In the last 20 years, I've gone from being completely obsessed with baseball, to not watching until the postseason, to basically never watching but loving old stats, to yawning from afar as the game disappears into a cloud of strikeouts punctuated by solo home runs.
As the industry learned about ppl's tastes, they realized ppl just want the same thing over and over.
What does the Shazam Effect have to do with baseball?
Well, when a handful of cultural producers get "smart" about what works in their industry, the formula gets shared widely, and as strategies homogenize, the entertainment product becomes more boring.
When every baseball team realizes it's optimal to increase pitching velocity and launch angle, you get a cloud of Ks punctuated with HRs.
When every basketball team realizes that 3 points is 50% more than 2 points, you get a leaguewide blitz of 3s.
By the same token, when radio DJs recognize that ppl tune out new songs, you get more repetetive playlists. When every movie studio realizes that mass audiences are neophobic and mostly buy tickets to sequels, adaptations, and reboots, you get ... well, you know what you get.
Maybe I'm just getting old.
Or maybe the cultural & entertainment industries were never supposed to be this smart, and the quantitative revolution in entertainment is a living creature that consumes data and excretes homogeneity.
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Daily vaccinations peaked the week the FDA paused the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. They're down 40% since. Coincidence?
1. It's the J&J pause—period.
Average daily shots peaked *the very same week* as the FDA announcement on Johnson & Johnson. What's more, daily doses plunged for every age group among non-senior adults, at the same time.
But wait...
Since mid-April, daily vaccinations are down ~40%. The highest-quality surveys don't show any increase in vaccine hesitancy that would explain more that a fraction of that. Something else is going on.
Will vaxbucks fix all of the vax-hesitancy problems? No.
Will millions of people still refuse the shots? Yes.
Is it sort of moral hazardish to means-test vaxbucks for the no-vax crowd? Kinda.
Will some ppl be *even more sure* that vaccines are a govt conspiracy? Yes.
Even so!
Most plans to overcome vaccine hesitancy cost money, either literally, or in the form of time spent with patients.
If we're going to spend scarce resources on the problem, maybe we should spend the least scarce resource—federal outlays—and give it directly to people.
1. The "no-vaxxers" never thought the pandemic was a serious threat to them, and they resent the idea that they need a pharmaceutical intervention to get back to a normal life that they never wanted to stop living.
2. Many people I spoke to said they had already tested positive for COVID and felt confident in their natural immunity.
(Since this group took fewer precautions last year, it would make sense that a higher-than-avg share of them would have antibodies.)
There have been a couple of great podcasts/articles about why NFL teams are still so bad at picking QBs. Coupla thoughts.
1. QB is one of the most contingent jobs in sports. He can't pass to himself, or block for himself. Success is determined by forces outside his control.
2. The reverse order draft (typically) guarantees the best college QBs go to the worst teams—a situation unlike any non-sports career—which means college talent is often "rewarded" with an awful professional home.
3. Greatness is (often) non-linear. Manning was a turnover machine who quickly learned historic efficiency. Brees was inconsistent before NOLA. Brady was a super-clutch player who got better and better thru his 20s until became a statistical monster in his 30s.
Masks are good; and inside, among non-vaccinated ppl, they're great.
But governments need to give Americans an off-ramp to the post-pandemic world. Ending outdoor mask mandates would be a good place to start.
To be clear: I don't support immediately lifting mandates in places with outbreaks, like Michigan.
But dozens of states that currently have outdoor mask mandates should mark an imminent threshold—in, say, local hospitalization rate—below which the mandates will be lifted.
The best case for KEEPING the mask mandates are
1. Masks are easy, and they work 2. Requiring masks outside makes them handy when people go inside 3. Masks build a sense of social solidarity.
I think I can imagine better counter-arguments for all three.