Numbers LIE
Lies lies lies!!!
🎶 Summertime, and the math is easy…
Life was good when the math was simple. Once I mastered long division, the world was mine.
Until, calculus in the winter. Calculus was a gut punch. I saw the path ahead and it was lined with LIES. When my calculus professor passed out the final, he said “Don’t sit between twins or you wont be able to differentiate between them.”
That’s not funny. Nobody laughed. I wasn’t laughing when I got my grade back.
Did you know the Earth isn’t even round? It’s true. Throw everything you know about Pi out the window. The Earth is shy of a perfect sphere by nearly 1/2 a percent and Saturn is a total inner tube burger at 10% shy of spherical.
Mercury and Venus are perfect spheres btw, whatever.
The deeper you go, the worse it gets. Math is no universal truth, no pure science. Quantum entanglement, schmauntum schmentanglement, two particles are connected even on opposite ends of the planet?
LIES
In little league I hit over 300 and if you don’t know what that means, it’s really good. I was a beast and so was the chaos monkey and so, together we danced through fields of baseball stats some years later, as the Giants tore through the National League.
My favorite stat was RISP. That’s your batting average when you have Runners in Scoring Position—a measure of just how clutch a batter is.
Stats have since gone wild; millions of data points are now tracked every single game. Did you know MLB, NBA, etc. sell real time data feeds of every second of every game to the likes of DraftKings who make billions by feeding it back to us?
You think you’re in control because you know ALL the numbers?
LIES
Here’s a good stat for you and it’s 100% true. More phone calls are made on Mothers day that any other day of the year.
TRUTH
That’s useful; now I know the max capacity my system has to handle so everyone can talk to their mom. I love data for that—just like long division—there is one answer.
But then, not to be outdone by quantum and baseball, app telemetry came along and now we log every twitch your thumb makes: clicks, scrolls and pauses.
Einstein, or at least someone smarter than my calculus professor, said “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
Cue the KPIs, build the dashboards, lets make some data-driven decisions.
LIES
Have you ever watched the home shopping network? QVC? LIES? Well maybe, I don’t watch it but lots of people do, so?
It might be a stretch to compare QVC with scrolling TikTok or whatever feed you fancy, but if you’re not careful, the Algorithm will QVC you.
Your feed is not my feed and maybe it’s full of exclamations that AI is killing the planet?
To wit: ask ChatGPT a question and it uses more energy than it takes to charge your phone. It slurps a glass of water to cool its cores. Did you know that question you just asked could power a light bulb for an hour?
Someone did a lotta math.
Someone manipulated the math.
This has been well debunked, but math is not only hard, for most of us it’s also boring. After enough reels sear your eyeballs, you too will believe AI is destroying the planet.
LIES
Did I mention I’m turning 60 on Monday?
LIES!!!
The world is bonkers. Haha. I also like the RISP in baseball. Let's see who can step up when called. I can only imagine the pressure to perform so well in front of millions and so the ones who score high on the RISP are beasts. Great post, Andrew.
Happy 60! You don't look a day over 57.
Remember "slugging percentage"? I always thought that one was a good one to shoot for, at least until Moneyball came along and it became obvious that getting on base was everything.