Dodgers' Standard @occupydodgers-blog1 - Tumblr Blog

We are going all out this year!#tistheseason #workholidayparty #christmasparty #christmas2017 #werehavnfun #izlit🔥🔥🔥🎊🎉💃🏽💃🏽🙌🏽👏🏼👏🏼❤️🙈🙈 #santaclaus (at Highland Park, Los Angeles)

#tistheseason #workholidayparty #werehavnfun #izlit🔥🔥🔥🎊🎉💃#christmas2017 #christmasparty #santaclaus

With my mom on an adventure!#meandmum #adventureawaits #hangingout (at Eagle Rock, Los Angeles)

#meandmum #adventureawaits #hangingout

Wrestling with my brother.#brothers #wrestling #helpme (at Eagle Rock, Los Angeles)

#brothers #helpme #wrestling

Singing the four seasons with my cousin! (at Camarillo Premium Outlets)

Our daddy’s and grandpas (at Edwards Camarillo Palace Stadium 12 & IMAX)

Chillin with the cousins (at Edwards Camarillo Palace Stadium 12 & IMAX)

Getting ready for my singing recital! (at Eagle Rock/Highland Park)

Make sure you all like and subscribe to my channel! It would be cool if we got to 1k! I hope we get there (at Highland Park, Los Angeles)

Got this limited edition rogue one Xbox controller for $19.99 at Marshall’stoday! Seems legit (at Los Angeles, California)

Can you spot the apples? (at Vons)

My elf has done it again! Taking selfies! (at Highland Park, Los Angeles)

My dog taking selfies (at Highland Park, Los Angeles)

My brother practicing his piano (at Highland Park, Los Angeles)

Found my elf on the shelf taking selfies on my iPhone! (at Highland Park, Los Angeles)

Give a Man a Fish, He’ll Eat for a Day, Make Him Think He Created Fish, You’ll Eat Him for A Lifetime

One of my first jobs out of college was working for startup news organization called Broadband Sports. Aside from being paid in late night pizza, shitty benefits, and occasionally walking in on the fat analyst plowing his fat internet procured girlfriend on a Sunday afternoon, I had the pleasure of sitting in the same bullpen with one of the OGs of the Roto world, Peter Schoenke. Hi Pete!

He waxed poetic about his good ole salad days at Northwestern when he and his friends would forgo the weekend football orgies for the quieter comforts of his PC, and the trusty Excel sheets where he calculated fantasy numbers for, honestly I can’t remember because I am trying to get the dimpled ass images out of my head.

At any rate, he parlayed that work into a nice payday once his RotoNews site was acquired by the geniuses running Broadband. Consequently, Broadband, who was all the rage in 2000 and was even featured on ESPN’s OTL, would take one step too many and fall off the proverbial sustainability cliff after the tech bubble burst. At least we got to keep our AOL Aim usernames!

While we enjoyed some of the daily sports activities running on the monitors in front of our cubicle bullpen just beyond the restrooms, Pete gave up the secrets to the realm. Maybe it was my disarming nature, or the fact that I hit him up when he was a sixer deep into the Bears game. At any rate, he relayed that Roto sports was really just a way for dorks and nerds to try their hand at GMing. This wasn’t surprising. What was surprising was what came next. In a nutshell, his take was that when you boil it all down, manipulating numbers give the average sucker the ability to think there is some control to the process. It gives people the sense that they helped in creating a result, because of x, y happened. The unconscious effects of this are burned into people’s brains by the repetition and ritualistic aspect of the activity. If we do know one thing about human beings brains’, it’s that rituals help cut through the cacophony of bullshit that it gets bombarded with in this rat infested media, sensory addicted world of ours. Seriously, your constant posting in Dodgers blog forums should be concerning to you.

Jump cut to 6 years later. I sat in a planning meeting when I worked for a rather large consumer satisfaction oriented market research firm, think Chevrolet commercials at the Olympics. One of the newer people on the team asked why the average person off the street put so much stock in an award and rating that were *sometimes* manipulated (behind the scenes) to increase ad revenue from “winners,” and yielded very low correlative value. The responses from the data scientist lifers and corporate communications hack were spontaneously identical. The vast majority of people are stupid, will believe anything you tell them as long as you attach a sense of authority and minimal vetting to it.

Most importantly:

if the average idiot on the street thinks he had a hand in saying this thing is the best or longest lasting or most sexy or dependable, whatever, then we are able to create a (air quoted for emphasis) ‘cognitive kinship,’ and that means we can say the box of turd we are about to sell him is the highest rated box of turd on the market, and they will still buy it and love it because WE said so.*

*Audio transcripts; clandestinely and surreptitiously procured are available upon request.

#Dodgers Sabermetrics Andrew Friedman Trolls Twitter Media Social Psychology

'Don’t Try to Solve Serious Matters in the Middle of The Night’ - Philip K. Dick

Henri Tajfel played a mean central midfield in his day. Of course, he’s not known for his athletic exploits, rather his contribution to social psychology intergroup dynamics. What does this have to do with Dodgers baseball? Nothing really, other than the fact that his findings using the minimal group paradigm methodology established that people will exhibit tribalistic behaviors rather easily, for the stupidest of reasons, and will strongly defend their positions in order to maintain their position within the in-group.

This then takes us to Twitter, Facebook, talk radio, newspaper forum; where people will essentially pick a side, often based on very little intellectual capital, and staunchly defend said position. Republican v. Democrats, Coke v. Pepsi, dressing on the side or on the salad, and of course, sabermetrics vs good ol’ fashion player evaluations a.k.a., the eye test.

Sabermetrics, in all honestly, is often the totem for a broader context. It’s a symbol for those that support guys like Billy Beane and Andrew Friedman and those that think these men are nothing more than practitioners of pseudo sciences, conmen that have perfected a certain brand of hustle that they can offload onto other pseudo-intellectuals running their own side hustle at data driven websites or news repackaging websites. Maybe the art is in being able to repackage this slop, who knows.

At any rate, arguing about who’s right or wrong doesn’t really matter, and the absurdity of staying up past midnight arguing points that will essentially be lost on guys with lower IQs is just that, absurd. Those timeline stalkers that retweet months old tweets in an attempt to show their followers how something that was true six months ago and is now no longer true and should be used for ridicule and fodder will never stop this cycle for the simple fact that they are carrying out their in-group duties to defend their position within the group. It’s what they do, it’s who they are. Humans are social animals, social identity theory tells us that, thus, the mental gymnastics undertaken in order to defend a chosen position uses up all the cognitive horsepower needed to simply compose a properly structured sentence. Cognitive dissonance is a bitch.

#Dodgers Sabermetrics Andrew Friedman Trolls Twitter Media Social Psychology

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