moneyball

As qualitative validation all but erodes, the only form of validation left is quantitative. Miles run. Books read. Movies watched. Songs streamed. Beers bought. Fantasy wins. We have turned competition into connection because it’s the only way we’ve learned that we can get attention — and when you see a continuous decline in relationships outside o... See more

I’ve struggled with this balance myself. When the audience responds to something I’ve written, it can be tempting to chase the revenue and viewership by repeating the format. Repeatability and audience fervor can build a business, but kill the artist.

“Grunt work” can be central to building community, but only if you do it yourself.

Not even our sleep is safe. Nintendo recently announced “Alarmo,” a very cute alarm clock that uses motion tracking to play different sounds from various Nintendo games to help getting out of bed easier. Move to the left, and the sounds of Super Mario coins ring. Move again, more coins clanging. By the time you get out of bed, that little Italian p... See more

he does see trouble in the glut of franchise and comic book entertainment that currently makes up much of what you can see in a theater. “The danger there is what it’s doing to our culture,” Scorsese said. “Because there are going to be generations now that think movies are only those—that’s what movies are.”

I think people already think that.

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's scary to admit that you can't control the future; it's a lot easier to distract yourself by trying to optimize every decision, no matter how insignificant.