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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2697 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 14, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How different does sport look if all the mangers were autist?

I was recently listening to a podcast in which an ex professional football player talked about the politics that go on behind the scenes.

He said a lot of what determines if you are a "good" player beyond the fundamentals is akin to astrology or colloquially known as the eye test.

At one point he said "You could be the most talented midfielder in the country but because of manager bias, your reputation and other external factors you will never reach the higher levels."

This strikes me as highly inefficient and got me to thinking about the types of people that become coaches, scouts and managers.

This is an assumption but the types of people that become football staff are different from the people who become engineers. People who become engineers may have interest in the sport but they often choose jobs more explicitly built for their way of thinking.

What would sports look like if it was run by the STEM type? I'm mainly talking about basketball and football because they seem to have the highest degrees of freedom.

Will these sports look completely different when the STEM guys get to them? How long will it take for the STEM guys to influence sport? 10 years? 20 Years? 50 Years?

I think hyper optimised basketball contains two types of players. Big men and three shooters. The big men try to stop the shooter from shooting threes. There will be no more dunks or two pointers.

I understand this is kinda like the concept of Moneyball. I never watched it tho.

Your question reminds me of this essay on "refinement culture" that starts by describing the changes that have happened in sports as decisions become more data-driven.

https://medium.com/@lindynewsletter/refinement-culture-51d96726c642

Dan Luu touches on this in a couple of his essays

https://danluu.com/talent/ - on the misidentification of talent in baseball (and elsewhere) by talent scouts trusting their 'gut' over the numbers.

https://danluu.com/bad-decisions/ - on bad decision making in baseball

I understand this is kinda like the concept of Moneyball. I never watched it tho.

Just go watch it. It is exactly what you are talking about. Except Hollywood.

Some sports like baseball and basketball are pretty autistically data-obsessed and managers have based a lot of decisions on data for many years.

I was recently listening to a podcast in which an ex professional football player talked about the politics that go on behind the scenes.

He said a lot of what determines if you are a "good" player beyond the fundamentals is akin to astrology or colloquially known as the eye test.

At one point he said "You could be the most talented midfielder in the country but because of manager bias, your reputation and other external factors you will never reach the higher levels."

I read somewhere that soccer/football is pretty unique among sports because games are usually decided by a single point, which means there are far fewer datapoints. The argument was that this makes management much less scientific than most other team sports where scoring is regular and consistent through the game. Soccer is more stochastic, overly reliant on luck, on a sudden mistake by the other team that allows you to convert one of dozens of scoring opportunities into a goal.

How different does sport look if all the mangers were autist?

Who knows? Presumably autistic people aren't all identical. They can have a diverse range of goals and values, same as non-autistic people.

At one point he said "You could be the most talented midfielder in the country but because of manager bias, your reputation and other external factors you will never reach the higher levels."

I don't know much of anything about traditional sports, but I doubt that this is literally true. If you're literally the best in the country then I'm sure a pro team will at least sign you.

I do watch a lot of eSports though so I can make a comparison with that. Top players will regularly stream matches, practice sessions, and analysis sessions on twitch. Stream views are certainly correlated with the skill of the player, but it's not a perfect 1-to-1 relationship. Some top players get far more views (and consequently, twitch sub money) than others because they have more interesting personalities, they put more time and effort into growing their streaming presence, or other chance factors. This is unavoidable. Especially in the smaller games there are no "managers", it's about as close to a pure free market as you can get, and when given the choice, the revealed preference of viewers is that they care about other factors besides just raw game skill.

The streamers who make a career as full time commentators or "personalities" get even more viewers than the top players themselves, which is to be expected, because they can focus 100% of their time and energy on growing their twitch/youtube presence, instead of splitting their focus between streaming and actually learning/practicing/competing in the game in question. So things like reputation and brand recognition can't be pinned solely on "managers", the person themselves also has to take an active role and put work into growing their reputation.

This strikes me as highly inefficient

It's a game. Why does it have to be efficient?

It being efficient (maximally competitive) is literally a significant portion of what makes competitive makes fun to play and watch.

My entire post was about how people become fans of players and choose who/what to watch for reasons other than pure competitiveness.

Good example is chess, the games that top bots play with themselves are frankly more novel and interesting on a move-by-move basis than the games played between human pros, but as far as I know no one really watches bot games recreationally. The most popular streams are for the human pro tournaments where people can see the storylines and drama.

Yeah but how would you feel knowing Magnus Carlsen was just chosen for his blue eyes and there's players better than him out there with less gifted looks? I know that can't happen in chess, but you get the point.

The process being mostly meritocratic is a necessary but not sufficient condition to sell the surrounding story.

The process being mostly meritocratic is a necessary but not sufficient condition to sell the surrounding story.

I agree with this. All of the factors have some weight, it’s not just one or the other.

It's a game. Why does it have to be efficient?

Presumably because there is a lot of money in making it so

Who knows? Presumably autistic people aren't all identical. They can have a diverse range of goals and values, same as non-autistic people.

I think you can read it as ‘a bunch of accountants run out anyone with sports specific knowledge’.

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