I have always been obsessed with the hidden rules that govern the chaos around us.
My education didn’t begin in a classroom. It began at the kitchen table. I learned to read by memorizing the pictures and complex text of Magic: The Gathering cards with my brother, and I learned probability by playing poker with my mother. These were my first lessons in strategy: look at the hand you are dealt, calculate the odds, and make the optimal move.
As I grew older, I applied this mindset to sports. I loved basketball, but I was frusturated by how it was understood. Esteemed coaches, players, and media spoke in narratives that felt disconnected from reality (this is different now, a lot has changed over the last 15 years). They understood the plays but couldn’t quantify the impact; it was like they were playing chess without knowing how to value the pieces.
That changed when my relatively young and energetic high school coach pulled me aside and introduced me to Dean Oliver’s “Four Factors.” He taught me that despite the chaos on the court, the outcome usually came down to four simple, quantifiable metrics. Our practice was structured around the pursuit of these factors. We practiced hand positioning and mechanics of passing to reduce our turnovers. Foot positioning and jump-stops to improve our effective field goal % and free throw %. And we practiced boxing-out and the likely direction of off-rim bounces to grab more rebounds.
I realized then that the world is full of information, but we are often too blind or too stubborn to see the story it is actually telling us.
I studied Economics to understand human systems, and then Computer Science to build new ones. The transition was my initiation. I moved from the theoretical to the tangible, seeking to combine analytical rigor with the creative possibilities of technology.
I am no longer just a student of the game, but an architect of it. I am driven to take the chaotic data of the real world and forge it into something clear, useful, and undeniably true.
Truman Daniels 