Part the First: Wither Sport in This Modern World? The World Series ended last week with two games for the ages. These were the only MLB baseball games I watched all season, and as a baseball man of the old school, I picked well. Both games between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays were played as baseball was intended: good hitting, good pitching including a complete game that reminded one of Bob Gibson and Sandy Koufax, good baserunning, outstanding defense, and even a perfectly executed sacrifice bunt that in the era of “Baseball Analytics” has become anathema. Unfortunately, one of the teams had to lose, and that was the wrong team (more on that below).
We are also now in the heat of that most peculiar American thing, the college football season, and the games are getting serious, on the field and off. The NBA season has begun with the college game on the way, and the sports fan has more than he can handle. But there is also a specter haunting sport, the specter of gambling – not the kind that hides in the shadows but the kind that is legal and supposedly out in the open. Not so much, as it turns out. And Bhaskar Sunkara explains why in Make Sports Sacred Again: Gambling Promotes Addiction and Decay:
The arrests of three basketball pros — Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, and former NBA player and assistant Damon Jones — made for the kind of cable-news spectacle the new FBI leadership clearly loves. Director Kash Patel stepped to the Justice Department podium to describe what he called “a historic arrest across a wide-sweeping criminal enterprise that envelopes both the NBA and La Cosa Nostra.” The timing was impeccable: right as the basketball season was beginning, guaranteeing maximum humiliation for the league and its commissioner, Adam Silver.
Silver must have been livid. Yet in a sense, he helped make this moment happen. A decade ago, he took to the pages of The New York Times to call for legalizing sports betting nationwide. The argument then sounded pragmatic: Americans were already gambling illegally, so why not bring it into the open, regulate it, and tax it? What Silver helped set in motion was the merger of sport and speculation — a regime in which the game itself becomes an advertising vehicle for constant wagering, and every fan morphs into a potential bettor.
Once, gambling was the seedy underbelly of sports culture, the business of backroom bookmakers and shady offshore sites. Now it’s the official sponsor of the pregame show, the banner scrolling under highlight clips, the push notification buzzing our smartphones. Players, coaches, and fans alike have been folded into a vast machine that monetizes the uncertainty that makes sport so compelling to begin with.
Please ignore the camera hog Kash Patel in the first paragraph, who is undoubtedly exaggerating. “La Cosa Nostra”? Who uses that term these days? I might have missed it, but the last time I heard it was from Efraim Zimbalist, Jr. on The F.B.I. Sunkara’s classification of thoroughly secular sports as sacred is a category mistake, but gambling will destroy football, baseball, basketball, and golf, nevertheless. Back in the day when the newspaper arrived on my doorstep every morning, my first stop was the sports section. Box scores do not lie. Games are won or lost by the rules, albeit with the occasional officiating lapse. The players and coaches either put up or shut up. The Sports Section was the only section of the newspaper not filled with bullshit back in the day. Now, who knows? All professional sports including college football and basketball, which have never been truly amateur, are at the mercy of an army of gamblers and their bookies, legal or not.
Back to the Dodgers and why they were the wrong team to win the World Series. Their star should have been cast into the outer darkness last year with Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson, for a few years at the very least (sorry, Wukchumni, but I loved the Dodgers of Koufax and Drysdale and Wills when I was a Little Leaguer). One sin in baseball is unforgivable: Gambling. Especially with a bookie. But we are to believe that Shohei Ohtani – a megastar of a magnitude not seen since Babe Ruth pitched and hit homeruns for the Boston Red Sox – did not know his interpreter was gambling away millions of Ohtani’s money without the player or his bankers knowing. Yeah, right. The following is a paraphrase from a good friend and baseball man going back to the New York Yankees of Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle, and Elston Howard when they were young:
At least the Most Valuable Player (Yamamoto) wasn’t Ohtani, known by anyone involved in the financial services and investment sectors to be more guilty than his pretend innocence would indicate. In their realm, $500k transfers (twice) don’t require verification, meet security protocol and IRS reporting? That kind of stuff doesn’t happen by accident. Ohtani said he did it to bailout his friend from his gambling debt. The very next day, his lawyer claimed Ohtani was unaware of the transfers.
