Why Geeks Should Care About Sports
blog.rickyrobinett.com
blog.rickyrobinett.com
No thanks. I believe designers should strive for predictable experiences when it comes to product design. Unpredictability is the #1 reason why I get those evening phone calls from my 84 year old father-in-law who just saw a new message on his computer and doesn't know what to do...
Regarding the money aspect: Those of us that don't really like sports think it is pretty appalling that so much money is spent on mindless entertainment. In so many Texas towns young boys are being told they will never be men unless they play full contact football and sustain debilitating head injuries at an extremely young age. They spend their entire school life being forced by their parents to try and attain some unattainable dream of being a professional athlete, and being deprived of a good education and a healthy life.
Is this not a shame that our society places so much value on sports that we would destroy our kids lives to try and live our dreams through them? I choose not to contribute my money and energy to sports because there are many other things in this world that are much more deserving of my time.
I learned at a very young age that society places too high a value on sports. Basically, it was reinforced by the school administration that it was perfectly fine for football players to bully computer nerds because sports were more important than computer science.
In my opinion, society needs to call these administrative authorities on this bullshit. At least I never listened to them and stuck with computers.
So I've actually completely changed my views of what team sports can do - at the moment my son believes he can go to Harvard and play rugby for Scotland, both of are his ideas, why would I want to stop him? Indeed, the QC that my wife trained with as a devil did play for Scotland - so crazy career combinations are certainly possible!
"Football is a gentleman's game played by ruffians, and rugby is a ruffian's game played by gentlemen."
NB I've seen a few rugby 7s games and they are awesome - even more athletic than normal rugby matches:
Edit: a quick followup for clarification: the amount of money, attention and pure worship that sports get in America is appalling. Anytime you hear a story about some football player in high school beating someone up or raping someone and not being punished, you can probably take it as true, because that's just the status quo. As for the money, who knows how many promising students are never given the opportunity to excel because money that could have gone to better teachers was instead spent on sports. Don't even get me started on the culture of anti-intellectualism engendered by this society.
Sports are valuable to know about, because so many peers, especially in other functions, value them. It's not that you need to even devote time to sports, or to know anything. It's that posturing that shows you respect others' interests in sports, is valuable.
In fact this applies to any set of interets, however mainstream, nerdy, alpha, or etc: whether sports, videogames, brewing, or bee-keeping. Always show interest and genuine respect for others' interests, instead of dismissing them.
I'll never forget a guy in high school who overheard me talking about a computer game... he said "Oh... you're still playing games? I stopped in middle school!". I've thought of him as an ass hole ever since. And it wasn't that he didn't play games (or enjoy sports, or etc): it was that he was arrogant and dismissive of my interest and put me down indirectly as a result.
Never be arrogant and dismissive of others' interests: show appreciation and respect... sometimes it helps to just genuinely look for what others enjoy. If you can't find it: pretend! You'll find enormous benefit in terms of how much others like you as a result: and this is important in any group. Especially for something as massively popular as sports, don't fall into the trap.
I'm not a huge sports fan, but I've picked a lot up by osmosis since I did ACC UG/Big 10 grad school. I can't tell you how often an interviewer has lightened up and become more engaged after I brought up his alma mater's football team. It's not just for show. It's social lubricant. It allows you to feel each other out while talking about a relatively neutral topic that neither of you have a big investment into, to cut down the tension involved in talking about the business discussion at hand.
The film Lincoln did a good job of showing old Abe doing that quite a bit in order to gain favor :)
This makes my head hurt. Pretending to like something you don't actually like in order to make other people like you seems like:
1. It's a lot of effort
2. It's a sad commentary on your intrinsic interestingness as a person
3. It's slightly unethical because you're misrepresenting yourself.
Extroverts who are able to understand these social concepts intuitively are weird.
Let me ask you this: if you were talking to a stranger and mentioned a passion of your's (I don't know, maybe astronomy, say?) would you feel better if that person looked interested and said "cool!" or if they shook their head and said "ehh that sounds like a waste of time"? It's actually easier to just try and empathise with others' perspectives most of the time, and has benefits. Not to mention it makes a more harmonious society.
