Speaking of shitstorms: https://theundefeated.com/features/mission-impossible-african-americans-analytics/ Talk about lightning rod. Really curious how Dame and CJ treat analytics. CJ drops Synergy tidbits and per 100 possessions stats in nearly every interview. PS: Wilbon is a tool.
I'll read the article in a sec, but I wanted to get this idea down before I do, to see if I touch on anything in it by accident. I was thinking about analytics and how, depending on how they're implemented, they can be unintentionally (or intentionally) racist, sexist, etc. Social media keyword analytics is a good example; the analytics engines use contextual clues in the text of tweets and blog posts to make a judgment call on if your brand is being mentioned favorably, neutrally, or negatively. But language is used very differently between different groups of people. If the analytics team making up the rules of judgment are a bunch of 30-something white men, are they going to accurately count Black Twitter's language usage, or Tumblr's more female/feminist leanings? Can the algorithms detect ironic usage of negative language that's sometimes used in marketing? The ownership of the business logic is very important for accurate results. Anyway, yeah... like all things built by humans, analytics is only as unbiased as humanity is. EDIT: I've read the article. Wilbon is, indeed, a tool. Expecting players to live and breathe analytics is asinine. Professional sports is not a white collar job. It's a very well-paid blue collar job. I don't expect factory workers at an automotive plant to understand how to use CAD to design a car. I do expect them to know their job, whether its by instinct or by rote memorization or by in-depth knowledge of the whys for that one part of the car they're building. All three methods bring success in different ways and different levels. Clyde Drexler is an awful coach because he played entirely on instinct, using athleticism to win. None of that translates well to a teaching/white collar job like coaching. But Glenn Rivers (as much as I hate him) played more with his brain than his body. He can teach people, because he knows the process of learning. Even disregarding the very important fact that most of the athletes have no experience learning statistics and discrete mathematics, the sheer number of years in college gives us a stratification of players within sports. Dame and CJ both show a deep understanding of how the game is played, and why things happen on the court. They will be good at the white collar management/coaching aspects of the job later. It's no surprise that CJ drops advanced stats in his interviews; he understands why they're useful. Not because he's "less black" or whatever Wilbon's on about, but because he doesn't purely succeed on instinct. He breaks players down as much with his brain as with his crossover. This is a black/white thing insofar as it is an education opportunity thing. Getting mad at athletes for not accepting advanced nerd stats is useless because it's just blaming someone for opportunities they weren't necessarily given. And that's bullshit.
Here is my insensitive question. How can their be sites and things like this dedicated to black people, but if someone started a site that only focused on white athletes or whatever, people would be up in arms?
Because, by default, the western world is focused on white people, built by white people (well, managed by white people and built by free labor by non-whites) for white people. Every month is White History Month. When black people rule the world for 1000 years, we can have White History Month. But, I'll be honest, I don't want to have to go through what black people went through just to be given some lip service and the ability to make my own clubhouse.
We found a funny one on another forum a few years ago back, but I can't remember its name, started with a c I think. It would only talk about the white players on every team, it was very weird. Joel Pryzbilla was the only guy on our team that talked about, lol.
Exactly how I felt. Bringing race into this thing seems completely unnecessary. It's just a convenient separation between athletes and front office types.
No, race is kind of necessary to the discussion because opportunities are stratified across race as much as income (because income is stratified across race). It's that Wilbon does some weird victim blaming here, like not quite committing to the end of the train of thought. Black people are not bad at math; people who aren't given good opportunities to get good at math (bad learning environment, the intense need to focus solely on the sport they're playing to succeed, the constant and tacit acceptance of academic dishonesty in order to further a sports career, etc.). They were probably told by adults who failed them a bit that math isn't needed when you're in the NBA. But again, I don't think it's a huge deal that not every player knows or cares about advanced stats. Lots of people thing it's stupid nerd numbers. And honestly, if you as a player only know that you now have a green light to shoot threes because your manager thinks the numbers add up better, why do you care what True Shooting Percentage is?
Is the Stormfront crowd even into sports? It seems like there are too many types of people they don't like in every pro sport but maybe hockey for them to get into.
I get your point but not completely correct. Some of that labor was built by irish who also were discriminated against. Not trying to take away anything you said because i agree, im just tired of not seeing irish acknowledged too.
You're absolutely right; and right now, we're exploiting the Chinese because their labor is cheap and willing. Capitalism has always taken advantage of desperate people to cheat the system, and then sell that cheating as The Way It Must Be.
They're still being discriminated against by people and institutions of all sizes. The War On Drugs was designed to target black people, and it's still doing that job. Redlining is still a thing that's being done. The police are still more likely to shoot an unarmed black man than an armed white man. The white world still targets black people, whether out of habit or actual hatred.
It's just better suited for a larger discussion. I didn't read it cuz I don't care about analytics in any form.
Sigh... And why are Irish and Italians largely not descriminated against now? Because of the invented construct "white". I'm so tired of this tired ass argument that the Irish had it bad as we did. Stop it.
