"Remember Rip Hamilton? Kobe? They lived in the midrange. Jordan did everything, everywhere, all at once. Now you know what you do in the modern NBA? You either get a sniper to shoot a foot behind the 3-point line, or you throw it to the post."
It's even worse. The post game also went the way of the midrange jumper. The entire game is 80% played beyond the 3 point line now. Those shots in the paint? The product of guards being pick-and-rolled from the 3 point line and into the paint to collapse defenses. Nobody posts up anymore.
A brutally true analysis. I've been thinking about some of this in terms of how board gaming and other "fun" activities have turned into spreadsheets. But how the "middle" gets removed is a unique take.
I read your essay, fantastic work. we are very much aligned in the pitfalls that we see. this essay of mine is similar to yours in its critique of rationalism and respect of the Complex: https://thedosagemakesitso.substack.com/p/defeating-nature
Great essay! I agree that util-maxxing does suck a lot of the variance (and therefore color) out of life, but I struggle to see an alternative (particularly in the domains of business, geopolitics, and military). If we do things that weaken our country relative to others, such as focusing on improving wellbeing and meaning for the middle class rather than maximizing utility for the nation, then another nation who is less sentimental can easily outcompete us by ruthlessly focusing on efficiency.
There may be the argument that "util-maxxing is helpful in the short-term but helpful in the long-term, therefore we will outcompete other countries over a long enough time scale". But I see two objections to this point:
1. The returns to util-maxxing last for quite a while. I think we can pretty unequivocably say that the US entered this mindset somewhere after WW2 - let's say around 1950, when the MBA degree became extremely common for the postgraduate studies. We're now 75 years removed from this point, and the US is still out-growing its competitors despite the cracks that have begun to form in the edifice. If the timescale required for util-maxxing to destroy your society is >100 years, then any scenario where we forego util-maxxing while another country, like China, pursues it could see us lose even if our strategy is better over a 200+ year timescale.
2. Are we really doing something different if we focus on the middle class as suggested by the article? One could formulate this as an optimization problem with a different objective - namely, instead of focusing on GDP, maybe we focus on some group of metrics relating to the middle class (such as income growth for 35-75th income percentiles over time, life expectancy for the 35th-75th income percentiles over time, etc). This would have prevented things like off-shoring our manufacturing, since a simple analysis would have shown that this was going to come at the expense of a huge number of middle class jobs. If this is the case, we're not arguing about whether util-maxxing itself is helpful, but whether the optimization objective & time horizon is the correct one.
The current deficit/debt economy is the result of killing off the middle class with optimization. It is not a time line problem. It is an ideological failure.
I think it is foolish to wait for a critical mass or any mass of other people. I think it’s best to lead yourself the best you can. It may be lonely, but only for a bit, as you will find new allies and new friends on the journey. I say don’t wait, get started now even if it is small.
I'd argue, Dmitry, that you are engaging in religious thinking--prioritizing the soul and the good of humanity above hoardmaxxing. And I think what you call religious thinking is rigid, calcified, blindered, soulless--cultish with numerical mysticism. A sick Pythagoreanism. My religious thinking converges widely and deeply with your eudaimonism.
And here is where religion and innovative economic thought hold hands! Right on target: "...what gives the best margins, (then)you implicitly worship the material." As a certain famous and controversial first century rabbi is said to have put it, " Ye cannot serve God and Mammon". Matt 6:24 Choose! But, Dmitry, I'm not sure how much chosing we can do on behalf of the powers that be, we do exercise the choice in our private practices, or orthopraxy. Not that I'm saying it ever hurts to open people's eyes to the nature of the game. Many people may vaguely intuit it, but are just inept at articulating it the way you do. So when you write it, we go, "oh yes, that makes sense."
