The Cult of Optimization is Crumbling Everywhere You Look.



People are tired of having their lives "optimized" by the technocracy that has dominated corporate thinking for the past twenty years.

In sports, Sportswriter Evan Drellich observes that the Seattle Mariners exemplify this tired way of thinking while the Padres seem to understand what people really want.

He writes how Mariners Jerry Dipoto at an end-of-season press conference made a plea to fans to "be patient as we build a roster that will win 54% of the time."

The problem, says Drellich "is that this mindset is just dreadfully, painfully boring. Soul sucking." Nobody wants to hear the goal this year is, ‘We’re going to win 54 percent of the time.’”

The lesson of all the rule changes in MLB this year he says is; "That nothing is more paramount than entertainment. The new rules made the sport on aggregate more enjoyable, and the owners in turn reaped financial rewards."

And the Padres seem to get it. "The Padres of 2023 assembled some massive names and contracts. They played terribly. The team also sold the most tickets in their franchise history, more than 3 million. They were interesting, a curiosity, and that sold. You don’t have to spend as much as the Padres to foster intrigue, either." "Stars and storylines should be the goal," says Drellich.

Russell Carlton in "The New Ball Game: The Not-So-Hidden Forces Shaping Modern Baseball" makes a similar point. In the war of statistics, he says, "When you try to optimize the rational, you lose the unseen beauty of things."

In advertising, Binet & Field have shown that this obsession to optimize both lower and upper-funnel advertising makes for soul-sucking, boring, and less effective communications.

In economics, Peter Coy references two new books in his NYT op-ed "We Need to Know When to Opt Out of Optimizing." Both books; “Optimal Illusions: The False Promise of Optimization” (2023), by Coco Krumme and “When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America’s Obsession with Economic Efficiency” (2020), by Roger Martin, point out the downside of viewing society and the economy as a perfect machine that can be optimized.

Returning to Drellich he says, "In a world so crowded with alternative ways for people to spend their time and money, the 'sustainability' obsession is penny-wise and pound-foolish. If most every team is playing some sort of tepid Wall Street simulation, it comes at the sacrifice of drama that could actually be a separator for the sport overall — and for owners’ wallets."

In marketing, optimization sacrifices interestingness. When a brand comes across as "optimized" we remove the unseen beauty in the unexplainable, the surprise.

And in all parts of life what humans seem to want and will pay for is what's interesting.

Advertising brand marketingeffectiveness Interestingness ThatsInteresting

Drellich: MLB teams should actually try to win instead of hawking 'sustainability' theathletic.com • 5 min read

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