YouSaid · the spoken record

Cade Massey

lines on the record: 84
first: 2021-04-19
most recent: 2021-04-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“This is going to sound really airy fairy, but I think to pay attention to your own experience, to pay more attention to your own experience and pay attention to when things are working for you, when they're not working for you, and to honor that. I think we can spend a lot of time out of touch with how things are impacting us. And that is something I wish I'd known the reverse.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mother said this thing late in life, and more importantly, she lived it. She said she just want to talk about things that matters. And I think this idea that spend time talking about things that matter. Get to the heart of things. She said this to me once in the hospital, and we didn't know it, but she was going to die just a few weeks later. And in the same conversation, this visiting minister walked in and this was back when the Methodist Church was debating whether or not allow gays to marry or whether or not to let homosexuals be ministers. And it was kind of a conversation that was happening in the church. And this retired minister walked into the hospital room. And my mother had just said this thing to me sometime the previous hour. And this little boy sits down and he wants to visit with her. And within the first 30 seconds, she was like, tell me, do you think they should ordain homosexuals? I mean, just like right into it. She didn't want to bother with the superficial stuff. She had limited time and she wanted to talk about what matters.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh Lord Ted, I don't know that I would have a biggest, but the pattern that I've tried to uproot. I can name having gotten myself in trouble a few times was really coming down on somebody or getting way beneath somebody or something before I understood it. Assuming that I knew why something happened, this usually happens when it hurts you in some way or really gets at you and you jump. and you react before you understand. And I have made a little progress on this. It's just something that comes to mind because when it happens, I'm so aware that it's a mistake. So hopefully after that happens a few times you start learning how to navigate it.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reported by Goodwin was just mind blowing to me and really a lovely demonstration. And I think we all need that kind of reminder.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got too many loved books to have a favorite book for sure, but I think I probably only have one book that I can say I feel like it changed my life, which is a heck of a thing to be able to say. I wish there were more. There probably ought to be more. But I think there's one that I can say that reliably about. And it is team of rivals, the Doris Carnes Goodwin book about Ave Lincoln, Team of Rivals. It's because of what an extraordinary portrait she paints of Lincoln, at least as reported by her, as put together by her, just such an unusual and extraordinary man. And in particular, About no ego, he was living proof that you don't have to have ego to accomplish great things. In fact, quite the opposite. A lot of what he accomplished was because he had so little ego. And for him to have demonstrated it so starkly, repeatedly.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you tend to have more of them, right? When they're away, I don't think I have a lot of pet peeves, but my wife reminded me the other day that it drives me crazy when people lean back in an airplane seat. It truly does. Some of my worst behavior has been when people have leaned back into me on the airplane.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say meditation, it comes and goes some, and it makes a big difference when it's here, and I'm forever trying to keep it in a more regular way. And in my experience, even just a little bit of dedicated time, if I can string a few days together, it starts making a pretty big difference.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would exclude because of the description for work visualization. It's a big part of my work. I'm quite happy to do that anytime, but that's pretty worky. The only hobby I have these days really is it seems to be tree trimming, Ted. I just spent a lot of time cutting trees, hauling branches. I spent all day yesterday hauling branches that were knocked down by this eye storm we had so we can burn them. We moved on to a little piece of land west of Austin this summer and it's been kind of nonstop. It's been a non-stop agronomy of one kind or another for the last few months.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing that's not obvious. The thing that seems most universal to me when I just reflect on my own experience with teams are those who give, those who are team first, those who are low ego, those are the things that people can get hung up on principle and what they're contributing versus other people. And it can really get in the way, especially because we're pretty self-serving in what we see. And so in my experience, those who are the biggest contributors are those who are basically always giving a little bit more than average who aren't worried about it, who aren't keeping score, and who are basically putting the team's whatever experience, outcome before their individual.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That don't typically get promoted, they might not be rewarded at all. They're probably underhired. And yet they're really important. So how can we get at that? And this is back to my little fantasy about meeting analytics. You need a lot of data to get at it and you need some pretty sophisticated modeling to get at it. But it's one of the questions I'm most interested in, and I think technology is finally getting us to a place where we can start looking at it. And so that's probably the thing that I'm most interested in.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Question We've been talking about individual contributions to teams I think is the most interesting thing. I'm fascinated by those who contribute to the group outside the box score and whose teams tend to do better. Teams, and I'm speaking very much in non-sports domains. So the classic example is Shane Baddier. So Michael Lewis wrote this article in New York Times magazine 10 plus years ago now on Badier's contributions to his teams despite The title of the article is a NoSats All-Star. So this guy is an all-star. Eventually he was appreciated even though he wasn't a big scorer or even a big box score guy at all. So what does that look like in non-sports teams? Are there people out there? And I think we've all experienced some of them who just make positive contributions and my projects with them tend to go better than my projects without them. What is it that they're doing? And can we figure out how to identify and value those people? Because those are the kinds of things.