fate, .... May no act of ours bring shame"

The Penn State Alma Mater

For the glory of old State,
For her founders strong and great,
For the future that we wait,
Raise the song, raise the song.

Sing our love and loyalty,
Sing our hopes that, bright and free,
Rest, O Mother dear, with thee,
All with thee, all with thee.

(Softly)

When we stood at childhood's gate,
Shapeless in the hands of fate,
Thou didst mold us, dear old State,
Dear old State, dear old State.

(Louder)

May no act of ours bring shame
To one heart that loves thy name,
May our lives but swell thy fame,
Dear old State, dear old State.

The NYT reports that Ivy teams will limit themselves to only 2 full-contact practices per week. I was wondering when something like this would happen, given recent research on brain injuries in football.

According to the new rules, teams will be able to hold only two full-contact practices per week during the season, compared with a maximum of five under N.C.A.A. guidelines. On the other days of the week, practices cannot include contact or live tackles, and no player may be “taken to the ground.”

This means the overall skill development of Ivy players will be terrible. A player from a good high school program might actually regress in blocking and tackling technique during their college career!

I used to say that if I had a son I'd want him to play football. But if the recent research is confirmed I doubt I will let him. I guess that leaves wrestling or maybe MMA (grappling only) to toughen him up :-)

The difference between football, wrestling, boxing, etc. and wimpier sports like swimming, track, soccer, basketball, etc. is that in the more combative sports the other guy can make you want to quit. I played linebacker and I can remember tough SOBs at guard who would explode out of their stance and plant a helmet on my arm/shoulder every running play -- if it wasn't the guard then it was a fullback with a full head of steam. By the late quarters my upper arm was blue and I started to wish they would pass the ball so I could drop into coverage. A good running game does literally wear down the defense. Somehow the 100 breaststroke, even the state championships, didn't have quite the same intensity.

There is an aspect of mental toughness developed from facing down an opponent in a physical confrontation. West Point required incoming (male) cadets to learn boxing for over 100 years -- sticking your face where someone can hit it forces you to overcome some very primal fears.

... cadets learn war ethos and fear management. They build aggressive mind-sets. Not surprisingly, members of the [boxing] team choose front-line combat, mostly infantry, at a higher rate than any other group on campus.

“They see the bigger picture of what we’re getting these young men ready to do, of what this is all about in the long run,” Daniels said. “That fighting spirit, it starts here. It starts in the ring.”

Eugene ("Track Town USA") has a long history in running (for instance, Nike was founded here) and hosts a number of high profile track meets during the spring and summer. One of the things I enjoy about these meets is that while they are here I often bump into superhumans (world class athletes) around town, like at the cafe or ice cream shop :-)

Speaking of superhumans, below is a picture of decathlete Ashton Eaton, who may soon have a claim on the title World's Greatest Athlete. The last time (2009) the USATF National Championships were here in Eugene, I predicted great things ahead for him. Eaton, then only a junior, placed second in the US championships. This year (competition completed yesterday) he won by a huge margin, with a total that is the 5th best all-time US score and 13th best in the world. Eaton has incredible times in the sprints (PRs around 10.3, 13.3, 46, IIRC) and is still just learning the technical aspects of the high jump and the throws. In the next few years he could break the world record.



Two winters ago UO had a family day at the rec center, and invited some prominent athletes to spend time with the kids. My twins got to play dodgeball with Eaton for about half an hour -- there were no other families on the court. Eaton took it easy on them :-) When they get older I'll remind them about their time with the World's Greatest Athlete!

A beautiful video on the crossover dribble.

The WSJ recently hosted a discussion about Bryan Caplan's book Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids.

In his arguments Caplan relies heavily on the behavior genetics findings I have discussed previously here and here. These findings show that it is very difficult for parents to shape their kids, and that genes have a larger impact than "shared environment" (i.e., effects from being raised in the same family). One can study these effects by varying genetic relatedness (e.g., identical twins vs fraternal twins) and environment (adoption into different families, variation of family characteristics such as SES, parental education, etc.).

This is from some correspondence (slightly edited) I had with a new father about Caplan's book.

The question is whether you accept the behavior genetics conclusions at the Tiger Mom/Dad extremes. That is, the twin/adoption data covers mostly normal people and probably cannot be extrapolated with confidence to exceptional cases like high IQ families with a strong focus on education and achievement.

I am very committed to helping my kids, although not in the Amy Chua way, and I wonder how well I could succeed if I had, say, 4 instead of 2 kids. As it is I can think of stuff almost every day that I could have done with them if I wasn't so busy with other things.

I take my kids out and play with them as much as I can. But not just random play. For example, I run races with them and I notice that at this age they can improve their running ability a lot by practicing. They have probably run hundreds (or maybe thousands!) more flat out sprints (say 40 yards) than a typical Taiwanese kid of the same age. (Cities there are very crowded, so it's not easy even to find a place to do something like this.) I can imagine that their self-esteem and ability to do well in school sports might be improved by my willingness to not only spend time with them but to insist that we do something modestly constructive while we are having fun.

I see lots of US dads already teaching their kids how to hit a baseball or do other sports specific things. I've spent a lot of time in sports and athletics, and while genes matter, training also matters, especially at the K-12 level where the threshold for making the team is much lower than in college. Even in football, basic skills like accelerating out of a 3 point stance are things you learn through early repetition and are hard to pick up later in life.

My dad was a professor but not a natural teacher. We had a neighbor who was a math professor and very extroverted and passionate about his subject. His kids really didn't like to discuss math with him but I loved it and it was one of the best experiences of my life. I could offer that kind of thing to my kids (in many subjects), assuming the dynamics are right. But I certainly couldn't if I were too busy or had too many kids.

Early success in anything (sports, math, etc.) can be self-reinforcing and have non-linear effects down the line. I realize the behavior genetics data suggests that *averaged over large groups* such effects are small, but the studies are still crude and could easily miss some relatively significant strategies that you or I might take advantage of. Are you willing to take the risk of forgoing such positive impacts you might have on your kids?

I like Caplan in general but I think he's a little too hardcore libertarian and also a bit robotic (autistic economist) and simple-minded in his thinking.

Looks like they finally broke their losing streak :-) Covered by the NYTimes, no less!

I was on the swimming, waterpolo and football teams (the football team no longer exists). The swimming and waterpolo teams (competing in somewhat geekier sports) were more successful than the basketball team. The football team would have probably had a similar losing streak if we played regular SCIAC competition, although we did have a superstar running back (Div I quality) who was scouted for the USFL as a senior.

Coincidentally, I picked up this t-shirt at the bookstore last week when I was visiting. The shirts were on clearance, so I got mine for 50 percent off. Now I bet they're a hot item. Go Beavers!