If you pay attention to sports, one of the things you may have noticed over the last few decades is the rise of numerology. The people making money from sports entertainment and their fans do not call it numerology, but they often treat the numbers of the respective games in the same way mystics treat numbers in life. They think numbers have qualities beyond the thing they are supposed to represent. Therefore, the numbers of the game are transformed into magical tokens.
For example, there is a site called Pro Football Focus that sells itself as something like a quantitative lab for the game of football. They started on the claim that they grade every player in every game in the NFL season, by grading every snap of every game in the NFL season. They conjured a grading system that they claim lets their clients compare the value of each player to the value of other players. Their numbers allow everyone to be a quantitative expert on football.
That last bit is part of the hook. While sports are not complicated, most fans never play organized team sports, so they know nothing about the game, beyond their own emotions while looking at the results. The typical football fan could not tell you the difference between zone blocking and zone blitzing. Baseball fans have no idea why an off-speed pitch is effective. Soccer fans could not tell you anything about the game, as the strategy is a total mystery to them.
What the numerology of sports does for the fan is give them ready made truths they can easily digest and memorize, so they can feel confident when assessing what they are seeing on their televisions. The baseball fan can confidently say Play X is not a good player, because his WAR is below three. The football fan can say that his team lost because the left tackle got a sixty-grade from Pro Football Focus. These numbers bestow a sense of knowledge on the person using them.
Of course, the people using these numbers have no idea what lies behind them, which is the magic of numerology. This allows the sports fan to think these numbers are predictive of future behavior, when, at best, they merely quantify past behavior in a way that allows for further investigation. Many of the numbers that arise from the numerology of sports are meaningless nonsense. The numbers from Pro Football Focus are a good example.
If you look at their site, they state that they are endeavoring to do something that is practically impossible. They employ a team of 600 people, but only 60 are qualified to grade games. These sixty people are then tasked with assigning a pass/fail/neutral grade to every player on every play and have the results hours after the game has been completed. Not only are they doing this for all sixteen NFL games but the fifty or so college football games each weekend.
Even if they solved the man-hour problem in such a task, the numbers they produce are based on purely subjective criteria. Anyone who has played sports understands that a player can do his job as dictated by the coach, but still fail. In other words, the only way anyone can know if a player executed his assignment in a game is to know what the coaches assigned him. You can surmise in many cases, but that requires a deep understanding of the game.
The ridiculousness of the numbers do not matter, even when it is pointed out to the people who love using them. There is a magic quality to assigning numbers, especially numbers that have been sacralized, to the sport. Scan a sports fan forum right now and you will find lots of posts about the grades from PFF. The fans want to believe these numbers tell them something about the prospects for their favorite team, so they accept the validity of the numbers, despite the absurdity.
At this point, some readers will be tempted to post the dumbest comment on the internet which is, “I do not own a television” followed by the second dumbest comment, which is, “I do not watch sportsball.” No one cares that you do not own a TV or that you spend your leisure time in self-flagellation. That is not the point of this post. The point is that in something as banal as sports entertainment, numerology has crept in and taken up a place in the mind of the viewer.
The reason for this is our society is saturated in numerology. In every large company there are hundreds of worker bees churning out tables and graphs that have meaning to the intended audience, well beyond the factual. Show the mid-level manager a report with sales figures and he gets excited. Show those numbers in the form of a dashboard and he passes out in ecstasy. There is a whole industry built on the magical power of showing numbers in the form of a dashboard.
The “data analyst” and the “data scientist” have become the court astrologers of the business world because of an obsession with numbers. The things they produce for their employer are not just about understanding the descriptive reality of the company but also understanding the prescriptive reality of the company. When the needle on the meter is in the green, everyone is in a state of grace. If the meter moves into the yellow, then it means someone inside is cavorting with Old Scratch.
This helps explain the obsession with AI. Numerology is just a way of creating an authority outside the people involved in the process. The sports fan does not want to know who is posting those grades after the football game. They just want to believe that there is some objective, omniscient force that knows the truth. Similarly, the people we call the left demand AI not talk about a certain Austrian painter, because they want AI to validate their beliefs and thus be their moral authority.
This is why the game of baseball has been taken over by robots. Quants crank out decision trees they supply to the managers, which the manager consults at every decision point in the game. Everyone embraces this, even when the results are bad, for the same reason the Muslim says, “inshallah” before embarking on a project. The results are in the hands of an authority everyone must obey and trust. If the team loses, then the mystery force behind the numbers must have willed it.
One of the unexpected results of the proliferation of numbers has been the collapse in the ability to rationalize the numbers. The numbers of life used to be simple measures of what needed to be measured. Now they are treated like omens that not only indicate the future but weigh on our moral understanding of ourselves. The bad stats from a game reinforce the notion among the fans of the losing team that they deserve to feel bad because their team deserved to lose.
This helps explain why the sports fan went from being a guy enjoying men compete to a guy whose identity is tangled up in the identity of a team. Numerology of sports did not create the bug man organizing his life around televised sports, but it coevolved with the general phenomenon of numerology, which itself is the result of the search for new moral authorities to replace faith and tradition. The numbers of life have now become signs from the gods, whoever they may be.
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“The “data analyst” and the “data scientist” have become the court astrologers of the business world because of an obsession with numbers.”
Strangely enough, though, they never manage to correlate the data on crime, shootings, and general socio-pathology with the percentage of the black population, do they?
You beat me to it. I was literally going to post the same thing. Well done.
I dunno. Steve Sailer has done this to the extent allowed by the Overton Window.
Yet Sailer remains a Civ Nat.
He has a peculiar obsession with black entertainers / athletes.
“to the extent allowed by the Overton Window.”
Which is not much.
It’s not as if Sailer is a presidential adviser or a writer for the New York Times or a tenured department chair or anything like that.
I give him credit for what he does but he’s hardly influential among the elites who are actually calling the shots.
I thought Sailer’s Taki column yesterday was great. He played around with the numbers for awhile, then used them to hit the reader with punch-line: The murder rate in a given city is directly proportional to the number of blacks in the city.
Knock me over with a ruddy feather.
You don’t say!!!
There’s a corollary in their wrt Hispanics somewhere. 😉
Stop the presses!
Yes, he has a distribution that reaches 100s of millions, too.
Ha! Ha! Nice. They do, but it is the job of the other 540 to flood the channels with nonsense, propaganda and commercials showing them as ideal civilizational leaders and family men so if you ever do see those numbers they don’t seem credible.
The odd effectiveness of propaganda, especially visual propaganda like TV, movies, and commercials, may simply be that while humans were evolving, there was no occasion when you would see images of people who were not “real”. In other words, the idea of theater and that of filmed fiction that followed it, was not something the human brain had to cope with before a few thousand years ago. Even then, plays were rare occurrences and many people in the country never saw one. The true audio/visual age didn’t start until about 1900. Showing audiences fictional images of blacks (and other “diversities”)… Read more »
I believe you’re onto something with that. Studies–for what they’re worth–have shown that when you’re fully engrossed in a movie you are actually experiencing the action as the characters themselves would if it was reality rather than fiction. The human brain seems to do a poor job of winnowing fiction from fact when the fiction is presented in a visually compelling manner.
If you call someone a “quant,” people immediately assume that means they are smart. Says a lot.
