🏀 KuBuckets Archive

@dylans uses a Bill Self quote for his tag line that has long fascinated me.

""We want to be in the game, not be a spectator with all the answers." Bill Self"

I increasingly wonder if Bill Self and staff are tapping into spectators that increasingly seem to be come up with "all the answers" we see kicked around here BEFORE he implements them.

I used to be enormously respectful of the boundary between basketball professionals and fans. I was very 20th Century in that regard. I believed the coaches were professionals and so light years ahead of fans in their understanding of the game and of strategy, tactics, and logistics, if you will in the game of basketball.

I used to see the embrace by Self of strategies and tactics advocated by fans in advance as random coincidences. The coach knew more than everyone back before the internet. The coach now makes $10M per year and so probably has fantastically more resources to expend on mastery of the game, not just more time.

But fans preceding Self and staff to insights has happened enough times now that I am starting question, if there were more than coincidence, or even synchronicity, going on.

Self still comes up with a lot of wrinkles and innovations that fans do not beat him to, or cannot even recognize, until he calls attention to them, so I do not wish to leave an impression that the man I have long called "the genius" out of genuine respect still does not know more than the fans--a lot more.

But a fascinating phenomenon may be emerging because of the internet's enablement of communication and analysis by individuals and its rapid cross pollination with large groups of individuals of varying perspectives and levels of knowledge and diversifications of knowledge.

Online communities, especially small ones like this one, with an enduring and common focus on KU basketball just do accrue knowledge relentlessly. The impact of this may have been being underestimated by me. I have long suspected a capacity for group learning accelerating over time in online communities, same as I have long recognized the capacity for group learning to be bamboozled with sophisticated spin and misinformation. But here is the thing: as we are increasingly observing in the large online communities that discuss all manner of subjects, but especially those engaging in various facets of politics, that the more TPTB engage in sophisticated mind control and disinformation campaigns up, the faster these online communities catch on to propaganda techniques and the faster they begin to identify poisoned wells of information, well-poisoning techniques, and new patterns of discourse that recover faster and reestablish faster integrity of discourse. The more sophisticated the lying and disinformation the more sophisticated the communities become about how they are being lied to.

But what I have underestimated IMHO is that group intelligence accumulates as well as group insight into bull shiting/disinfo/well-poisoning techniques.

What if this online community really IS getting smarter as the years go by about all things basketball?

What if the fans really are becoming a collective resource about the game that is growing richer by the day, by the season?

It is scary how much more I know about basketball after ten years of online interaction about the sport and I knew quite a bit about college basketball before I started.

I find it at least possible now that down stream fan communities that engage rigorously in keeping up with and analyzing the latest in college basketball statistics, and strategy and tactics, may overtime become a harvestable resource for coaching staffs looking to try to innovate and stay ahead of the competition.

I know this sounds like sacrilege to the traditional way of coaching and governing countries in the age of experts, but I have a hunch that the next great discovery of experts is going to be that there is a fantastically under utilized and under data mined resource out there that the can bring into play for the advancement of strategic and tactical thinking rather than just for spying on it and brain washing it and terrorizing it.

Market feed back before markets were hamstrung with top down controls gave western economic developments huge advantages.

Political markets back before they were hamstrung with top down controls gave western political systems tremendous advantages in political innovation.

Perhaps military and sports organizations need to begin to look at their fan bases as knowledge bases, not just money bases, that can be data mined for strategic and tactical knowledge that can lead to innovations current leaderships are simply just to slow and legacy ridden to recognize and adapt to.

Welcome to the really brave new world!

The world where not only AI, but the collective strategic and tactical and logistical intelligence of cultures are data mined for how to more effectively engage the world militarily and athletically.

Imagine the stampede to a renaissance in education of our nation if our leaders began to understand AGAIN that the intelligence of the nation is its greatest strategic, tactical, logistical and technological match up advantage. And what if they realize that perhaps the most underdeveloped and underutilized category is group intelligence capable of triggering nonlinear leaps in matchup advantage? What if we can not only benefit hugely from identifying the highest IQ types, but what if we should be identifying and data mining the intelligence of communities, of cultures? OMG!!

It may seem obvious what I'm talking about here, but there is some subtlety to it.

