What is a successful season in sports?

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If you follow men’s college basketball at all, you’re certainly aware that my alma mater’s team was on the wrong end of an upset last weekend. It’s not hyperbolic to call it the worst upset in NCAA Tournament history. The team won its conference by three games and then went on to win the conference tournament for good measure. It has the National Player of the Year frontrunner. It reached a #1 ranking in the polls for a large portion of the season. But it got embarrassed in the first round by a team that only made the tournament because the rightful participant wasn’t eligible. Was this a successful season?

Purdue’s success (or lack)

Most Purdue fans seem to say “no”. I’m one of them, maybe. Purdue has more Big Ten titles than any other team. It’s nice to get another, but NCAA Tournament success has been more elusive. My parents hadn’t met the last time Purdue was in the men’s Final Four. In 18 seasons as head coach, Matt Painter has reached the Sweet 16 six times (including one Elite Eight appearance). Excluding 2020 which had no tournament (although it’s likely that Purdue might have missed the cut), Purdue is twice as likely to reach the Sweet 16 than to miss the tournament field. That sounds pretty successful.

But in the last three years, Purdue has lost to double-digit seeds — twice in the first round! Even though you have to earn a high seed to have the opportunity to get embarrassed like that, it’s hard to call that a success.

This was supposed to be a rebuilding year. Purdue was picked pre-season to finish in the middle of the conference. Instead, they went 21-1 in November through January. They not only won the conference outright, but by the largest margin in nearly a decade. In that context, it seems like a successful season.

That team down south

Indiana’s men’s basketball fans are asking the same question. The Indianapolis Star ran an article (subscribers only) asking “[w]as IU basketball’s season a success?” Like Purdue, IU had a dominant post player who put up historic numbers. Unlike Purdue, IU was predicted to win the conference (they finished in a tie for second). Unlike Purdue, IU didn’t win a regular season or tournament title. Neither the coach nor the star player received individual awards. Sounds like a disappointing season.

On the other hand, they lost a key player to Injury early in the season and a second one missed several games early in conference play. A team that started January on a three-game skid and 4-6 in the last 10 games pulled together to sweep their rivals (the aforementioned three-game-margin conference champs). That’s something to celebrate. And they made it to the second round of the tournament for the first time since 2016 after missing four in a row (they’d probably have made the 2020 tournament, had it happened). But this is a program that has won the NCAA Tournament five times, so making the second round is not particularly great by historical standards.

Was the 2022–23 season a success? As Tyler Tachman wrote in the Star,

The reality is the intricacies of this season make it difficult to put a singular, binding label on it right now. It is not an undoubted success, nor a clear failure. Perhaps it is somewhere in between.

What is success?

When I was 12, my Little League team went undefeated through the regular season. In the finals, we faced a team that had gone winless in the regular season but got hot at the end. They ended up beating us. Were they better? Probably not. We went on to win the district tournament — clobbering the team that was the consensus favorite — and finished with a 19-1 record. But we lost the league tournament.

Any single-elimination tournament involves a lot of luck. One bad night and you’re done. How often is the tournament champion truly the “best” team? You have to be good to win, but you also have to be very lucky. The former you can control, the latter you can’t.

If pressed, I’d choose having long-term success over a few good days in a row. Of course, I’d rather have both. As Purdue fans “sit in it” (as Matt Painter said) this off season, we have to think about what our expectations are and how we define success.

There’s no right answer here. I doubt we’ll even reach a general consensus. Nobody wants to lose, but maybe we’d all be a lot better off if we (meaning the broader culture) stopped using narrow, short-term definitions of success.

Ed. note: for further thoughts on this, I recommend Doug Masson’s “That Purdue loss” and “Indiana Basketball: 2022–23” posts (plus their comments). I repurposed my comment on the former for parts of this post.

Other writing: February 2023

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Duck Alignment Academy

Lafayette Eats

  • Westside Diner — Just because it’s 2pm, that doesn’t mean it’s too late for breakfast food. And this is good food.

Fedora

Twitter kills Twitter

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I got hooked on Twitter in July 2009. I’ve remained extremely online since then. It was never about the platform itself. It was always about the people — those who I interacted with and those who wrote the third-party clients that made the service usable. That Twitter the service became the success it did was despite Twitter the company, not because of it.

I’ve often wondered if anyone at Twitter used Twitter. Third-party clients innovated and drove improvements. Twitter made changes no one asked for. In 2012, Twitter changed rules around the API, which caused many third-party developers to abandon the platform. By that point, the first-party tooling was good enough (thanks, in part, to the acquisition of a few key third parties). But still, it was a loss for the ecosystem.

Earlier this week, Twitter went further and gave a one-week notice that free API access is ending. This likely means the end for many integrations. It will almost certainly be the death knell for many of the fun and useful bots that make being on Twitter a better experience.

