The Limits of Optimization

For good or ill, the youth baseball experience worldwide is about to be more information-rich than ever. If anything, though, objective measurements provide fuel for competitiveness and a new way to hook kids on an old game. The same people who say stats suck the joy out of following baseball may also say that launch angles and spin rates suck the

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“The dilemma for owners and players and fans may be understood as The Paradox of Progress: we know the game is better, so why, for so many, does it feel worse? I submit that while Science may win on the field, as clubs employ strategies that give them a better chance of victory, Aesthetics wins hearts and minds.” It won’t matter how good players ge

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• · Are we being reprogrammed by algorithms? In the last edition, I mentioned a recent tweet-er-xeet post by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. Jack suggested that we should all be able to choose the algorithm that controls our timelines across social media products. But the underlying premise is more interesting: As social algorithms get far more effectiv

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So if you have large-scale bureaucracies that need to be organized and function coherently, then you need these kind of simple, nuance-free packets of information. And I think that’s one of the reasons we’ve seen this constant rise of simplified metrical analysis.