HERE IS WHY ANALYTICS WILL NEVER BE THE SOLUTION FOR SPORTS, CENTRAL BANKING OR ANY HUMAN PROBLEM11/29/2023 Back in 2003, mainstream journalist and FTX lover Michael Lewis released his most famous book, MONEYBALL: THE ART OF WINNING AN UNFAIR GAME. The book immortalizes Oakland GM Billy Beane who had to cut payroll and rebuilt the Athletics into a 100-win team using the art of analytics in only one season. A few years later, the Boston Red Sox became the first team to win a World Series using this system of analytics as their foundation. Since this book and the entertaining 2011 movie were released, analytics has taken over the game of baseball. Creating new acronyms in our society like OPS (On Base plus Slugging Percentage) for hitters, BB% (Walk Percentage) and K% (Strike Out Percentage) for pitchers, and WAR (Wins Above Replacement) for everyone, the means in which players are evaluated has completely changed from the game that was played in the 20th Century. Every aspect of the game is divided into percentages and statistics. What is the batter’s hit rate if the pitcher’s first pitch is a strike? What is the likely ERA of a starting pitcher after he has thrown 70 pitches? What are the chances of the Los Angeles Dodgers coming back from a 2-run deficit with San Francisco’s set up man and closer pitching the final two innings? Every aspect is now based on mathematical formulas. While there have been some interesting benefits to this system which has revolutionized the game, after over 20 years of usage, it is time to analyze what analytics or sabermetrics has done to the game from an entertainment perspective and where it has gone wrong. Then, we will analyze how other mathematical data analysis is used in another key aspect of our lives, central banking.
“Everyone sees it, everyone knows it, everyone recognizes its killing baseball, yet it persists. Baseball is ruled by math based on the broadest possibilities; ones that spread corrosion posed as wisdom.” Phil Mushnick When I was in school, I was very good at math and statistics. There is a basic logic to math that if you follow a specific formula or problem-solving mechanism, you will get a universal and definitive answer. You can’t lie about the solution to a math problem. But there is another problem with math. It is incredibly boring. Watching a baseball game where both teams strike out twenty times, most of the runs are generated by quick one or two run homers, and a pitching coach or manager make ten trips to the mound cumulatively between the two teams has sucked the air out of the game. Most baseball games are unwatchable now. Even Michael Lewis agrees with this. The game has become robotic, predictable, and worst of all, boring as hell. To fix this latter problem, the MLB had to institute a pitch clock to speed up the game and keep the fans in their seats due to the increase in pitching changes that analytics brought about. Because taking pitches is now one of the foundations of this movement, strike outs and home runs seem to set new record highs every season. Baseball used to have big personalities,” Lewis said. “It hasn’t accommodated them recently. Baseball has steadily been drained of emotion. The analytics movement has drained it of emotional content. What used to be a source of great drama was the manager coming out of the dugout and lifting third base and hurling it into the outfield and kicking dirt on the umpire. There’s no point in doing that anymore… You raise your hand and say, ‘Can we review the videotape?’ It’s become much more slickly professional.” In addition, there is no guarantee that analytics has created the “perfection” that was promised. One of the best examples of the failure of the analytics movement is Game 6 of the 2020 World Series. Blake Snell was unhittable through 5 1/3 innings. He gave up his second hit to Austin Barnes and was pulled after 73 pitches. He was replaced by Nick Anderson who preceded to give up a double to Mookie Betts. A wild pitch and fielder’s choice later, Tampa Bay was losing 2-1 on their way to blowing the World Series. Based on analytics, Snell should have been pulled in that scenario before facing Betts. But with the way he was pitching, a little common sense and leaving him on the mound through the sixth inning may have been the better outcome. Analytics cost the Tampa Bay Rays that game. There is no way to know if Snell would have blown the game if he had been left in. As people obsess over analytics and its robotic efficiency, they often fail to notice how the proper reliever may be brought into a game and not have his best “stuff” that evening. Or maybe a specific umpire has a tighter strike zone which will be a hindrance to your best side arm reliver who lives on the corners of home plate. Baseball analytics works when the percentages, and the formula succeeds. But it fails because analytics eliminates the emotion of the game, dehumanizes the sport, and does not account for the variables of the human experience, which is unpredictable, random, and chaotic. Taking an analytical stat like DRA (Deserved Run Average) seriously is ridiculous. The chaotic nature of sports means nothing is truly earned and nothing is deserved even on a percentage basis. If a player is having a bad run of luck or no support from his lineup, a statistic like DRA means nothing when evaluating a player. SIERA (Skill-Interactive Earned Run Average) and WAR (Wins above Replacement) are just percentage calculations and change nothing about the player’s current statistics. So, understanding the problems that analytics causes, what other fundamentally important aspects of our society are being burdened by mathematics? Well, there is the question of central banking. Almost every country in the world has a Central Bank. There is even an International Bank called the IMF run out of the United Nations that helps give assistance loans to third world countries as long as certain political goals and contractual obligations are met. In the United States, we have had a Central Bank since 1913 called the Federal Reserve. With a system set up to control the nation’s money supply with data coming in from every aspect of this nationalized economy, it would be logical to think that these “experts” would understand the economic problem and be able to fix it. But the Central Bank managers are incapable of doing anything other than putting out small fires while allowing larger infernos to blaze beneath the surface. There was never a Great Depression till we had a Central Bank. There would have been no tech crash without a Central Bank. There would not have been a mortgage collapse without the Central Bank. You can also not blame this problem on just one nation’s Central Bank. Every country in the world has different economic problems usually caused by a previous action undertaken by their Central Bank. Inflation in the UK Property Crisis in China Basic Overall Failure of the US Federal Reserve So, what could be the cause of these problems? Why can’t these Central Banks keep the economy healthy? First, almost every Central Bank will distort data which causes many of