I propose four scoring categories for Fantasy Intellectual Teams: bets (B); pairings (P); wins (W); and memes (M)
B: Bets is a measure of “thinks carefully.” Your team member doesn’t have to win a bet to have thought carefully. Merely “thinking in bets” shows that one has considered the possibility that you could be wrong. A point is scored when one of your players states a prediction or an opinion in probabilistic terms.
P: A pairing shows that a player is valued as a teammate.
A pairing is when one of your players has a public dialog with another player, typically in the form of essays or a joint podcast. Twitter does not count. A record of the discussion must be accessible on the Web. Past pairings do not count. Only pairings that take place during the season.
Assume Annie Duke and Tyler Cowen are both on teams (not necessarily the same team). Then if she appears on a Conversation with Tyler, each one gets a point. Or if Russ Roberts and Mike Munger are both on teams and Russ hosts Mike on econtalk, points get scored.
In fact, Russ tells me that of the candidates that appear on the cheat sheet, over 70 have appeared on econtalk! So he would be a good one to draft to pick up points in the P category. Of course, as with all categories, only pairings that take place during the season count. Past pairings don’t.
Suppose Martin Gurri and Yuval Levin are both on teams. Then if they participate in a dialog on Pairagraph points get awarded.
But a given pairing can score only one point per season. Points would be awarded once for Glenn Loury in conversation with John McWhorter. A subsequent discussion between the two does not count.
W: A win shows that a team member does well in debate. You score a win when one of your players debunks an idea of a prominent intellectual (not necessarily on anyone’s team). I will be the final arbiter of what is “prominent” (I will be generous there) and what constitutes debunking (I will be strict there–no “one-chart” or “one-tweet” debunkings. Debunking must include steel-manning.)
M: Memes measure the ability to develop creative ideas that stick. You score a meme point when a catch-phrase or acronym of one of your players gets used in an essay or book that appears during the season. The meme itself might be from years ago. So if an essay (it does not have to be written by a fantasy intellectual) uses WEIRD, Joseph Henrich’s owner scores a point. If an essay uses “black swan,” Nassim Taleb’s owner scores a point. If “state-capacity libertarianism” gets used in 4 different essays, then Tyler’s owner gets 4 points. But if it gets used 4 times in the same essay, that is only worth one point.
Scoring mechanics: The season will run from April 1 through September 30. During the season, when you think one of the intellectuals on your team scores a point in a category, email me and I will decide whether to award the point. So plan to pay attention to your team during the season. You don’t want to miss when they score points!
Note that each category has an equal weight. The way scoring works in fantasy is that your team is ranked in each category relative to other teams. In a ten-owner league, suppose your team finishes first in B, ninth in P, fifth in W, and third in M. The points you get are 10, 2, 6, and 8, respectively, for a total of 26. So you cannot win just by piling up B’s and ignoring the other categories. For those of you who are fans of the Arrow impossibility theorem, this scoring technique totally violates his “Independence from irrelevant alternatives” postulate.
****You do not get to unilaterally select your team. You participate in a draft in which you and other owners take turns picking players. If a player you want gets picked by another owner before it’s your turn, you will have to pick someone else.****
I will schedule a draft before the season starts. You can select a player who is not on the cheat sheet. I will explain the mechanics of the draft in a different post.
At this point, questions and comments about the scoring categories are welcome. But don’t suggest more complicated scoring approaches. Since the burden is on me to oversee the scoring, I am going to keep it simple.
Obviously an extremely arduous task and far too easy to become prohibitively complex but the major flaw I see is the lack of penalties for engaging in poor forms of intellectual thought. Someone who appears on 20 podcasts, “wins” 2 of the debates that are there, and engages in “bets” on 3 of the 20, would seem to do better than someone on 4 podcasts who uses “bets” and “wins” in 3 of them.
For something as complex and really impossible to score as this task is, the system here seems quite good, but that would be my biggest concern. I agree that one should get points for pairings and being out there. But perhaps the other categories can be weighted by total appearances? (Though as above I suspect it’s far too easy to make this thing prohibitively complex by trying to improve the scoring system)
Overall, I like the system way more as a framework that we should all use in thinking about and evaluating intellectuals than as an actual game to play.