Which is it, Shohei? Pick one and stick with it. The details are certainly uglier than that but remain very well hidden. No surprise from Rob Manfred, the Commissioner of baseball, who in the aftermath of the Houston Asterix’s cheating scandal called the Commissioner’s Trophy awarded to the winning team in the World Series a “hunk of metal” if I remember correctly. This time MLB was required to protect their first 700-Million-Dollar Man (albeit with much of the money deferred), come what may. It worked. For now.
Meanwhile the online betting traps and snares that shall go unnamed here are bankrupting 20- and 30-something men (and a very few women, who are smarter) as fast as they can. At least the bookie hanging out at the end of the bar, next to the payphone back in the day, at 4:00 on Thursday afternoon would cut off a “client” as soon as he couldn’t pay up. Consequences of one sort or another would follow in due time. That doesn’t happen in the online betting world until it is much too late, when the credit cards are finally cancelled. Widespread damage is coming. We are not a serious nation.
The Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) is about to learn a lesson, too, when the owners get their salary cap in the next contract because the Dodgers, with their large payroll (#2), won the World Series twice in a row against the Blue Jays (#5). Unfortunately, Marvin Miller won’t be available to help them. With his background in the real labor movement, he would also have advised the players that becoming prop bet bait “to make the second-greatest game more exciting” was a bad deal that would only get worse.
Part the Second: Wellness Influencers and Nonsense. In news that will surprise no one outside the influencer orbit, but Wellness Influencers Are Relying on Junk Science:
There’s a new kind of health revolution happening online. Forget rushed GP appointments and overbooked clinics — today’s health experts are wellness gurus who wear yoga pants, talk cortisol levels, and sell empowerment. Last week, the Wall Street Journal was the latest outlet to show how “hormone balance” and “wellness” have become both diagnosis and cure, promising that better sleep, clearer skin and calmer moods can be achieved through supplements and an unwavering commitment to this new lifestyle.
But before people dismiss this movement, it’s important to remember that beneath the soft lighting and wellness tonics lies a harder truth — a growing number of women have justifiably lost faith in medicine. They’re tired of being misunderstood, overprescribed, or told that their problems are “just hormones”. And into that space has swept the wellness industry — part rebellion, part exploitation of women’s worries.
Yes, there is a lot to this. Confidence in the power and legitimacy of modern medicine has waned, and the medical establishment has only itself to blame. Consequently:
The wellness industry has extended far beyond vitamins and minerals. Los Angeles photographer Masha Maltsava has cleared her home of “forever chemicals”, swapped her cookware for cast iron, and banished her polyester leggings. She now tracks her stress levels with an Oura ring and uses AI to interpret her lab results.
But herein lies the problem with relying on the wellness industry. What began as a justifiable search for better information has morphed into a multi-million-pound industry. This is where “first, do no harm” collides with “buyer beware”. The tragedy is that women aren’t wrong to seek better or non-pharmaceutical care for certain ailments — the worry is that they’re being sold certainty in place of science. It’s easy to mock those who turn to influencers instead of doctors, but in a world that demands answers, someone will always be waiting to sell you one.
The great irony in all this is that the wellness ecosystem is driven by profit. Influencers with something to sell thrive on creating a sense that their target market is missing something in their lives. All the while, the efficacy of the wellness industry is increasingly questionable. Little of this is evidence-based, and most of the research is extremely limited. Influencers often lean heavily on phrases like “preliminary findings” and “emerging science”.
What this trend exposes is a broader collapse of trust in expertise. In this case, the old medical paternalism hasn’t been replaced by better self-guided care, but by naked consumerism resting on junk science.
Pretty much. And until we have a healthcare system with the primary goal of health, for everyone, this will continue. The parade will be led by the Medical Medium, one Anthony William, “who was born with the unique ability to converse with the Spirit of Compassion, who provides him with extraordinarily advanced healing medical information that’s far ahead of its time.” Then there is Levels.com, founded by the next Surgeon General, where for about $2000 per year one can continuously monitor his or her blood glucose levels, not that this will mean anything to someone without pre-diabetes or diabetes. In the meantime, people get sicker and sicker eating a poor diet of food-like substances. But that tide may be turning, too.
