Turncoat Politics

Brainpicking CurrentTV’s Max Lugavere & Jason Silva

I was reading an interview with CurrentTV’s Max Lugavere & Jason Silva on Brain Pickings and it got me thinking about sabermetrics. Specifically it got me thinking about a question in Bill Simmon’s recent mailbag.

It was good to hear about their thoughts with quotes such as:

I’m obsessed with the euphoric rush that comes with the creation of something entirely new.

and

Each of us has the responsibility to act as a lens and lend focus to the content and the ideas that will enrich the world and elicit our sense of wonder.

I think that they end up coming off a little pretentious and I feel badly for them because I don’t think that they deserve it. I think it is really relevant what they are saying, even though for marketers and business folks, they would see it all as a bunch of hokey bull shit.

When Simmon’s was talking about the recent MIT Sloan Sports Conference and broke up the attendees into three buckets:

Group A: Smart people with mathematical backgrounds figuring out new ways to evaluate sports.

Group B: Smart people without mathematical backgrounds determining which of these advances are more useful than others.

Group C: Outsiders (fans and media members) figuring out how to digest these concepts without being overwhelmed by them.

There are a couple things that I got me thinking. I see a lot of similarities between what is going on with with Lugavere/Silva and what is going on with sabermetrics. I believe that Lugavere/Silva are in that “Group A.” They are just out there figuring out new ways to do things, leaving the application of what they are doing to others- specifically those in “Group B” and “Group C.” I do disagree with Simmons, though in the way that there have to be a group of people out there - either those in Group C or in a Group D who are the people there trying to see what A and B are doing in a way that can be monetized, applied, or tweaked to work for their business or organization.

I just started following Max and Jason, let’s see if these guys are entertaining….