Re:Napoleon Was the Best General Ever
by dfxm12 on Friday August 17, 2018 @10:02AM
(#17782876)
It makes me wonder how such a poor article made it to the front page of HN...
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Napoleon Was the Best General Ever
by Nightshaxx on Friday August 17, 2018 @11:06AM
(#17783356)
Idk, I think it is a pretty interesting thought experiment. Sure it's not focusing on overall tatics or deeper reasoning, but you can't really measure that with data.
The author is just looking at purely combat performance as some sort of way to rank them. Anything deeper wouldn't really work from a data perspective because we really don't have the best records from back then.
Exactly, it's just some dude having fun with sabermetrics.
Sabermetrics works for things like baseball with enormous amounts of data to work with over long timescales and a very well-defined and limited domain with explicit rules and constraints. This hardly applies to war, especially over millenia. If anything, this guy's analysis just proves the point. Reminds me of the tongue-in-cheek "power rankings" people make for granola bars or hot dogs.