[no subject]

["Berry, Mark S" <berrym@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yeah, this sounds like the Wonderlic test the NFL uses, only the Wonderlic
has more data to create a context. Anyway, it's just another tool to
separate players, not some sort of panacea. There have been plenty of
successful NFL players with lousy Wonderlic scores and plenty of lousy NFL
players with high Wonderlic scores. You have to consider everything, but
personality type certainly is part of it.

This is a factor Wallace seems to have completely ignored. He chose Joe
Johnson and Kedrick Brown, passive wallflowers, and Joe Forte, a jerk,
seemingly ignoring red-flag personality traits. Ugh. Let's hope this Ainge
thing gets finalized soon.

Mark 

--- --- ---

Kestas wrote:

That's the first time I've heard of it and it sounds really quacky to me.
When
someone starts talking about N brain types, I see "charlatan" written all
over
it. As anyone who has studied real brains either anatomically or through the
various imaging techniques knows, brains are incredibly variable in size and
morphology, and there is no relationship (aside from brains with clear
pathology) between these variables and function. It sounds like some mixture
of
phrenology and pop psychology. 
If you want to talk about personality variables, sure, people with high
scores
on certain measures (say, drive to succeed, or intelligence) will do tend to
do
better at some things. If they evaluate players in some personality trait
test
and find that it correlates with achievement in the NBA, then fine. But
somehow
I doubt these people did scientific testing on lots of  past and present NBA
players, including Jordan and Bird. Most likely, they're just talking
through
their hat. That the Suns picked Nash, who later became a successful NBA
player,
means nothing. One can pick up decent players by chance (the probability in
a
decent draft is not that low, although Wallace managed to elude that with
not
one, but 3 fairly high picks).  Or they could pick successfully because of
some
other judgment criteria. 
I sometimes wonder what I could sell to an NBA team, if I were a
slick-enough
salesman. These people 1) usually know next to nothing about science and
statistics; 2) are desperate to gain an edge on the competition; and 3) have
money to burn. The better GMs probably go by "gut feeling", which is another
way of saying they have no idea why they feel that way about a player or a
deal, but they "know" it's right - and they're right more often than not.
The
crappy ones....it's too painful to contemplate.