You can read the whole thing, which is worth your time, here:
The Numbers Game | Fiya Starter
Some excerpts:
There absolutely is a worthwhile a story about blacks and analytics worth exploring, but Wilbon and The Undefeated whiffed, badly. Worse, they whiffed in a way that confirmed the reservations and worries many blacks harbor about ventures like The Undefeated – whether they can possibly stand apart from the institutions that commission them, as well as the audiences that fund those institutions. In a culture where both capital and the biases of a core audience increasingly drive content, moral decency and intellectually honest discourse tend to be sacrificed at the altar of profit. In that light, the issue The Undefeated faces is integrity of purpose. What audience are Wilbon and The Undefeated writing for? When they engage “blackness,” are they talking about or with blacks? What’s the point of a black perspectives site if it rehashes the usual conversations that substitute generalizations for nuance, and favors crude stereotypes over investigation of the forces that produce such narrow, simplistic notions?
The real story is not that “blacks are not feeling the sports metrics movement.” That’s an old and tired framing of the issue that places the blame on some cultural failing, lack of vision, intellectual deficiency, or an addiction to the emotion and rhythm of any given thing at the expense of the strategic, analytic, intellectual aspects of it. The fact is most people have been slow in embracing analytics, and white men have long been leading the backlash, from the columnists pumping out cliché-riddled, vituperative pieces for years about geeks who live in their moms’ basements, to the former players like Goose Gossage lamenting nerds from Harvard ruining the game of baseball.
The real story is black people are actually the most justifiably skeptical of “advanced analytics” and “the sports metric movement.” And not because they love players with heart, and are charmed by trash talk and chest-to-chest, posterizing dunks. When black people have expressed aversion to advanced analytics in my circle, it has little to do with privileging flair and heart over math and strategy. It’s a skepticism rooted in our direct knowledge of the meaninglessness of specialized languages and the exclusionary nature of implied credibility through such languages. For as long as our collective memory can stretch most of us have observed the manipulation of statistics to justify politics, policies, and rationalizations for our societal oppression and disenfranchisement. We’ve been inundated with statistics that imply black cultural pathology, whether by criminality or intellectual deficiency. We’ve been shown statistics that defy the reality we see day-to-day. And when statistics actually confirm our life experiences, they seem to garner only passing interest, eliciting a perfunctory eyebrow raise from the mainstream before evaporating into the ether.
We’re especially wary of the culture of credentialization, especially in a society that sees blacks with college degrees have a likelihood of employment on par with white high school graduates and college dropouts. When I was younger, my civil rights mentor was on the Executive Board of the ACLU, and explained to me a controversial job search for which he believed the job description had been written to suit a specific candidate. I didn’t know about that sort of cronyism and nepotism at age 19; my cynicism is appropriately sharpened. When new “movements” and languages emerge, in any given field, I always take a long look at whether it’s the same old turd dressed in a new tuxedo.The problem blacks have isn’t advanced analytics, it’s the attendant, familiar process of exclusion we recognize instinctively at this point, like a drug dog sniffing out product. One thing black people have long smelled a mile away in America is bullshyt.
Advanced statistical analysis isn’t some impenetrable realm of sports genius and mysticism and that necessitates a PhD, a subscription to The Economist, a slide rule, and a yearly spot at the Sloan conference to grasp. Intelligent utilization of measurables work to create smarter ways to watch and evaluate sports. Understood. Not new, and not news. But when we overvalue that utilization, speak in coded languages that seem inaccessible to regular people, and begin to talk of analysis as if only a select few “brilliant minds” with Ivy League degrees can comprehend, we veer into specious territory of buzzwords and terms like “thinking outside the box,” the “slow food movement,” “organic,” “gluten-free,” and “diversity.” The terms lose meaning, become void both by overuse and vagueness; hucksters begin to attach the terms to their own pursuits to provide an automatic credibility to a public (and often a media) still intoxicated from the brand new buzz.
The numbers game has worked against blacks, and so has the credentials game. We know very well that just as often as a new, mysterious, coded language is the parlance of innovation, it’s the parlance of Ponzi schemes. In the NBA it’s the parlance that has seen a GM of a glorified treadmill team to deemed a genius and receive an endless parade of profiles, and one of his protégés waltz into a high profile front office job and then make such a mess of things the league had to intervene in its own best interest. And this latest movement rings especially familiar to blacks in its myth-building of white masterminds who get credit for their constructing of winning teams through visionary understanding of numbers, as if the ultra-talented and sharp black players are mere mindless cogs in the mathematicians’ machines.
It’s one thing to agree that analysis helps players and coaches do their jobs better; it’s another (disturbing though telling) thing to believe the analysis is winning the games, aided and abetted by some black dudes mindlessly enacting the plans of our brilliant venture capitalist overlords.