I think the real correlate is basketball. How good are the schools? How bad is crime? How good are the local basketball teams.
Wonderfully cynical…. 🙂
My profession relies heavily on data analysis and it is a good tool for the modern age, among other good technological tools. Even better that we can create neat-o dashboards and interactive reports. The guys upstairs love it, and it keeps me employed.
Of course, when the collapse happens, I am out of work. I am ill-suited for the stone age and would have to rely on my alpha personality and bloodlust. That’s why I’m trying to get my son to do something that would keep him employed and alive if the lights go out.
Best of luck to your future career as a tenement warlord, because AI looks like it might wipe out the white collar class. Corporate capitalism’s done crapping on the assembly line, now it’s about to put the office people against the wall.
All hail the Inscrutable AI, whose wisdom is unknowable!
Nah. “AI” is only as good at its training data. Garbage in, garbage out. Why do you think the “AI” came up with black Shakespeare and black George Washington? Until the clouds quit skewing the input data, AI will continue to be absurd. And being honest would probably kill them. Certainly would kill their ideology.
And even if they do quit censoring the training, there’s no way (yet, anyway) to program inspiration or insight into an algorithm. Best it can do is Monte Carlo particular solutions.
Exactly. However, knowing that does not make AI any less dangerous. As we become less and less intelligent, the pressure to supplement our workforce—even with subpar mechanisms—becomes irresistible. As short a timespan as yesterday, I read an article that simply quoted an AI (without citation) to support an assertion.
It’s getting interesting out there….
The amount of pressure I’m under at my company to incorporate AI into the code I write is increasing rapidly by the day. Every single retrospective is accompanied with – “Could we leverage AI to prevent this in the future?”.
When I read that quote, I heard in the voice of a dot Indian…
Leverage–gawd how I detest that word.
When used as a verb, that is.
Dont worry about it. Number crushers exist since the dawn of civilization. Writing has invented so priest kings could know how much they ruled over.
The first name ever recorded was in proto-Sumerian, and it is “Kushim” – thought to be either the name of a person or a title. The tablet recorded a grain transaction.
Brings back memories of “game tape day” in football. Before practice the next day after a game, we would go play-by-play through the previous game analyzing everyone’s performance. It made us on edge because every player had a play or two he dreaded coach showing on the screen, but also because oftentimes when you think you made a “good” play, coach would point to how you got lucky, and it would have been a disaster is our opponent did something different. On the corollary, oftentimes coach would praise someone who, on first glance, had nothing to do with a play,… Read more »
Right. The fact we have no general solution to the Three-Body Problem, which is entirely deterministic Newtonian physics, but rather, in all but a few trivial cases, must model a solution should give us humility when looking at the infinitely more complex situation of, “But what if the defender had instead chosen to cut behind the um, linesman?” Fill in the correct words if it matters.
Yep. Everyone look up chaos theory for a good headache. Read and despair.
It is a substitute for living an active life where you bring it meaning and purpose. We need to revive shaming culture after we revive active outdoors culture. Passive sports watching is a dreadful phenomenon. It is perhaps the biggest poison and most fatal of poisons afflicting modern man. Cultivate outdoorsmanship including taking care of your own landscaping. Fill yourself up with satisfaction and the pleasures and hardships of nature – even in the modern world. Find a subtle way to shame the guy who sits around in a jersey promoting some other man who plays a child’s game and… Read more »
Agreed! Great post.
“including taking care of your own landscaping.”
Oh, good Lord. Do something with your life that will last more than a few days without your constant attention. Lawns and grounds were products of the idle rich, in a vain effort to impress.
The rest, ok. But keeping your lawn properly edged is about as important in the long run as selling deodorant. Less so, actually. I can just not look if your edging bothers me, but it’s not like I can just quit breathing if the clod the next table over hasn’t showered in three weeks.
Steve, that’s one side of the coin (pun intended). Another is that at my age, or anyone’s age—if one is sedentary, such work in the garden or simply yard/home care can be the only physical exercise you will do on a regular basis. It can be vain, but also quite useful in physical health maintenance.
Lawn looking nice is the pride of maintenance – the hallmark of why private property is important. This extends to vehicles, marriage, and body. All will eventually break down, but the struggle to maintain is the point.
Fair. I’m just saying that obsessing over something that isn’t going to last even as long as it takes them to bury you is part and parcel of a prideful, materialistic worldview.
Yes, people’s memories of us will die, and very rapidly, but if we don’t give them even that, we are more ephemeral than the wind. As I look out my window, I see evidence of previous winds.
What does it say if Amazon’s targeted ads are the most lasting evidence of our existence?
As ZMan says, or to paraphrase: Who are you to say what constitutes someone doing something with their life? The point is that it is an activity, not a passive time sync. For many it is edifying, gratifying and can bring about a sense of tremendous satisfaction. It is an art form that takes real effort and skill. Having a beautiful yard isn’t to impress the outside world. A noble man does it to reflect the beauty and order of his inner world and to surround himself with an ordered natural setting. Go to what remains of the Land of… Read more »
I don’t want to live in a nabe fully of scruffy, unkempt yards. In addition to the aesthetic blight, it usually indicates the poor character of the owner, or more likely renter, of the house. Whether you do it yourself or pay somebody else to do it is no nevermind.
Sure, no problem. I don’t want neighbors in the first place. I don’t have a “scruffy, unkempt lawn”, I have virtually no lawn at all, and what there doesn’t require much in the way of upkeep.
A lawn is evidence a man owns too much property. He can’t come up with anything more productive to do with it than pour water and gasoline and time and equipment into it.
I need to mow maybe 4 times per year, and then it’s a 10′ bush hog going down the middle of the clumps of berries. Heavy shade mostly keeps the grass from getting over 4″ or so. With the forks on the front, I can easily pick up the tables and chairs and hammocks and whatnot so I don’t even have to get out of the cab. Outside that part of the “yard” is an acre or so of garden, outside that is woodlot. And outside that is people. 😉
The berms? If you have to ask…
No. It’s evidence some of us prefer grass, bushes and trees to dirt and concrete.
I’ve got a concrete floor in my basement and one of my garages. That’s all the concrete I have. Bare dirt in the garden. That’s it.
False dichotomy?
Lawns do have a purpose for those of lesser means.
That purpose is to provide an immediately accessible outdoor space for individuals and families that is free of nuisance and danger.
Those nuisances and dangers include insects, wild animals, and terrain features that would be obscured by tall, unkempt grass.
You do have my sympathy. Some anyway. The collapse of the safety of public parks and playgrounds happened way faster than I expected. But nonetheless, it happened. Whose fault is it if you don’t “adapt, improvise, overcome” to the current state of affairs.
2022 was a great time to get the heck out of Dodge. Now, not so great, but what are the lives of you and those you care for worth?
I have several acres. I have fruit trees and an extensive garden (for food). I will be planting nut trees next year. Some real men need more than concrete. I also have plenty of grass to play with the kids.
“Lawns do have a purpose for those of lesser means.”
Fellow DRer’s don’t forget about a 300 yard deep lawn. Makes a fantastic kill zone…. 😉
Good way to not make it out the other side of the unpleasantness. It’s easy for a small group to cover all the windows. Very limited number of firing positions relative to even clear grass out to 300.
What you want is a place where they think they have you bottled up, and you come at them from behind their firing position.
