I want to use individual blog posts to single out some of the Fantasy Intellectual Teams that were selected. If the owner wishes to reveal himself, he can do so in the comments. The team calling itself Deep Thought had the last pick in the first round. I think that if any team managed to avoid mood affiliation, it was this one.
You can go to this page to see the different Fantasy Intellectuals teams. Just select any team. Comment only on the teams you like.
By round, here were Deep Thought’s picks.
1 Matt Yglesias
2 Sam Harris
3 Lex Fridman
4 Ezra Klein
5 Yuval Levin
6 Timothy Taylor
7 Nate Silver
8 Nick Gillespie
9 Vitalik Buterin
10 Eric Kaufmann
11 Paul Krugman
12 Josh Barro
13 Anna Khachiyan
14 Venkatesh Rao
15 Gwern Branwen
In baseball, analysts speak of the “eye test” and “the numbers.” A hitter passes the eye test if you are impressed watching him hit. A pitcher passes the eye test if his pitches look hard to hit. The numbers are the statistical record of the player.
I think that Deep Thought’s players all pass the eye test in this context. They seem like intellectuals to me. Most of them are moderate in their tone (Lex Fridman is exceedingly soft-spoken, for example), which I appreciate. As a group, they are about as far from a monoculture as one could want.
Matt Y is a legitimate first-round pick. He has a record of Thinking in Bets, he is likely to steel-man, and he might even be able to score a meme point. Sam Harris is certainly capable of picking up S’s, and one would expect Nate Silver to pick up B’s. Eric Kaufmann might get an M or two. Yuval Levin and Timothy Taylor are usually very good about offering fair characterizations of views with which they disagree, so one can expect some S’s from them.
In fantasy baseball, some leagues that reward stolen bases also subtract for getting caught stealing, and some that reward saves also substract for blown saves. Hypothetically, one could have a FITs season where we only count “net” steel-manning, meaning steel-manning minus straw-manning. In that case, Krugman would be a player to avoid having on your team. But subtraction would require a whole different logistical system for scoring, because for now we depend on self-reporting by team owners.
It’s interesting that Ezra Klein is on the same team as Sam Harris. Klein’s criticism of Harris several years ago for interviewing Charles Murray on Harris’ podcast was a partisan hit job that was based on numerous logical fallacies, particularly straw-man arguments.
Klein’s criticism of Harris and Murray was so misleading that it prompted Richard Haier (editor of the scientific journal Intelligence) to publish a devastating critique of Klein’s arguments. Not surprisingly, Klein never responded to Haier’s critique.
I have to force myself to take Klein’s arguments seriously after that display of either intentional or negligent disingenuousness.
Not sure if this counts as a negative comment and delete if so, but what do you mean when you say this team avoids mood affiliation?
I think of all the teams I looked through this one has a relatively well defined political affiliation.
Rao in the 14th round seems like a hidden Meme gem, hadn’t noticed he fell that late.
I think the issue with FITs and avoiding mood affiliation is that with self-reporting, you need to be willing to closely watch both everyone on your team and everyone who could plausibly be giving them M points. This favors taking a cluster of similar people, especially ones someone was going to follow closely anyway – e.g. it makes sense that I ended up on a team with Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander.
A team across the spectrum is well-balanced in important senses but not in the ways that score points. If we want to avoid echo chambers, we’d want to avoid synergies between team members – e.g. it might help if next season, you couldn’t score M points based on one member of your team using a Meme of another team member. That forces you to branch out, and actively punishes things like Zvi+Scott on the same team.
Zvi – good point on the echo chamber. This exercise is forcing me to read more broadly, but our team choice framework did weight heavily towards “easy to follow”. Also, thank you for your post today (first day of the season!) where you made explicit bets. The Null Hypothesis grinds on.
Attention span time by owners will be large — have to watch to get the points. I chose folk I’ll be happy watching, even if they don’t score quite as much.
If a few intellectuals make a few more Bets, thinking quantitatively, that would be good for society. Glad to hear Zvi made some bets; inspiration to ask my intellectuals to try out some fun bets of their own.
Sam Harris was picked too high in my view. He is often overly certain of his own opinion and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him vigorously steel-man. And don’t get me started on Krugman post 2000…
Matt Y however is indeed a great pick, as is Vitalik Buterin who I was counting on falling at least 1 round further than he did. Lots to like on this team.
Team owner here — comments:
I actually agree that Harris was probably picked too high. To be honest, after round 1 I didn’t have a clear idea of who to take, and he just seemed to stick in my head. I’m going to guess he underperforms his draft slot though.
After having a few days of thinking it over, I feel good about Yglesias, Friedman, Silver, Buterin, and Krugman performing well at their draft slots. Arnold’s point about there being no negative points is relevant here. High functioning partisans might accumulate a bit more points than they deserve since you can’t dock them points for straw-manning.
Gwern & Rao are my sentimental favorites, and I agree about Rao & Memes — Premium Mediocre, The Gervais Principle, Be Slightly Evil, etc — although getting relevant examples in the alotted timeframe might be difficult.
Taylor & Levin carry themselves very well, and seem like they personify the spirit of the exercise, but I’m not sure they produce content that fits well within the points system, so we’ll see.
High functioning partisans
Just wanted to say how much I loved that bit.
your link is broken