Currently we have educated to find the brilliant persons and shove them up as high as we could as fast as we could to leverage off their individual high IQs, while educating the rest to enable the carrying out of insight of the great thinkers. But what if there were another category of great thinking? What if there were a category of great, untapped thinking at the group level. We have done this in the past by creating epistemic ghettoes called universities where we group brainiacs together to try to get some nonlinear advances in thinking. But what if the online communities of our world are almost without our knowing it becoming massive concentrations of untapped thinking data, not just consumer data. What if online communities that focus on certain categories of activity are now tappable wells of innovation and insight, if only hidebound leadership would wake up and smell the epistemic coffee brewing online?

Remember, rock oil bubbled up in seeps for thousands of years in the midst of all stages of human cultural living without any one thinking of doing anything with it but putting it in bowls or on the ends of sticks and burning it. Recognizing untapped resources under our noses is the essence of human advancement.

Education of individuals to reach the maximum potential of their intellects is the greatest strategic tool and weapon the world has ever discovered and periodically underutilizes, because of the bias in leadership to want to monopolize knowledge to enhance its own legacy control.

If America wants to be great again, first educate its human beings to think creatively and rigorously, then build the infrastructure necessary to trigger and harvest their collective thinking, as well as individual thinking, BEFORE the rest of the world does it. Don't just keep using the internet for eavesdropping. You're never going to find out anything strategically big and worth a shit with 24/7 surveillance. All you are going to do is scare us all into finding a way to overthrow you all; that much history tell us for certain about top down constraints. Human beings are absolutely evolved to throw off top down constraints endlessly.

But if we begin to free persons and encourage them to generate, share and accrue knowledge, well then: a.) things are going to get better even faster than they have in the past, and b.) persons are going to be a lot happier and more fulfilled. Now listen up! Happy, fulfilled people need far less governing and far fewer drugs to put up with the hideous pain and depression that flows from totalitarian governance.

We can't lose educating all of us and capitalizing on the individual and collective knowledge we accrue. Even the private oligarchs can't lose.

It is amazing how much knowledge of basketball this web site has accrued on a shoestring and by serendipity.

Even if it is ahead of the coaching staff and management only 20 percent of the time, that 20 percent alone would probably be enough of an edge to push the program to another level of winning above the competition, if the coaching staff were open to harvesting it.

How might they do this? Share more and more of their knowledge with us, so long as it doesn't hamper their abilities to win games. Get us thinking more and more about the game, about strategies and tactics, about recruiting, about player psychology, etc. The more we think the more information we accrue and the more information we accrue the quicker we are to come to insights that might be useful to the coaching staff. Why would this possibly work? Because time is always the limiting constraint. A staff of coaches only have so many man hours to devote to thinking about basketball and they have to think with great focus on the immediate situations--the next game. Fans bring more man hours of thinking to every problem that coaches might steer them onto. The community brings more. Large communities bring still more. As with most things, there are probably diminishing returns at some point to the size of online communities regarding their knowledge accrual, same as with research teams, and universities and coaching staffs. But we don't know what those are yet to my knowledge. I've never seen research of online cultures to see learn: a.) do they get smarter; b.) can they be engineered to think and accrue more knowledge; and c.) that knowledge be harvested.

And imagine if all the fan web sites that were vastly bigger were actively encouraged to think and accrue knowledge. We are talking about a virtually untapped resource.

It is absolutely scary how much farther the already brilliant coaching staff we have could take the program by leveraging off the rapidly accruing knowledge in its fan base, if it were to actively develop its fan base. And an actively engaged and committed fan base would be less likely to fire a coach IMHO.

Stability through increased knowledge.

Stop using the internet to break everything and everyone down.

Start using it to build knowledge productivity, not just find out what buttons to push to make them buy shit they don't need, or divide them to allow another stupid, unproductive pirate oligarchy to take over without any net improvement in productivity and wealth generation.

And more wins for KU!!!

Rock Chalk!!!

@jaybate-1.0 In context the quote was after an elite eight loss. Bill wanted to be playing not watching others play. It's more of a bash on DickieV or Bill himself in that instance. It really has nothing to do with us board rats. I just wish we could bottle that feeling the hurt/desperation/urgency and pull it out as needed. It usually happens too late.

@jaybate-1.0 I suspect most professional coaches feel that if you give enough internet bandwidth to enough monkeys--er, uh, fans--tapping on innumerable tablets and phones, eventually one of them will transmit an electronic message containing a piece of wisdom that looks like it sprang from the pages of Allen's or Rupp's or Wooden's notebooks.

