Philadelphia 76ers: The Sam Hinkie Manifesto

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Then I looked at real estate prices. I was right, yes, but this view was decidedly not a non-consensus view. My viewpoint as a Silicon Valley real estate dilettante, which took a whole week to form, had been priced in.
Shocker.
To develop truly contrarian views will require a never-ending thirst for better, more diverse inputs.
What player do you think is most undervalued? Get him for your team. What basketball axiom is most likely to be untrue? Take it on and do the opposite. What is the biggest, least valuable time sink for the organization? Stop doing it. Otherwise, it’s a big game of pitty pat, and you’re stuck just hoping for good things to happen, rather than developing a strategy for how to make them happen.
There has to be a willingness to tolerate counterarguments, hopefully in such a way that you can
truly understand and summarize the other side’s arguments at least as well as they can. And then, after all that, still have the conviction to separate yourself from the herd.

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A tolerance of uncertainty

This one can be really difficult, especially when the stakes are high. But it’s critical to making
rational decisions over the long term. We are all so tempted to simplify when something is hard to think about, simply to get it out of our mind by treating it as impossible.
This goes from academic sounding to life altering in basketball team building, though. Looking at a
player with an estimated 10% or 20% chance of being a star over the next three or four years can’t be written to zero—that’s about as high as those odds ever get. That’s surely a very, very high number for any player that is ever available to you to be added to your team. Once you accept that, it becomes clear that shrinking the confidence interval around that estimate (and the estimates of the downside risk at the other end of the spectrum) becomes pretty darn important.

But our well worn thinking patterns often let us down here. Phil Tetlock, from just down the street
at Penn, addresses this well in his most recent remarkable book Superforecasting where he quotes the great Amos Tversky saying, “In dealing with probabilities…most people only have three settings: “gonna happen,” “not gonna happen,” and “maybe”.” Jeff Van Gundy sums it up succinctly on our telecasts, “it’s a make or miss league.” He’s right.

In some decisions, the uncertainties are savage. You have to find a way to get comfortable with that range of outcomes. If you can’t, you’re forced to live with many fewer options to choose amongst which leads over the long term to lesser and lesser outcomes.

The illusion of control is an opiate, though. Nonetheless, it is annoyingly necessary to get
comfortable with many grades of maybe. Sixers fans come up to me to say hello and many of them say the same thing (almost instinctively) as we part, “Good luck.” My standard reply: “Thanks. We’ll need it.”

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Be long science

Science is about predictions. Understanding the world until you can make a prediction about what
will happen next. If you’re not sure, test it. Measure it. Do it again. See if it repeats.