This week, we were shown an expert of “Basketball: A Love Story” called “Analytically Correct.” in recent times, it seems that the labor force, the players, are being recruited based on the information given by a machine that analyzes everything there is to them, all the little things, from the best angle of shooting the ball ( I don't know the technical word,:( sorry! ) to other stuff about them. Then from there they pick and choose which players will make up their team. Now, back in the day, though I don't know how far back, players were chosen by the managers or coaches, which ever, based on just seeing them perform in the court, using their own two eyes (duh). They pick the players that have a desired skill, but having a machine do it instantly for them is great, but what the machine doesn't do is tell them about the feeling of the labor force.
Now as part of the working class, I work at a restaurant, where all the workers are capable of doing the job after we have sufficient training, what follows is the motivation to follow through. If my co-workers and I were to be analyzed, the results would be that we all have a specific skill required to get the job done, but what isn't taken into account would be teamwork. After all, teamwork makes the dream work. For instance, all my co-workers and I have a skill, but lets say I am put in a shift with person #1, who I just strongly dislike, although the work is done, inefficiency would decrease as there is tension. Why? Well I won't communicate with them as well as I would with others, which could cause mistakes and problems. But that would contradict what the machine says because analytically us two working together should bring decrease inefficiency down not up. No matter how intelligent the device is, it doesn't take into account human emotions.
Now, taking that into account, you can have the best team in the history of basketball, analytically, but if they can't work together as a team then they are useless. If were to only recruit players based on their analytics only then there is a possibility that instead of bringing the team up, they would only bring a the team down. I think that there should be a balance of each idea: use the stats from that the technology is giving you but also take into account how the players interact with other people. In a perfect world, that should bring the inefficiency t of the labor market down.
That is all for my take of this short clip. Byeeee!!!!!!!!!!
Loved how brought in your personal experience working at your job and tied it into the in-class documentary “Basketball: A Love Story” Brittany! I definitely agree with you about how there should be a balance between statistics and measuring social interactions or dynamics when accounting for labor force. As you pointed out the downside to machines are that they fail to address human emotions including motivation and teamwork, but I think the upside is that they are less prone to error because analytics can show consistency whereas emotions are constantly changing. For example, a player or worker could be happy one week, increasing efficiency but then upset the next week, decreasing efficiency. For a more concrete example: the nature of diseconomies of scale and the marginal cost curve also show that the when more labor is added, efficiency decreases. Besides tension and communication, I think factors that affect productivity levels also also depend on the types of work environments. Anyways, solely relying on one source of information for data and using it towards predicting can be dangerous.
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