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How extraordinarily influential the offensive line is in the running back's production. And so it leads us to do things like partition a run between pre-contact and after contact. And so you can start parceling out the individual contribution of the running back. And what we find is that there's just not that much variation in the part that the running back brings. It's not zero, but it's not as much as Fame and celebrity and compensation would suggest.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's been sad, hasn't it? It really is sad. I grew up on Earl Campbell, and there's nothing I'd rather do than watch a college football running back. And they've really been devalued in recent years. I think a couple things. The most important thing is that we've come to appreciate how dependent their performance is on other components and especially the offensive line. And the simplest way to think about it is you shouldn't think about a rushing yard as being attributed to a running back. It's an offensive line and running back accomplishment. And we've just never done that before. We've always thought about it as the running back. And it's become very apparent, and especially, again, this is something that motion tracking has helped us understand.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who's sufficiently good at that position? It's especially valuable because he has these knock-on consequences for the other position. That's exactly the kind of analysis you really need to answer the question. We've never had it before and we're finally getting there with motion tracking.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've changed our opinion some, but honestly, I think it's going to continue to evolve because only now are we beginning to say, what difference does it make whether you have an all-pro wide receiver out there versus a couple of good starters? Can one guy who's extraordinary? Well, let's flip it around. If you could have an all-pro at one position, where would it be most valuable? And to answer that, you really need to understand what is the impact of someone who is exceptional at that position on all the other positions. And we've not been able to say that historically because we haven't had the data. And increasingly, we can say, okay, now we're watching these guys move around. We know when you have a player of that caliber how much attention he attracts and therefore how much space it opens up for other people or flip it around when you have a cornerback who can cover as much space as some of these guys can, then it frees up other people to move away. That's saying if you put a”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, generally, the interior positions on both offense and defense, the interior offensive linemen and the inside linebackers, it's moved around some. I mean, safeties are having a little bit of a comeback, but in general, people go something like for a long time it was edge rusher as the obvious next, and maybe to counter the edge rusher, you need a good left tackle. And now they've kind of moved out to the wide outs and cornerbacks, shut down corners and explosive wideouts.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kelly in the middle, Marino at the end of the first round. But in between there, there's Tony Eason, Ken O'Brien, and Todd Blackledge. And so between, this is literally between Elway and Marino is Ken O'Brien, Tony Easton, and Todd Blackledge. And so whenever they were comparing the 99 draft to 83, I didn't think they were learning the lesson from 83. I thought the lesson from 83 should have been, it's really hard to know what order these guys are in. Because in 99, Everyone talked about Tim Couch. It was consensus Tim Couch and then argued about the next four guys. Consensus number one, and now let's argue about the rest. I'm like, well, if you pay attention to 83, that's not the right story. That literally launched the project. And if I wanted to map it on to the 2021 draft, I hate to do it because I like Trevor Lawrence, but I think that the sharp prediction would be, okay, I'll put some chips on shorting Trevor Lawrence. I'll take the field over Trevor Lawrence.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That draft, and they were comparing it, it's a great quarterback draft to 99. So this was Tim Couch, Donab, Dante Culpeper, Achille Smith, Kade McNown. There's like five guys who go in the first round. People talked about this is the best quarterback draft since 83. So 83 was LA up top.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This philosophy, and it's been a slow movement, but it seems like slowly the league is learning that the higher value positions forget the players, just the higher value positions should be drafted more highly. And the best example of that is quarterbacks. And so now this is going to be the most extreme version. We're going to have four guys in the top 10 or whatever. So that's the first thing that jumps out to me. And it's just a manifestation of a trend we've been seeing for a while. If I had to say, Ted, I mean, if you want to take a real hard line here, I would say I don't really believe this, but the interesting bit is how much consensus there is around Lawrence. Trevor Lawrence is the consensus number one. And if I had to short something just on principle, I would short Trevor Lawrence being the long-term best quarterback in this draft just because it was fun because there's so much consensus. Like we're arguing about guys two through five. No one's arguing about number one. And to be honest with you, my project with Thaler on this came from the 99 draft. And they were talking about...”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that consolidation of quarterback talent at the top of the draft is one of the, it seems to me, stories of the last ten years or so. You see quarterbacks now just drift up the board. A couple years ago, Kyler Murray came out. He came out of Oklahoma, and he was highly rated baseball player. And everyone thought he's going to play baseball. And then he said, maybe I'll play football. And we were speculating this is like December, January. If you play football, I wonder how high he'll go. Not even be a first round pick. No, no way. Sure enough. Okay. Then as soon as he announces very clearly going to be a first round pick. And then all spring, you just watch him drift up the board until he's the number one pick. One of the reasons for this is I think the league has slowly begun to appreciate position value in the draft. It just makes more sense to spend draft capital on positions that are ultimately more valuable and quarterbacks the most valuable position at league. So all teams don't follow.