Downvoted. Control of one’s environment and pride in one’s property is a mark of civilization. It’s no idle wastefulness to have a good-looking property and take pride in maintaining it.
Yep. While everyone else is watching the Negro Felon League I will either be at the rifle range or out hunting.
Speaking of which, early doe abatement season starts in about 10 days around here. Not looking forward to the amount of work involved in dragging and cutting a deer as fast as possible in 75 degree heat, but damn it sure is nice to have fresh meat in the freezer this early in the year, and the doe is always better eating than the trophy buck.
I have read about this mindset creeping into the real estate industry. The example given was a renter who wanted to renew his lease for $2,500 a month. As empty units in the building were being rented for $2,200 a month he thought he could negotiate with the management company. Instead he got a notice his rent was going up to $2,800 a month, but was told if he wanted to move into a vacant for $2,200 they would transfer him. All the management company cared about was making the stats they present the ownership group with hit the right… Read more »
Might also be simple stupidity on the part of low level employees. I had a term life insurance policy that came up for renewal after 15 year, level rate. They simply billed me about 2.5 -3 x’s the old rate. Quick survey of the market determined the rate for me at my age was about 1.5 x’s the old rate. I called them and said they were a bit off wrt the adjusted market, new rate. They would not budge. So I switched providers. My assumption was that the old provider was hoping to land an unobservant policy holder, and… Read more »
Possibly. Whenever something that absurd crops up, the first thing to do is try to find the bureaucrat screwed up the economics. Managerial mindset that he has, it’s not the outcome that matters, it’s following the rules.
With State Farm, the reason life insurance rates changed turned out to be them trying to recover the losses from property damage in Florida from hurricanes because some building commissioners following the rules granted variances on rafter ties. Corrupt, maybe, but so long as you followed the rules to a “t”, it doesn’t matter if it was the wrong thing to do.
Does anyone remember the “Terror Threat Level” color coding after September 11th? Pure attempt at numerology that magically qualified in color the “quantity” of the chatter as a way placing authority, as Z notes, outside the managerial class. I was randomly remembering that system about a week ago.
Yep, and what I remember was that the biggest complaint was that no one could figure out what the colors translated into in the real world. Totally meaningless as there was no metric basis, just assigned colors in some sort of rank order. I guess white was “not shooting” and red, complete “mayhem”. But in between was anyone’s guess.
Baseball no-hitters are going away because of the numbers. Just last night Cubs’ pitcher Shota Imanaga pitched seven no-hit innings, but was pulled because the numbers-crunchers say that pitchers shouldn’t exceed 100 pitches. Shota had thrown 95 to that point. The game ended up being a no-hitter, but it’s now called a “Combined No-Hitter.” Sounds very managerial.
This is one of the reasons that Z’s advice from a couple weeks ago should be followed. If I recall the wording correctly, it’s that the solution to baseball (and other pro sports) being run by the stats guys is, open the windows of the skyboxes in which the stats guys are sitting, and throw said stats guys out said windows. A baseball no-hitter or even perfect game are exceptionally rare things, and provide intensely memorable moments for those players who participate in them and for the fans that witness them. Denying pitchers the opportunity to complete them because stats… Read more »
So we grill the grillers on this forum for their obsessive love of sportsball. Now Z is grilling those who shun TV and sportsball. 😂
and I think yesterday’s oration was a veiled swipe at Tom Brady
Nothing wrong with sportsball: done right, it’s an incredible booster of nationalism. Say what you want about English hooligans, but they’re the practically the only Englishmen who proudly wave the English flag in public and are totally ready to obliterate anyone who has a problem with it. The problem is that America’s biggest sports, football and baseball, aren’t played by other countries, so you don’t get the rush of humiliating Johnny Foreigner in a big Battle Royale. Z once wrote a nostalgic column on the USA vs USSR ice hockey triumph, the patriotic adrenaline boost and flagwaving bonanza it produced.… Read more »
I enjoyed playing and watching sports. Until the woke / corporatist take over.
love sports hate “sportsball.”
Somebody needs to start up a world “Rollerball” federation….
I must have seen “Rollerball” back in ’75. Now that was some film ….
Except Jonathon sold out to MegaCorp in the end. Predictive programming?
I don’t think he did. He remained defiant until the end of the film.
He’s rolling towards Mr MegaCorp, steel ball in his hand and all the enemy team devastated, he has a clean kill shot, yet he just drops the ball into the goal.
Well, not exactly like I remembered it, but close enough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB1LuCUovW4
Maybe there’s some hippie subtext I’m missing, but it looks like a sellout.
Problem is, those ‘English’ teams are populated mostly by people who bear no resemblance whatsoever to those fervid English hooligans.
You put your finger on the weak point.
But in principle, watching sportsball is good for you, and not just for the hooligans. I never watch sportsball myself, except if Denmark is playing in the European- or world champion finals. Then, everybody is a sportsball fan, everybody comes out for the team, Copenhagen looks like Rio during carnival week, there’s flags all over, red-and-white t-shirts everywhere and the Moslems keep a very low profile.
While nobody here even noticed the Olympics.
Found the fart sniffer who was going to post about being above the screens as he types pointless words onto a screen.
What is it about radical politics that attracts this type of dick waving? Far lefties do the same thing when they brag about not having racist bad thought when DeShawn was mugging them.
Too stupid to recognize the difference between woke, niggerized tv / sports and reading Z man aren’t you? Ya dumbass cool bastard!
I said nothing of “screens.” I said “TV.”
I said nothing of “screens.” I said “TV.” asswipe!
I no longer have a TV but mostly just because cable TV is too expensive and I can watch most of what I like on YT. If I had the money, I’d buy one to have a way to watch movies or play console games again. I do remember those Lefties who all had that same crappy old Volvo or Subaru with a “kill your TV” bumper sticker next to the “Reading is sexy” one and one for whatever pathetic Democrat was running for office. Seeing that stuff made me want to kill the driver certainly but not a TV… Read more »
It’s an interesting perspective just not caring about sportsball anymore. Once you realize how silly it is, you can never go back to being excited about it. Everything about it is dumb- the announcers with their pretend deep interest in the game. All the analysts with their faux authority. The coaches with the fake “tough guy” personas. The mulatto faces pretending to be on “my” team. The African players simply using the sport to gather money buy a white wife. The millions of fat white dudes and alcoholics wasting yet another Sunday boozing and watching mixed race commercials, pretending not… Read more »
Sportsball, like everything else in the West, began to change in the second half of the 60s. And all the change has been change for the worse.
“Most of the players were tough, inspirational people…”
As a young boy my guy was Johnny Unitas, even if Earl Morrel had to QB for the 70 championship. Everything about Unitas made me want to play harder, hit harder, and be ‘the man.’
Now some odd looking freak pitching private jets in tee-vee… pass. Along with his sport.
Call it the ghost of Robert McNamara. He’s the guy who invented “scientific” management by using computers to make graphs and trends to spot marketing opportunities.
This goes all the way back to Taylor “time and motion” studies and Alfred Sloan. It’s a pre-computer concept.