I guess I'm weird for respecting others' interests that I don't see intrinsically as something I'd spend my own time on.
But now, at 32, having tried probably about 10 times, I realize I just can't. I just don't care. I care about politics, about music, about urban design, about architecture, about so many things that clearly have meaning and affect people's lives in real ways.
But when I watch two teams of people I don't personally know kick a ball around... I simply couldn't care less. Absolutely nothing whatsoever hinges on it. There's no meaning in it. And to this day, asking all my sports-obsessed friends why they like it so much, I've never gotten an answer I can actually understand or identify with. (The Onion T-shirt "the sports team from my area is superior to the sports team from your area" pretty much sums up the extent to which I understand it.)
And BTW, my code acts unpredictably often enough already, without my trying to make it so ;)
Sort of similarly, if you buy the thesis of The Mating Mind, a book about the role of sexual selection in human evolution, then to some extent we're just sort of programmed (to differing degrees?) to find music and sports engaging because they're good indicators of the fitness of their participants.
I say this as someone who doesn't really follow sports (maybe in the playoffs or post-season), but can recognize it's impact on culture.
(Interestingly I'm far more able to appreciate professional wrestling, since (at least some of) the fandom for that is more interested in seeing a good performance than which side wins (and indeed often it's the "loser" who has the most important and hardest job))
So do sports.
Sports seems to be zero-sum; people don't appreciate a good game, they appreciate one arbitrarily-labelled team beating another.
This couldn't be more wrong. Sports fans absolutely do enjoy good games, independently of which team happens to be their favorite.
It's certainly an important aspect of our culture, but it has a much smaller role than music and architecture. Everybody knows the Empire State Building and Beethoven, but most people don't know who won last week's football game and by what margin.
Besides, I'd be shocked if fewer people know who played the Monday Night Football game this week than who was nominated for best album at the 2013 Grammy awards, 5 days earlier.
Even without the money, people watch sports for the narratives. If it really is just two teams of people you know nothing about, then for most people, it's going to be boring. Most sports fan watching a league they're not familiar with will be bored, even if it's the same sport. How many American football fans enjoy Canadian football?
Once you get to know some of the players, their successes or struggles, it makes more sense why people enjoy it. It's basically a soap opera with testosterone. And while many nerds might not be interested in sports of soap operas, the majority of time you can find some activity they enjoy that does follow the basic tenets of enjoying narratives about other people that are essentially meaningless to your life. I would say that in many ways Hacker News has it's own players and teams that it follows (Google, Apple, Zuckerberg, Stallman, etc). While the stories of these people and companies probably does impact a lot of people here in some big ways, I think a non-neglible amount of interest is derived from the same storytelling aspect that sports provides.
And of course there is the tribal aspect of it, and being able to share something with other people, that glaugh touches upon, as well as the appreciation of athletic talent and strategy.
I enjoy talking politics as well, but in many ways is just as pointless and arbitrary..."my side of the aisle is better than yours". When your presidential candidate makes a goof he is an idiot, when mine does it he is misunderstood.
But there are lot of people who don't seem to care about that at all, but rather follow politics like sports or soap operas -- which politician said what, how that affects their polling, etc.
There are two very different ways of being "into" politics.
I'll try and answer it from a european perspective (soccer fan)...
In a nutshell: a sense of identity, sense of belonging, tribalism, 'banter' among opposing fans.
One of the highlights of a fan going to an away English premier league game (esp. against your fierce rivals) is to piss off the home support by singing something insulting about their team/players/team history etc. Then the home support respond by singing their own insults, and you get the atmosphere really fking rocking.
Other people you have a go at: opposing manager, the ref, even "gently" mocking your own players as a sign of affection.
I saw this documentary about Dutch football, where there was a guy explaining that Dutch people don't go to church any more, so they pack into football stadiums (modern cathedrals) on a Sunday, which provides a sense of community/identity.
Check out this incredible video of Greek basketball fans (!) - a sport not exactly renowned for passionate fans like the European/South American soccer terraces...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcvAOpnnMK0
(brace yourself if you are not familiar with the concept of "banter" among fans, and check out the english translation in the video description ;-)
Here's another cool video of really passionate Borussia Dortmund fans (they have really amazing, well-behaved, yet passionate support) marching in a tunnel in Manchester, co-ordinated chanting, the whole lot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZnUlEJFPjs
Hope that helps!