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are people still around? Do we still have the same bosses? Or do we still have the same portfolio? Often not. So that's the one tip I have that's clear and I want to acknowledge it's really hard. And we spend a lot of time on this in our decision making classes in school just trying to educate people, but it's a hard process.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so hard. And the main thing, and one of the only things I know of, Ted, is the same thing I've said already three or four times, is to write things down. You have to write things down. We trick ourselves. It is human nature to misremember what we thought once we know the outcome. We think we would have understood that. We think we predicted it right. There's just study after study that show this. And so unless you write it down, so there's incontrovertible evidence what your decision was, you're less likely to learn from it. The other thing is a lot of times people aren't writing down the outcomes at all, maybe five years before we know what happens.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About how much variation there actually is out there. I'm kind of skeptical of significant variation of these kinds of domains. There's a term that a fellow named Matthew Rabin, a behavioral economist, coined. He just dropped it into a paper years ago and hasn't caught him, but it's a good term. Fictitious variation. And it's this idea that even chance processes, if you look at the outcomes and then rank them, it looks like it's a meaningful ordering. It's like there is going to be somebody who has the most heads on 100 coin flips. There's going to be somebody. And so In Raven's term, fictitious variation. So my first question is, running the numbers and looking real hard and rigorously at it, how much variation is there in that industry in the money manager's ability to reliably outperform?”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly right to me. One of the things we come back to again and again in decision making is to not be too distracted by outcomes, to focus on the process and the inputs and what you knew before the decision was resolved and what's your opinion of the process before the decision was resolved. And so I would think that that would be a critical part of it. But my first question is,”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm fascinated by this question, and I know very little about the industry, but it strikes me that it's the exact same exercise. I've listened to some of your guest, was it Colette Chilton Williams, talking about her money managers a few weeks ago? And here's a person that's had that much success, and she's got whatever it is, 25 or 50 managers, and she turns them over real slow. And she talked about, well, it's probably a year from first conversation until I put them in or whatever. Like, what is she doing that year? How does she decide? How does she and her team decide? I'm fascinated about it. I mean, mostly did. I want to go out and talk to the folks who have a demonstrated track record of doing this well to figure out what they're doing. And what I heard her say that I appreciate is that she talks a lot about process. And so you want to see record and you want to see position by position, some details, but you're also talking a lot about philosophy and process. And that sounds...”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you were distilling advice that you wanted to give someone who's investing money with money managers, an allocator to managers. What would the advice be from a systems perspective of based on what you've learned from all your work, here's how you should think about getting better at picking the talent that is the money managers in your portfolio?”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm very intrigued by the way models are used in the investment decisions, but I don't think that's very far from what we've been talking about. I gather that the tensions are the same as the tensions I see in other places. The reversion to models are the same as I see in other places. I'm always entertained by how much subjective matters affect decision-making in finance. I think some folks think that it's going to be this purely meritocratic place or purely about the numbers, and then you get in, you start hearing stories about investment committees. It sounds a lot like power in politics. It sounds like some other industry. It's just, it feels to me mostly like it's not that different. What I think is true is that because human assets are such a big part of financial services firms, I think they are, they think harder about these HR practices and they're more open to improving the HR practices. And so I think we're seeing some advances there. But I don't think it's qualitatively different from other industries.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Than humans are. There's just so much noise in human judgment that it degrades the whole process and models ringing out that noise”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You might think of it as process. It's very much like the blocking and tackling of decision making. What we did was systematize what they had been doing. All the inputs, especially in the first few years, all of the inputs in the model were the exact same evaluations that they were doing for years and years. It was a reader looking at an application and scoring an essay or scoring a letter of recommendation or scoring a transcript. That's all it was. We've taken those inputs which have been going on for decades, but we're putting them into a model and we're now going to weigh them systematically. Everybody's going to get the same weight and we're going to push that against some objectives that we've sat around and talked about as a school what we're looking for. It's the systemization that makes the difference. And this is a big lesson in decision making. It's the benefit of models is really boring. The main benefit of models is that they're more consistent.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So mostly, Ted, we haven't changed the inputs. And this is what I think we surprised the administration a little bit. Whenever they sent me to go have these conversations and start talking with these folks, and by the way, the leaders there, in fact, the head of admissions there came out of financial services. And so she was all about this approach in general, which is really helpful. But I think they thought that we'd come up with some new signals, some new silver bullets. We'd find out, oh, we'll run some numbers and we'll find out when the person says this or if we see them do that, that's really what tells us. And it's very much not the way we went about it. It was very much.