There’s finally no doubt that the person in charge of Twitter actually uses the service and it turns out he’s a fuckwit. The larger services already (I assume) have paid API access. That’s what you do when you’re running a business. So basically, Elon is just killing off the hobbyists. You remember them; they’re the ones who made Twitter Twitter in the first place. If it’s a shakedown for money (and given the debt Twitter is saddled with by its fuckwit-in-chief, that seems likely), I doubt it will be very effective.

That said, I’m not abandoning Twitter yet. There are still too many people that I don’t want to leave behind. But it’s easy to see a gradual decline until we reach a tipping point. Will the last one out please put up the Fail Whale?

Other writing: January 2023

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The Pragmatic Programmers

Duck Alignment Academy

  • Why does this meeting exist? — If you can’t come up with a sentence or two that says why you scheduled the meeting, you should consider what that implies.
  • Stop writing like an engineer — Putting the important part at the end doesn’t encourage them to read the whole thing; it just means they move on without reading the important part.
  • Perception matters — make people feel heard — Making someone feel heard doesn’t mean doing whatever they want; it means they feel like you’ve made a good faith effort to understand them.

Fedora

Other writing: December 2022

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The Pragmatic Programmers

  • Manage your project deadlines — Deadlines are easy to set and hard to meet. So how do you set deadlines that aren’t hard to meet? It’s not hard!

Fedora

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Book review: Sapiens

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I just finished listening to Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuvah Noah Harari. It an interesting look at the history of our species as viewed through the lens of thee revolutions: cognitive, agricultural, and scientific.

Harari takes a detached — and sometimes cynical — view of history. He does not place humanity at the center of the story. Instead, he talks about humans and human systems as part of a broader evolutionary process. For example, he says “we did not domesticate wheat; it domesticated us.”

There is no inevitability

It is a mistake, he argues, to ascribe intent to evolutionary processes. Humanity is not the end goal. It follows, then, that there is no underlying purpose of human life. We exist because we exist. Whatever meaning we give life is a shared myth, as is all of human culture. Our economic, political, religious, and all other systems exist and have power because we agree they exist and have power.

For me, some of the more interesting parts of the book were the descriptions of how various economic systems influenced — or even necessitated — historical outcomes. European colonization and empire from the 15th century to today is not because of any innate nature of Europeans. Environmental factors and accidents of invention gave Europe’s leaders the ability and motivation to conquer the globe. Were we able to replay history a hundred times, how many times would western Europe become the home of global empire rather than, say, the Middle East?

Are you better off than your ancestors?

I was also intrigued by early discussions of the relative quality of life and later discussions of human happiness. For all of the hardships we imagine our ancestors faced, Harari argues that our hunter-gatherer forebears may have had a greater overall standard of living than their post-agricultural-revolution descendants. Nevertheless, the agricultural revolution prompted changes in our societies that made going back all but impossible.

“Happiness” is a difficult concept to explain, let alone measure. Nonetheless, it seems plausible that we are no more happy than our grandparents’ generation, or their grandparents’ generation, or… If happiness has not increased, what was the point of the millennia of changes? Why do we try to increase our wealth, expand our understanding, and conquer disease? What, truly, is the point of anything?

The questions to ask

“What, truly, is the point of anything?” is a question to ask. But it’s a mistake to think any answer find is universal. What we consider as fundamental human rights are only fundamental because we think they are. Perhaps societies many thousand years ago that had little concept of individual well-being and instead focused on the well being of the collective were right? Ah, but what does it mean to even be right? Rightness depends on the cultural context, which in tend depends on the shared myths in that place and time.

Sapiens ends with a look at the future and how our technology puts us in a position to render ourselves obsolete. We are forced to confront the question of “what do we want?” for our future. But that’s not the most pressing question, Harari says. We should be asking ourselves “what do we want to want?”

Should you read this?

Although I found much of the latter part of the book less interesting, the book overall was well worth the time. It was thought-provoking in ways that I did not expect. I may end up re-reading it with the intent of putting it aside to explore the thoughts as they arise.

Sapiens was first published in English in 2015. Although that was less than a decade ago, some parts of it feel out of touch. Harari describes a move away from nationalism. While that may be true in the broader sense, the last few years have bucked that trend — in the US and elsewhere. Similarly, he says that no state can “declare and wage war as it pleases”, yet Russia has done just that. Although it faces international retribution, and indeed may prove to be worse off as a result, it nonetheless is very much waging a war against Ukraine.

It’s a mistake to assume that history is a smooth line. Only time will tell if recent events are the start of a long trend or a ripple in the trajectory of history of homo sapiens.

Don’t make new tools fit the same hole as the old tools

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I forgot what prompted me to have this thought three and a half years ago, but it seems fitting for the moment.

One of the worst things you can do when replacing a tool is to try to make it work just like the old one. If the old and new tools were meant to be exactly the same, they wouldn’t be different tools.