Getting a scoring system together that can actually be calculated is indeed overwhelmingly difficult. I tried to come up with one to try to get some discipline in forming a draft order based on the “best role model for my children” idea and gave up: there just wasn’t enough hard data and time in the day to assemble what there is. I would just have to go on mere rough ordering.
It seems like a good draft strategy under the proposed system would be to pick people with books coming out who will be on book tours. And of course the professional punditocracy would seem to be high point scorers. I am not sure that your criteria will do much to overcome the gap between the famous and the high quality unknowns.
Originally the FIT was to be about the problem of establishment drek. This seemed like a well founded idea. I had pulled down From the shelves books like Roger Kimball’s The Rape of the Masters, Martha Nussbaum’s The Monarchy of Fear, Kimberly Strassel’s Resistance (At All Costs) and F.H. Buckley’s The American Illness to place into context the discrepancy that I thought that the game was meant to address. But, alas, I get a tingle of fear that the scoring will reward good old-fashioned book tour logrolling.
If I were going to change one thing, I would substitute “accomplished something substantive that contributes to human flourishing.” If the Dangote Refinery starts operating this year, as the largest single train refinery in the world, Aliko Dangote should deserve huge points. By freeing his country from the need to import refined petroleum products and enriching his people, Dangote will be contributing to human flourishing at a scale greater than a couple dozen Gates Foundations and he will have done it with skin-in-the-game and great courage in taking on the eco-imperialists. He is a model of nationalist virtue: doing well by helping his nation do well. Yet, under the proposed scoring rules he probably gets nada. In contrast, if all the professional pundits fell over dead today, who would notice or care tomorrow?
It seems like a lot of think tankers would get on teams at other positions. To not reward tax code distortions, I’d personally disqualify anyone working for tax exempts from assignment at any position other than the think tank slot.
I won’t have time to put together a team and actually follow all of the team members, but I will be an avid fan of the contest and hope to see the standings posted on a regular basis – hopefully with details of fantasy team members who are leaders in each category and perhaps at the end of the season the “Triple Crown” or “Quadruple Crown” winner for the team member who scores the most points in the most categories. Update scores and standings will be a great introduction to some intellectuals I might not have payed attention to otherwise.
Good luck to everyone in the game!
+1 we’ve already assembled the essential readings for our daughter for when she is old enough to appreciate them. And, I don’t need a fantasy team to validate them.
However, we are huge supporters of what Arnold is trying to do here and wish the best of luck to all of the participants. We will be following and rooting closely in the stands. And sorry, to Arnold, but he is still on my FIT team…deal with it dude :).
Sign me up for the draft. I like the forcing function that will force me to make bets on some inhabitants/non-inhabitants of my small intellectual bubble. Would expect to be compelled to consume content from a wider variety of folks just to keep track of my team.
Great idea to Keep it Simple (…stupid. KISS)
I am eager to learn about drafting, too.
I do have a suggestion about FAQ /examples – this would be a good time for me to review last year and, for a given person, score them for a month or so, or for 5 points, and send my view of their score to you. You could then confirm it or correct it.
“Win” is likely to be tough – I see you show no examples so far. Nor with “Bets”, altho I suspect there will be far more Bets points than Win points.
Should David French and Dave Rubin be on here? Neither are high picks for me, but they seem relevant. Chloé Valdary, Raj Chetty, Angelo Codevilla, Jason Brennan, Michael Lind, Tim Harford, and Geoff Shullenberger are also possible additions.
Wesley Yang, John Gray, Samuel Bowles, Stephen Fry, Garret Jones, Greg Mankiw, Ryan Holiday, Malcolm Gladwell, Luigi Zingales, Valerie Ramey, Jill Lepore, Heather Cox Richardson, George Selgin, Scott Sumner, Steven Levitt, Brett McKay, Jacob Howland, and Megyn Kelly
One slightly unfair aspect to Pairing is that it penalizes heterodoxy and gives cancel culture a seat at the judges table. Some of the individuals on the list are simply too unjustly maligned and radioactive to ever get the opportunity to associate directly with any of the more respectable and mainstream intellectuals.