Saying that sports is just "kicking a ball around" is like saying software development is just "banging away on keyboards", in that it is easy to dismiss something as trivial when you choose to ignore a lot of details.
But at the end of the day, it really is just kicking a ball into a net.
The military has planning and strategy too, but there the goal is replacing a government, or saving lives, or changing a society (or less noble causes) -- things that can change millions of people's lives in huge ways. So I can get into military planning and strategy, for example.
But if it's just to kick a ball into a net... after the game, and after the world cup, I find myself asking, "why do I even care?"
Personally, I have no interest in letting myself become involved because I think there are many more enjoyable and productive things to become immersed in. I also really dislike being a permanent spectator.
Some people like sports because of the athleticism it. A 100 mile per hour fastball is much more impressive when you've pushed your own limits trying to throw a ball.
Some people like it because of the strategy on a macro- or micro-level. When you've played/watched the game enough, you learn more about the big picture and the small decisions that shape a game. In ice hockey, like in chess, you might not get punished for a mistake until a number of moves later. Someone who knows the game can tell you, "You see how #15 turned towards the boards instead of away there? That puts him out of position for..."
Lots of people like sports for the social aspect of watching the game. Seeing the underdog Giants take on the undefeated Patriots for the Superbowl is a lot more exciting with a group of friends than it is sitting home alone. (Even moreso with a group of Giants fans in Boston, but I digress.)
I can come up with other reasons, but these are the big 3 for me.
Take baseball: a baseball season is a narrative as rich as movies and books, but watching one game between teams you don't know is like reading a page or two from the middle of a novel. You might get lucky and catch some enthralling action, but the real excitement comes from understanding that game in its context. The players on both teams each have their own stories, and the teams themselves have their own stories.
Take the drama between Marco Scutaro and Matt Holliday after the Holliday took out Scutaro in a dirty slide. On the surface, it's just a nasty play: http://mlb.mlb.com/video/play.jsp?content_id=25415817 But it happened in a major playoff series, which is exciting not just because "it's the playoffs", but because a grueling, 6-month 162-game series is on the line. (Picture what that means, don't just skim the numbers.) For the Giants, the slide looked eerily like the catastrophic injury last year that ended the season of a highly admired young rising star. (The significance of that injury comes from his role as a rookie the previous year in bringing the first World Series Championship to San Francisco, and the resulting high expectations for 2011 that were instantly crushed by that injury.) Scutaro himself was brought on mid-season to fill an important hole in the Giants offense, one which was supposed to be filled by Melky Cabrera, whom the fans grew to love dearly, but who betrayed fans by breaking league rules around performance enhancing drugs and getting suspended. There's lots more to this, but I'll leave it there.
As another example, take the last season game of 2011: Day of: http://bats.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/leading-off-what-a-... Day after: http://bats.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/leading-off-three-m...
So yeah, on the surface, it's just a bunch of guys hitting the ball around. But if you can put aside easy dismissal ("my local sports team is superior to your local sports team") for a minute and accept the conceit of the game, you may find the experience quite unique, in that the team element, the community of fellow fans, the rightness of both sides, and the fact that it's not scripted make it very different than most modern forms of storytelling, and it comes with its own insights on the human condition (see Pete Rose, the Black Sox scandal, or Jackie Robinson).
You might check out some of the Ken Burns documentary "Baseball" or Leonard Koppett's "The Thinking Fan's Guide to Baseball".
No they are not. Sports are very predictable, but they are a stochastic process. You simply have to use a different way to reason about them.
A lot or programmers deal with stochastic processes as well and we have plenty of tools at our disposal that make us able of reasoning about even the most random seeming stuff. Case in point: software that predicts how many cash registers a store might need to never have a single person waiting for more than 3 minutes, while keeping costs at an optimum.
