(2017-10-29) Zvim Leaders Of Men

Zvi Mowshowitz: Leaders of Men. Related to (Eliezer Yudkowsky): Inadequacy and Modesty. (2017-10-15-YudkowskyInadequateEquilibriaChapter1InadequacyAndModesty)

Epistemic Status: Confident. No sports knowledge required.
In 2005, Willie Randolph became manager of the New York Mets.
In his first five games as manager, all of which he lost, Willie made more decisions wrong than I thought possible.
Willie’s in-game decisions did not improve. If anything, they got worse.
Despite this, we came to understand why Willie got and kept his job.
Willie Randolph was a leader of men.

Do bad in-game decisions cost games? Absolutely. But not that many games. Maybe they lose you 4 a year out of 162.

If the lineup makes your players unhappy, that costs a lot more. If your pitchers lose motivation or have their rhythms disrupted, that matters more than getting high leverage for your best reliever. Maybe bunting inspires team unity. The reason we hate bunting so much isn’t because it’s a huge mistake. It’s an obvious mistake. A pure mistake. An arithmetic error.
Plenty of people could get those technical decisions right. I could do it.
What most of us can’t do is lead men. Leading men is what counts. That’s the real job, but it comes with these other tasks.

Could Willie Randolph hire someone to micromanage the game? Could Andy Reid hire someone to manage his two minute drills?
No. The people who are capable of that, are not leaders of men, and how they make those decisions is part of how they lead men.
Even if you could do that, fixing such penny-ante problems is too disruptive. You want their eyes on the prize.

This generalizes.

...if you need rare levels of such skills compared to what you can offer, you won’t select for anything else. You can’t demand ordinary competence in insufficiently important areas. There aren’t enough qualified applicants. Plus it wouldn’t be worth the distraction.

This helps explain why people in unique positions are often uniquely terrible. They’re not replaceable. Some incompetence and shenanigans are acceptable, so long as they deliver the goods.

The same goes for other groups, organizations, religions, software and most anything else.
If a system has unique big advantages, they’re not effectively competing on less big things. They might be optimizing small things, but they don’t have to, so you can’t assume such things are optimized at all. Even when a system does not have unique advantages, anything insufficiently central is likely not optimized because it’s not worthy of attention. (Most Successful Companies Get Just One Thing Right)

Thus I generally believe the following two things:

• It is relatively easy to find ways in which almost anything could be improved on the margin, were one able to implement isolated changes. Well thought-out such ideas are often correct.
• The person making such a correct suggestion would likely be hopelessly lost trying to implement this change let alone running the relevant systems.