McNamara and his “whizz kids” wizards of smart were a disaster in the Pentagon. They did some good things (forcing the Air Force to adopt the Navy’s better-performing F-4 Phantom), but they insisted on a “joint” aircraft that could be the Air Force’s long-range, all-weather bomber and the Navy’s long-range interceptor to protect the carrier groups from Soviet bombers and their Mach 3 cruise missiles. It was a disaster because it required too many compromises. The F-111 turned out to have a great career and its capability to fly unrefueled and go supersonic while in terrain-following mode and drop a… Read more »
Numerology revealed to me that there’s no way Lauren Chen could have supported herself doing reactions in a feminine studio.
There MUST be a sponsor of some sort!
Let’s face it, anyone with a studio better than Ramzpaul’s is getting sponsorbucks.
Essentially off topic but back when her youtube name was something millennial (I genuinely cannot remember) I wasn’t yet perma-banned from the site & the algorithm used to spam my feed with her videos. Back then I used to enjoy commenting on her videos bringing up race statistics about crime, voting patterns & the like which would rile up all the “one race, the human race” conservatives which was the bulk of her audience. I always pointed out that their responses were identical to the doomsday climate change predictions that never come to pass which almost always triggered emotional breakdowns… Read more »
Say what you want about the alt-lite people and even the Jewish edgytarians, they allow your speech unless it’s pointedly violent.
Basically I’m at the point where if you allow free speech and the freedom to be skeptical of certain founding myths and Liberal shibboleths, you’re right by me. Even if you’re okay with being paid by shadowy “European” interests.
For the ones who do allow discussion I’m in full agreement with you though I suppose the ones who don’t aren’t alt-lite. The line between generic conservative & alt lite has gotten quite blurry over the years so depending on the definitions my preemption may not have been necessary. As for Lauren I never really had any real disagreement with her based on what I’ve seen her discuss & thus never had any ill will for her. I don’t ever recall her being maladaptive, she just didn’t touch certain subjects. Back when I was commenting on her videos there was… Read more »
Well, if that bunch of influencers wants to refute the DOJ claims, they need to publicize their financials.
A lot of this is due to the rise of sports betting and also video games With betting, being able to quantify things makes you feel better in your bets, even if you still get taken to the cleaners. I also know a few guys who totally misread the numbers. Example, a friend was going to place a bet on the Gators, who had like a 26 win streak against Kentucky. His thinking was, the streak has to continue. I took the opposite view, that after that many wins in a row you are definitely due for a loss. I… Read more »
To be fair, both of you committed statistical fallacies.
Tell that to my wallet 😉
@Falcone, “Tell that to my wallet”
Say the Jews every Christmas when they join hands around the cash register and sing “What a friend we have in Jesus.”
Hey, it’s Stevie Nits !!!
Just joshing, but you certainly are a nitpicker
Burt seriously Alan, how were these statistical fallacies?
It has to be A or B.
If you flip a coin at it comes up heads 19 times in a row, what is the probability of a heads on the next throw?
Oh, that one..
Yes, but that is NOT football
Which is why sports betting is a bit of statistics mixed with an understanding of the game
Yes, but that is NOT football
True. But then you can’t argue statistically, your prediction is based on you understanding the game.
Yes, but also in play are OTHER stats
Where streaks max out for a reason, because after 20 or 25 tries, in a league of near-equals, the lesser team is going to grab a win after 10 or 20 tries. That itself is a stat
Hm, yes, but now you’re into some very esoteric stuff with compound probabilities, way over my paygrade.
@Felix Krull, It’s not above your pay grade. He has just added priors. You may not be competent to say anything about his priors (I sure as heck am not) but if he could quantify them you could run the numbers as well as you do on the coin.
But that’s still wrong. Probability is all just a game to conceal the fact that we don’t understand the causes of, well, any complex phenomenon.
“in a league of near-equals, the lesser team is going to grab a win after 10 or 20 tries. That itself is a stat”
That’s not a stat. It’s a circular argument.
Your friend committed the Hot Hand Fallacy: “His thinking was, the streak has to continue.”
I hear ya, but again real life competitions are not purely statistical things
But then how is that not a stat? The numbers say consistently that the lesser team will win 10% of the time on average, based on a long long history
The problem is that a “streak” or any outcome has a probability of win or lose. As Felix was trying to say in his 19 heads in row example. The probability of a head on toss 20, is 1/2. But the probability of a streak of 20 heads in a row is 1/2 x’s 1/2 x’s 1/2 … 1/2. Highly improbable. Nonetheless, you can lose the bet that the 20th toss is a head. 50% of the time.
Yes Compsci, but the issue here is that you (rhetorically) are assuming that a competition is purely a statistical thing. It is not. It is a competition first and foremost and then stats can be applied after the fact to help one bet on likely outcomes on future games. But you first need a track record. It is never as simple or the equivalent of a coin toss. Because obviously if it were then massive computers with massive computational power could figure out the outcome to every game.
“…you (rhetorically) are assuming that a competition is purely a statistical thing. “ You are absolutely correct. You (seem) to take note of the “human factor”—and that ain’t trivial. I would never gainsay you there. Let me qualify where I come from. Too much time at uni around other academics. I became somewhat of a hard nose when listening to “proposals” describing the latest theory and experiment to test such theory. ‘My go to response—before hitting the door—was “if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist”. So yes, there is something above and beyond simple probability theory in your speculation, but… Read more »
But you have no reason to believe the probability of the streak ending on that particular game is above 50 percent, let alone well above 50 percent. And, at any rate, in sporting events the past doesn’t determine the present. Or, its determinitive power is minimal.
I disagree. I figure if a 30-year winning streak has never before happened in the history of the game then there is something else in play that operates outside the realm of pure statistics. And statistics are just things that are grafted onto human endeavors after the fact. They do not determine outcomes, they only can assign probabilities. So getting back to my original example, the odds were probably in my favor because someone who follows college football, and especially the Gators, knows that if a team in the SEC has won 26 games straight then, eesh, you better figure… Read more »
That is definitely true. That is a prior. That you profited may mean your prior is correct. It might also mean you got lucky and there was nothing to your prior.
Back in the day-trading craze, I took a bet that I could invest in one or more of the losers of the previous day and come out ahead. Came out fabulously. But I realize in retrospect that I was dragging in priors — I knew of some of those companies, and my previous analysis of their business model influenced which of the “losers” I bet on.
“Very soon” does you no good, only that particular game does you any good. And the odds are much greater that that streak will end very soon–however defined–rather than with that particular game.
And incidentally, 30-game winning streak is a stat.
“They do not determine outcomes, they only can assign probabilities.”
Bingo, Yahtzee…no more need be said.
If you use a maximum likelihood estimator (which doesn’t have any assumption of a fair coin), it will be much more than 0.5.
which doesn’t have any assumption of a fair coin
A fair coin is assumed in a thought experiment like this.
“A fair coin is assumed in a thought experiment like this.”
What is a fair coin? One that results in a 50%, right? It’s not really assumed, it’s just a tautology, a circular reference.
“What is a fair coin? One that results in a 50%, right? It’s not really assumed, it’s just a tautology, a circular reference.” That’s correct. Now let’s do the thought experiment again, with no assumption on the probability distribution. The maximum likelihood estimator would say that after 19 heads in a row, the most plausible probability distribution is one where heads occurs 100% of the time. If on the other hand I know — from prior experiments with this coin — that heads occurs roughly half the time, I would say the chance of getting heads on the 20th is… Read more »
Be that as it may, we’re talking about two football teams, and that is most definitely not a fair coin. Rather than relying on these probabilities to make a bet, you’d be much better off relying upon current factors associated with the teams to make your betting decision.
