Why Sports Matter
There is a boring opinion somewhere out there that sports are pointless, silly and/or a waste of our time. Maybe even evidence of our flaws as humans.
The obvious rebuttal is that sports unites us – think the Chicago Cubs, Leicester City or the Cleveland Cavaliers bringing a generational gap-filling ecstasy to millions of people; or the Yankees and Steelers serving as legitimate sources of pride for the working classes of New York and Pittsburgh. Sports as a conversational topic is a great equalizer. If we can’t talk politics at Thanksgiving, why not talk sports? (A basic knowledge of baseball history has been very positive for my relationship with my father in law). And when shit’s hitting the fan in the real world, sports serve as an escape.
There is deeper value to sports, though. Much like art, food and wine, one's appreciation of sports increases non-linearly to the depth of their understanding, making it an intellectually rewarding pursuit beyond basic entertainment. It’s beautifully messy to make sense of all the patterns, the massive amounts of data (sometimes), the lack of data (other times), the approximately-infinite tiny variations of past situations.
But my favorite aspect of sports is that it’s an art form. Take a moment to soak in Hakeem Olajuwon. He’s an overgrown ballerina. It is footwork euphoria, a paralyzing fever dream for his opponent. It’s not just a series of “moves”, it’s a new realm of activity forked off the root game of basketball. Watch Barcelona’s unparalleled team creativity at their apex. The movement is so eerily well-coordinated it feels like one mega-brained person is controlling 11 players in a video game. Simply observe Ali. You may hate boxing, the thought of head injury or violence in general, yet the grace and swagger of The Greatest is so mesmerizing it overwhelms any ill will.
I can’t help but laugh at this notion that sports exposes our flaws after writing or watching any of the above.
Furthermore, I’m not really interested in settling that argument, because there’s a more interesting takeaway from the sport-as-art framing.
Hakeem, Barcelona, Ali and nearly every other successful athlete or team relied on innovation to achieve their greatness. Elite athletics are so competitive, that simply improving marginally, negligibly over the “way it’s always been done” is not a sustainable path. Rather, those that break paradigms, explore uncharted waters and optimize across new vectors of competition find themselves at an advantageous position over their opponents. It’s no different than the most successful businesses, artists or academic-intellectual contributors.
To achieve progress, creativity is the most important thing. You may know it as “human ingenuity” or “problem solving” or even “critical thinking”.
So what can we learn from sports?
One offer is that sports provide a glimpse into answering the very thorny question: “How much of our lives are we comfortable automating away?”
This question is becoming increasingly important, as we interact with discovery algorithms all around us. This is a relatively early implementation of AI, and we should expect more of them, and they’ll probably get pretty weird – “You may be interested in this promotion of Charmin Essentials Mega Roll Strong [because it seems to resonate with your federated learning cohort of middle income | 41 years old | family history of diabetes]. Would you like to add it to your cart?”
Discovery algorithms are obviously convenient for consumers. I’m in no way implying they need to be stopped. But I do see a downside in over-automation, where we tilt so far towards the outsourcing of original thought (vs. problem solving, critical thinking) that we lose some of our creative muscle. Striking this balance is going to be massively important for humanity – if we don’t have creativity, we won’t have progress.
One of the best things about sports is its ability to generate a plethora of arguments among friends.
There’s a quip that Google killed the barstool argument. You can easily look something up in five seconds on your phone and well, that settles that. In the past, arguing over who had a higher career batting average between two players might have taken legitimate cycles of human time (!! Yes, I’ve participated in this more than I’d care to admit).
A more interesting debate might be “who’s got the nicer swing, Ken Griffey, Jr. or Gary Sheffield?”. This question is all kinds of messy. How is niceness measured? What sort of inputs and outputs are at our disposal? The answer is not sitting somewhere on a search result page; it lies in the beholder’s eye test, aesthetic ideals and emotional gut. It will require him to triage different mediums of data, rely on memory, filter out personal biases, meditate on what it means for a swing to be nice and ultimately make sense of these creative tracks and place them into a coherent worldview. It is a thing only we, the humans, can do. It is a beautiful question.
A computer can’t answer that question in any sort of satisfactory way. What it can do, is provide the inputs – videos, statistics, historical archives (“Gary had the meanest, most vicious bat I ever saw” – anonymous scout, Atlanta Braves farm system, c. 1990) – in amazing speeds and displays.
By focusing our question-asking and our problem solving on the hard, messy stuff that requires creativity, we won’t lose our muscles. In fact, we can build bigger and bigger ones with the aid of our new super-machinery.
Let’s keep arguing and forcing ourselves to find those uncharted and muddy waters, the ones that force us to mash up a bunch of hard data and qualitative emotions and intuitions. Because once we stop, we’re doomed.