Part the Third: Human Uniqueness in the Animal World Takes Another Hit. A paper in Science last week shows that Chimpanzees are natural scientists:
The ability of humans to identify relevant information as evidence and update their beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence is foundational to all scientific inquiry. The extent to which nonhuman animals are capable of similar forms of reasoning has long been under debate. In his book The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin proposed that the greatest challenge for evolutionary theory is human intelligence. He predicted that psychological elements would be found in nonhumans, particularly in nonhuman apes, that bridge the gap between human and nonhuman cognition. Schleihauf et al. report that chimpanzees can update their beliefs on the basis of the quantity and quality of new evidence, providing more support for Darwin’s radical idea.
But this result has been long in coming. Self-knowledge is old news in non-human primates. Great apes have also shown a capacity to revise a choice when presented with contrary evidence.
Despite this progress, it has remained unclear whether chimpanzees possess the capacity to rationally evaluate the strength of new evidence in relation to their existing beliefs and revise those beliefs only when appropriate, as humans do (metacognition). This capacity for reflective responsiveness to reasons is likely to be the only definition of rationality that the strictest opponents of animal rationality will admit. Schleihauf et al. adopted a previously developed experimental setup in which subjects are given a chance to revisit an initial choice after being presented with additional evidence (9). Across five experiments, 15 to 23 chimpanzees living at the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda were tested on their ability to revise decisions when presented with varying strengths of evidence regarding the location of hidden food rewards.
Schleihauf et al. gave subjects eight opportunities to locate food hidden in two identical containers. Chimpanzees could select one of the containers but not both. For each trial, they received two sequential clues: one providing strong, conclusive evidence, and the other offering weak, inconclusive evidence. In half of the trials, the strong clue was presented first, followed by the weak; in the other half, the order was reversed. Chimpanzees consistently based their choices on the strong form of evidence, regardless of the order or modality (visual, when food could be seen inside the container, or auditory, when the container made a noise indicative of food when shaken) in which they received the information. Notably, when weak evidence was encountered first, subjects frequently revised their choice after being exposed to the stronger evidence, which is consistent with rational revision of beliefs
.
The Schleihauf et al. paper is here, unfortunately behind a paywall despite attempts to retrieve it. But the evidence is strong and proves that Charles Darwin was correct in The Descent of Man (and Selection in Relation to Sex), which was published in 1871, eleven years after the On the Origin of Species (By Means of Natural Selection). There is a continuum that includes our non-human relatives. However, one thing about this is clear. More than a few individuals of the species Homo sapiens lack the gift of metacognition. These include a distressing number of medical students who need to be told that if they study better, and usually longer, they will do better in medical school and be a better physician to their patients. It is always passing strange they must be told this. One would think a failing or near-failing grade would send a message. But when they follow the advice. it works 99% of the time. Imagine that.
Part the Fourth: The Sokal Hoax Thirty Years later. From The Baffler a long article, Little Magazine, on the importance of little magazines on the Left (and the Right) and their survival. My introduction to them was the long-gone newsstand across from the main entrance of my university campus, where a wide assortment of little (and not so little) magazines and journals – Dissent, Working Papers for a New Society, Monthly Review, The Public Interest, Partisan Review, Commentary, Lingua Franca, City Journal, Past & Present– were available. I read them all. For those who were not present when Alan Sokal did his thing:
(His) article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, was published in the Spring/Summer 1996 “Science Wars” issue (of Social Text). It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. The journal did not practice academic peer review at the time, so it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist. Three weeks after its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in the magazine Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax.[2]
The hoax caused controversy about the scholarly merit of commentary on the physical sciences by those in the humanities; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; and academic ethics, including whether Sokal was wrong to deceive the editors or readers of Social Text; and whether Social Text had abided by proper scientific ethics.
Does Critical Theory have its problems? Yes. Is some of it more than recondite and did it “interrogate” concepts that may not have been worth the trouble? Yes, again. But that also goes for science; you cannot know these things ex ante. At the time Social Text was not peer-reviewed (which used to mean something and these days it can mean less than nothing), but it was a serious journal led by Stanley Aronowitz. The article got four readings before it was published. None of the readers was a physicist.
