How It Started. How It's Going.
October 20, 2020·10 comments·Politics
The rules haven't changed. The 3-point line has existed for decades. Yet in the span of one decade, an entire sport reorganized itself around a strategy that didn't exist before, and now no other way of playing is possible. What changed wasn't the game. It was how people thought about winning within it. And once everyone knew everyone else was thinking the same way, nobody could ever go back.
• A competitive advantage, once discovered and copied, becomes the only way to compete. Daryl Morey didn't invent the 3-point shot. He invented the idea of organizing an entire team around it, and Houston thrived while everyone else followed.
• The transformation happened inside the existing rules, not because of them. The 3-point line was available for 28 years before anyone restructured the game around it. The rules didn't force change. A single innovator's success did.
• Once this strategy became common knowledge, it stopped being a choice. Players get benched for attempting midrange shots now. Coaches get fired for deviating. GMs get replaced if they don't build for 3-point shooting. The equilibrium erased alternatives.
• You cannot undo an equilibrium unilaterally, even if everyone agrees it made things worse. No individual team can go back to midrange shooting without losing games to teams that don't. The trap is perfectly rational at the individual level but collectively damaging.
• The political system has undergone the exact same transformation with none of the visibility. Domestic politics shifted from coordination games where compromise was possible to pure zero-sum competition. And like the NBA, nobody can step out of it alone.
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Comments
Kind of like the three true outcomes and the shift in baseball. Analytics distill everything to one approach and variation is punished. It is easier to change the rules in sport than in democracy and they can’t even do it in sports. Grrr
You know, there is one example that should have become equilibrial that never did for reasons I don’t quite understand.
Basically, Pete Carroll, the coach of the Seattle Seahawks, structured his team to play hyperaggressively in the defensive backfield, betting that flag fatigue would cause referees to begin withholding flags they would otherwise throw because they felt pressure not to excessively interrupt the flow of the game with penalty calls. It worked extremely well.
And then they stopped. To be sure, some of that has to do with having personnel who can actually make the most of press man coverage, which they began to lose with the departure of Sherman and Chancellor. But it just seemed to peter out across the league even though it clearly seemed to play a big role in their defensive success for several seasons.
/shrug
ah, but is the 15 foot shot now the new arbitrage?? It’s rarely guarded and is twice as likely to go in as a 3-pointer, so the odds are actually better.
hmmm
Sooo, basketball aside, even though you all know I LOVE basketball, would you rather live in Colombia or in Japan if you had to choose?
This question came up on a call I was on yesterday in a conversation about GDP in the context of “is positive GDP always a good thing?” It’s something that everyone knows that everyone knows is good. If your economy is not growing, I mean, that’s bad right? Everyone knows that.
But I think from a peaceful society perspective (the focus of yesterday’s call) most people would probably rather live in Japan even though their GDP has been anemic and sometimes negative for decades and Colombia has consistently had very high GDP.
What do we choose to measure?
https://www.economicsandpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/PPR-2019-web.pdf
Vin Scully, the preeminent baseball broadcaster (probably of all time) was asked what is the worst thing that happened to baseball in history? He answered, with little hesitation: “Velcro.” /smh #RaysUp
excellent illustration here Ben. Not to quibble, but “you can’t undo an equilibrium” is really “you can’t undo an equilibrium unilaterally,” correct? A rule change that forces a reassessment is an outside influence that could undo this equilibrium…
Would love to see this line of thought expounded upon
Basketball will change again once a new entrepreneur, probably a coach or player, identifies a competitive advantage for their team and others follow suit - the mid range shot will return in some form. The game will evolve always. Same in politics. Obama understood the power of the emergent social media and the promise of “Change” and Trump followed suit. This equilibrium can be disrupted more quickly, in basketball or politics, with a rule change which would have the potential to transition competitive advantage, possibly disruptively, from one team to another, or one style of play to another.
What was the competitive advantage which the political class and elites gained over the last 20 or 30 years which led to our MMT and the detriment of our middle class? Or what was the rule change (or series of changes) which led to this?
We need a movement and a leader who understand the evolution here and have a vision to drive a rule change to stem the tide and reverse course. Liberalism is far from dead, but without a vision and leadership it could die.
As a side note, I wish ET would stop using the acronym BITFD. This is not a solution and is counter to your “Let’s work together” thesis.
And to advance your conversation on a grass roots movement to save this country, maybe the world, I think at the core, we need heavy regulation of the social media industry which includes limitations on the use of AI and the break up of Facebook and Google within the US. They control too much messaging and drive too much of what people think and feel. And our politicians and elites use them as tools against the best interest of the middle class.
If I were the league and I saw that situation developing, I’d instruct the refs to aggressively make all the right calls when games were coming down to the wire, which would cause the Seahawks to lose close ones under this strategy and cause everyone to re-evaluate the tactic. It seems like the sort of thing that would only work when the refs didn’t understand it, and didn’t communicate between themselves.
Things are always getting globally better, but locally worse.
Also, learning Esperanto is an enabler of alternative paths going forward.
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