Good movie on this subject: Moneyball
I don't get it. If you grew up in Queens, you're a Mets fan. If you grew up in Philly, you're a Phillies fan. From my perspective, these people are exactly the same, except they are wearing different colors. Yet they are supposed to hate each other, and spend a large amount of time rationalizing their hate. There are hours upon hours of sports talk (gossip) radio on every day in every major city.
I've tried. There is a special place in my heart for the Baltimore Orioles. As a kid, I liked Cal Ripken because he had consistent stats (talk about nerdy), and later I lived in Baltimore. I'm trying to like the Brooklyn Nets, because their stadium is a few subway stops from me.
But I'm always on the metaphorical sidelines when it comes to fandom. The suspense can be fun, but at the end of the day, it's just a game to me.
One perfect example: A few years ago, the Philadelphia Eagles hired a quarterback who spent time in jail for abusing dogs (Michael Vick). Despite having grown up in Philadelphia, I immediately ceased rooting for that team. It was the easiest decision I ever made. Meanwhile, my Philadelphia friends agonized over this turn of events and eventually rationalized they could still root for the team, so long as Michael Vick made amends via charity/volunteering. The attachment is strong. I just don't get it.
Sports teams are the most powerful brands in the world. Maybe cigarette brands are a close second.
Generally speaking, I'm militantly rational. My rational brain is engaged in perpetual combat with my powerful Italian-American emotions, and I feel as though even if I win most of the battles, the war will never end.
Except in sports. I love my Mets, Devils, and Giants (screw basketball) with the heat of a thousand stars. My rational brain recognizes the utter absurdity of it, but I simply don't care. It's fun almost because it doesn't make any sense.
In a way, being an avid, emotionally invested fan of something so insignificant is practice for the very real emotional ups and downs inevitably experienced in 'real' life. Sports instruct us both in how to react to traumatizing events (in a safe, controlled environment) and in how to feel, how to attach ourselves emotionally to something.
I follow a few sports, the one my brother is on a team for I follow quite closely and know unnecessarily deeply. It's not like there aren't techies that like sports, or work inside of them already to bring the goods. There are pockets that lack the latest and greatest tech, but thats true of every industry and doesn't make sports some untapped gold mine. They are actively seeking tech where it will help them, and on top of that just through osmosis from coverage, stadium presentation and post game tape review teams soak up even more tech.
If you're looking for an industry that could uniquely benefit from an infusion of tech, it's not sports. The sabermetrics story is a big story because the hostility to it it was an unusual case. It was also a very narrow case that the application of that particular bit of math was such a game-changing development.
Oh and that thing about sports as a way of thinking about software is not only a stretch, my experience makes it sound like pablum.
Then I learned about mirror neurons. The human brain has been shown through functional MRI studies to 'mirror' emotions that are watched. Speculation suggests this evolved as a way for one person to empathize with another's situation. How does this relate to sports? It turns out that if you're watching someone hit a home run at the crucial moment in the game your brain gives you a little 'hit' of the same emotion that actual player is feeling. In other words, people who love watching sports have a physical reaction that makes them feel the highs and lows of the players.
I no longer assume that people addicted to sports are just in it for the beer.
I'd say the best part is although they compete on the field, they don't consider each other competitors, so they exchange best practices constantly. Meaning if you do something good for one team it will get out quickly. We have hundreds of brand advocates in the space. Now when we launch a new product we can go from 0 to 40 sales and 1/2 mil rev in 6 months.
And as it pertains to the story. Only 30% of our staff is into sports and has a daily knowledge of players and league issues. In fact I don't follow any sport or watch ESPN, I just enjoy going to games in person. I think our companies objectiveness has helped is greatly.
Http://row27.com if you are curious. Our "apps" are http://fanmaker.com and our news network is http://sportsbusinessnow.com
If code was almost completely predictable, we wouldn't spend so much darn time squashing bugs. If users were predictable, we wouldn't need to spend time prototyping or A/B testing or anything like that, we'd just build exactly what our users wanted from the start.
If sports were almost completely unpredictable, sabermetrics wouldn't be as large and a profitable field as it is, and we wouldn't have statisticians working in other fields (such as everyone's favorite pundit Nate Silver) who got their start modeling sports.
