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27 Apr, 4 tweets, 1 min read
There have been a couple of great podcasts/articles about why NFL teams are still so bad at picking QBs. Coupla thoughts.

1. QB is one of the most contingent jobs in sports. He can't pass to himself, or block for himself. Success is determined by forces outside his control.
2. The reverse order draft (typically) guarantees the best college QBs go to the worst teams—a situation unlike any non-sports career—which means college talent is often "rewarded" with an awful professional home.
3. Greatness is (often) non-linear. Manning was a turnover machine who quickly learned historic efficiency. Brees was inconsistent before NOLA. Brady was a super-clutch player who got better and better thru his 20s until became a statistical monster in his 30s.
If QB greatness is both contextual and non-linear, scouting will always be extremely incomplete. It's like forecasting how a plant is going to grow by doing a full genomic breakdown of a seed, but having no idea what climate or soil it's going to be planted in.

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More from @DKThomp

Derek Thompson Profile picture
19 Apr
A very hard question that we should probably try to answer at some point: What state had the best COVID response above expected value?

Here's the chart of excess deaths (Y) vs job losses (X) by state. Some thoughts...
And here is the color-coded map of deaths per capita by state (darker red means more deaths per population)
Coupla observations:

1. State policies fed into regional effects: Many deep south states and northeast states really got rocked.

2. But northern New England and the west/northwest did much better, as regions.
Read 5 tweets
Derek Thompson Profile picture
19 Apr
I wrote about the outdoor mask mandates.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

Masks are good; and inside, among non-vaccinated ppl, they're great.

But governments need to give Americans an off-ramp to the post-pandemic world. Ending outdoor mask mandates would be a good place to start.
To be clear: I don't support immediately lifting mandates in places with outbreaks, like Michigan.

But dozens of states that currently have outdoor mask mandates should mark an imminent threshold—in, say, local hospitalization rate—below which the mandates will be lifted.
The best case for KEEPING the mask mandates are

1. Masks are easy, and they work
2. Requiring masks outside makes them handy when people go inside
3. Masks build a sense of social solidarity.

I think I can imagine better counter-arguments for all three.
Read 9 tweets
Derek Thompson Profile picture
15 Apr
Some math and metaphors.

This CDC report finds that documented post-vaccine infections are a 1-in-11,000 event.

What's that like?

Well, the odds that an average 20something driving 17 miles gets into a car accident is ... 1-in-11,000.
To be fair, CDC is only reporting documented breakthroughs. There are probably more asymptomatics that aren't reported. Let's say actual breakthrough rate is 250x higher.

Well, those are the odds that a 20something driving 17 miles *every weekday* gets into an accident this year
You can check my math here

aaafoundation.org/rates-motor-ve…

I DM'd with a university mathematician before tweeting to make sure the math was rightish. He points out rightly that drives and immune systems are pretty heterogenous, so this is apples/oranges. But the point stands.
Read 4 tweets
Derek Thompson Profile picture
14 Apr
In a Media Insight Project survey of the moral values of news audiences, the value drawing the least support was "the idea that a good way to make society better is to spotlight its problems—only about 3 in 10 agree."

washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/medi…

Well, that's certainly interesting.
A few thoughts, in tension:

1. From my perspective, audiences love reading about society's problems. They consume the hell out of "problem spotlighting" from gender/race inequality to threats of anti-democratic right (MSNBC) to purported migrant dangers (FNC)
2. I, personally, have no idea What Americans Want, and it's very possible that the vast majority of ppl who I don't know and will never meet actually don't want so much problem-spotlighting, and they're being over-served a lot of Sad World Journalism.
Read 5 tweets
Derek Thompson Profile picture
13 Apr
I wrote about how we're entering the full zombie phase of "hygiene theater"
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

Evidence for surface transmission of COVID-19 is truly pathetic. But unlike the actual coronavirus, performative cleaning rituals are very much alive on surfaces across America.
The surface-transmission theory of COVID-19 is basically dead. But hygiene theater lives:

- on subways
- in schools
- in stores
- in offices
- and ... sigh ... at The Atlantic
I want to directly address this point because I think it represents a plausible-sounding but probably wrong objection to my hygiene theater critiques.

The objection is basically: Hey but isn't hygiene theater actually, you know, pretty hygienic?
Read 6 tweets
Derek Thompson Profile picture
11 Apr
I'm mildly obsessed with the question of whether the decline of organized religion has ironically pushed religious thinking into every other nook and cranny of "secular" life

nytimes.com/2021/04/10/opi…

No surprise that @DouthatNYT has smart things to say on it
To the extent that there's a sort of god gene that must do *some* work for secular ppl, I buy the case that organized religion has partly dissolved into:

1. non-organized spirituality (wellness, meditation, astrology)

2. quasi-religious political movements (you know the type)
(Don't take "god gene" literally. That's I'm-running-out-of-Twitter-characters shorthand for "assuming without evidence that even religiously unaffiliated groups have a sort of baseline level of non-rational spirituality, and that energy has to flow somewhere, where does it go?")
Read 4 tweets

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