Truly spoken, "We're improvisational creatures who find meaning in struggle." This may come as some surprise to you, but that also resonates deeply with certain women. Particularly with those of us who were not born blessed by our ancestors with the genetic gift/curse of beauty, but were instead given the gift/curse of the DRD4-7R gene - the generator of the need for risk-taking, traveling, exploring.(And it probably generally includes dealing us a pretty good hand from the deck of tactics!) I've heard it said, (most recently, I believe, by Paul Waggener) that without struggle, nothing of significance is ever accomplished. My personal history, to me, validates more your statement above:
The significance/the glory/the accomplishment is in the Struggle itself. Of course, 🤣, amassing a wealth of unorthodox experiences may be an enormous accomplishment to me, and just draw nothing more than a "huh?" from the spreadsheets.
There's a little book, pretty good, about how 'optimizing' in the modern sense has really taken the fun out of things (she says it more academically), by a former Google-er and now optimization consultant somewhere on the west coast. it's worth flashing through for thoughts & anecdotes related to your post.
on a contra-note: I did enjoy Moneyball movie. And "playing the rules" while potentially quite asshole-ish, is in fact a part of playing the finite game. (To your point, tho' it does feck up the infinite game.)
Excellent article. Major League Baseball is even worse. They changed rules that had worked for over 100 years just to accommodate the shorter attention spans of younger viewers. Now it's just a LARP of a video game, i.e., a derivative of a derivative.
Hi, thanks for responding. I only recently stumbled upon your Substack and have been very impressed. You've explained things regarding the Fed I've long suspected, but couldn't quite articulate.
As for MLB, they've changed the fundamental nature of the game through various rule changes post Covid. There's now a pitch clock, for example. Or limiting the number of pickoff attempts to 2 with a runner on base. The penalty being a balk. Or limiting the infield shift to only 2 infielders on either side of second base. The worst so far, in my opinion, is putting a runner on 2nd in the event of extra innings. All these things diminish the timeless nature of baseball. As well as the historical comparisons to past teams and/or players. All the records are now distorted. It was one of the few sports without a clock. A game took however long it took. And that, to many (myself included), was part of its charm. It's now less a battle of talent and skill, but more like a live action video game. Modern stadiums are more like mini amusement parks that happen to occasionally have baseball games. Maybe I'm just old, but Fenway Park or Wrigley Field are like living history museums, whereas modern stadiums seem lifeless, despite being full of endless distractions. Fenway or Wrigley say something about the people who built and maintained them and what they thought important vs our what our modern disposable culture values, (which isn't much, unfortunately). I hope that makes sense. I recently went to Truist Park in Atlanta and it was surreal. An actual game seemed just "incidental" to everything else going on at the time. Lastly, the most egregious 'middle-gutting' thing I've seen is the rise of sports betting. There are several stadiums with sports betting kiosks within them. If that's not middle gutting, I don't know what is.
I think the soul of baseball is also being affected by analytics as it pertains to pitching/hitting, regardless of the clock rules. The analytics say strike outs and home runs are all that matters, so that’s what we’re getting. Batters are optimizing for that split. The middle is being gutted. Same with pitchers going 3 innings and blowing their elbows to throw 100mph
I really appreciate the kind words. Thank you. And I'm very happy to hear those comments regarding the Fed! I will continue to add to that series of essays.
Thank you for this detail. Super informative, I was unaware of all of that. I commiserate with your conclusions.
Sorry for the delayed reply, substack never gave me a notification for this comment.
There's actually a second-layer event to this. I can spreadsheet how this is NOT helpful and in fact destructive to that nation and ALSO the corporation itself. That is, I can make a national security spreadsheet for a nation of 4 Million square miles that can't make a handful of artillery shells. ...But that spreadsheet is in a different office on a different desk. That is, it's siloed and not holistic. I can sell them using their own material reasoning, but I suspect what they're claiming is not the point. They promote these type of spreadsheeters and fire the other ones because they're up to something else. A larger strategy, value system...or call it religion.
Example: the news will CLAIM that Boeing got into trouble bc maximizing shareholder value. But because of this shareholder value has plummeted. And that's not a surprise, everyone on earth predicted that, even all their own internal people (who were then fired). So.... Zoom out one level and tell me what you see.
CEO's think in quarters. No five year plan. No one year plan really. Good quarter means getting a bonus. It's burning down your house to stay warm. Very foolish in the long run.
