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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

Any BJJ player will understand Moneyball.

There are things that work with a very high percentage ...and there are things that are enormously satisfying and exciting to do.

If you're interested in winning you will methodically do the "correct" things.

The problem is it's just so much fun to do a firemans carry ...

In the Moneyball narrative, the non-analytical scouts are branded as "stupid" or "thick" or even "bigoted". I see them as more human and less robotic. I bet they have more fun than Billy Beane (and the book suggests they do).

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As someone who has practiced and followed sports before, during, and after the revolution in analytics and optimization, I can say that “back in the day,” sports were definitely more fun, interesting, and creative, whereas now they are more regimented and boring, but individual athletes and teams are much better at winning. There is no longer much room for eccentric, flamboyant characters, “geniuses,” or charismatic competitors who, thanks to their instincts and intuition, were able to make the winning move.

But, as in business and personal relationships, finding what works best and putting it into practice tends to be more likely to succeed than simply hoping it will work--look at me, it has never been tried before!

Totally anecdotal, but you see in Sim Racing versus Real Racing, the best sim racers are very regimented and analytical, and whilst it's mostly true of Real Racing, the confluence of death, consequence and mechanical failure lends some advantage to "characters" that can ride their waves better than others.

In both, it's way more interesting to watch a bunch of less talented people with personality and style duke it out, than it is to watch perfect, best of the best execution go toe to toe.

In the end, apart from the nerdiest among us, we don't watch sports because we want to see technical perfection or tactical precision. We watch them to be moved by a narrative, by the "hero" that is about to be defeated but finds a way out, for the creative solution that has rarely, or never, been tried before.

That's why we look at a short video of an unbelievable Forward 3½ Somersault combined with a Pike dive, and we say to ourselves, "that's great", before quickly switching to look again, for the 100th time, at a less technically impressive but more emotionally charged goal scored by our favorite team 25 years ago.

I rarely watch sports nowadays, also because it is difficult to get really into a team or an individual when they are younger than you are and make millions.

>I can say that “back in the day,” sports were definitely more fun, interesting, and creative…

I’ll agree. Was kind of a big sports fan in the 80s (nba, nfl, mlb). The characters were pretty fun. It was a little crazy but fun. Some recent documentaries/books on the Celtics I checked out reveals more things going on behind the scenes. The press had more access. The Celtics broadcaster “Johnny Most” was really not very partial to other teams, but came up with fun nicknames. One game on the radio they stopped announcing and started laughing because he lit his pants on fire with a cigarette https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Most

I tried watching sports now, the players are so good but it lacks the fun / heart. It’s professional and big business but somehow when you don’t care it’s a lot less fun. Though I did enjoy the women’s world cut in France quite a bit.

Sports "analytics" is just the meta narrative bullshit of fools and a scientistic society willingly and collectively fooling itself via non-ergodic stochastic process taking the place of actual scientific progress.

The trick is to make games where doing the thing that wins the game is also the most interesting thing to see and do.

it's only a matter of time before some team owner instructs his analytics team to "build me the team that gets me the best ratings/sells the most tickets" rather than "build me the team that gets me a championship".

> The problem is it's just so much fun to do a firemans carry ...

what about grabbing a folding chair and hitting your opponent with it?

the problem is when 'entertaining' optimizes away reality.

It’s true in boxing, too. I almost never enjoy a Floyd Mayweather bout because he plays for points better than anyone. It’s effective but not entertaining.

The "highest expected value"-ification of MMA has made it uninteresting to me. Fighting styles have become so homogenized that I fight back tears of boredom, especially when my mind drifts back to the days of seeing random fighting styles like Art Jimmerson fighting Royce Gracie

Brazilian jujutsu player?

This is a postmodernist, market fundamentalist, meta narrative that has basically nothing to do with reality.

As if there is some kind of no-arbitrage condition arbitrage, to be made between humans playing baseball.

This is nothing new though. Baseball is America's pastime in a very deep way. I collected baseball cards in the 80s like I was trading stocks in another bullshit, market fundamentalist delusion.

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