Exactly. Probability is not some inherent quality of the object in question, but your prior experience (loosely speaking, “priors”) with your object. It really and truly could be a “fair” coin, but like the Monty Hall question, based on your observations, that’s no longer the way to bet.
A fair coin is important, but the reason for 50-50 outcomes is not in the coin alone. Consider an arrangment in which a machine does the flipping and there’s a flat, soft pad to eliminate bounces upon landing. The machine always flips the coin the same way (same rotation rate, same upward force, same horizontal force). Now, how could there be a 50-50 outcome if the coin is inserted into the machine in the same way, that is, with the head facing in the same direction w.r.t. the machine? If the starting position were the same each time, would not… Read more »
It’s not a fair coin if it comes up heads 19 times in a row. Or at least that’s the way to bet. But everybody knows this (except for the occasional autistic pigeon) so even then it’s not a good bet.
“It’s not a fair coin if it comes up heads 19 times in a row.”
The probability of a fair coin producing 19 consecutive heads is not 0, though it is a very small number. More tenable, though, is to conclude it’s not fair.
While it is strong evidence that the coin is not “fair”, the fallacy here is assuming probability has some kind of memory. Or that probability maps into some kind “expected value”.
Probability is the measure of how well we understand the underlying causes of an event. Nothing more, nothing less.
If you doubt it’s a measure of our ignorance, simply ask yourself what you would do if you took that coin and analysed it for anything that would explain why it did what it did, and found no physical difference between that coin and one which performed “properly”.
On what basis could you call it “unfair”? Wouldn’t it be more honest to say there’s something going on that you don’t understand?
It is a fair coin if it came up tails 19 times in a row directly before it came up heads 19 times in a row. In real life, of course, there has never been such a ridiculous coin.
“It’s not a fair coin if it comes up heads 19 times in a row.” You don’t understand what I wrote, maybe bc you didn’t read it. The property of chance, if there is any such property, is not in the coin alone. One can obtain results which appear to be those of an unfair coin with a completely fair coin. Also, as Arshad wrote, the probability of 19 H in 19 flips is not zero. So your confident assertion does not follow. Your gambling rule of thumb is ok, but I’m not concerned about the profits and losses of… Read more »
I didn’t mean to give offense. I was just in a kinda snarky mood. Sorry about that.
One of my favorite plays, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” begins with such a sequence, signifying that they have entered an absurdist world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_TfdNAXOwE
Stoppard’s play focuses on the plight of two of Shakespeare’s most disposable characters from Hamlet, sent off to die to advance the plot for the major characters.
Most people, most of the time, are inconsequential characters like them, but still have their unique lives to live, which matter to them.
I took the opposite view, that after that many wins in a row you are definitely due for a loss.
Lol. That’s the first – and arguably the most egregious – statistical fallacy in the book.
How so?
Explanation above.
Now this is a fun discussion !!!!
No, a fun discussion is the “Monty Hall” problem. If one can not explain that, one need not discuss probability further.
Disclaimer. It took me years to understand it myself, and they gave me a damn PhD. My committee should have simply asked me this question and flunked me then, but they didn’t, so here I am. (They did ask one probing question and allowed me to pass after embarrassing me.)
You jest surely? Monty Hall is simple to understand and explain — I think the idea is that some additional information changes the likelihoods.
That’s correct. But the salient aspect of the “problem” is to understand that the conditions (hence probabilities) of “the bet” had changed via Monty’s showing you one of his two windows. I’ve spoken to many smart people who were fixated on the original conditions and did not understand/accept that a new “game” was now being played. One of them was me. The explanation is relatively straight forward after that with some simple probability computation to illustrate.. However, studies of folk who were presented this problem showed not simply a division between “wizened academics” and the “common man”. It showed a… Read more »
You can get a very good idea of how good a businessman is if you put him in that situation. Not specifically the Monty Hall Question, since, as you say, way too publicized, but in any negotiation, the other side is not likely to reveal something that weakens his position, and, if he does, you should do a quick count of your fingers and toes.
I’d like to point out that 9+5+2024=22. There are three master numbers in numerology which are 11, 22 and 33, which are considered powerful numbers. It’s a little suspicious if not auspicious that Z’s numerology post occurred on a Master Number Day! That’s right. I know my arithmetic so don’t even bother trying to prove me wrong.
.
This phenomenon is the residue of managerialism. Everything has to be quantified even if it’s ineffable. The credit score writ large….
<i>The “data analyst” and the “data scientist” have become the court astrologers of the business world because of an obsession with numbers</i>
Sounds like someone has become burned out by the pointlessness of their professional life.
Good News: You’ll get over it.
Bad News: Everyone’s “job” is pointless make work at some level – but important enough for someone else to pay you for doing it at another level. Which is the point of a job after all – to get the money to live your life. Not to provide meaning t your existence or define you.
It’s not pointless if it gives you something to do whereas otherwise you would be getting into trouble and losing money to pay for the mess you’ve created
Feeling disillusioned? Hey, just swap out that tedious grind you’re in for a career in something you love!
I mean… people love the Peace Corps and it’s tough.
I don’t know if I agree with this. Humans have been recording statistics for thousands of years. The abacus was invented and accountants have been around for millennia. fWAR, OPS, etc are just newer ways to measure performance because (see: Moneyball) teams are trying to find ways to extract better results in poorer television markets. Stats have always had a voodoo element to them. But they can be incredibly powerful tools when used wisely. In fact, many of the new baseball rules, such as banning the shift, were put in place to counter what was a very effective defensive strategy… Read more »
Go for it. There is little enough pleasure in this world. However, as a counter to what I’m sure is a fine analysis of the game—everything you said is “Greek to me”.
Everyone has their hobbies. I know a guy who builds huge train models in his 30×45’ steel garage and travels to obscure locations to buy particular train cars. I have no idea what he’s talking about 99% of the time. But he seems to enjoy the minute details so who am I to judge?
Probably 75% of the country has no idea who Chuck Schumer is. There are all kinds of things we take for granted that is a mystery to someone else.
I’m something of a political junkie, I suppose, but wouldn’t recognize Schumer if he walked up and offered me a bialy with cream cheese and smoked salmon. That’s a function of watching next to no television.
And I probably would. I’m not much of a commercial TV watcher, either. But I read a lot of news sites, and there’s that YouTube video of him trying to dance like a rapper….
Sounds like I’m missing out on some prime comedy.
You’ve had several great columns this week, Zman; but this one is strikes me, unexpectedly, as especially insightful. Your observation that the reliance on A.I. is part of the search for a new authority to which to surrender is profound. Embedding that observation in a discussion of sports numerology is very clarifying.
If you think it’s bad in baseball you should look at areas like theoretical physics (which is arguably where all this originated). Thousands of “physicists” working with abstract ideas like fiber bundles and string theory that have just about no contact with experimental reality. The broader point is that this obsession with not just numbers but mathematical abstractions has become a key component — maybe the key component — of western civilisation. Trying to unlearn this abstract and simplifying focus is a major undertaking.