I totally appreciate the other arguments he's making about why the sports industry presents a potentially lucrative one right now, but the point about unpredictability seems like a nonsequitor. I'd like to think he's trying to make an interesting and meaningful point with it, but it's not coming through clearly at all.
But the point made about disruption in sports is interesting- I've seen a ton of developers working on pick-up game organisers, and a few fantasy leagues, but nothing more significant than that. The locked-in nature of sports licensing makes it very difficult to 'disrupt' any sports franchise without the consent of the owner- I suspect that will continue to be a barrier.
You never know when a lockout might occur to hurt your business. In fact, there have been 3 lockouts in the past 4 years. NHL is STILL locked out from Oct, with half their season gone and no deal in sight.
There are seasonal changes that impact your business. Fall/Winter are wonderful since the NBA, NFL, and NHL are playing. NFL especially dominates in terms of eyeballs.
You can combine all other sports and it still won't equal NFL's popularity and how it drives user interest.
Once the NFL season ends, so does your revenue and/or traffic. In the summer, you basically just have baseball and limp through wishing September would come quicker.
Cough soccer cough.
However, it appears that this article is just about watching sports. What a disappointment.
I am not against pro sports as an entertainment, but doing it yourself, as opposed to sitting on the couch or stadium seat is so much better for your health.
To give you a better idea. EPL clubs brought in £2.3bil last year[1] but lost £361m. These losses are largely due to wages: "In total, £1.5bn was spent on wages by the 20 clubs in 2010-11 (including Birmingham's £38m wage bill in 2009‑10). That accounted for 69% of the clubs' total income, slightly up from the 68% of income the clubs spent in 2009‑10 on wages." So if you can somehow improve efficiencies for the other 31% of the costs then you could probably make some decent money. Sports is highly irrational when it comes to business.
[1]- http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2012/may/23/premier-leagu...
[1]- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/competitions/premi...
Players are the only ones who make any real money from football (maybe Sky Sports does too, but they have to bid billions for secure the rights and then spend years recouping the cost). The author goes on to state that the highest earning football club (think it was either Real Madrid or Manchester United) made only a tiny fraction of revenue of the lowest ranked, anonymous company on the Fortune 500 index. Football is not played for financial reasons.
Forcing people to care about domain specific knowledge that is relatively useless outside of social ingratiation seems like a waste of time.
That said, if you're into it it very well may be the fertile ground for innovation the OP suggests.
Those who dismiss sports as being "for jocks" are not better than those who consider computers "for nerds".
Sports are irrelevant to living in the modern world; we can leave them to the jocks. Computers are not; knowing how to use a cell phone or the Internet helps enormously with many inevitable tasks of daily life.
The fact that cheap computers became possible a few decades ago means our lifestyles are quite different from before that time.
The fact that the Red team beat the Blue team in the Capture the Flag Series Bowl Cup a few decades ago is largely irrelevant to most people -- even to most sports fans.
So am I not living in the modern world?
Playing (and following) sports helps improve communication, discipline, teamwork and leadership without mentioning the obvious health benefits.
Oh and guess what? A decent sports knowledge helps enormously with connecting with your fellow man, something I get the feeling you may have trouble with.
First most (interesting) code deals with exterior inputs. Typically "user" inputs. Which means software engineering is far from as predictable as CS 101 might make you believe.
Second, sports (at least at the game level, and to some extent the player performance level) are highly predictable. If they were not book making and sports betting would not work.
I kind of stopped reading at that point. But, it sounded like actually theme was "care about the sports industry as it is a market" which is very much different than care about sports.
Why not? Taking parimutuel wagers [1] is guaranteed [2] to make money.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parimutuel_betting
[2] In most US jurisdictions, the organizer taking a percentage of the pot is either illegal, or requires the organizer to pay millions for a gaming license. Of course, you also have costs and taxes, like any other business. Mathematically the pool is guaranteed to make money as long as there's at least one paying customer; whether the business makes money is another question. (Another path would be to operate without approval -- illegal gambling is one of the most common forms of organized crime. It obviously has its own set of challenges, including the possibility of jail time and physical danger from competitors and customers. On the whole, it's not a market you should consider entering if you value your freedom and your life.)