The Limits of Optimization

This simple tool supported the collection of a surprising amount of data. Most of this data told us what had happened in a game, and it required relatively straightforward calculations to yield useful information about player performance. A more sophisticated class of statistics was then made possible by computation. My sense, too, is that there wa... See more

In his own fine post on baseball and optimization a couple of years back, Rob Horning cited Melissa Gregg who observed that “personal productivity is an epistemology without an ontology, a framework for knowing what to do in the absence of a guiding principle for doing it.”

It was right for the Baltimore Orioles in the 70s and the A’s in the early 2000’s to optimize their team strategies and tactics as they did. Moreover, it is right (meaning rational and in keeping with the competitive nature of the sport) for all other teams to do so. It is not, however, good for baseball that they do so, or so Jacobs and others who... See more

So, is Jacobs right to say that baseball was better when we knew less about it? And here we are at the crux of the issue from another angle: how is the goodness of the game measured and accounted for? Or, more to the point, can the goodness of the game be measured? If not, then in what would the goodness of the game consist? And, an equally interes... See more

We can now measure and analyze dimensions of personal and social life that we wouldn’t even have thought to measure a decade or two ago. It was always theoretically possible for us to count our steps, but altogether impractical. Now we can have it done for us passively. Indeed, as most of us know all too well, all manner of information about us and... See more

Generally speaking, quantification and the logic of optimization which it encourages tend to transform our field of experience into points of aggression, as the sociologist Hartmut Rosa has aptly put it. Data-driven optimization is, in this sense, a way of perceiving the world. And what may matter most about this is not necessarily what it allows u... See more

technique colonized realms of life to which it did not properly belong. The key, then, is to recognize where and when it is appropriate to allow technique (or quantification or optimization) a place and where and when it would be good to circumscribe its scope. In order to do so we must have before us a clear sense of the good we seek.

Technology, then, is but an expression and by-product of the underlying reliance on technique, on the proceduralization whereby everything is organized and managed to function most efficiently, and directed toward the most expedient end of the highest productivity. Ellul’s own comprehensive definition is found in the preface of The Technological So... See more

Within the sporting world, of course, the point is to win, and to do so in a way that can be clearly determined quantitatively. There are no grounds for anyone to ask a manager or a player to pursue a strategy that will diminish their competitive edge. Most of life, however, is not a game with quantifiable outcomes, and probably shouldn’t be treate... See more

The power of digital computation—still nascent when Ellul published his best known work, The Technological Society—radically widened the scope of technique, understood as the drive toward efficiency in all realms of human experience. And, as it turns out, developments in the game of baseball illustrate the more general social patterns pretty well, ... See more