The Russell Westbrook Problem

I've historically exhibited extreme depth but very limited breadth in my interests, and so naturally, I find analogies in some of my areas of expertise to apply to life. One of these areas of expertise is in why Russell Westbrook is the most overrated basketball player of my viewing lifetime. In other words, he's probably the NBA player for whom there's the largest discrepancy between my opinion of his value and the opinions of everyone else--and by everyone else, I'm including both the median casual fan (the 50th percentile opinion) as well as other more serious analytical folks (the 10th percentile opinion). Basically, he was an outlier in terms of the statistics points, rebounds, and assists, and his tools (size, speed, strength, vision, etc) were all very good. The reason I deviate from other people in terms of his value added to winning basketball is that either consciously (maximizing points, rebounds, and assists helps you get paid more, specifically because most people value those stats) or subconsciously, Westbrook ended up prioritizing to such an extreme degree metrics that have historically correlated with "winning" that he often did so at the expense of important tradeoffs.

And this is the phenomenon I'm calling "the Russell Westbrook Problem," which is a specific variant of "missing the forrest for the trees." It's the simplification of a big picture goal (in this case, winning basketball games) to metrics that correlate with that big picture goal, which due to the assumption of causation from correlation, leads to making suboptimal tradeoffs that then result in the dissolution of the original correlation. It's important to note that for the most part, there is very limited conscious intention in this practice, so I'm not necessarily assuming malicious selfishness in his behavior. In Westbrook's case, the most obvious example is that he often left opposing offensive players open away from the hoop because by staying closer to the hoop, he could 1) grab more rebounds, 2) save more energy for offense by not having to move as much on defense, and 3) start fastbreaks easier (which is good for his team's offense) given he's the one grabbing the rebounds. A second example is that he dominated the ball on offense heavily, which to put simply, means he often only passed when a teammate was in an immediate position to shoot (which led to Westbrook only passing when he could get an assist). All of these things led to him being rated extremely highly by box score stats, be it the casual fan's "triple double" (he had many games of more than 10 points, more than 10 rebounds, and more than 10 assists) or various all-in-one box-score metrics such as box-plus-minus (BPM). The latter is due to the fact that rebounding is often correlated with size and athleticism and assists is often correlated with high basketball awareness/basketball IQ, so a player who is athletic AND "understands" the game is basically one of the best players ever. However, he's historically the player who achieved these feats at the highest tradeoffs ever. As Westbrook (and other players at a less extreme level) started to optimize for metrics that used to be correlated with winning at the expense of other less measurable aspects of the game, those metrics started to weaken in their correlation with winning. The Russell Westbrook Problem.

So what are examples of this problem in normal life? Well, one such example is in human health. People have long observed that being overweight leads to many physical ailments (diabetes, heart disease, dementia, etc), so health (the original goal) is heavily correlated with being overweight. What else is correlated with being overweight? Eating lots of high-fat foods like fried foods, burgers, and dairy products. So for much of the 20th century and into the 21st century, scientists and corporations have pushed the low-fat narrative for "heart health" and losing weight. However, as with Westbrook's points, rebounds, and assists, this was an overly simpified causation assumption that people gravitated towards because it was easy to understand and implement. What's not as easy to understand and implement is the additional fact that a lot of the bad foods people had correctly identified were bad for reasons other than/in addition to their high fat content. Fried foods (i.e. french fries), burgers (the buns), and dairy products (i.e. desserts such as ice cream) are also extremely high in refined carbohydrates, processed oils, and simply in calories in general that lead to consistently high insulin levels, which then leads to inflammation and all of the various associated health problems. Simplifying the problem to "fats = bad" led to generations of Americans eating large amounts of other unhealthy foods (such as sugar, breakfast cereal, refined grains, and processed seed oils). Add to all of that the incentives for the government, corporations, and individual farmers to produce high volumes of low-cost foods (that by the mere existence of other more high-cost foods such as avocados, grass-fed beef, and organic vegetables means they're less healthy, because if they weren't less healthy, nobody would eat the other foods that are "worse" in the other dimensions) while blissfully assuming they were succeeding at their original goals of being healthy. The initially simple and reasonably accurate proxy for being healthy of avoiding high fat foods now no longer correlates with healthy eating as people found loopholes to obtain their sugars and vegetable oils. The Russell Westbrook Problem.

Another example that specifically hits home for me exhists in spirituality and the related issue of mental health. For much of humanity, people were content with their lives (even if by today's Westbrookian standards of wealth, life expectancy, and power/influence, they were extremely unsuccessful people). They didn't really have many life decisions to make because they didn't have many options; they simply had to do whatever was available in order to feed themselves. And yet, mental health problems are at their highest levels by far in recent years, especially among "wealthy" members of the developed world. This problem is accelerating despite the overall higher levels of wealth, improved flexibility in career options, and higher life expentancies (due to medicine that specifically optimizes for keeping people alive) among those people. And why is this? It's because in times of less manufactured optimization, having lots of money correlated (and often caused) people to be more healthy. Having more money meant one was no longer starving; having more money meant one likely was among the best at one's "profession" due in large part to hard work and commitment; having more money meant one could then devote more time and resources to other interests that also brought meaning to one's life. What's changed since? Well, the specific optimization for monetary wealth has dissolved its relationship with life contentment. People spend their entire able lives trying to make more and more money (from the billionaire to the corporate hamster), at the misguided assumptions that 1) they'll necessarily be alive, 2) they'll be healthy enough to enjoy their newfound luxury and freedom, and 3) they'll be wiling to give up the additional marginal wealth treadmill. People go to graduate school when they can't figure out what they want to do with their lives (law school being the most egregious) assuming that by spending additional years they could be trying to find themselves working towards this well-defined path while accruing additional debt will allow them to in the future make more money and be happy. The most common regrets of people on their death beds are that they ended up living other people's lives and not lives true to themselves and that they didn't spend enough of their lives around the people that are important to them. But it's a good thing their lives ended with very high monetary wealth scores, right? The Russell Westbrook Problem.