How David Beats Goliath

A long article from the New Yorker, subtitled "When underdogs break the rules", and well worth the read.

Excerpts:

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...A non-stop full-court press gives weak basketball teams a chance against far stronger teams. Why have so few adopted it?

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The political scientist Ivan Arregun-Toft [How the weak win wars. A theory of asymmetric conflict] recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arregun-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful - in terms of armed might and population - as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.
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In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. "I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it." he said (in Robert Alter's translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arregun-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David's winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath's rules, they win, Arregun-Toft concluded, even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn't.
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Consider the way T. E. Lawrence (or, as he is better known, Lawrence of Arabia) led the revolt against the Ottoman Army occupying Arabia near the end of the First World War. ... when Lawrence looked at his ragtag band of Bedouin fighters he realized that a direct attack on Medina would never succeed. .... The Bedouins under Lawrence's command were not, in conventional terms, skilled troops. They were nomads. Sir Reginald Wingate, one of the British commanders in the region, called them "an untrained rabble, most of whom have never fired a rifle." But they were tough and they were mobile. ... tribesmen, men quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets were movement, endurance, individual intelligence, knowledge of the country, courage.
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David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability; and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life.
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What Ranadiv's company, TIBCO, did was to consolidate those [formerly disparate] databases into one stream, so that the [securities] trader could collect all the data he wanted instantaneously. Batch processing was replaced by real-time processing. Today, TIBCO's software powers most of the trading floors on Wall Street. .... Ranadiv views this move from batch to real time as a sort of holy mission. The shift, to his mind, is one of kind, not just of degree.
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Insurgents, though, operate in real time. Lawrence hit the Turks, in that stretch in the spring of 1917, nearly every day, because he knew that the more he accelerated the pace of combat the more the war became a battle of endurance, and endurance battles favor the insurgent.
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So why are there no more than a handful of college teams who use the full-court press the way Pitino does? .... Arregun-Toft found the same puzzling pattern. When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time underdogs didn't fight like David. Of the two hundred and two lopsided conflicts in Arregun-Toft's database, the underdog chose to go toe to toe with Goliath the conventional way a hundred and fifty-two times, and lost a hundred and nineteen times.
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It makes no sense, unless you think back to that Kentucky-L.S.U. game and to Lawrence's long march across the desert to Aqaba. .... We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It's the other way around. Effort can trump ability; legs, in Saxe's formulation, can overpower arms, because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor co-ordination.
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... the second half of the insurgent's creed [:] Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is 'socially horrifying' - they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought. All the things that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and co-ordination. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable - a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out of bounds. You have to be outside the establishment - a foreigner new to the game ... George Washington couldn't do it. His dream, before the war, was to be a British Army officer, finely turned out in a red coat and brass buttons. He found the guerrillas who had served the American Revolution so well to be "an exceeding dirty and nasty people." He couldn't fight the establishment, because he 'was' the establishment.
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The price that the outsider pays for being so heedless of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider. ... Goliath does not simply dwarf David. He brings the full force of social convention against him; he has contempt for David. .... "In the beginning, everyone laughed at our fleet," Lenat said. "It was really embarrassing. People felt sorry for us. But somewhere around the third round they stopped laughing, When we won again, some people got very angry, and the tournament directors basically said that it was not really in the spirit of the tournament to have these weird computer-designed fleets winning." It isn't surprising that the tournament directors found Eurisko's strategies beyond the pale. Its 'wrong' to sink your own ships, they believed. And they were right. But let's remember who made that rule: Goliath. And let's remember why Goliath made that rule: when the world has to play on Goliath's terms, Goliath wins.
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And David, let's not forget, was a shepherd. He came at Goliath with a slingshot and staff because those were the tools of his trade. He didn't know that duels with Philistines were supposed to proceed formally, with the crossing of swords. "When the lion or the bear would come and carry off a sheep from the herd, I would go out after him and strike him down and rescue it from his clutches," David explained to Saul. He brought a shepherd's rules to the battlefield...

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Audentes fortuna iuvat.