Change is hard but necessary. You know what else is hard? Trying to contort your old workflow to work with the new tool. Replacing the tool is an opportunity to improve your processes. If nothing else, it prevents you from fighting the tool.

This holds true even if you’re writing the tool yourself. If you’re doing the work to write a new tool (or rewrite an old one), take the opportunity to re-think how you work. What assumptions have you carried forward that are no longer valid? What new ways of working have you learned since you first adopted the old tool?

I’m seeing this play out on Mastodon as people used to Twitter try to adjust. They expect certain things based on their use of Twitter. And while Mastodon has a lot in common with Twitter, they’re not the same. Some things may change as Mastodon grows. And some of the Mastodon experience probably should be more like Twitter, even if it isn’t. But if you make the switch, think about why you think it should work the way you want.

Prepare the lifeboats?

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When do I leave Twitter? That’s a very good question and I don’t have a very good answer for it. But last night I decided to go ahead and create a Mastodon account just in case. It’s been less than two months since I wrote “Mastodon won’t save us“. I stand by everything I wrote there. But as Elon Musk continues to corncob at an accelerating pace, there may not be a Twitter to cling to much longer.

Where are my people?

Someone on Mastodon objected to my use of the word “lifeboat”. But that’s what it is. I care about Mastodon as a technology exactly as much as I care about Twitter: none cares. The important part is the social aspect. I ran my accounts through the Movetodon tool. Of the 2708 accounts I follow on Twitter, it found 380 Mastodon accounts. I’ve manually added 19 others. Most of them are my tech friends.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my tech friends. But what about the ~2300 others? My timeline gets a lot less interesting if 85% of the people I follow disappear.

Will I use it?

I know myself well enough to know that I crave the interactions of social media. Because I try to associate myself with kind people, my replies are almost universally soothing to my overwhelming sense of insufficiency. So even if Twitter survives, I’ll probably end up active on Mastodon without meaning to be. That’s how I roll.

One thing I’ve already noticed, though, is that I’ve skipped on posting a few things already this morning. I wasn’t sure if I should post to Twitter or Mastodon, so decided not to post at all. I have long believed that cross-posting to various social media sites is anti-social and I have no desire to maintain parallel streams of thought. I guess we’ll have to see how this plays out.

Other writing: November 2022

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Happy birthday, Kurt

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Booth Tarkington. Theodore Dreiser. John Green (a transplant). Ben Cotton. Indiana has a tradition of great authors. But none of them can compare to Kurt Vonnegut, Junior, who would have turned 100 years old today.

My dad first introduced me to Vonnegut’s work when I was in sixth grade or so. He lent me his copy of God Bless You, Mister Rosewater when I went on a road trip with some extended family. I’d never read anything like it. It mixed talk of pubic hair with phrases like “offensive effluvium.”

The first story we read in the Junior Great Books after-school program in seventh grade was the short story “Harrison Bergeron.” I loved that story. The rest of the year was a disappointment.

But soon I was reading other Vonnegut books. Breakfast of Champions inspired several projects for the intro to drama class I took my sophomore year. The first assignment was to make a poster for a play — real or imagined. I decided to make a poster for “Cornflakes”, a play where a man went crazy and began eating nothing but corn flakes. For a later assignment, I had to design a set. I kept using “Cornflakes” and designed the slide room from the play: the room where the main character slid down a slide into a giant bowl of corn flakes. My drama class was at the end of the day, so I had eaten many of the corn flakes by the time class rolled around. I still got a decent grade. Later on, I began writing the short story when I had down time in classes. It is mercifully lost to time, but as far as I know, it remains the only short story based on a set based on a poster.

Breakfast of Champions has been my favorite since I first read it, and not just because Dwayne Hoover has some absolutely bonkers lines. It wrestles with questions of existence in a way that’s both profound and absurd. In the 25 years that I’ve read and re-read it, something else catches me every time.

Mother Night is the same way. When I was younger, it was a tragic tale of a hero who lost everything in order to anonymously serve his country. Now, it’s a cautionary tale. Whenever I’m tempted to pretend to be a terrible person on the Internet for some lulz, I stop and think “we are what we pretend to be.” Howard W. Campbell was absolutely a good guy to a younger me. Older me isn’t so sure.

Of course, I’ve ready many other Vonnegut books, and books about Vonnegut. I even got to help with a time capsule and a literary landmark designation at the Vonnegut Museum earlier this year. I don’t have time to go into all that I know, or think, or wish I knew about Kurt Vonnegut. But it’s clear that his work has had a profound effect on me. I often catch myself trying to be witty in a way that is, at best, a poor imitation of Vonnegut’s style.

When my sisters and I were coming up with the eulogy I was to read at Dad’s funeral, we knew it had to include a Vonnegut reference. I’m glad that a love of these books (even though I think much more highly of Slapstick than Dad did) was a bond that my father and I could share. And when my kids are a little bit older, I hope that I can share that with them. I hope Kurt would have liked that.