Why The Best Player Alive Barely Runs
David Epstein, author of the recent Inside the Box (a book about the value of constraints), did a fascinating video on “anticipatory skill” and “chunking” and how players like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo (who can accurately head the ball even in the dark) use them to slow down a fast, complex game.
And this is the skill that Messi, Ronaldo, and Pujols all share. They’re chunking positions of people and angles of legs and spins of balls in order to understand immediately what’s going on and what might happen next. The more patterns you absorb in any domain, the less effort it takes to read what’s happening and to predict what’s coming next.
So when Messi walks, he’s not resting. He’s chunking the entire field. Every position, every shift, every gap in the backline is feeding a pattern library that he’s been building since he was 5 years old. By the time he decides to move, the map is already drawn. And when Ronaldo heads a ball into the net in total darkness, it’s because he’s seen that angle of another player’s leg and that ball’s trajectory a hundred times over and knows the pattern it follows.
I love this kind of thing and even though I am not a world-class boxer or football player, I can see it in action as I’ve gotten better over the years downhill mountain biking (where I’m able to go faster on the bike while still being able to react to terrain in what feels like the same amount of time), playing Fortnite (which I’m still not great at, but the game seems to move at a much slower pace, allowing me to keep up), or doing the crossword puzzle (you get an instinctive feel for answers just by how questions are posed). I’m sure this shows up in my work too — I read so damn much online that sometimes it takes me only 2-3 seconds to figure out if something is worth my while — but it’s easier to observe in sports or gaming.
BTW, Epstein just started his YouTube channel a few months ago, but it’s already filled with great stuff like Why The Fastest Way To Improve Is To Subtract, Why The Smartest People I Know Set Constraints, Not Goals, and Why The Best Kids Are Rarely The Best Adults. I’ve got some catching up to do.
Comments 1
The idea of the "Generation Effect" is super interesting to me. I suspect this is one of the problems with using ChatGPT or some other LLM to write a first draft. It's the act of generating the ideas that creates the ability to chunk, right?
I'll go even further: the act of reading the model's best guess at the right answer focuses me in on that answer. Immediately, all of the other answers I might have come up with are eliminated. Instead, I'm thinking about what the model thinks. I've delegated the creative process, failed to form the connections between the synapses in my brain, and missed out on the opportunity to develop my own thoughts and opinions. No matter how well the AI is imitating my writing style.
For a bit, I went all in on the "chat as thought partner" process. I used it to summarize big documents. I used it to discuss ideas in my life, both personal and business. I used it to start memorandums and strategy documents. A few months in, my business partner mentioned in passing, though kindly, that my writing had gotten significantly worse since I started talking to ChatGPT all the time. Ouch.
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