It’s either some kind of deep terminal disease or external competitors, some synthesis of the two, or something else. What do you think? Carol Quigley wrote about a plan to intentionally pass the baton to China (after it had been intentionally passed to USA in 20th century). Iain McGilchrist thinks left-brain dominance is cause. But who / what guided us to left-brain-ism?
Personally, I'm fond of Tom Luongo's theory. Europe has been colonizing the world for centuries, and as we can see, the British Empire didn't fall, they just rotated into tactics that are financial extraction and subterfuge. But this is true of all Europe.
What Europe can do is: print money, set up their own EUSA, replace us. They can do that by buying off our politicians who don't see them as a threat. They get us involved in wars, ruining our army and our status, slowly gut the industrial base, and
at this point, buy Utilities, brands, outright, and ruin them. Bud, Harley, Stellantis, and via proxy, Disney, Boeing, etc.
When Boeing goes down, Airbus goes up. When Stellantis fails a 1-foot putt, fails the company, closes Jeep, then Fiat, Cooper go up. This is a long plan but it pays the whole while. Then you can make fun of the U.S for being poor, depressed hillbillies, not rich, cool, and sophisticated like Europe. ...When really it's just a narcissistic murder rampage where they pay trillions over time of our own money to undermine us.
At that point, having sapped an enormous Gulliver Giant, you have them so weak and demoralized, you break them up like African tribes and re-colonize them. Why wouldn't you? It would be crazy not to. ...And not that China doesn't have the same interests to do the same things, but we are aware of them as a possible bad actor, and they are not leveraging into Boeing and replacing the Engineers on the Board with Finance and DEI HR people. The BlackRock/London side is.
How do you fix it? Track down if what I'm saying has legs and who is for/against us. Once you see that, you might see that America isn't against itself, nor is it weak, it's being undermined and attacked from without. So in that case, our problems aren't Us, we just need to stop the harmful criminal actions against us, and companies would start working, profits would reappear, ages would rise, and internal struggles would vanish. It's surprising it matters that much if the cause is internal vs external, natural or intended, but it appears so.
I think you are not allowing for bad actors in America. Greed and the lust for power have caused most of our current problems. Europe is in worse shape than the US by a degree of magnitude or more.
Oh absolutely. But it's always the scoundrels in every colony that sell their own people out, and manage them on behalf of the overlords just to eat off better china and drive slightly better cars. Of course the lower management, the floor bosses, would be paid off people of the colonized country.
The challenge is stopping that.
This has been done from time to time, so go find out who did it and how.
I've heard the name before but I'm unaware of who he is. I've never read his books. does he approach this same issue more as a philosopher or economist?
His research and findings are too broad to belong in either of those categories. The simplest representation of his work that finds common overlap with your essay is a critique of narrow-mindedness, and deep research into its origins, consequences, and potential responses.
potential solutions are worthy of another essay. any solution will basically definitionally be temporary, as I'd expect over enough time for everyone to converge on dominant strategies like this. even moreso now that we're equipped with AI. I think the solution may be found within finite games actually, meaning once they're solved, we move on. because all games will get solved eventually, and infinite games eventually converge on gray expected-value monolithic behaviors.
will reflect more on this. thanks for the comment man.
"Remember Rip Hamilton? Kobe? They lived in the midrange. Jordan did everything, everywhere, all at once. Now you know what you do in the modern NBA? You either get a sniper to shoot a foot behind the 3-point line, or you throw it to the post."
It's even worse. The post game also went the way of the midrange jumper. The entire game is 80% played beyond the 3 point line now. Those shots in the paint? The product of guards being pick-and-rolled from the 3 point line and into the paint to collapse defenses. Nobody posts up anymore.
yep. it's really a tragic development. grayness and predictability.
A brutally true analysis. I've been thinking about some of this in terms of how board gaming and other "fun" activities have turned into spreadsheets. But how the "middle" gets removed is a unique take.
https://waverings.substack.com/p/optimizing-the-trains-to-auschwitz
thanks man, appreciate you reading.