Speaking of abstraction, I wasted a few precious minutes of life looking at Lex Fraudman’s doctoral thesis. I have a few initial observations. At a total of 67 pages it’s on the light side for a PhD thesis. My final Master’s paper clocked in around 100 pages. The writing has a very word salad quality to it. I assume part of that is down to a non-native writer and part of that is intentional. My brief skim did not reveal anything that made me think Fraudman is some deep AI genius. A brief review of his YouTube and Instagram did… Read more »
Damn, I’m having fun with AI today. I suspected the typical length of a thesis may vary upon discipline, especially mathematics. I had remembered the old rumors of the brilliant one page, knock ‘em dead, thesis’ from young, budding geniuses in their fields. Here’s one: “John Nash’s PhD thesis, titled “Non-Cooperative Games,” was remarkably concise, consisting of just 26 pages. Despite its brevity, it introduced the concept of the Nash Equilibrium, which had a profound impact on game theory, economics, and other fields. The thesis is often cited as an example of how a short but groundbreaking piece of work… Read more »
What field was his diss in? Math dissertations are routinely in double figures and sometimes not much more than 30 or so pages.
Ostei (and Comp)
He was studying the idea of using biometrics for user authentication.
The essential concept was to accumulate user mouse/touchpad gesture data for the purpose of authentication.
It’s a slightly more sophisticated version of the “Are you a human?” web pages that track your gestures to make that determination.
There is a link to a PDF of his thesis in his Wiki entry.
For comparison, I wrote about electromagnetic simulation for my MS.
Thanks. Sounds like computer science to me. And those dissertations tend to be longer than those in math.
This reminds me of a remark by a good and very smart and unorthodox friend, a kind of business journalist who has to write and hold speeches about all business sectors:
‘I only use numbers and stats when I write or talk about a subject I have absolutely no clue about.’
Maybe I’m missing your point, but numbers do tell us important stories. How are the sports examples much different than the DR talking about crime rates and IQ? Similarly, the advanced metrics in sports do usually flesh out and show the better teams. Don’t get me wrong, I hate the changes these things have created in the sports (the proliferation of basketball being a 3 point contest being one), but they are effective, and a team not doing it would be less successful for it.
“How are the sports examples much different than the DR talking about crime rates and IQ?”
Yep. There’s more to data analysis than plugging numbers into a spreadsheet and running a regression.
To be fair, as I run the numbers the DR has a point (or I wouldn’t even bother reading) but I don’t think most have bothered to look at the distributions, but gone with means or even regressions. The distribution itself is at least bimodal, and it sure looks to me like multimodal. But the powers that be don’t trust us with the actual data.
Crime stats are far less subjective–and therefore more meaningful–than most analytics. Hell, even IQ scores are better. And I’m not convinced a coach/manager who has the quants do all his work for him will win more games than those who largely eschew analytics. That they will strikes me as a gross and unfounded assumption.
To be fair, the situation before the Bill James SABREmetrics revolution was “guy looks good” scouting in player selection, that was it. James, a night janitor at a canned bean factory, felt you could quantify who was exceptional and who was not, if you analyzed the correct data properly. This wasn’t new — Branch Rickey had tried that but it was before the spreadsheet revolution. James was not exactly credentialed, so his methods did provide some value. Its not that numbers are useless, its just that the map is not the terrain. Even the most detailed map is just a… Read more »
Ah, Branch Rickey. Goes from being a guy that would chisel a nickel out of a player … or throw your ass off the team… becomes the racialist savior.
Has anyone EVER considered that ole Branch might have just been looking to bust a competing league? One that was known for better, at least more entertaining baseball than MLB?
And with his destruction of the Negro League went black-owned businesses in those towns. Black business ownership has never recovered.
Just another false narrative of ‘history’ the Branch Rickey story IMO.
Tremendous column. (In other words, I agree with it.) The quantification of sports really is the acme of absurdity in a world saturated in it. Z highlighted a few examples, but I’ll add a few others from basketball. Basketball fans, especially the young shavers, are as ga-ga over analytics as baseball fans. They’re constantly referencing this or that analytical stat. But those stats, which are supposed to be dispositive because they’re “objective,” are anything but. For instance, one such stat is Blocked Shot Attempts. But what constitutes a blocked shot attempt? Virtually every time a defender is close to a… Read more »
I would think the whole grading thing is also related to sports betting. Gives people the false confidence to place larger or more frequent bets. Since we now glorify vice, betting is everywhere. Just another way to fleece the suckers.
I agree. And people can bet not just on the game outcome, but on the performance of a particular player in a particular situation.
Cracks me up whenever I watch a game now that 25% of the ads are for sports betting sites. They always put that disclaimer “Call 1-800-badimpulsecontrol if you think you have a gambling problem” somewhere on the screen.
like we’re supposed to believe that they care in any way about someone’s gambling health/habits. Those people would sell your shoes while your corpse is still warm to make a buck.
“One of the unexpected results of the proliferation of numbers has been the collapse in the ability to rationalize the numbers.” I’d say it’s the exact opposite. The inability to “understand” (that’s my definition of “rationalize”) the numbers has resulted in the “proliferation” of the numbers. My minor area is statistics. As a student, it took me no time at all to generate “the numbers”, but it took over a couple years—literally advanced courses and some good luck—before I “understood” the numbers. Once I understood that, what I was generating, was probabilistic nonsense, I ceased to generate/create/interpret such findings. There… Read more »
I don’t think that’s a flaw in the math. It’s usually flawed experimental design.
The math per se, maybe not. The problem is in people who don’t understand the limitations of the math but just blindly crunch the numbers.
For example, people often confuse a regression with actual data. They see the line through the scatter plot and are conditioned to think it has some basis in reality, despite the fact that at a glance could see that not a single actual data point lies on that line.
That’s what I think @Compsci is getting at — a certain level of mathematical maturity is necessary in order to “rationalize” (using his definition) the numbers.
Exactly. But even the math can be flawed if the numbers don’t fit the assumptions of the mathematic calculations used. But that’s quibbling and possibly little more than semantics not of great import to the concept expressed.
Mann’s Hockey Stick, anyone?
Yeah, that I agree with. To help them understand this is draw three dots going up the whiteboard. “What is the trend? They would connect the three dots into a straight line 99% of the time and say “the trend is up”.
I’d connect the same three dots using a sine wave and say “What if it’s just a cyclical pattern?” It’s a great way to illustrate that our eyes and brains are prewired to spot easy patterns.
I actually think people’s intuitive understanding of numbers has declined precipitously since the advent of modern computing. I have a team that supports a 3-shit rotating schedule. The workshop couldn’t figure out why their shifts are always gapped. using some basic algebra, I showed them that not only were they undermanned for the shifts, but that their 5-3 shift schedule was exacerbating the manning problems. Took me a little while to settle on the best way to measure it, but they were stunned. And what for me was a relatively easy math problem (former math/physics teacher) was beyond their skill… Read more »
A 3-shit rotating skedge, huh? Sounds like this may more of a job for Immodium than algebra…
No matter what opinion you have about any sport, team, player, coach, or whatever, there is some midwit nerd with some “advanced stat” to try to refute it. And Z is totally correct in that, to this midwit nerd, the advanced stat stands alone. To that nerd, there is no context, because they do not understand the sport they are watching. I think this is even true of many of the people who have rocketed up the sports world on the back of “analytical analysis.” Like, I don’t think Daryl Morey really understands basketball that well, which is why his… Read more »
I think Morey is the one who used a first round draft pick on current Minnesota Senate candidate and known crazy person Royce White. White was open about his mental health issues and at times had refused to fly to road games while playing in college for Iowa State. He was a serious headache for the Rockets and they never got him to the point where he even played in a game for the team. When questioned why he took such a high risk player with a first round pick Morey responded with something like, “if you look at it… Read more »
I don’t get the fear of flying being some kind of mental issue and helping to make him a crazy person as you claim. It literally saved John Madden’s life if I remember correctly.