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think everybody listening probably has some experience with admissions to some school. So I'm so curious, what are the kind of inputs into a model that would determine whether you would accept a candidate or not to wart?”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could let them in a little bit, and that's an open question in different models, you probably ruin a model pretty quick in some cases, so you may not want to let them touch just anything. But yeah, I'd be curious to know in what way could you let a decision maker in that domain tweak a model? Another element of it is it's a long process. So maybe when they first see the model, they're averse to it, but they need some time to get used to it. And one of the experiences we had is that when we started using the model with admissions, In the first year, we said, hey, it's just advisory. Y'all do what you want to with this thing. It's advisory. And they move around a fair bit. And then every subsequent year, they move around a little bit less. And part of it is we improve the model, but part of it is they get used to the model. And so you give away a little more control early on to get their buy-in. They get a little more comfortable. They'd like the model better. They want to influence it less. And so there's a longer-term process you can keep in mind that will degrade the model less.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mind's spinning about thinking about a quantitative asset manager with the theory that, hey, you should never touch the model. But the point is you should touch it all the time as long as it's not impacting the actual result of the model.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“anybody at all. So it was the act of participating rather than the amount of influence that made the difference. And I think this is very general advice for people who are selling models or analytics. You got to let the users in a little bit. You got to let them kind of put their hands on it, have some influence over what goes into it if you want their full buy-in.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We kind of went the opposite way. We wanted to know how little we could let people play with it and still get their buy-in. And that was what was the most interesting thing about that second paper is that we kind of surprised ourselves by how little we could let them influence the outcome. Let's just play with some numbers. Let's say you give people a chance to use a model and half the people take it up and half don't. And the people that take it up easily do better than the ones who don't. So you want people to take it up. And then you let them move the model around by say plus or minus 10%. The take-up jumps up to maybe three quarters. So you get a lot more people using the model even though they make it a little bit worse. And you think, well, if I got 75% or 10%, I wonder what would happen if I let them do plus or minus 5%. You get the same 75%. You don't get any loss even though you cut their influence in half. And then you can take it even further. We knocked it down to 2% and we barely lost it.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In many of those domains, the models are so superior to intuitive judgment that even the degraded model would outperform judgment without the mod”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“algorithms until they see them fail and then they want to get out of them. And they're much harder in that respect on the model than they are on people. And I think this explains what I've run into in teams. I think it explains it in a lot of different domains. I heard when we wrote that paper, I heard a lot from people in financial services talked about how models get used in your decisions. And it seems to be a kind of a universal battle. One of the tricks we came up with in a follow-on paper was you can take the edge off of that at least a little bit by letting people inside the model, by letting them participate a little bit in the model. If you give a little control to those you want to use the model, they're more open and more interested. And it's a big enough effect, at least in the places we studied it. It's a big enough effect where even if it makes the model a little bit worse because you're letting somebody kind of play with it. And you've already optimized the dang model. You know, you don't need anybody to play with it. But let them play with it. Let them degrade it a little bit. That's fine if it means that they're more willing to use it.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The lead author on that is Berkeley Dietforst, who is a student at Wharton a few years ago, and another author is Joe Simmons, a colleague of mine. I've done some other work with. And we all probably come in at different places, but I came at it precisely because of this thing we're talking about. It's precisely the experience of going into an NFL team with a model and running into the resistance of using the model. And I felt like it was universal enough. I'd seen it in enough different places that it deserved looking into a little more closely. And what we found when we got into it was it's not that people are averse to models universally. It's that when they see models fail, they're harder on models than they are on people. So there are tasks, I suppose, for models can be perfect, but not many interesting tasks. So most of the jobs you and I are interested in, every model is going to fail. Every person is going to fail some of the time, maybe a lot of the time. And the observation is folks are happy using these.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This other angle that you've taken, you wrote a paper on what you called algorithm of aversion, just from taking, you had this model that said, hey, 52% of the time the players can't distinguish one player from the next, and you have a model, the outside view based on that. But there is this bias that people are averse to using algorithms. So what is that about?”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love that tension. I love that balance. I mean, it's really, really hard and rare. But when you can find it, yeah, that's one of the great things to be pushing for, absolutely.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and the portfolio management side, there's also this balance when you're playing against the markets of needing to be sufficiently confident that you can be different and think differently because that's the only way to add value relative to the crowd. But the humility that you might be wrong. Showed half of that in the same person. And I imagine that that has to play out across disciplines as well.