It's hard to predict a small group. Reliably. The masses are easy. Wall Street and Madison Ave do it all the time. But in football (soccer); which is fast paced, unpredictable and where an individual can have major influence you have a cluster fuck. Anyone's prediction is just a guess.
Now baseball is another matter. A much more rigid game. Easier to predict.
You know, we see this all the time in politics. How many upsets over the years? The models need to be thrown out every year. But it's expensive. So the US media clings to their same old models and is "shocked" when an upset occurs. And then they usually search so fast for a reason, they miss the real reason in the process. Hollywood has been missing the mark too. They also need to throw out their models and start over. BADLY.
Anyway I sometimes wonder just how far away we really are from Asimov's "Psychohistory ".
> So the US media clings to their same old models and is "shocked" when an upset occurs. And then they usually search so fast for a reason, they miss the real reason in the process. Hollywood has been missing the mark too. They also need to throw out their models and start over. BADLY.
This seems to assume that the US media is interested in having an accurate model of reality. I think it's far more reasonable to assume that the US media is driven by self interest, and 'shocks' and 'upsets' are part of what consumers are interested in. Speedy answers, not accurate answers. The model works for them.
To quote Steve Jobs from a Wired interview in 1996:
"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth."
People want to know who won the election. Getting that wrong does not help news networks in any way.
And, it's not like news media are the only people who try to predict elections. Eric Cantor and Mitt Romney had vested interests in winning their elections, but they still got it surprisingly wrong.
Hollywood has been missing the mark too. They also need to throw out their models and start over. BADLY.
Based on what? I work in the film industry, and studio level (ie larger budget) projects are heavily data driven. Considering the slipperiness of the input factors, I think Hollywood does a pretty good job actually. Do your remarks have a quantitative basis, or are you expressing your dislike of Hollywood's output?
Dislike of Hollywood's output, for sure. But "slipperiness" is a great term. As I said, it's hard to predict small groups. Are you saying Hollywood can't do a better job of figuring out what we want to see in big budget films? Cause all we are getting is the same crap over and over and over.
The input factors are slippery because many of them are not easily quantifiable. Quantifiable factors include past financial performance of films employing particular actors, directors, and other creative personnel; ratios of marketing to production budget, run-time, correlation of scene length distribution with power-law spectra, and various others.
Story factors are almost impossible to quantify reliably. There are some popular story schema like the Hero's Journey, and some pacing guides, like Black Snyder's 'Beat Sheets' that look at the structure of many successful movies to make guesses about the optimum time for story structure - eg if it's an action movie you need a fight scene by minute 15, or the Villain has to be appear within a certain time frame and get x minutes of solo screen time - but those tools are fashion-driven and if anything they contribute to the cookie-cutter approach. Whenever someone produces a better-than-average guide to what makes popular movies tick, it is quickly imitated as widely as possible.
I've written several screenplays and dislike templates, but I don't know in detail what people want to see. When I write or am working on film production I just have to keep playing the story like a movie in my head and and attempt to gauge whether it's sufficiently involving and consistent over time. The bigger the budget, the more conservative production decisions are likely to be, since executives and biased in favor of repeatability.
I doubt that any particular baseball game is easier to predict than any particular soccer game. But there are so many baseball games that aggregate statistics can become useful tools of analysis. Even the knockout tournaments in baseball are series of 5 or 7 games between the same teams.
World Cup knockout games are rare and are single-elimination. Same with U.S. elections. That makes it easier for the final outcome to be determined by outliers or lower probabilities.
Broader trends can still be predicted, though. It's not like North Korea just defeated Brazil 7-1...Germany is a well-known powerhouse. And in U.S. politics, quite a few people predicted that a protracted conflict in Iraq would hurt Republicans, and it did in 2006 and 2008.
Perhaps, or maybe the right data just isn't tracked / accessible yet.