@mayjay

You response reminds me a some of the French scoffing at the British that greatly broadened compulsory and higher education to lower classes to tap into more brain power expressly to surpass the French in science, economic productivity and military force applied to grand strategic ends.

The British kicked the scoffing French's ASSes until now when France is everyone's bitch.

Oui?

Will Lon intentionally foul a player that shot 70% in his previous game or does the guy have other tricks up his sleeve?

@Gunman he won't admit it.

@Gunman He is going to have his own players wear white and foul Trae Young on 3 pt attempts so he can score some points on those shots finally.

Marcus is about 50%

@jaybate-1.0

jaybate 1.0 said: @mayjay

The British kicked the scoffing French's ASSes until now when France is everyone's bitch.

Oui?

No, no.

How do you figure that? France has the second largest economy in Western Europe (Germany is first) and the most powerful military...yes, more powerful than the British. You are looking at a dated stereotype that has not been true for a while now.

@jaybate-1-0 Like anything in life, when you devote time to it, you are going to get better at it. We all devote a lot of time (maybe too much??? No WAY!!!) to KU hoops. I recently agreed to coach my 15 year old son's indoor soccer team. I know little about soccer but coached basketball for a long time. I have watched enough soccer and gleaned from observing his coach's both good and bad to know enough to do a serviceable job for a rec indoor league. We even won a couple games! Years of observing, studying, dissecting, and breathing the greatest game of all time will lead to knowledge. We won't have the X - O depth of Larry Brown, but that does not mean we won't know key parts of the game.

Look at Dok's free throw shooting. We were all going nuts saying why has a coach not pulled him aside and taught him the right way to do it? Lo and behold a week later young Dok has a brand new form and a skyrocketing free throw percentage. We could all see the fundamental problem because we all (for the most part :-)) know quite a bit about roundball.

Self is a smart guy. If there is a way to pick up an edge from anything he will be doing it. Now the ultimate would be in the presser when Bill goes: "Well something Jaybate 1.0 observed really altered my approach...."

For years I told my friends to read this message board (and it's previous iteration) because the analysis, info and insights were far greater than the drivel the press (read: Keegan!) was generating. Plus the writing is often of a much higher quality and there is a lot more humor. Who needs the stinking press! It is a brave new communication world.

Time + knowledge = wisdom. It is fun to get wiser about this great game as we all analyze and pontificate together.

@JayHawkFanToo

Nice of you to weigh in. Alas, you are obviously conflating my remarks about England's and France's differing approaches to enabling their respective industrial revolutions in their respective domains with what is going on currently, and at that you appear not to have much grasp of the current French economic situation in the global economy. These are easy mistakes to make: discrediting one argument with unrelated circumstances. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, or perhaps you just made a mistake in your reasoning. What ever, I will try to square you away.

Yes, yes, its been widely studied and written about in histories grinding differing agendas regarding the industrial revolution. Education was one of several decisive factors in the Brits getting a leg up on the French during the industrial revolution. The British bet correctly on broadening educational access to increase and accelerate identification of innovative thinkers and so succeeded in speeding industrialization and naval architecture advances. The Brits did other things as well, but broadening of educational access was one of them. The French liberalized educational access much less, because they viewed themselves as larger population and a land based empire with Naval linkages, rather than as a naval empire with ports, and trade routes, and so the French felt more in need of maintaining their legacy feudal descended agriculture economy far more so than the British. One put it this way: the French were landlubbers that sailed to export their ag goods, and the Brits were sailors that came into port only to trade. The French bet the existing French upper classes, if well educated, could supply all the knowledge and advances they needed to stay on top. Alas, the failure to broaden educational access, as much as England did, bit them in the ass. The French upper class just could not produce the quantity of educated brains that England did by opening up education to more of its underclasses. This is old news.

USA took the British lesson and chose education on steroids and leap frogged both of them. Well it was a bit more complicated than that. USA tried to emulate both English and French approaches to curricula and emphasized early ID in all social classes of high IQ types and focused educational resources on skimming high IQs from ALL classes that then current prejudices would permit. Again, old news. Can't believe you haven't read about this.

