Personal

Books I Just Finished Reading and Enjoyed: The Great Reversal (Thomas Philippon).

Enough unfairness in competitive sports, a decomposition method for score-differentials. (I wrote this long time ago (2010), but I stand by this)

In this note we express our perplexity at the standard procedure for assessing competitive sports games results and propose an alternative, fairer and yet simple to use.

It is a well established fact that score-differentials in competitive sports games are determined by a number of both observable and unobservable characteristics' differentials. Examples within the former group are differentials in training, accumulated years of experience in sports, age, etc. In the latter, differentials in pure ability.

Here we argue that declaring winner to that one who scored more than the opponent is pure bollocks. It's differentials in pure ability that matter. Our contention relies on two conditions of "time": scarcity and irreversibility. You cannot be training all the time because of time scarcity and because of irreversibility, you cannot choose to become younger to play your 19 year-old opponent, nor can you go back to your times of childhood and convince your parents to encourage you to do more sports. For these reasons, the current methods to assess winners and losers are flawed, because it is unfeasible to have two opponents with the same characteristics. Here we propose a decomposition to be performed after games that enables a fair definition.

a) Specify a score differentials equation such as:

(score1-score2)= c1(ability1-ability2)+ c2(age1-age2) + c3(hourstraining1-hourstraining2) + c4(accumexp1-accumexp2)

Everything in the equation is observable but ability.

b) Compute the values for the observables (use reasonable estimates for c1, ...c4) and solve for (ability1-ability2).

c) Declare the winner on the basis of the differential found in b).

There you have a simple and fairer method to assess winners in competitive sports. Hopefully, this well needed contribution will be soon matched with consistent estimators of c1, ... c4.

El corset del lenguaje (2012)

En “The stuff of thought”, Steve Pinker dice que las palabras que usamos explican nuestra naturaleza.

Algunos apuntes que me parecen curiosos a este respecto:

Los italianos no tienen palabra para “privacidad”, por eso usan la version en ingles: “privacy”.

En Indonesia la palabra “responsabilidad” no esta en el diccionario, y cruzar la calle es algo tan complicado como lo implica la palabra que describe la accion: menyeberang. El matrimonio es ineluctable. La solteria se define como: “belum menikah”, cuya traduccion es “todavia sin casar”. Es un estado meramente pasajero.

Los individualistas del norte angloparlante escriben “Yo” con mayusculas, en indonesio “Tu” va con mayusculas, como en lituano.

Y los eficientes alemanes se ponen presion cada vez que preguntan la hora. “Wie spat ist es?” literalmente quiere decir “cuan tarde es?”

Dicen que somos lo que decimos.

Y tienen razon.