I read your essay, fantastic work. we are very much aligned in the pitfalls that we see. this essay of mine is similar to yours in its critique of rationalism and respect of the Complex: https://thedosagemakesitso.substack.com/p/defeating-nature
Oh as a gaming enthusiast, I have a lot of thoughts on this as well. Will definitely check your article and try to rant in the comments there. 😉
“You curiously find yourself with no midrange jumpers, and no middle class.”
Fucking brilliant
Great essay! I agree that util-maxxing does suck a lot of the variance (and therefore color) out of life, but I struggle to see an alternative (particularly in the domains of business, geopolitics, and military). If we do things that weaken our country relative to others, such as focusing on improving wellbeing and meaning for the middle class rather than maximizing utility for the nation, then another nation who is less sentimental can easily outcompete us by ruthlessly focusing on efficiency.
There may be the argument that "util-maxxing is helpful in the short-term but helpful in the long-term, therefore we will outcompete other countries over a long enough time scale". But I see two objections to this point:
1. The returns to util-maxxing last for quite a while. I think we can pretty unequivocably say that the US entered this mindset somewhere after WW2 - let's say around 1950, when the MBA degree became extremely common for the postgraduate studies. We're now 75 years removed from this point, and the US is still out-growing its competitors despite the cracks that have begun to form in the edifice. If the timescale required for util-maxxing to destroy your society is >100 years, then any scenario where we forego util-maxxing while another country, like China, pursues it could see us lose even if our strategy is better over a 200+ year timescale.
2. Are we really doing something different if we focus on the middle class as suggested by the article? One could formulate this as an optimization problem with a different objective - namely, instead of focusing on GDP, maybe we focus on some group of metrics relating to the middle class (such as income growth for 35-75th income percentiles over time, life expectancy for the 35th-75th income percentiles over time, etc). This would have prevented things like off-shoring our manufacturing, since a simple analysis would have shown that this was going to come at the expense of a huge number of middle class jobs. If this is the case, we're not arguing about whether util-maxxing itself is helpful, but whether the optimization objective & time horizon is the correct one.
The current deficit/debt economy is the result of killing off the middle class with optimization. It is not a time line problem. It is an ideological failure.
I’ve heard this called the “tyranny of optimisation”.
I think it’s clear that the optimisation (left brain, spreadsheets, number go up, moneyball) impulse is valuable but misapplied.
We need a new system, a new ruleset. A new game, or at least a new variant.
There are plenty of games much more fun to min-max than Monopoly.
But that means getting a critical mass of people (or equivalent authority quota, or both) on board with the change.
I think it is foolish to wait for a critical mass or any mass of other people. I think it’s best to lead yourself the best you can. It may be lonely, but only for a bit, as you will find new allies and new friends on the journey. I say don’t wait, get started now even if it is small.
I'd argue, Dmitry, that you are engaging in religious thinking--prioritizing the soul and the good of humanity above hoardmaxxing. And I think what you call religious thinking is rigid, calcified, blindered, soulless--cultish with numerical mysticism. A sick Pythagoreanism. My religious thinking converges widely and deeply with your eudaimonism.
<3
Actual vs potential.
Maximizing predictable actual, sacrificing disbehaving potential.
Yeah, once everything is proxied to "money" then "making money" is a panacea, and everyone turns into a more-or-less whore for the trick.
Dress it up however you like, but the love of money --- and *especially* money as the primary metric -- is the root of all evil rot.
And here is where religion and innovative economic thought hold hands! Right on target: "...what gives the best margins, (then)you implicitly worship the material." As a certain famous and controversial first century rabbi is said to have put it, " Ye cannot serve God and Mammon". Matt 6:24 Choose! But, Dmitry, I'm not sure how much chosing we can do on behalf of the powers that be, we do exercise the choice in our private practices, or orthopraxy. Not that I'm saying it ever hurts to open people's eyes to the nature of the game. Many people may vaguely intuit it, but are just inept at articulating it the way you do. So when you write it, we go, "oh yes, that makes sense."