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone come up with a number before you say, just come up with a number by yourself before you say it. We're like little geeks because we know how much, if we're trying to get to the right answer, we want to preserve that independence as long as possible.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“instead of November were ahead of the game because people have been able to independently collect information for a longer period of time. The other bit is that I love this example you're giving. I'd love to hear more about it from portfolio managers who do it well. How can they license disagreement? How can they encourage people to fight with them? Actually, the best I would hope would actually reward analysts who'll disagree with them. That should be part of the reward system is to disagree and poke holes. You might have to, I'm sure some organizations do this. Why not have these kind of red team people assigned where they're going to criticize any investment decision and poke holes in it? They're licensed to do so because that's their job in that setting to do so. So those kinds of things are ways you could get at this a little bit. But I want to own up to not being a purist about it. But the fact that you can't be a purist about it means that you got to find ways to do it all the time. If you hang out with people in decision making, people who study this for a living, we do this. It's kind of ridiculous how often we do this. We'll be speculating about something. We'll say, what was that number? What was that year? How many of that? And sometimes we'll say, okay.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For sure. And I recognize that that's a tension. And we're not a bunch of little robots that can perform the same regardless of our work conditions. And culture makes a huge difference. And frankly, the organizations who have had the best luck with analytics and professional sports have been those who have blended that with culture. It's not analytics or culture. It's the organizations who can say it's analytics and culture. So the short answer is you can't be pure. You've got to make compromises. But the fact that you have to compromise, Ted means that you have to push it as much as you can as often as you can. And so you've got to find ways to keep independence where you can because you know that ultimately you're going to break down the independence. Postponing information sharing as far into the process as possible is something we talk a lot about because eventually those guys are going to sit around at a table and argue about a player. And so everyone's going to know how else feels about it. But if we're having that kind of information sharing and awareness in March.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the other things I'm always curious about in these situations is we understand in this business and in all the decision making theory the importance of this independence of thought or in the football case you don't want the scouts talking to each other about a player but oftentimes certainly in the investment world there is a decision maker there is a leader of the team a portfolio manager and then you have the analysts who have different thought processes And there's all the whether you call it politics or compensation arrangements or whatever it is, there are all these reasons why the analyst wants the portfolio manager to like them. How do you kind of balance fostering the independence of thought with a culture that needs to have people communicating with each other?”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guys who believe in analytics and believe in the trade down philosophy and believe in uncertainty, it's a lot easier to believe in that stuff. Because between January and April, their study and film, they're having debates with their colleagues. They're putting guys on the board in the building. And then by the time it comes to April, they think they can draw really fine distinctions. In fact, they can draw really fine distinctions between the different players. It's just that they're not as predictive as it feels like it is. So this is a very general promise, inside view versus outside view problem. And I think it's one of the reasons we have a hard time using models in these situations.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we can't really argue with you if you say, well, by God, this guy on this year, I am certain is the guy. I have to have him over the next guy at his position. Like, okay, well, if you're that sure about it, my 52% number is about history, right? Thousands of people. But that one case, I don't know. And so that's the inside view is you've got all the particulars of that particular guy or that particular woman if you're in an organization hiring that. And that base rate number I've given you is pallid in comparison. And so it just carries less weight psychologically. It's almost something you have to believe philosophically to end up giving it as much weight as needed. And otherwise, you get pulled. Even in the NFL draft,”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of the main dynamics here is what Kahneman and Lovalo call the inside view versus the outside view. Our 52% number is very much an outside view. It says, look, the base right here is 52%, and that's across. A lot of teams were a lot of years, and so I'm sure about that number. But of course, there are some ones, and there are some zeros in there. And so any given case is either going to be a one or a zero.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we only have proxies for that, and we know it's imperfect. So they are saying upfront, we know it's imperfect. The only way to get closer is to write down the data, compare that to results, revisit it religiously, and refine the process and go again. And I think that's kind of the goal standard for all of us making these group decisions.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make their decisions, and it's a group process. And then they see how it goes and they see who comes, and then they see after one year how they've done, and they see after two years how they've done. And so they can compare their decisions at the point that they make the offer to what happens down the road, and they can see how they're doing. They said this thing early on when I heard them talk about it, they said this thing. They said, we know we are not measuring what actually matters. Like we're imperfectly, we say we want this thing, but that's only a proxy for what we actually care about. We want to create like leaders in the world.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source