Sokal was lionized in my circles. I always thought he took a cheap shot that was an early modern example of “I’m a scientist and you’re not, so you must listen to what I say (and I do not care what you think).” We see where this attitude has led. Whether the sciences as disciplines with social and cultural relevance will recover is uncertain. Hubris leads inevitably to the fall, and one does not have to be Sabine Hossenfelder to see that physics may have thought itself into a cul de sac. Heresy alert! But that might have been inevitable. Physics is a “small problem” in that its working parts are not contingent on any history that followed the first few seconds after the Big Bang of current cosmological theory. Biology on the other hand is contingent upon a dynamic history of more than three billion years (Wiki but a good review of LUCA). And contrary to the fever dreams of physical scientists and a few biologists, biology will never be reduced to chemistry, much less physics. Or that is the (completely unoriginal) KLG Conjecture and I am sticking to it.
Part the Fifth: A Political Temblor in the Hinterlands. What ultimately happens is anybody’s guess but Election Day 2025 was notable, in New York City and other strange places. One of the latter is the State of Georgia, where Marjorie Taylor Greene has become a politician who makes a lot of sense on the large issues of the day. That was not on my bingo card. There were only two statewide races on the ballot. Both were for seats on the Public Service Commission, which for the past fifty years at least, has been the handmaiden of utility companies in the largest state east of the Mississippi River, and now the eighth largest state by population in the US. As covered in The Current, the only reliable source for news in Coastal Georgia:
Democrats Peter Hubbard and Alicia Johnson have delivered an upset in Georgia’s off-year special election Tuesday, defeating two Republican incumbents on the state’s Public Service Commission.
The double victory marks the first time the Democratic Party has won a statewide constitutional office in Georgia since 2006 and reshapes the political landscape ahead of the pivotal 2026 midterm elections. As of 10:15 p.m., Alicia Johnson led with about 60.5% of the vote, according to unofficial results from the Georgia Secretary of State’s website, while Hubbard carried 60.7% of the vote.
Turnout was large for an off-year election (>1.5 million votes). The final results were even clearer: 63%/37% for each Democrat. That is a smackdown of epic proportions. I would remind everyone that we have to start somewhere, and sniping at the winners from last Tuesday who can be transformative should await at least a few results. We got into this crack over a long period, and it will require steady pressure to reverse our momentum toward oblivion. Natura non facit saltum applies to biology most of the time, and political economy all the time, if things are not to fall apart completely. Hope is the antithesis of optimism, and this is a time for hope. And hope requires action from citizens, not consumers. As Rabbi Tarfon put it nearly 2000 years ago, “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.”
See you next week!
Thanks for the comment on Sokal Hoax. Glad to know that I’m not the only one who thought it was a dirty cheap shot, even if at least somewhat deserved on the receiving end as well.
How else can you show that the publication is, itself, fraud-adjacent by presenting articles as being meritorious?
This issue applies to LLM outputs too: people tend to weigh verbiage as accurate if it is well written, or at least written in a certain style.
Shoul we call AI output verbigarbage?
Then does the Piltdown Man, an actual fraud, discredit human evolutionary biology? There are plenty of real scientific frauds that got through for years. There is something cheeky and wrong about someone wilfully committing, essentially, “scientific fraud” and proudly claiming it as evidence that the “victim” discipline is fraudulent. I say this as someone who does believe that critical theory is mostly bunk.
The Piltdown Man hoax has been attributed to Conan Doyle, who lived nearby to the place where the supposed “specimens” were found and at the time of the “discovery.” My theory is that the Piltdown Man hoax was meant to show up the ossified nature all “credentialed” disciplines eventually fall into. This happened roughly in the same historical period in which Planck uttered his infamous quote: “Science advances one funeral at a time.” In this situation, most of the “credentialled” people working in a field are the ‘frauds’ and the field itself the “victim.”
Stephen Jay Gould wrote that Teilhard de Chardin may have been involved and IIRC thought the lark would be recognized immediately as such.
The lesson here being: Never underestimate stupidity.
Now apply this to contemporary politics. Keep your potassium iodide handy.
I suppose it was a cheap shot of the kind Socrates was fond of: showing people who thought they knew that, in fact, in this area, they knew nothing at all. Not really my idea of a cheap shot, but horses for courses I suppose.
Remember what happened to Socrates.
Indeed. It takes real bravery to take such cheap shots. They tend to very much upset their targets.