Truly spoken, "We're improvisational creatures who find meaning in struggle." This may come as some surprise to you, but that also resonates deeply with certain women. Particularly with those of us who were not born blessed by our ancestors with the genetic gift/curse of beauty, but were instead given the gift/curse of the DRD4-7R gene - the generator of the need for risk-taking, traveling, exploring.(And it probably generally includes dealing us a pretty good hand from the deck of tactics!) I've heard it said, (most recently, I believe, by Paul Waggener) that without struggle, nothing of significance is ever accomplished. My personal history, to me, validates more your statement above:
The significance/the glory/the accomplishment is in the Struggle itself. Of course, 🤣, amassing a wealth of unorthodox experiences may be an enormous accomplishment to me, and just draw nothing more than a "huh?" from the spreadsheets.
There's a little book, pretty good, about how 'optimizing' in the modern sense has really taken the fun out of things (she says it more academically), by a former Google-er and now optimization consultant somewhere on the west coast. it's worth flashing through for thoughts & anecdotes related to your post.
on a contra-note: I did enjoy Moneyball movie. And "playing the rules" while potentially quite asshole-ish, is in fact a part of playing the finite game. (To your point, tho' it does feck up the infinite game.)
Straight into my veins, brother.
Great piece—thank you!
thank YOU for reading :)
Excellent article. Major League Baseball is even worse. They changed rules that had worked for over 100 years just to accommodate the shorter attention spans of younger viewers. Now it's just a LARP of a video game, i.e., a derivative of a derivative.
thanks man. do you have any specific examples of these changes and the 'middle-gutting' impact they had? I don't follow baseball.
Hi, thanks for responding. I only recently stumbled upon your Substack and have been very impressed. You've explained things regarding the Fed I've long suspected, but couldn't quite articulate.
As for MLB, they've changed the fundamental nature of the game through various rule changes post Covid. There's now a pitch clock, for example. Or limiting the number of pickoff attempts to 2 with a runner on base. The penalty being a balk. Or limiting the infield shift to only 2 infielders on either side of second base. The worst so far, in my opinion, is putting a runner on 2nd in the event of extra innings. All these things diminish the timeless nature of baseball. As well as the historical comparisons to past teams and/or players. All the records are now distorted. It was one of the few sports without a clock. A game took however long it took. And that, to many (myself included), was part of its charm. It's now less a battle of talent and skill, but more like a live action video game. Modern stadiums are more like mini amusement parks that happen to occasionally have baseball games. Maybe I'm just old, but Fenway Park or Wrigley Field are like living history museums, whereas modern stadiums seem lifeless, despite being full of endless distractions. Fenway or Wrigley say something about the people who built and maintained them and what they thought important vs our what our modern disposable culture values, (which isn't much, unfortunately). I hope that makes sense. I recently went to Truist Park in Atlanta and it was surreal. An actual game seemed just "incidental" to everything else going on at the time. Lastly, the most egregious 'middle-gutting' thing I've seen is the rise of sports betting. There are several stadiums with sports betting kiosks within them. If that's not middle gutting, I don't know what is.
I think the soul of baseball is also being affected by analytics as it pertains to pitching/hitting, regardless of the clock rules. The analytics say strike outs and home runs are all that matters, so that’s what we’re getting. Batters are optimizing for that split. The middle is being gutted. Same with pitchers going 3 innings and blowing their elbows to throw 100mph
I really appreciate the kind words. Thank you. And I'm very happy to hear those comments regarding the Fed! I will continue to add to that series of essays.
Thank you for this detail. Super informative, I was unaware of all of that. I commiserate with your conclusions.
Sorry for the delayed reply, substack never gave me a notification for this comment.
There's actually a second-layer event to this. I can spreadsheet how this is NOT helpful and in fact destructive to that nation and ALSO the corporation itself. That is, I can make a national security spreadsheet for a nation of 4 Million square miles that can't make a handful of artillery shells. ...But that spreadsheet is in a different office on a different desk. That is, it's siloed and not holistic. I can sell them using their own material reasoning, but I suspect what they're claiming is not the point. They promote these type of spreadsheeters and fire the other ones because they're up to something else. A larger strategy, value system...or call it religion.
