Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
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Everyone Wants To Go Home During Extra Innings — Maybe Even The Umps - Analysis showing that in extra innings the team closer to winning gets more favourable calls on balls and strikes. I would guess some unconscious biases are at play here.
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Science’s “Reproducibility Crisis” Is Being Used as Political Ammunition - This part stood out to me ‘…the reproducibility debate has already been exploited by political activists. “These guys are loving it,” Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard, told me. “Any time scientists themselves admit there’s a mistake or a problem, they’re all over it. They have a feeding frenzy because this is exactly what they want. And what they want to do is use this now to try to discredit all science.” ’ To me someone who can’t admit to a mistake or changing their view based on new evidence is someone whose opinion should’t carry much weight. The lack of reproducibility of scientific studies is a real issue and we should be questioning things vigorously, but exploiting that to discredit all science is dangerous.
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How it Happened - Details on how Yuki Kawauchi won the Boston Marathon written by his agent and translator.
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EconTalk: Jerry Muller on The Tyranny of Metrics - A discussion on how the fixation on metrics can lead to less than optimal results.