What a World Series, one amazing play after another and relatively few errors, none of which changed the outcomes, I really wanted it to go 9 or 11 games.
I don’t really focus on money in sports, except for paying Fox $20 to watch the World Series, that is. The salaries are so over the top compared how miserly the owners were in paying out when we were kids.
Maybe I watched snippets of say a dozen games this season, a typical fairweather baseball fan whose smack dab in the middle of where their aged reliable fan base lies-which might be why the professional powers that be turned to gambling-their leagues being not much different than churches in Europe-full of empty, young people don’t do that anymore.
The problem with stopping this insidious practice of allowing it, is they’ve come to expect the revenue now, and if you took away gambling advertising, not sure what would pick up the slack?
Similar to your thoughts KLG, sports remains the only numbers I can rely on to be accurate in a world bent on falsehoods, so there’s that.
I went to the World Series game in LA the day after Gibson hit the home run heard round the world in 1988, and I literally had to fight off grown men that oh so wanted my $50 ticket up the right field line and curving way back into foul territory. They’d all seen the magic of the night before and wanted in on more.
The game was a pleasant snoozer with the Dodgers winning in a 6-0 shutout, nobody talks about it all that much in comparison to the first game.
Dr Singularity
@Dr_Singularity
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55m
The ultra enormous wave of knowledge that’s coming and will change everything.
let me explain
Among tens of millions of scientific papers, there are likely, due to the combinatorial power of cross disciplinary knowledge, millions, or even billions, of new discoveries waiting to be made.
Soon, one of the tech giants or a leading university will develop AI model capable of analyzing all those papers and uncovering millions of hidden insights, such as 1000s of new cancer drug candidates and ideas we’ve never even imagined, because of the sheer complexity of the scientific landscape that AI will finally understand.
If such a model is developed by a tech giant like Google DeepMind, Microsoft, Meta, or other AI lab – xAI, OpenAI, it could increase that company’s valuation beyond $10 trillion.
The amount of value created would be enormous, and the market capitalization of those companies could explode to the Moon.
IMO, we’re close to creating such AI, and it will happen before 2030, possibly as soon as 2026/2027.
Intellectual Property Rights are a social construct, as are all property laws. If such an AI model is ever developed, it will only remain in private hands if the owner is prepared to treat it as a public utility because, when push comes to shush, all property rights are a social construct supported by the power of the state and the state may not remain in private hands forever.
I also doubt Ohtani’s innocence. However, if the Dodgers had made a secret deal with the federal government to protect him, it would have been exposed by now.
Nobody has to make any secret deal.
Ohtani just blames his fall guy and everyone pretends thats what actually happened. There is nothing to expose except the fact that there’s a sucker born every day.
On sports betting:
Brit follower of NFL and NBA here who grew up in a house with a legal gambling addict (horses, bets mostly placed by phone).
I think there are separate issues
1. I completely agree that the gambling revolution is bad for it’s victims (aka customers). I hate that every show and podcast has become an increasingly sophisticated lure for the gambling sites. It’s addictive and destructive and also a distraction from what I care about (the games themselves).
2. Has legalised betting increased corruption and match-fixing? I think any answer here is speculative as we cannot know how much fixing is undetected, and how much it happened in the pre-legal era.
I am fairly persuaded by the argument that legal gambling makes successful fixing less likely as the big sites have strong “abnormal betting pattern” detection systems. This is how Rozier was detected – unusual amounts of money on over/unders for a fairly obscure player. This did not exist when gambling was in the shadows. Case in point: There is huge corruption and match-fixing in Indian cricket despite gambling being illegal there.
The counter to this is that the explosion in prop bets for everything offers more opportunity to corrupt single obscure players. I doubt the old school bookie in the bar was giving lines on a rotation player getting +/- 2 points etc. Prop betting manipulation is much easier and more likely than match-fixing.
Bonus: I’ve heard several references from informed insiders in interviews to “more is coming” on the gambling investigation, particularly something involving college sports which seem more corruptible due to the relative poverty of it’s athletes.
Been quite a few years ago a local college I loved and had a kid graduate from, got busted in basketball because a couple of guys were caught. In this case it was about beating (or not) a point spread. That’s a different animal than the prop bets, which really opens things up for something fishy.
Great point.
Re; Blue Jays and sports betting.
