Sporting decision makers made better decisions after they got serious about learning from analytical models of their games, models that often began life as blogosphere passion projects. In this front office, we believe that can happen again, one level up: sports themselves as the model for decision makers trying to improve the outcomes that matter most.
For someone who doesn’t care about who wins, what do sports have to offer? High on my list is getting to closely observe people being incredibly (like world-outlier-level) intense about something. I am generally somewhat obsessed with obsession (I think it is a key ingredient in almost every case of someone accomplishing something remarkable). And with sports, you can easily identify which players are in the top-5 in the world at the incredibly competitive things they do; you can safely assume that their level of obsession and competitiveness is beyond what you’ll ever be able to wrap your head around; and you can see them in action. …
What else is good about sports:
I think it’s fun when people care so deeply about something so intrinsically meaningless. It means we can enjoy their emotional journeys without all the baggage of whether we’re endorsing something “good” or “bad.” (My wife also loves this about sports—her thing is watching Last Chance U while crying her eyes out.) My next sports post will be a collection of “heartwarming” links and stories.
There’s a lot of sports analysis, and I kind of think sports is to social science what the laboratory is to natural sciences. Sports statistics have high sample sizes, stable environments and are exhaustively captured on video, so it’s often possible to actually figure out what’s going on. It’s therefore unusually easy to form your own judgment about whether someone’s analysis is good or bad, and that can have lessons for what patterns to look for on other topics. (My view: academic analysis of sports is often almost unbelievably bad, as you can see from some of the Phil Birnbaum eviscerations, whereas average sportswriting and TV commentating is worse than language can convey. Nerdy but non-academic sports analysis websites like Cleaning the Glass, Football Outsiders and FiveThirtyEight are good.)
the last point of which jives with your blog’s thesis.
Subscribed :) I agree with your take there that
Holden used to write about sports too back in the day but stopped in 2021, which was a bummer because I liked his argument to give sports a chance that
the last point of which jives with your blog’s thesis.