The Numbers Game | Fiya Starter
Some excerpts:
There absolutely is a worthwhile a story about blacks and analytics worth exploring, but Wilbon and The Undefeated whiffed, badly. Worse, they whiffed in a way that confirmed the reservations and worries many blacks harbor about ventures like The Undefeated – whether they can possibly stand apart from the institutions that commission them, as well as the audiences that fund those institutions. In a culture where both capital and the biases of a core audience increasingly drive content, moral decency and intellectually honest discourse tend to be sacrificed at the altar of profit. In that light, the issue The Undefeated faces is integrity of purpose. What audience are Wilbon and The Undefeated writing for? When they engage “blackness,” are they talking about or with blacks? What’s the point of a black perspectives site if it rehashes the usual conversations that substitute generalizations for nuance, and favors crude stereotypes over investigation of the forces that produce such narrow, simplistic notions?
The real story is not that “blacks are not feeling the sports metrics movement.” That’s an old and tired framing of the issue that places the blame on some cultural failing, lack of vision, intellectual deficiency, or an addiction to the emotion and rhythm of any given thing at the expense of the strategic, analytic, intellectual aspects of it. The fact is most people have been slow in embracing analytics, and white men have long been leading the backlash, from the columnists pumping out cliché-riddled, vituperative pieces for years about geeks who live in their moms’ basements, to the former players like Goose Gossage lamenting nerds from Harvard ruining the game of baseball.
The real story is black people are actually the most justifiably skeptical of “advanced analytics” and “the sports metric movement.” And not because they love players with heart, and are charmed by trash talk and chest-to-chest, posterizing dunks. When black people have expressed aversion to advanced analytics in my circle, it has little to do with privileging flair and heart over math and strategy. It’s a skepticism rooted in our direct knowledge of the meaninglessness of specialized languages and the exclusionary nature of implied credibility through such languages. For as long as our collective memory can stretch most of us have observed the manipulation of statistics to justify politics, policies, and rationalizations for our societal oppression and disenfranchisement. We’ve been inundated with statistics that imply black cultural pathology, whether by criminality or intellectual deficiency. We’ve been shown statistics that defy the reality we see day-to-day. And when statistics actually confirm our life experiences, they seem to garner only passing interest, eliciting a perfunctory eyebrow raise from the mainstream before evaporating into the ether.
We’re especially wary of the culture of credentialization, especially in a society that sees blacks with college degrees have a likelihood of employment on par with white high school graduates and college dropouts. When I was younger, my civil rights mentor was on the Executive Board of the ACLU, and explained to me a controversial job search for which he believed the job description had been written to suit a specific candidate. I didn’t know about that sort of cronyism and nepotism at age 19; my cynicism is appropriately sharpened. When new “movements” and languages emerge, in any given field, I always take a long look at whether it’s the same old turd dressed in a new tuxedo.The problem blacks have isn’t advanced analytics, it’s the attendant, familiar process of exclusion we recognize instinctively at this point, like a drug dog sniffing out product. One thing black people have long smelled a mile away in America is bullshyt.
Advanced statistical analysis isn’t some impenetrable realm of sports genius and mysticism and that necessitates a PhD, a subscription to The Economist, a slide rule, and a yearly spot at the Sloan conference to grasp. Intelligent utilization of measurables work to create smarter ways to watch and evaluate sports. Understood. Not new, and not news. But when we overvalue that utilization, speak in coded languages that seem inaccessible to regular people, and begin to talk of analysis as if only a select few “brilliant minds” with Ivy League degrees can comprehend, we veer into specious territory of buzzwords and terms like “thinking outside the box,” the “slow food movement,” “organic,” “gluten-free,” and “diversity.” The terms lose meaning, become void both by overuse and vagueness; hucksters begin to attach the terms to their own pursuits to provide an automatic credibility to a public (and often a media) still intoxicated from the brand new buzz.
The numbers game has worked against blacks, and so has the credentials game. We know very well that just as often as a new, mysterious, coded language is the parlance of innovation, it’s the parlance of Ponzi schemes. In the NBA it’s the parlance that has seen a GM of a glorified treadmill team to deemed a genius and receive an endless parade of profiles, and one of his protégés waltz into a high profile front office job and then make such a mess of things the league had to intervene in its own best interest. And this latest movement rings especially familiar to blacks in its myth-building of white masterminds who get credit for their constructing of winning teams through visionary understanding of numbers, as if the ultra-talented and sharp black players are mere mindless cogs in the mathematicians’ machines.
It’s one thing to agree that analysis helps players and coaches do their jobs better; it’s another (disturbing though telling) thing to believe the analysis is winning the games, aided and abetted by some black dudes mindlessly enacting the plans of our brilliant venture capitalist overlords.
.
