The latest NBA strategic battle

"A lot of the defensive strategies you see now are a natural evolution from rule changes," says Houston GM Daryl Morey, in reference to the league's decision a decade ago to abandon illegal defense rules and essentially allow zone defenses. "First the defense evolved by overloading the strong side, and now the offenses are evolving to beat that."

The Heat are the most obvious example of a team that has torn down and rebuilt its entire offense over 18 months to counter defenses committed to clogging the lane, sending an extra defender toward the ball, and forcing offenses into second, third, and fourth options. It's no coincidence Miami plays in the same conference as Boston and Chicago — the two teams most associated, via Tom Thibodeau, with that strangling defense. Thibodeau didn't invent this system, and he's loath to take any public credit for it, but coaches, scouts, and executives all over the league agree he was the first coach to stretch the limits of the NBA's newish defensive three-second rule and flood the strong side with hybrid man/zone defenses. Other coaches have copied that style, and smart offenses over the last two seasons — and especially this season — have had to adapt. The evolution will have long-lasting consequences on multiple fronts — on the league's entertainment value, the importance of smart coaching, and the sorts of players that GMs seek out in the draft and via free agency.

Zach Lowe on how NBA offenses are evolving to counter the trendy Thibodeau-style defenses which have become so popular and effective. Smart throughout.

Lowe notes that a key in countering these types of defenses is being able to pass the ball well. This matches what I've seen with offenses that have given the Bulls problems in the past. Because the Bulls attack the strong side so aggressively, a team that can quickly swing the ball all the way back to the other side of the court quickly often gets open 3-pointers against the Bulls.

​To beat a team like Miami, with its habit of sending a whole series of fast, good defenders at the ball from among Lebron, Wade, Battier, Chalmers, Cole, and Anthony, quick passing is the only way to win. You can't expect to beat them off the dribble which is one reason the Bulls struggled so much in their last playoff meeting. Once they put Lebron on Derrick Rose and neutralized Rose's dribble penetration, the Bulls offense choked. When the Bulls have had success against the heat, it is with quick passing, not dribble penetration.

Just as football has gone through a series of back and forth chess moves between offenses and defenses (Buddy Ryan 4-6, West Coast offense, Cover 2, spread offense, option read), basketball is in the midst an inflection point too. 

The fairly rapid transitions in these cycles make sports an underrated way to study evolutionary systems.

Summer nostalgia

One of the biggest adjustments of moving from Los Angeles up to San Francisco has been the drastic climate change. In LA it was an apocalyptic outlier when it was cold or rainy; in San Francisco, a warm, sunny day like today is so rare it is like a spontaneous holiday.​

Whenever warm weather returns after a long cold spell, I'm noticeably more cheerful. One of the most important reasons is that smell travels more readily on warm air. Through my bedroom window this morning I could smell a mixture of flowers, trees, grass, and just the slightest hint of ocean, and smell is so closely tied to memory that I'm immediately plunged into nostalgic reverie.

In the winter, I can't smell anything. The air is chilly, both literally and figuratively, and since it's chilly about ten and a half months out of twelve in San Francisco, my nose goes numb.

It's a mixed blessing depending on where you live, of course. Walking by a pile of trash on the sidewalk in NYC on a sweltering summer day is like a drive-by assault on the nose, and San Francisco has no shortage of unpleasantly familiar odors lurking on the wrong sidewalks.

Right at this moment, though, I can smell just a hit of wildflower through the window as I sit typing at my kitchen table and part of me is eight years old again, at a kitchen table in a townhouse in Palatine, waiting for my mother to bring me a tuna sandwich for lunch.

Good Fast Food

Mark Bittman writes about his dream of good fast food: healthy, cheap, real food.​ So far, he has yet to find it, though he cites some places that come close, like Lyfe Kitchen, Veggie Grill, and Tender Greens, all of which I've been to, incidentally (there's a Lyfe Kitchen near the Flipboard office in Palo Alto).