Basketball is an instructive example --- as recently as 10-15 years ago, it was thought that this game couldn't be quantified/predicted nearly as well as baseball, that it had a lot of the same fluid properties of soccer and (US) football. Fast forward and a lot of work has been done to push basketball much closer to the baseball-side of the spectrum. Whose to say whether or not taking detailed data of every movement of every player in a soccer match might yield similar breakthroughs.
From what I have read (previous 538 blog post on Messi), they are already tracking a good deal of data about the games. I think one issue with soccer is that there is a lack of discrete, measurable outcomes in the game. I read a while back that one of the breakthroughs in basketball analysis came when they started tracking the total point differential during each player's time on court. Because so many points are scored in a game, and because so many games are played in a season, this stat was a fairly reliable and accurate picture of how a player would impact the team's performance (which allowed teams to measure the impact of players who may not rank high in the more traditional stats).
In soccer, you don't have a lot of data points to model against. The number of goals scored is typically low. Because of this, there is probably a higher level of uncertainty and variance in the outcomes of soccer games (and the prediction models as well).
You do have lots of data points. Each pass is a data point, each shot is a data point. Opta logs mores than 2000 events per game, each with an outcome and pitch coordinates. Yes, soccer is more complex than even basketball, but there's a lot more money involved and people watching. This stuff is being worked out right now, and it's an exciting field.
Often shots on goal or number of corners are used as a proxy variable because those events occur much more often than scored goals. But you're right that football is incredibly hard to model. For example, what would happen to the Argentinian team if Messi gets injured? Any pundit can tell you that it would probably be "really bad", but quantifying exactly how bad is currently impossible.
It seems that it wasn't so much about the rigidness of the game, as much as it was Neymar missing from the field. Brazil is very superstar-oriented, with excellent offense followed by pretty good midfielders, followed by okay defense, followed by bad goalkeeper.
Predictions on baseball teams probably fall through when a star player is injured.
No, this match had nothing to do with Neymar missing, and everything to do with Thiago Silva missing.
Neymar wouldn't have marked Muller for the first goal. Nor would he have been at the back to clean up the second fuck up, and the many fuck ups thereafter.
Thiago Silva is an excellent defender who organizes his defense to ensure proper defensive shape. In his absence, David Luiz was in charge of the same, and he isn't a particularly great defender to begin with (decent attacker, sure, but not a good defender).
Further, football resists statistical analysis, unlike most American sports, because momentum plays a HUGE part. Upsets are a common phenomenon in football. Small teams beat the big fish ALL the time.
> Lots of people lost money. Maybe it was done on purpose? The models I mean. Cause I bet someone made a fortune. Someone short-selling the game?
The considerable amount of collusion required across fifa, the teams and players, multiple publishing industries, organizations, countries and cultures to have sports betting and publications like fivethirtyeight make shit up (to the point that they created a very detailed scoring system for their predictions, all for the purpose of lying about a lop sided 7-1 game) would have to be considerably large.
I think the the better, and frankly incredibly blindingly obvious, way to look at this is that this was just an unusual game that nobody expected and you can maybe take a break today from being suspicious about the whole world being manipulated by a nefarious few who conspire to create every fucking notable turn in history to screw you or someone else over.
"being suspicious about the whole world being manipulated by a nefarious few who conspire to create every fucking notable turn in history to screw you or someone else over."
It's still challenging to predict the outcome of a baseball game. Sabermetrics can project the outcome of a 162-game season, but a playoff series is too small of a sample size. Lewis stresses this in Moneyball.
Are you kidding? II'm guessing most of us have. And like me, many have probably read the whole series. Oh and if you read the I, Robot series they sort of connect - the whole human future/history spanning 100,000 years.
Now baseball is another matter. A much more rigid game. Easier to predict.
You know, we see this all the time in politics. How many upsets over the years? The models need to be thrown out every year. But it's expensive. So the US media clings to their same old models and is "shocked" when an upset occurs. And then they usually search so fast for a reason, they miss the real reason in the process. Hollywood has been missing the mark too. They also need to throw out their models and start over. BADLY.
Anyway I sometimes wonder just how far away we really are from Asimov's "Psychohistory ".