John Madden logged something like 80,000 miles a year on his bus, the risk of that is not zero. In fact, it’s a lot higher than logging all those miles on a plane. We all choose the risks and risk tolerance we are comfortable with, of course, but it needs to be placed in context.
Mycale, here’s a thought. I’ve heard both sides. Is 80k miles more dangerous on a bus than a plane when measured in “time spent in travel” or “distance covered”? At say, 50 mph per hour average speed is 1600 hours spent on traveling those 80k miles. Assume the plane substitute is a private type jet, rather than large commercial airline.
But on the positive side, Big John didn’t have to contend with some water buffalo fondling his huevos and jamming an x-ray wand up his tukhas every time he tried to board a plane.
White’s issues went way beyond fear of flying. His college coach later said he had to spend time nearly every day coaxing White into practicing because of his anxiety. He also had been kicked off the Minnesota team for shoving a police officer while he was getting arrested for shoplifting. Given NBA travel schedules, fear of flying is basically a disqualifier for a player. They play all over the country and turn around times between games are short. If someone wanted to sign him as a free agent to see if they could work through his issues that would have… Read more »
Fear of flying is not as crazy as it’s made out to be. For one thing, flying is intrinsically way more hazardous than driving despite the statistics. I don’t know about Madden but the risk of flying in the current year is not reflected in the numbers and we all know why that is.
The problem with flying versus driving is that when you’re flying, you have no control. You are entirely at the mercy of the pilot, the aircraft, air traffic controllers, and pilots of other aircraft. When you’re driving, you are much more in control. It still may statistically be more dangerous than driving, but being in control provides one with a greater sense of wellbeing. At least it does for me.
No, the statistics say that flying is less dangerous than driving. But the statistics are wrong for two reasons. First — and I know people will say that the statistics apply only to airline miles flown — but many people will be lulled into thinking that it applies to all miles flown and will thus be more willing to get into a private plane. This tendency would be difficult to measure. Second, the statistics haven’t yet caught up with the implementation of DEI policies.
Even if DEI blows up the standards of flying and we end up in a situation like the 70s and 80s, it’s not something an alternate-universe John Madden would have had to deal with. The point here is not to argue about the safety of flying vs. driving. They both have risks. Buses crash all the time and people die from them. Even if John Madden hired the greatest bus driver on planet Earth (quite possible), it’s still a risk. People tend to inflate risks you are not comfortable with and discount risks you are comfortable with. And that’s alright.… Read more »
Less dangerous–yes, that’s what I meant to say.
For a long while I have mulled crating and promoting a new “fantasy” sports operation. Before this year I considered Race Walking, then Olympic Trampoline but after recent events I’m now convinced that Competitive Break Dancing is the big focus.
Surely, Beating Up White Women has to be a contender.
I’ve been saying precisely this for 25 years. My scholarly theory is that Sportzball numerology is just another facet of the underlying malaise that is killing our neoliberal society – the same thing is killing (or has killed,if you prefer) – the churches. The church amassed great power and wealth over the centuries, which brought about corruption. As the upper echelons were infiltrated and the real clerics were driven out… people began throwing away their churches as they devolved into grifting scams through televangelist grifters, pedos, faggots and other carpet baggers. In the 70’s people looked for an alternative… and… Read more »
Lamenting a macro-pathology such as societal addiction to instant data via the smart phone and internet portal is not going to incite revelation and cure what ails us. Endless focus on macro-problems is in itself a useless distraction. The time is soon approaching where practical knowledge and improving tangible skills will matter much more than esoteric debating points. If you live in a big city, the chances that an illegal is going to kill or maim you is no longer trivial.
I corrected the 1 down vote I’ve noticed so far. Why the downvote to a perfectly sensible concern? What does it matter when I’m shot in an assault, the make, caliber, type of the firearm—or is it of more concern who pulled the trigger and why? Sigh….
“The numbers/cards/entrails/ChatGPT said it, not me.” A friend of mine recently got in trouble for writing a corporate non-apology. The company loved her message—then not only threw it away but flew into just short of a rage when her answer to “What did you use?” was, first, confusion, and then a confession that she’d written it without consulting “AI.” The management-approved, chatbot-assembled replacement message is repetitive, ungrammatical, artless, and a lie. They’re very proud of it and themselves. She’s forbidden from writing anything. Her impression is that her career is over. It probably is. I can imagine a comment section… Read more »
True story here: Friend of mine is a certain well-known gambling town who played a lot of sports in his youth and was an avid sportsball watcher/better decided to build his own spreadsheets and analyze the minutiae of player stats in order to play the bookies. Well, he got so good at it that word got around, and he ended up being unable to place bets in this well-known gambling town. He couldn’t even do it with proxies. (We’re not talking winnings in the millions here – tens of thousands.) He would also bet all sides at different bookies and… Read more »
Friend of mine IN a well-known gambling town (oops!)
There was a famous poker player who did this too, also counted cards in blackjack ripping off casinos & basically did anything else he could game through figuring out probabilities. Eventually he got banned from virtually all the bookies & all forms of gambling save for poker where he naturally thrived. Probability exists everywhere it’s just a matter of understanding it & crunching the numbers which is obviously easier said than done. The more variables there are the harder it is to calculate & with complex subjects like sports there’s all sorts of data sets that have to also be… Read more »
Soccer is far more chaotic. For example, last year Dortmund were among the least favorites to win the Champions League: but they reached the final and almost beat Real Madrid, had some incredible “rub of the green” along the way (e.g. against PSG and Atlético Madrid). On paper they probably shouldn’t have won a single game. Much as soccer has been ruined by big money, there is still the odd upset, although not as many as there used to be: Biggest upsets in FA Cup history – The Non-League Football Paper (thenonleaguefootballpaper.com) Rugby, on the other hand, rarely yields upsets.… Read more »
Your I know very little in the way of rules about soccer but struck me as an even more extreme form of basketball in the sense that whole game is more in line natural law where fortunes can change on a moment’s notice & there’s far less “artificial” rules /designs in place to give the losing team a chance to turn things around. I always viewed it akin to the old warfare where people matched in formation versus guerilla warfare & for that reason it’d probably be insanely hard to quantify the variables. On the surface it seems like the… Read more »
Soccer, hockey and basketball share the same form of “free flow” play that makes prediction much more difficult. Baseball is still difficult to predict “by the numbers” but I suppose in theory it is closer since it lacks the same level of freedom of movement (stats on a particular pitcher against a particular batter, etc.). American football is in between. As with most sports, money is the biggest factor – buying better players generally leads to better results (caveat of the “chemistry” factor). There is a reason teams like Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Barcelona, PSG, etc. have largely consistent success.… Read more »
“Always felt kind of bad for Dortmund – seems every time they get a good player and develop him, Bayern or some other bigger club buys him out.”
