Scouting & Scoring: QMN001
Wednesday, 24 April
This is The Quartermaster Newsletter - things that KS Anthony and Brady Moore are finding in the worlds of cognition, memory, mental models, planning practices, tools (like analytics, machine learning and other AI) - and the effects technology is having on our worlds - both personal and professional.
The Quartermaster refers to the original Quartermaster of the seventeenth century - the man charged with traveling days ahead of an expeditionary army to find what path they’d take and where they’d camp. He was a trusted advisor and leader who eventually was also responsible for gathering intelligence. As Martin Van Creveld describes in Command in War:
His first task is to reconnoiter the country ahead of the army, not merely in the manner of guides but “militarily,” that is, taking into account all the possibilities and obstacles that it might present for marching and for battle. Riding ahead of the army in this capacity, the quartermaster general will naturally be entrusted with intelligence work, interrogating local inhabitants and deserters as well as intercepting friendly patrols on their way back from observing the enemy. He is [...] responsible for coordinating all the correspondence addressed by members of the army to the commanding general (who in turn will have his hands full corresponding with the minister of war and with the governments of the countries in whose territories he operates) and also for preparing all marching orders and ordres de bataille. Finally, it is for him to inform the sutlers of the army’s movements, its logistic requirements, the location of its magazines, and so on.
KS and Brady are already out front, dealing with the concepts and technology you’ll be dealing with tomorrow. How about they give you a taste of what’s coming up? Don’t worry if the initial report sounds a little foreign - they’ll articulate and explain to make sure you’re getting the “so what”. You’re a busy commanding general. They’re here to enable the march of your army.
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Brady here. This month in The New Yorker, Louis Menand wrote a review of the new book Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know about Baseball by Christopher Phillips. The book examines the two different ways players are valued in baseball - Scouting being the traditional heuristic method that uses experience-gained human indicators of future performance and Scoring being the more modern statistical method using performance data and the ratios they form to determine the value of a ballplayer to a club. Most people are likely familiar with the difference from the movie or book Moneyball - and Menand in his review often compares the two. Scouting is cast as less rigorous and likely superstitious and Scoring is only concerned with facts and figures and is therefore more empirical. Phillips, he says, though, sets the record straight that the two methods aren’t night-and-day different - “that scouting involves measuring and scoring involves judging.”
A leap.
In August 2011 I got out of the Army and enrolled the next day at Penn State - I took nearly 10 years of on-the-ground experience leading and planning operations around the world into a civilian academic environment focused on business - two worlds where I had exactly zero background. But I had high expectations - already an apostle of Peter Drucker’s observations, I was sure that I was headed into a world that valued outcomes over intentions - something I had come to find lacking in the Army. In the first semester while in a mandatory team-building seminar class, I was presented with a list of principles of business decision making, with guidance to make decisions based on data alone, and to demand that all recommendations be backed empirically. Business leaders were to be wary of any judgments made based on experience - they were faulty - results of bias, human memory and inherent error.
I was horrified at that advice. Having spent the previous decade steeped in the wisdom of the grizzled noncommissioned officer (NCO), I knew that what I was reading was the basest heresy. NCOs - widely regarded as the backbone of the Army - had spent their entire careers planning and carrying out operations and though they often lacked a degree, they lived the consequences of decisions good and bad. NCOs never came with stats - they came with scars. They’d done it a thousand times and if they were good and cared about their people and you, they’d let you know how to get the job done right, from experience. An officer was well-served by keeping their counsel at all times - throughout my career I got to meet heroes of the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War and Somalia - and they all told us junior officers, “Listen to your NCOs”. “Listen to experience” was what they were saying - listen to the ones who’ve done this more than once.
Articulation.
Now after five years of applying analytics to military and business problems, I know where Menand’s and Phillips’ heads are with their observations of Scouting and Scoring in baseball. The Oakland A’s, the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox are all shining examples of the value of scoring - and it’s changed the whole sport. But they still need people to know which methods to use and which data to consider. Both hard-won human experience and deliberate, objective statistical methods are not only valuable, but required for good decisions today. Tyler Cowen’s descriptions of freestyle chess in Average is Over - where teams use multiple artificial intelligence tools to compete against each other in a chess game - show that humans paired with automation perform both better than humans alone and computers alone - and is a good example of how best to approach the conflict between man and machine. The skill to be developed is judgment - knowing which tool or intuition to apply to a given situation and why. (BJM)
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Apparently there are people out there who don’t like home runs. “Baseball is becoming more static, and we’re one unpredictable fluctuation in the baseball’s aerodynamic qualities away from an ugly offensive outage.” More on launch angle, drag, the historic dearth of stolen bases, the rise in wild pitches and getting beaned: it’s all connected. Baseball Goes to Extremes on The Ringer (BJM)
AI Speech Assessment May Provide a Definitive PTSD Diagnosis - A brief overview of research conducted by NYU utilizing AI to analyze differences in speech/vocal affect in samples of both veterans diagnosed with PTS and those without in an effort to identify markers associated with PTS. They claim an 89.1% accuracy rate. (KSA)
What The Hell Is Going On - an excellent essay about the way the internet (and its attendant information abundance) has changed commerce, politics and education - and how the three are connected. Longread - but worth the time. If you’re a fan of Martin Gurri, this will look pretty familiar to you. And if you lived through 2016, it’ll explain a lot. (BJM)
Company With Emotion Recognition AI Aims to ‘Understand All Things Human’- Affectiva, a company boasting an emotion recognition AI that “understands all things human” by analyzing facial expressions has raised $26M in its latest funding round. Their goal? A Human Perception AI. (KSA)
America’s Biggest Supermarket Company Struggles With Online Grocery Upheaval. - Ecommerce is forcing fast change in grocery - where margins were razor thin to begin with.(BJM)
Developers Create Genderless Voice For AI, Citing Need to 'Break Down the Gender Binary' - Vice’s creative arm seems to have discovered that creating a problem is a great way to sell a solution. But is there really a need for “non-gendered” representation in digital technology? (KSA)
We Now Live in a World With Customized Shampoo - Hair care, soft drinks and weight loss supplements are all being customized at the individual level. What’ll be interesting is seeing how far this will all go - what customizations are we willing to pay for? (BJM)
Remarks complete. Nothing follows.
KS Anthony (KSA) & Brady Moore (BJM)
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