#18: Moneyball
I don't watch enough baseball to know this (I check in when the postseason starts) but the sport is apparently getting more boring: Less is happening in baseball games, thanks to the sport's so-called statistical revolution. Players are hitting more home runs, pitchers are striking out more batters, and less of basically everything else is happening than in the past, because stats reveal that these are more efficient ways to get wins. I know enough about baseball to accept that this is a less exciting version of the sport.
Beyond baseball, it feels like nearly everything has undergone its own statistical revolution in recent years. You can recognize this by an activity's weird transformation into something that seems worse than before, despite producing undeniably better quantitative results. Take, for example, this story about a Goldman Sachs-owned complex of aluminum warehouses near Detroit. Trucks pointlessly move aluminum from warehouse to warehouse, keeping it there longer, and Goldman gets paid extra storage fees as the global price of aluminum unnecessarily rises. Measured one way, it's the optimal outcome; measured most other ways, it's stupid.
Domains that have been optimized for profitability, wins, or another singular criterion sometimes do get better, sometimes they get worse, but either way they usually start to look quite different. They don't always get more efficient, either, as the Goldman aluminum warehouses prove. The optimizers just conceal a point that their predecessors may have grasped: Optimizing for something less obvious, or not optimizing at all, often produces a preferable outcome overall. Moneyball was such good PR for the phenomenon I'm describing that it made us forget all the mediocrity that the first part of its title has caused.
Reads:
Phoenix was so hot on Tuesday that planes couldn't take off.
"Technology" is what we call things that don't work yet.
Platforms dividing up the world: Walmart is requiring partners and vendors to stop using Amazon Web Services because Amazon is a competitor.
Until next time,
Drew