their projections to be incorrect. This inevitably leads to mal-investment and the creation of a new problem. This distortion of data allows the Bank to create a more positive narrative about the economy and prevent people from engaging in bank runs or losing confidence in their investments. Why is the bank incapable of projecting economic numbers? Because there is an inherent flaw with banking statistics that it shares with baseball analytics. The world is unpredictable and chaotic, and decisions made by human beings cannot be predicted by a computer algorithm. There is a famous book that explains this phenomenon and why the elites with their administrative need to control the flow of money can never succeed no matter how many data points reach their computers. After World War II, Austrian economist Ludwig Von Mises wrote the greatest economic book of all-time called HUMAN ACTION. It explains in detail that centrally controlled economies, especially Communist ones, will always fail economically. Because no matter the intention, Central Banks will distort an economy and create the conditions for bad investment, misplace demand for labor, and worst of all, allow preferential treatment of certain individuals and institutions over others. Human beings will make the market work through their own consumer actions and these actions will adjust the market to its proper pricing mechanism. These actions are incompatible with administrative spreadsheets and economic statistics. Here is the summary. “Mises argues that market-generated money prices are essential to determine the most highly valued uses for resources to satisfy consumer demands. He attempts to demonstrate the inconsistencies of piecemeal political intervention in the market economy and the pernicious effects of political control and manipulation of the monetary system. In Mises's view, government interventions that distort market prices always result in misdirection of resources, including labor, and mal-investments of capital, leading to inflationary upswings followed by inevitable economic downturns. Mises believed that the market economy was the only system that provided freedom and personal choice to all members of society while generating the means for coordinating the actions of billions of people in the most economically rational manner, and that monetary manipulation by central banks was one of the most disruptive distortions to the process of economic calculation.” All this is important to keep in mind because the globalists have every intention of plugging in every imaginable data point and statistic into artificial intelligence and allowing it to control our lives. AI can be manipulated based on the data that is inputted which is one major problem. But as mentioned above, how can a computer determine the intricacies of human speech, intelligence, and personality with statistics? It is an impossible task. But if we allow it to happen, baseball and Central banking aren’t the only things the administrative state is going to ruin. Online censorship, digital money, and digital identification are coming. These things will be just as bad if not worse than everything discussed here. It is time that we wake up to what is being prepared for all of us. A world run by data and statistics that has turned every living being into a dehumanized data point is not the future of humanity that we want.
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After all these con jobs, attempts at upselling, and data mining my information, you would think that this miserable ordeal was over. But before I could grab a craft beer and pour it down my gullet in celebration, another irritation came upon me shortly after final publication. I will explain this problem in two condensed parts.
The first problem revolves around the media. A couple of weeks after my book was published, my publisher released a “press release” to hundreds of newspapers, magazines, and websites for promotion. So far, I have done one authentic interview with a small-town paper. Before I explain what happened, I have to provide a little background. As an individual who worked in the television industry for 12 years, I have a firm understanding of how the money was made and how my toast was buttered so to speak. Advertising is the key to making money in television, magazines, and newspapers. It has been the foundation of the industry for generations. Without it, the newspaper industry would not have survived for centuries. But in the present day, there are other types of advertisements. One of the biggest is subscription fees paid by the consumer for a service or money received by a cable provider to carry a particular station to its consumers. Another, which this blog will be focusing on, is sponsored advertisements. If you do a Google search, usually the first search result will say “Sponsored.” Sponsored ads appear in newscasts to promote certain products. On television, the best example of a sponsored ad is a thirty-minute infomercial that usually airs at night. Once my “press release” was sent out into the world, the nightmare began. First was something called the Spotlight Network. It apparently exists only on Roku. The network contacted me for a ten-minute interview. But being from the television industry, my first question was, “How much is this going to cost me?” Confused by my response, the salesmen asked me why I thought this advertising would cost money. After explaining the concept of sponsored advertisements and the fact I worked in television for over a decade, he came out and stated exactly what I expected. $999 out of pocket for a ten-minute infomercial on a station with virtually no viewership on Roku. I told him I wasn’t interested. This did not stop the calls. For this nightmare to end, I had to register his phone number as spam on my Android Phone to block all future phone calls. Then, two magazines started to contact me (These shall remain nameless). They were only interested in my book based on how much advertising I could spend in their mediocre publications. The problem with both these magazines is that the demographic I was interested in targeting had no relation to the subject matter in either one. Finally, there is one last problem which will serve as a warning. Once the book is published, third party book services or providers scrape Amazon, my publisher’s website and Barnes & Noble to acquire the information regarding my book. They quickly create a page to buy the book for resale and charge an exorbitant price in a different currency. I have no control over stopping these websites due to them being created outside the United States. Here are several examples on Google alone. Indigo in Canada Mighty Ape in Australia Germany Bruna in the Netherlands Libris in Romania Prospero in Hungary Rakuten in Japan And many more. If you are interested in my book, buy it on Amazon, Google, Barnes & Noble, Thrift Books, or my publisher’s website. Do not get conned into purchasing it from any other source. Hopefully soon, this marketing nightmare will come to an end. |
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