I was one of the lucky ones to be behind home plate on April 7, 1977. Still remember the snow being cleared off the outfield by Zambonis. Dad got us in along with my cousin who was in a wheelchair due to a serious motorcycle accident. My father bless his soul was an habitual gambler. I remember bet sheets, over/ unders, parlays, and point spreads. Dad lost a business in late 60’s due to his efforts to beat the odds. Sundays were all football, channel jumping and required phone calls to his bookie. Thankfully he rebounded and left Mom comfortable.
I think the author here misreads both the intent and effect of the Sokal hoax. What Sokal demonstrated is that the arcane hieratic oracular language of post-modernism (to wit, “jargon”) even manages to swindle and hoodwink it’s own progenitors — the “social scientists” and “theorists” who approved it for publication.
The Sokal “text” is full of logically vacuous and natively unprovable pronouncements, along with patent absurdities masquerading as rare insights. It amounts to theology, but without (unlike the Bible) any entertainment or aesthetic value. Those prophetic fumes aren’t even intoxicating.
What’s unfair or cheap about exposing utter nonsense?
When you created it for the purpose of entrapment.
The elenchus?
Oh my. Well do I remember Dad and Uncle Gerry, (an English ex-pat friend,) poring over the Daily Racing Form. They were engineers and so the Quant Method fitted their personalities. Yet both made their respective “Big Scores” due to sheer luck.
Uncle Gerry ran a parlay at the Miami Jaiali Fronton and won enough to buy outright a new 1967 Bonneville two door ragtop beauty. At last communication, he still has it, in running condition.
Dad made his killing due to an overheard argument between a Navy officer and an Army officer at a chemical company Friday cocktail hour. (Don’t ask, don’t tell.) The upshoot was that the Navy officer stated that the decision over which fighter jet to purchase for carrier duty had already been made, (the ‘competition’ was still “up in the air.”) Dad came home a bit swozzled and gathered together all of our available funds and bet it all on the company that made the “secret winner.” That product duly won out and Dad made a killing in that other gambling casino, the Stock Exchange.
I’ve already told the tale about how you “fix” a dog race. (I won some money there.)
My inner cynic tells me that acting as if any particular ‘sporting’ contest was “fixed” is merely rational behaviour.
I realize that this is America, but why oh why doesn’t the Federal Government set up a National Betting Corporation and cut out the usually crooked middlebeings? The skim could be used for so many “good works.”
Alas, I’ll take corruption and the points.
Stay safe. Bet responsibly.
National Betting Corporation, lottery tickets. Scratch ‘n Lose.
Yes, but that is the ground state of gambling in general. The real question is what are the “winnings” to be used for. Are they private and thus often removed from useful social purposes, or are they public and thus available for the public benefit?
I generally hew to the opinion that vices are well nigh ubiquitous and ineradicable. The management of said vices is the pertinent endeavour.
In our Neoliberal Dispensation, gambling “taxes,” both public and private (the vig,) are treated as a means to implement the transfer of wealth upward. We of a more Socialist bent would prefer that this transfer of wealth be of a horizontal nature.
Excellent writeup on the World Series and kudos for the reminder about Ohtani’s off field activities. The team itself sets a bad example if you ask me. As you noted, a lot of his salary is deferred, and I call shenanigans on that. Players are essentially taking a bet on their own compensation with those deals, because in order to pull it off, the team would have to be able to meet the future years’ likely increased payrolls along with all the deferred salaries, which requires revenue expanding at a rapid pace. Bubbles everywhere you look.
All this financial engineering allowed the Dodgers to have a massive advantage over other teams. The World Series announcers mentioned the $billion+ in contracts for the core of the Dodgers playoff staff, but what they didn’t mention is that Snell, Glasnow, Ohtani and Sasaki spent most of the year on the injured list (Ohtani batted all year, but didn’t pitch until late), and didn’t really ramp up until September. Not many teams can leave that much salary on the bench and still remain competitive. They had a future hall of famer on Kershaw who they didn’t even need to use! The Dodgers individual players are actually very likeable – I just liked them better when they were on their original teams.
And Houston Asterix’s – you win the internets today for that one!
I will be 70 next year. Baseball was a huge part of my life, as a player, then coach. I am sad to see what they have done to the game I “once” loved. And now I hear rumors there could be a lockout/strike in the next year or so.