This is also the case in college hoops in the era of NIL and Transfermania. Those poor mid-major programs develop an overlooked player to the point of him becoming very good, and then he transfers to some power program offering him a big sack of gold. Pretty sad to see. Unvarnished capitalist rapacity. But since it functions in favor of nuggras, Leftists support it to the hilt. CINOs–Commies in Name Only.
A sports stat is inherently a record of the past. That said, some stats that are valuable because they’re objective (free throw shooting percentage), and then there are analytics, which are subjective hocus pocus more likely to deceive than to guide.
I own a TV.
I watch sports.
My brain is so big my skull has fold bulges on the surface from barely being able to contain the sheer mass of grey matter contained within it.
(Sorry I couldn’t help myself)
Look guy, you are talking to a person who with others from the university used to go to the downtown civic center to watch Hulk Hogan and the WWF when they came to town. With a few beers, I can enjoy anything. It was great entertainment for the kids as well.
I was riffing off of Z saying the dumbest & second dumbest comment on the internet would be to say “I don’t own a TV” & “I don’t watch sports” in response to this article so ya know if that’s the dumbest comment then I just made the smartest comments. Ironically I could be an idiot & misread the intent behind your comment, if I did I apologize for ruining the inside joke with this response. In all seriousness I have to digitally fistbump you for this comment. *fistbump* I used to occasionally enjoy watching basketball many years ago when… Read more »
Now that’s my kind of friend…. 😉
Someone has to say it…
I don’t watch sportsball.
“Someone has to say it…”
What if Z man mentioning it caused someone to say it? What if the sports numbers logic he discussed would’ve predicted that he would’ve mentioned it thus creating the conditions such that someone had to say it?
Gematria mystics & astrophysicists please respond, we must get to the bottom of this mystery!
“My brain is so big my skull has fold bulges on the surface from barely being able to contain the sheer mass of grey matter contained within it.”
Pshaw. My skull folds have folds. If you’ve followed modern fractal work, you have probably heard of the Steve set…?
“If you’ve followed modern fractal work, you have probably heard of the Steve set…?”
Even if I did the lack of folds within folds preludes me from being able to grasp fractsl work let alone the Steve set.
Lemme tell you, I can imagine what can be because I’m unburdened by what has been so don’t be Steve set trippin on me even if I can’t understand that it be like do because it is, ya fill me?
https://youtu.be/1f8h9dHXsUc?si=A6o_EbziaXWKJsbO
From the regime perspective, anything that increases public interest in the circuses is good, because “the circuses must go on” is right up there on the priority list with “the loldollars must be printed” and “the wogs must be imported.” Remember that the next time you wonder why the NFL stadium is being financed from the public trough. It’s because it is top priority. I noticed that this past weekend my fellow white southerners turned out in full force to cheer on their BLM negroball teams (after Nick Saban led the team on a BLM pride march I really don’t… Read more »
I just wanted to post that I don’t own a television and I don’t watch sportsball.
Very vaiid point but you missed the most obsessive sports numerology of all, the fan’s modern focus on salary and contract term now that this info is public record
Players are not rated so much on their contributions as whether those contributions justify his salary and the number of years the team is now stuck with him, or how soon it risks losing him to free agency.
Thinking of sports & numbers – as a casual Chi White Sox follower (just because I was born & raised that way) I’m now curious as to what numerology might’ve gone into making them the worst – or very close to it – major league team in baseball history. Payroll is apparently ~135 m, or $0.85 m per game (162 games). That works out to paying a little over $100 m to lose +/- 125 games. I can’t even begin to work out an ROI on that (but it’s bad), and would appear the numbers guys in the organization might’ve… Read more »
Paying top dollar for mediocrity (or worse) is hardly limited to sportsball. The corporate sector is awash in it. I’m open to the possibility that some amount of money laundering is going on.
That would explain a lot
Your post reminds me of the deference of greenies to “climate change models”, or as someone put it “an appeal to Microsoft Excel as an authority” It also reminds me of the earlier days of the video game Destiny where one of the devs would put up blog posts of all the weapon stats and talk about how he was “nerfing” this or that to make sure every weapon was used in an equal manner. The end result was predictable: all the weapons sucked. At this point, some readers will be tempted to post the dumbest comment on the internet… Read more »
The quantification angle is driven by gamblers looking for an edge. Traditional pro bettors inclined to bet on sports look askanse, but the modern explosion of legalized sports betting, driven by gummint’s insatiable and never ending quest to wring out more dollars from the every day joe types creates a market for this sort of tea leaf and entrail reading mumbo jumbo. If people talk about it around the water cooler or across the bar as they talk about sports anyway, it’s bound to gain some undeserved traction.
I’ll stick to betting on pro wrestling and Philadelphia elections!
Baseball has always had a brand of fan that sat in the stands scoring the game with his nose in the program instead of his eyes on the field. As a kid I knew what they were doing but couldn’t imagine what they got out of it. The Old Man, when questioned, would always grunt “math guys”. Of course, he was the same father that told his kids that the game was over at the 7th inning stretch to beat the traffic out of Dodger’s stadium. He still claims it was one of the saddest days in his life when… Read more »
Sounds like the infamous “Heidi” affair. I’ll kill two birds here. An excerpt from ChatGPT: ”The infamous “Heidi Game” refers to a notorious television incident that occurred on November 17, 1968, during an American football game between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders. The game became one of the most famous moments in sports broadcasting history due to a decision by NBC to cut away from the final moments of the game to air the scheduled children’s movie “Heidi.” …” In short, the fans were deprived of one of the most famous turn arounds and last minute scoring… Read more »
Here in Finland there was a big investment con operation called WinCapita which included an app that looked technical and would show the user numbers and statistics. Of course all of those were complete bogus but just its existence made people think it must have been legit. You can literally write a program to display random numbers and draw a bunch of aimless graphs and people convince themselves that it must be real.
“Numerology is just a way of creating an authority outside the people involved in the process.” No truer words, in my experience in corporate America, sum up the Administrative class who do not understand the business, but get by on flogging numbers that many times have no bearing on how well the business corpse is doing. If you are gumshoeing the output of the business, you get an innate feel and sense of how well things are or are not going. Data/numerology does not always compart with that reality. See also “why did our stock just take a dive when… Read more »
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As if I didn’t need any more reasons to avoid so many televised sports. The developments continue to suck out all the joy and fond memories of having played. I can find bread and circuses more to my liking only about a million other places.
This is a perfect metaphor for America these days – it’s all about the benjamins baby – and we’ll data crunch the minutiae so you can cash in. Obviously, there’s been betting on sports forever, but now it’s institutionalized, where every Tom, dick or Harry can get in on the action from the comfort of their own couch. I remember when I was involved in fantasy football leagues back in the day. I wasn’t watching games just for the joy of watching them anymore, and the satisfaction of a game well played or of “your” team winning. Nope I was… Read more »
It’s only “about the benjamins” because almost everyone agrees that it’s “about the benjamins”.
For all the grief the boomers get, we’ve gone from a bunch of high school kids congregating at the park listening to music from their (mostly) crappy car stereos on AM radio, to listening to (subscription service) on their (subscription) phones through Bluetooth speakers, the sum of which is several times more than we paid for our cars.
I get it. Not your fault, and it’s probably not. It’s only your fault if you participate and perpetuate the model of the eternal renting of your life.