They’d get hammered into shape right away. While there is a lot of public money out there, every sharp would unload on a line that a full 5 or 6 points off from expectation.

”

II.

Douglas Adams once said there was a theory that if anyone ever understood the Universe, it would disappear and be replaced by something even more incomprehensible. He added that there was another theory that this had already happened.

These sorts of things – things such that if you understand them, they get more complicated until you don’t – are called “anti-inductive”.

The classic anti-inductive institution is the stock market. Suppose you found a pattern in the stock market. For example, it always went down on Tuesdays, then up on Wednesdays. Then you could buy lots of stock Tuesday evening, when it was low, and sell it Wednesday, when it was high, and be assured of making free money.

But lots of people want free money, so lots of people will try this plan. There will be so much demand for stock on Tuesday evening that there won’t be enough stocks to fill it all. Desperate buyers will bid up the prices. Meanwhile, on Wednesday, everyone will sell their stocks at once, causing a huge glut and making prices go down. This will continue until the trend of low prices Tuesday, high prices Wednesday disappears.

So in general, it should be impossible to exploit your pattern-finding ability to profit of the stock market unless you are the smartest and most resourceful person in the world. That is, maybe stocks go up every time the Fed cuts interest rates, but Goldman Sachs knows that too, so they probably have computers programmed to buy so much stock milliseconds after the interest rate announcement is made that the prices will stabilize on that alone. That means that unless you can predict better than, or respond faster than, Goldman Sachs, you can’t exploit your knowledge of this pattern and shouldn’t even try.

Here’s something I haven’t heard described as anti-inductive before: job-seeking.

When I was applying for medical residencies, I asked some people in the field to help me out with my interviewing skills.

“Why did you want to become a doctor?” they asked.

“I want to help people,” I said.

“Oh God,” they answered. “No, anything but that. Nothing says ‘person exactly like every other bright-eyed naive new doctor’ than wanting to help people. You’re trying to distinguish yourself from the pack!”

“Then…uh…I want to hurt people?”

“Okay, tell you what. You have any experience treating people in disaster-prone Third World countries?”

“I worked at a hospital in Haiti after the earthquake there.”

“Perfect. That’s inspirational as hell. Talk about how you want to become a doctor because the people of Haiti taught you so much.”

Wanting to help people is a great reason to become a doctor. When Hippocrates was taking his first students, he was probably really impressed by the one guy who said he wanted to help people. But since that time it’s become cliche, overused. Now it signals people who can’t come up with an original answer. So you need something better.

During my interviews, I talked about my time working in Haiti. I got to talk to some of the other applicants, and they talked about their time working in Ethiopia, or Bangladesh, or Nicaragua, or wherever. Apparently the “stand out by working in a disaster-prone Third World country” plan was sufficiently successful that everyone started using, and now the people who do it don’t stand out at all. My interviewer was probably thinking “Oh God, what Third World country is this guy going to start blabbering about how much he learned from?” and moving my application to the REJECT pile as soon as I opened my mouth.

I am getting the same vibe from the critiques of OKCupid profiles in the last open thread. OKCupid seems very susceptible to everybody posting identical quirky pictures of themselves rock-climbing, then talking about how fun-loving and down-to-earth they are. On the other hand, every deviation from that medium has also been explored.

“I’m going for ‘quirky yet kind’”.

“Done.”

“Sarcastic, yet nerdy?”

“Done.”

“Outdoorsy, yet intellectual.”

“Done.”

“Introverted, yet a zombie.”

“I thought we went over this. Zombies. Are. Super. Done..” ”

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/11/the-phatic-and-the-anti-inductive/

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anyway, there might be something similar going on with football, in that its constantly changing and evolving, its possible that it changes and evolves at a faster rate than we have instances to study and have any sort of scientific confidence in
to create a glossed over example – a few years ago some teams started running read option concepts and had a lot of success with it
as predictors of what would happen, how many instances of the read option did we need to see to have confidence predicting how successful teams doing that would be going forward?
while we were amassing that sample, defenses were experimenting with different ways to defend it
at some point the effectiveness of the read option sort of stabilizes as a concept
but by that point, we’re on to some new conceptual evolution
that’s what makes it tough to predict over the long term,
that the game is constantly in a state of evolutionary flux