Spit!
Ah, I wondered about your handle. Are you left handed by some chance?
Don’t forget Michael Jordan’s temporary retirement, some believe that was a secret suspension for his gambling.
A running list of all the U.S. professional sports stadiums with sportsbooks, USA Today, from 2023. Churchill Downs for the masses.
The man who revolutionized the sport. Michael Jordan gets stake in DraftKings for advisory role, NBA, September 2, 2020.
It was a strong rumor that gambling was behind Jordan’s three year suspension.
Should “wither” be “whither” or am I missing a clever pun that everyone else is getting?
I didn’t read Sokal as a cheap shot, although by the time he got it into full-length book form it was a little overdone for the few examples he came up with. There may be an element of clear-sighted analysis in the morass of Critical Theory, but it’s overwhelmed by the neologisms and repurposing of terminology from other disciplines to mean whatever the author wants it to mean in order to sound “deep”, which is the main criticism Sokal has. The sources he cites just sound too much like “teacher said the term paper had to be twenty pages so here’s a lot of big words and not very sensible associations and analogies I can stuff in to make that count”.
Regarding the wellness trend, I don’t think it’s entirely fueled by declining trust in western medicine. I have met a lot of under 25s who told me their experience following advice from TikTok like it wasn’t strange at all to look there for videos for medical advice.
I asked one of them why and he said it’s just easy to look it up and they usually have “good advice” (he was depressed out of this world despite trying multiple influencers’ advice one after the other). Not to say that the younger gen are all slaves to social media, just that it seems to have cemented itself as a reliable source of information in the minds of a surprising amount of young adults, probably from having constant access to it, and not feeling like persons around them were able to understand them.
Also, the med student apocalypse is already here (I assume, if it’s reached my non-USA patch of the boondocks). I was tutoring some residents and discussing an interesting question they’d raised when someone casually cut in to read out ChatGPT’s take on it. I wasted about twenty minutes, but I think it was worth it, to pivot into why Chat is totally unreliable and inefficient… (this was maybe in July or so).
I am in the UK and enjoy the services of a good general practitioner paid for out of my taxes. I was getting fat, a couple of years ago, and I was advised to lose weight, which I did pretty rapidly with a very austere diet and long walks. I regained some of the weight, which I have again managed to lose over the summer just gone by gentler means. In this I have been following tips from various You-Tubers. That sounds dreadful, but arriving at a readily obtainable, easily cookable, enjoyable diet that will prevent me needing the doctor for various metabolic disorders to which a poor diet may expose me is a complicated business which my doctor, who has many other patients, probably wouldn’t have time to discuss. There are ‘wellness influencers’ out there who encourage one to seek a varied diet with plenty of greens and not much junk food and take some exercise without pushing supplements and the like. I think these are a good thing and weighing up what they have to say doesn’t mean I wouldn’t go to the doctor if I fell off a ladder.
That doesn’t sound dreadful at all, I’d actually encourage it for largely the same reason you said.
My issue is patients coming to the doc months after trying every alternative thing. A similar patient to the one I mentioned above, had taken so much bad advice for their (moderate, hypnotic) addiction that I had to advise them how to get back on their drugs so that I could take them off it safely.
For minor things like general health advice I think searching for your own info is fine but I think that persons realizing they have a problem would be best served seeing a doc first (assuming an ideal world where that’s readily available and feasible) and then taking it from there. For eg. I regularly give my patients links to apps/websites that would help for more info/finding communities that I encourage them to pursue after their visit. In that time, I also tell them that, there’s no way I can keep track of every single resource out there but xyz are the things to look out for if you think you find something interesting, then they can always call the office and ask what I think about something like a new supplement, before they take it, so I can give them more advice to make an informed decision.
I love seeing when patients take their personal health seriously and it makes parts of my job a lot easier but it scares me when patients opt to trust influencers rather than have a problem checked out first. (I can understand, maybe watching a bump on your hand for a few days, but soaking it randomly in a solution ‘cus other people said it helped, for example, I think should be plan b, not plan a).
Since the talk is of gambling, I thought readers might enjoy the story of one of the infamous and stupidest moments of horse racing here in Oz which was all caused by gamblers-
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-03-19/fine-cotton-racing-scandal-dig-podcast/100899712
It would make a great comedy film.
