Quote:
Originally Posted by vhawk01
Yes, the way to deal with small sample size problems is to break them into even smaller samples to prove your point.
What? He is looking at the complete sample set of all games played for both teams, and noting what the distribution looks like. How the heck is this "breaking them into even smaller samples"? Are you trying to simply toss out the poor games for the 2012 team because if we actually noted poor results for them we'd be "breaking our sample set into smaller samples"? This doesn't make any sense.
Yeah it would be great if we had 100 game samples, but just because we don't doesn't mean we have zero information available. And it certainly doesn't mean that analyzing what the distribution looks like means we're "breaking it up into smaller samples".
Quote:
Originally Posted by vhawk01
More like:
1. I understand the gut reaction that 92>>>all. I grew up with them just like you guys. They are all the gods of basketball. No one could ever be better.
2. When I actually try to think about how I'd prove that, or demonstrate it, or find out if its actually true, I struggle badly, and cant think of any good arguments. I can think of a lot of terrible ones though.
3. So I just continue to mildly hold the opinion, based on basically nothing except gut reaction.
4. To my (very little) surprise I find that many people dont actually have any introspection, confidently assert their gut reactions, and then scramble to find any terrible argument they can to shoehorn into support so they dont need to question their premise.
4 points is more comprehensive than 2.
The more you post the more hilarious it is that you were accusing people of intellectual dishonesty earlier.
1. I've said in this very thread that, without looking at it in too much depth, I think the 2008 Olympic team is pretty much a coin flip with the 1992 Dream Team. You can stop pretending anyone that is arguing for 1992 thinks that this team is unbeatable and they are the "gods of basketball".
2. I suspect you lack imagination, and aren't honestly looking at the arguments presented. Keep beating up those strawmen though.
3. OK cool?
4. You mean the premise that 1992 is unbeatable? The one that I don't even hold? Does anyone even hold this premise? You may want to consider that you're projecting here, because you seem to be clinging to the premise that there are always huge athletic leaps no matter what in relatively short amounts of time. Because something something gut reaction, something something shoehorning an argument, something about not questioning your premises. Yeah, the more I think about it the more it's definitely projection. Also, I should probably point out something about strawmanning an argument to death here (holy crap you guys! Let me keep bringing up average margin of victory for the 14th post in a row even though no one is even talking about average! That'll show you!), but I think my point is already clear.
But let's backtrack a little bit. You have tried to argue that the 1988 Olympic team consisting of college players would be about equal to the Dream Team, aside from the USSR game. So I'm not exactly sure what weird point you were trying to make here, except maybe that the 1988 team won some of their games by a lot. If anything this is a terrible anecdote for 2012. Like 1988, they blew out a lot of teams that couldn't compete at all, but when they played solid international teams they struggled. Maybe if you quit pretending we're only looking at average margin of victory this would have been clear earlier. This shows that teams that are no where close to as good as the 1992 Dream Team can still blow teams out and skew the average margin of victory high. Guess what the 2012 Olympic team did?
I think you should probably consider the fact that no matter what the results were in the 1992 Olympics vs. the 2012 Olympics, and no matter what the team makeup is for 2012, you would still have the position of "shrug, I think 1992 is better but it's just a gut reaction because I grew up with them. Any argument you can make for 1992 is terrible." I mean, 2012 doesn't even have their best team they could assemble. Their starting center is Tyson Chandler! Their backup center is a power forward that can't play defense!
Quick, which is the better team: 2008 or 2012? The answer to this is pretty obvious right? But wait, how could we possibly come to this conclusion?? They only played 8 games!
Quick, who is better, peak Shaq or peak Dwight Howard? It's Shaq right? But how could you possibly know??? Shaq hasn't been at his peak for a decade and the league is WAY BETTER now! After all, it's been 10 whole years! Plus we have a ZERO game sample size of peak Shaq vs. peak Dwight! How could we possibly make an educated guess on something like this??
Honestly, if you weren't mad that I showed athletics doesn't always dramatically improve in a 2 decade time span and made you look silly, would you really have the position that there are zero good arguments for 1992?