Tuesday, August 18, 2026

Team Construction and AI



On this day:
1572
Marriage in Paris of the future Huguenot King Henry IV of Navarre to Marguerite de Valois, in a supposed attempt to reconcile Protestants and Catholics.
1587
Virginia Dare, granddaughter of governor John White of the Colony of Roanoke, becomes the first English child born in the Americas.
1590
John White, the governor of the Colony of Roanoke, returns from a supply trip to England and finds his settlement deserted.
1634
Urbain Grandier, accused and convicted of sorcery, is burned alive in Loudun, France.

1963
American civil rights movement: James Meredith becomes the first black person to graduate from the University of Mississippi.

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“The dead, but sceptred sovereigns who still rule
Our spirits from their urns.”--George Gordon Byron, Act III, scene iv. Manfred (1817)

 
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There is a notion among the foolish that prosperity is, somehow, a problem and not a solution.

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The sound of the langur monkey is the only effective deterrent to the smaller rhesus macaques that roam around Delhi in large numbers, stealing food and causing havoc, and mimicking that difficult call has become a dependable occupation.

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We study four Progressive-Era reforms in a triple-difference design—women’s suffrage, the secret ballot, direct primaries, and the direct election of senators—and none produce detectable shifts in who reaches Congress. Our results document a Congress drawn from the most fortunate families in American society in every cohort we observe.--working paper

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Berkshire Hathaway increased its stake in Alphabet by 83% in the second quarter, making the Google parent its third-largest equity holding.
The company ended 14 quarters as a net stock seller, buying nearly $20 billion more equities than it sold.

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Team Construction and AI

The identification of information sources and culling that information will always be of value. But ambition has neither a pathway nor a momentum. There is a very human conclusion here in this analysis of building success.

From a Harvard's Working Knowledge piece on AI and Sports:

"The draft and free agency are not just events. They show you what a team learned about itself last season and what it believes it should be next.

You can see it in this year’s Finals, too. It was a great matchup.

The Knicks and Spurs were two very different team-building stories. The Knicks took a focused approach to building that roster: they were deliberate with their trades, the players they targeted, and the type of team they wanted around Jalen Brunson.

San Antonio followed a different path. That’s more of a homegrown, asset-management story: draft well, develop well, manage your picks and contracts, and build the kind of organization that can win without the advantages of a bigger market.

AI and data can help both of those situations, but only if you already know what you’re trying to build. AI can now help you process more information and test more scenarios. It can be as tailored to your specific situation as you’re willing to define. It can help you compare players, lineups, contracts, and trade-offs faster than before. But it cannot answer the first question for you: What kind of team are we trying to become?"

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