A RealGM Scandal, and a Conversation about Projects

[jjgp111292]

I don’t trust any number or tracking they ever documented themselves unless it’s verified by someone that isn’t an absolute sociopath. Their circle jerk threads with their friends and alts were cringe enough.

Honestly the biggest goofball ring ever encountered in basketball talk.

My skeptical approach to home-brewed stats seems to be yet another W for me on this thread:
viewtopic.php?t=2402176#p114793216

You would think the guy you dismissed as a fan turning out to be an official NBA game tracker would humble you, but alas...

[One_and_Done]

The important thing is we all remain committed to racking up Ws

+1,000. The whole issue is 2 posters consuming with winning and the its nbd guy is also consumed with winning. Probably just a weird coincidence though.

I mean, it certainly is given I called out Enigma for his conduct in the RPOY at the time it was happening, criticised all the ballboy votes or dubious mail-ins like Kola, and publicly criticised KdO trying to recruit me to discord over a year ago.

I just don't think this is such an earth shattering event. Ban those 2, put the project on hiatus till after the top 100 one, and next time have some minimal post/participation requirements. Easy.

[Doctor MJ]

And this is the real unfortunate thing, isn't it? To spend so many hours, days, and years on this forum lecturing others about "data-driven approaches" only for all their own tracking data, and whatever concocted all-in-one "impact" metrics to be forever tainted/asterisked because none of us know at this point how much they were juicing the numbers for the sole purpose of pushing a specific agenda. All that work, time, and effort just flushed down the credibility drain.

This is actually even more wild than the vote-rigging stuff. "Manipulate the data to achieve a desired outcome" is bad-faith arguing 101, and these dudes made it their entire identity as being the "show your work/all relevant data" knobs that I referenced earlier. It all just ended up being a parody of itself.

I really appreciate the subtopic (thanks to NO-), and I want to want to highlight the way you frame it Ron.

Broadly, reputation matters when you want people to take your work seriously, and when it comes to what I'll call "professional integrity" in presenting data, it can make it reasonable to not even look at data from that source.

I do think that the fact that we're all just seeing each other as handles on a site can make people feel like they can behave badly in whatever way in one community and have it be no consequence to them elsewhere, but aside from the fact that that's never a guarantee on that, it's a bit different when you don't actually remain "elsewhere".

[parsnips33]

The question is do you see this forum as a battleground in which to slay your ideological enemies, or do you see it as a shared community that we all participate in and should take (at least some) responsibility in upholding?

At the risk of being seen to care too much, I think that's a really important, fundamental question. What does this community, to the extent that it's a community at all, stand for?

[falcolombardi]

Fwiw for the MAMBA thingh i contacted the stat creator about his stat being influenced to get certain desired rwsults for players at the top since that is not a particularly uncommon goal og advanced stats (like PER being the first advanced stat made around having jordan 1st or VORP/BPM not sure which changed because westbrook was too high on it) which i dont think is inherently a bad thingh as we all want our advanced metrics to correlate to eye test to a degree to show they pass the smell test

No, I was not influenced by “OhayoKD” and “Ceaser Lowry” to make changes to a metric. What actually happened was, I had an issue with my computer and had to redo alot of work, and I realized I made a few slight mistakes in my PBP parsing and summarizing the box scores from the API, so I restarted some of those processes from scratch. I ended up weighting rim protection more in the second version that tested a bit better and was more stable year to year in its performance. I submitted for the APBR win projection contest prior to last season for live testing, where it got second place and was leading by the trade deadline (Since metric projections cant take into account trades of course). If people want message logs of me going to mac repair in LA and not being able to get it fixed at that time, then sure.

I went around asking people about the metric, how it looked, etc, and that does include the discord server. This isnt out of some crazy respect I have for the discord server, I view it as a server where people talk about basketball sometimes and anime other times, so I asked there, and in other places as well. My interpretation when he asked, “Did you include Fouls in the prior” and I said yes, I did. How I would go about “doing something with fouls” to prop up lebron, im not even sure how that would be done. I like lebron, the player, alot, but I didnt try to make a impact metric to prop him up, I made it to have something cool on the resume. The player's that were helped the most by the main adjustments I made were mostly rim protectors, if I were to remake it Im not sure if I would keep that same emphasis at least to that extent.

The entire basis of rigging it solely for Lebron is a pretty serious accusation because I took this project pretty seriously, so I don’t appreciate being brought into this weird internet forum drama as a piece of evidence, not to mention it looks like this was the second time the same person said so.

I ran many different tests and versions for the prior, and picked the one that tested the best overall. I don’t particularly view it as a pro-Lebron metric, I think that a discussion about how I would rig it specifically for Lebron, I’d just have to ask how would I even go about doing that?

People can criticize it or say it stinks, that's fine I'm open to a discussion on what I could have done better in creating it, but don't accuse it of being biased or rigged for the sake of this petty internet feud. I dont even think Lebron looked good there so i dont understand how I rigged it for him. I took it down awhile ago anyways, if people on the discord are posting the results here or anything they dont have permission to do so and shouldnt do that.

But the idea that I rigged it for Lebron for this discord argument, by creating a metric where he ranked first place 1 time from 2015 to 2024, is a bit absurd right? The idea that its a fake concocted impact metric, when I submitted it as a part of preseason projections last season and it got 2nd place in the live APBR forum contest last year and was in first place up to the trade deadline seems a bit silly right? I dont think there’s anything wrong with someone not liking it, but someone arguing its fake or rigged over some internet forum nonsense is silly

[Doctor MJ]

Okay folks, I'm going to end this thread here. I'll lock it but leave it as an Announcement until I replace it with the next one.

Remember, the next one will not be about the present scandal or any specific posters. We're talking about what we want going forward, and on that note, I'll leave parsnips' wise questions, for your own consideration, before we get into granular details.

The question is do you see this forum as a battleground in which to slay your ideological enemies, or do you see it as a shared community that we all participate in and should take (at least some) responsibility in upholding?

At the risk of being seen to care too much, I think that's a really important, fundamental question. What does this community, to the extent that it's a community at all, stand for?