Example: the news will CLAIM that Boeing got into trouble bc maximizing shareholder value. But because of this shareholder value has plummeted. And that's not a surprise, everyone on earth predicted that, even all their own internal people (who were then fired). So.... Zoom out one level and tell me what you see.
CEO's think in quarters. No five year plan. No one year plan really. Good quarter means getting a bonus. It's burning down your house to stay warm. Very foolish in the long run.
It’s either some kind of deep terminal disease or external competitors, some synthesis of the two, or something else. What do you think? Carol Quigley wrote about a plan to intentionally pass the baton to China (after it had been intentionally passed to USA in 20th century). Iain McGilchrist thinks left-brain dominance is cause. But who / what guided us to left-brain-ism?
Personally, I'm fond of Tom Luongo's theory. Europe has been colonizing the world for centuries, and as we can see, the British Empire didn't fall, they just rotated into tactics that are financial extraction and subterfuge. But this is true of all Europe.
What Europe can do is: print money, set up their own EUSA, replace us. They can do that by buying off our politicians who don't see them as a threat. They get us involved in wars, ruining our army and our status, slowly gut the industrial base, and
at this point, buy Utilities, brands, outright, and ruin them. Bud, Harley, Stellantis, and via proxy, Disney, Boeing, etc.
When Boeing goes down, Airbus goes up. When Stellantis fails a 1-foot putt, fails the company, closes Jeep, then Fiat, Cooper go up. This is a long plan but it pays the whole while. Then you can make fun of the U.S for being poor, depressed hillbillies, not rich, cool, and sophisticated like Europe. ...When really it's just a narcissistic murder rampage where they pay trillions over time of our own money to undermine us.
At that point, having sapped an enormous Gulliver Giant, you have them so weak and demoralized, you break them up like African tribes and re-colonize them. Why wouldn't you? It would be crazy not to. ...And not that China doesn't have the same interests to do the same things, but we are aware of them as a possible bad actor, and they are not leveraging into Boeing and replacing the Engineers on the Board with Finance and DEI HR people. The BlackRock/London side is.
How do you fix it? Track down if what I'm saying has legs and who is for/against us. Once you see that, you might see that America isn't against itself, nor is it weak, it's being undermined and attacked from without. So in that case, our problems aren't Us, we just need to stop the harmful criminal actions against us, and companies would start working, profits would reappear, ages would rise, and internal struggles would vanish. It's surprising it matters that much if the cause is internal vs external, natural or intended, but it appears so.
I think you are not allowing for bad actors in America. Greed and the lust for power have caused most of our current problems. Europe is in worse shape than the US by a degree of magnitude or more.
Oh absolutely. But it's always the scoundrels in every colony that sell their own people out, and manage them on behalf of the overlords just to eat off better china and drive slightly better cars. Of course the lower management, the floor bosses, would be paid off people of the colonized country.
The challenge is stopping that.
This has been done from time to time, so go find out who did it and how.
I am confident you have read his books, but if you haven’t check out Iain McGilchrist.
I've heard the name before but I'm unaware of who he is. I've never read his books. does he approach this same issue more as a philosopher or economist?
He has much content online, and his books are thick, but here’s a good introduction from 7 years ago: https://youtu.be/qB36kva_2_w?si=GSb8v8AiODgjngjv
His research and findings are too broad to belong in either of those categories. The simplest representation of his work that finds common overlap with your essay is a critique of narrow-mindedness, and deep research into its origins, consequences, and potential responses.
good thoughts. agreed.
potential solutions are worthy of another essay. any solution will basically definitionally be temporary, as I'd expect over enough time for everyone to converge on dominant strategies like this. even moreso now that we're equipped with AI. I think the solution may be found within finite games actually, meaning once they're solved, we move on. because all games will get solved eventually, and infinite games eventually converge on gray expected-value monolithic behaviors.
will reflect more on this. thanks for the comment man.