On sports betting:
I just listened to Pablo Torre’s conversation with legendary NBA gambler (and ex Dallas Mavericks exec) Bob Voulgaris interesting. Bob is strongly against the marketing of gambling to young men and the way leagues and networks are in bed with the gambling sites. I learned a lot and the guy talks well. Interesting stuff.
https://youtu.be/o4RrHWCQh08
Thank you for this. The history is fascinating, and accelerating rapidly.
Two thoughts on Sokal: If you think of satire as Baubo lifting her skirt, interrupting what’s oppressive—whether Demeter’s grief or academia’s pretension—Sokol’s generic (in the sense of genre) intrusion likewise exposed (laid bare? pricked? the puns write themselves) the multisyllabic nonsense rife in certain precincts of the professoriate then and now. The magnificently transgressive lexical clothes that the tenured class were wont to go on about turned out to be, in that instance, somewhat less substantial than they had believed. With predictable results. Indignation. Apologetics. Nitpicking. Gnashing. Calls to shoot the messenger. Concern trolling that future contributors might feel “unsafe.” That the diligent toil of countless transvaluators had been besmirched. And some tactless laughter. This is what can happen when a sharp point touches a bubble.
And yet. Could there be something to that title? Think of the debate between Einstein and Bohr, determinism (God does not play dice), albeit unquantifiable (as yet), perhaps because of unknown factors or incalculable complexity, vs. quantum strangeness that may express randomness all the way down. Is that not a hermeneutic debate over how to construe what we observe and measure? And is that not expressive of social and linguistic, to say nothing of epistemological and ontological, constructs? You might even say that debate over the intentions and ethics of the prankish submission practically defines a variety of hermeneutic boundaries. Maybe the emperors of the seminar-tables aren’t entirely naked at that.
“gambling will destroy football, baseball, basketball, and golf”
Do you promise? Is it really true? Will it destroy soccer too? Oh, happy day!
I don’t think its fair to call what Sokal did a cheap shot. My feeling from reading his extensive account from his side of things, in Beyond the Hoax, is that he cares a lot about philosophy. His attitude was never one of dismissal or pettiness. Never once does he explicitly argue that scientists should be the only ones to comment on science, and a reasonable reading of Beyond the Hoax does not imply anything of the sort.
In fact, I believe the defenders of Social Text miss a truly stunning irony. They accuse scientists like Sokal and others in general of relying on unjustified claims to authority to exclude non-scientists from criticism of science. That is, “I’m a scientist, and you’re not . . . ” However, this is either the implicit or sometimes explicit response to anyone who criticizes critical theory and various strands or continental philosophy underlying it. If you don’t understand Derrida, or rather if you say something negative about him, it’s because you haven’t read enough Derrida. You aren’t an expert, you don’t know the right terminology, or you haven’t read enough critical theory.
There is excellent study of science, and criticism of science that doesn’t fall into this trap. However, the kind of criticism practiced by Social Text is totally inaccessible to the uninitiated. They practice the the very thing they claim to criticize, arguing from claims to authority. The editors of Social Text, chose to publish a paper not because they understood it, but because it flattered them and their worldview. If they really practiced a radical questioning of authority, they should have realized their own limitations and told Sokal to buzz off, or at least recognize that a non-expert in critical theory was using their own language in ways that were suspect.
That gets at why I thought the Social Text and critical theory generally deserved what Sokal delivered on one hand.
On the other hand, it does become unbecoming for the outsider to pretty much openly mock an entire enterprise in the fashion that Sokal did, without extending some form of “professional respect.”. Now, the reply might be that the “victims” did not deserve any such professional respect because they are “phoney,” then we are back to where I was at when I thought what Sokal did was undignified and dirty.
But, then, I’ll confess that the original question does keep nagging at me–if something that claims to be a serious discipline can’t tell between gobbledygook and serious work, wtf is it? (Or, conversely, if it can’t openly address a serious challenge to its premises that I think Sokal should have engaged in…but I too know enough about academic publishing that challenges like that from outsiders will never be taken seriously. (Not that hard sciences are that much better–I always recommend The Nemesis Affair by David Raup.)