Bittman made me chuckle with a term he coined for restaurants that are just one step up from the McDonald's, Subway, and Taco Bells of the world. He refers to the Shake Shack, Five Guys, Starbucks, and Pret a Manger's of the world as Nouveau Junk.​

Efficient Charity Donation

Scott Alexander reports back from a talk on efficient charity at the Berkeley Faculty Club. A highlight was a section by Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias fame.​

One of his claims that generated the most controversy was that instead of donating money to charity, you should invest the money at compound interest, then donate it to charity later after your investment has paid off – preferably just before you die, since donating money after death is legally complicated. His argument, nice and simple, was that the real rate of return on investment has been higher than the growth rate for 3000 years and this pattern shows no signs of changing. If you donate the money today, your donation grows with the growth rate, but if you invest it, it grows with the interest rate. He gave his classic example of Benjamin Franklin, who put his relatively meager earnings into a trust fund to be paid out two hundred years later; when they did, the money had grown to $7 million. He said that the reason people didn’t do this was that they wanted the social benefits of having given money away, which are unavailable if you wait until just before you die to do so.

...

Then he started talking about how you should only ever donate to one charity – the most effective. I’d heard this one before and even written essays speaking in favor of it, but it’s always been very hard for me and I’ve always chickened out. What Robin added was, once again, a psychological argument – that the reason this is so hard is that if charity is showing that you care, you want to show that you care about a lot of different things. Only donating to one charity robs you of opportunities to feel good when the many targets of your largesse come up and burdens you with scope insensitivity (my guess is that most people would feel more positive affect about someone who saved a thousand dogs and one cat than someone who saved two thousand dogs. The first person saved two things, the second person only saved one.) In retrospect this is absolutely true and my gibbering recoil at this problem isn’t just Yet Another Cognitive Bias but just good old self-interest.

Just as fascinating was a discussion of reasons Hanson's strategy might not be optimal. For example, this from St. Elie of GiveWell:

He said that the world is getting better so quickly that we are running out of good to be done. After the initial burst of astonishment he explained: in the 1960s, the most cost-effective charity was childhood vaccinations, but now so many people have donated to this cause that 80% of children are vaccinated and the remainder are unreachable for really good reasons (like they’re in violent tribal areas of Afghanistan or something) and not just because no one wants to pay for them. In the 1960s, iodizing salt might have been the highest-utility intervention, but now most of the low-iodine areas have been identified and corrected. While there is still much to be done, we have run out of interventions quite as easy and cost-effective as those. And one day, God willing, we will end malaria and maybe we will never see a charity as effective as the Against Malaria Fund again.

Lots of thought-provoking ideas, highly recommended (h/t to Marginal Revolution).

While it's true that much of charity donation work is self-serving, it feels like a worthwhile indulgence. The anonymous donor is the most noble of donors, but I shudder to think of how much charity funds would shrink if all donations had to be kept anonymous. Your name on a scrolling list on a web page, a plaque on a sidewalk, or in the end credits under Special Thanks is, in the scheme of things, a low price to pay.​

Why does red meat contribute to heart disease?

The answer may not be the fat in the steak.​

The researchers had come to believe that what damaged hearts was not just the thick edge of fat on steaks, or the delectable marbling of their tender interiors. In fact, these scientists suspected that saturated fat and cholesterol made only a minor contribution to the increased amount of heart disease seen in red-meat eaters. The real culprit, they proposed, was a little-studied chemical that is burped out by bacteria in the intestines after people eat red meat. It is quickly converted by the liver into yet another little-studied chemical called TMAO that gets into the blood and increases the risk of heart disease.

The study is not conclusive, but it may cast a pall over some energy drinks that contain carnitine, a substance that is found in red meat. Gut bacteria metabolizes the carnitine to produce TMAO in the blood.

Many energy drinks, like Red Bull, Monster, and Rockstar, contain l-carnitine with the idea that it helps to metabolize fat more quickly, releasing energy.​