27/07/2025
I remember reading about math nerds making waves at major poker tournaments from my dad’s TIME subscription. The article felt ancient as I associated it with magazine piles in the living room. Looking back, it was 7 years after ‘Moneyball’ was written and 4 years after the inaugural Sloan Conference.
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I was greeted by Emma at her collage workshop. It was a new venue and she’d incorporated a theme: Future Shock. I had pre-prepared references and it fortuitously dovetailed with the assignment.
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If you’re wondering how gamechanging AI might be, one only has to look at the analytics revolution in the NBA. How Barkley still considers Daryl Morey an idiot, even after a “jump-shooting team” won it all.
On socials, the comments section and group chats, you’ll find fans lamenting the cost of efficiency over entertainment. How the modern game pales to the one they grew up loving:
• 3s-and-layups over mid-range 2s
• Legacy making over load managing
• First round picks over first round exits
• Free throw over free flow
• Highlight reels over real-time drama
• Data sets over eye test
• Betting lines over storylines
• Analytics over intuition
Kirk Goldsberry remarked on Michael Lewis’ invisible hand, shaped by his former life as a bond salesman:
“KG: (33m) Slowly efficiency starts to replace the word greatness in a lot of conversations. That’s straight out of Wall Street... The intrusion of financial reasoning into front offices and sports itself is one of the larger trends... The more financial ideologies infiltrate art, music, cinema—I don’t think it’s been great.” (Plain English with Derek Thompson, May ‘24)
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I skimmed through the provided text as the collage party arrived. It was written 15 years before Neil Postman’s ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’, I’d never heard of it. The book was an artefact of the past, and tonight primarily used for aesthetic.
As I sat with this sea of printed content, I pondered the value of taking some of it in before I began cutting it up.