Now if you want to talk 20th and 21st Centuries, then there were different drivers and objectives and goals and its not remotely germane to my remark; this was a different era, one when the Anglo-American alliance sought to (and did) take over Europe from the old orders and turn the European nation states inexorably into vassal states of the Anglo-American alliance. The old orders were far more complicated that we need to get into here. Suffice it to say the Anglo-American alliance was focused on breaking down ANY orders capable of resisting the alliance's growing trading influence on the continent and in the colonial regions those continental powers held control of. WWI is really the place to start for this sort of thing, but few accurately understand its underpinnings at all, and besides it would be a digression from the basic point which is this: I was referring to the British leap frogging the French in the industrial revolution by using more liberal access to education. You were conflating with irrelevant, illogical connections to today.

That should just about do it.

@jaybate-1.0

Yada, yada, yada...

I was referring to you statement:

"The British kicked the scoffing French’s ASSes until now when France is everyone’s bitch."

emphasis on the "NOW" and "IS"

How IS France NOW everyone's bitch when they have the second largest economy in the the biggest and strongest military in Western Europe?

You are still living in the 20th century and are painfully unaware of what is going on in Europe. SMH.

JayHawkFanToo said:

@jaybate-1.0

Yada, yada, yada...

I was referring to you statement:

"The British kicked the scoffing French’s ASSes until now when France is everyone’s bitch."

emphasis on the "NOW" and "IS"

How IS France NOW everyone's bitch when they have the second largest economy in the the biggest and strongest military in Western Europe?

You are still living in the 20th century and are painfully unaware of what is going on in Europe. SMH.

No, you appear categorically incorrect on this and you appear to know it.

Rock Chalk!

@JayHawkFanToo

P.S.: Naa, na, na poo, poo.

I know more about what's going on in Europe than you do!!!

Howling!

@jaybate-1.0

Sure you do. Say hello to disco and bell bottoms for me. :smile:

@JayHawkFanToo

Good luck with the polishing.

Remember:

KU 35

WVU 2

Enjoy Europe when you finally get there.

@jaybate-1.0

I lived in Europe for 2 years, have you?

@JayHawkFanToo

Why do you ask?

@jaybate-1.0 @JayHawkFanToo

Thank you both for this lengthy exercise that has provided several moments of chuckling as you have both pretended to be arguing over precisely . . . nothing.

It was very clever of you both to agree to work together to illustrate how people get caught up in silly arguments on the Internet over a word or two while the topic at hand gets completely ignored. This is something I know I have done many times. The equivalent of, "Are you looking at me?" in and then outside a bar, minus the cue sticks and bicycle chains and dropped beers.

I feel like a new man. Thank you again!

@mayjay

It would make a good Seinfeld episode. :smile:

@Fightsongwriter maybe markelle fultz should get with whomever fixed dokes form

mayjay said:

@jaybate-1.0 @JayHawkFanToo

Thank you both for this lengthy exercise that has provided several moments of chuckling as you have both pretended to be arguing over precisely . . . nothing.

It was very clever of you both to agree to work together to illustrate how people get caught up in silly arguments on the Internet over a word or two while the topic at hand gets completely ignored. This is something I know I have done many times. The equivalent of, "Are you looking at me?" in and then outside a bar, minus the cue sticks and bicycle chains and dropped beers.

I feel like a new man. Thank you again!

And thank you for playing your role of conflict arbitrageur and fake judge.

I really like this game.

Oh, just kidding around, of course.

Trying to help you de-wad your wear. :-)

@mayjay

P.S.: And I'm getting used to this arguing about nothing technique. I've read about it a number of places. I try to see this glass half full. To wit, isn't it marvelous that our humble little site appears to be keeping up with the big online community Jones' with their paid shills and bots and their vogue of driving pointless conflict to content steer?

Howling!

Don't you just love amateurism?

I keep trying to tell you: there's a lot to be learned from data mining collective intelligence of online communities, rather than just moronically surveilling them like chipped apes with tactical flash lights.

Should I be worried that people aren't getting along? Or are we getting along? Or are we not getting along but I shouldn't worry? Or should I worry but am I living in age where anything resembling authoritarianism is now rejected and moderators sensibilities no longer matter?

Weird times man.

Somebody tell me everything is going to be ok.

@approxinfinity Let it be me! Yes, everything is going to be okay.

And pay no attention to the fact that neither I, nor anyone else, can answer this question as to whether it will be okay any time in our personal, or even human, history.

But remember, it doesn't help to get upset about things you cannot do anything about. So, chill, sit back, grab some nachos or tofu or whatever floats your boat, and just enjoy the ride.