{"id":19933,"date":"2019-02-08T14:48:50","date_gmt":"2019-02-08T19:48:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=19933"},"modified":"2019-02-08T14:48:50","modified_gmt":"2019-02-08T19:48:50","slug":"ruminations-about-replacement-value","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2019\/02\/08\/ruminations-about-replacement-value\/","title":{"rendered":"ruminations about replacement value"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Your Humble Blogger has some thoughts about irreplaceability running around in the old brainbox this week, and what\u2019s a blog for if it\u2019s not for writing those thoughts up and what happens, right?\r\n

Anyway\u2014I have made the point about Harvard<\/a>, that if the two thousand or so people who were admitted this year were replaced by the two thousand or so who were next on the list, nobody would be able to tell the difference. Every year there are plenty of people who don\u2019t get admitted into Harvard who are indistinguishable from those that do, and vice versa. I made that point in reference to the Oscars, where (in my opinion) we could easily replace all the nominated actors with a new list of equally worthy nominations, because there will always be more really good performances than there are slots for awards nominations, and because while there are good performances and bad ones, there is no objective way to correctly rank the good ones.\r\n

I was thinking about this recently in reference to an article in The Grauniad<\/cite> on the television show Friends<\/cite><\/a>, in which both Larry Hankin and Christina Pickles, who were much older and more experienced than the stars of the show, relate how impressed they were with the young actors. Ms. Pickles specifically says that she \u201cknew Jennifer Aniston would be a huge success\u201d because of she was \u201ca really special actor\u201d. And I thought, but surely most really special actors do not make huge successes<\/i>.\r\n

Now, I never really got Friends<\/cite>, but I do understand that it was a phenomenon, an outlier, one of the most successful shows ever and one of the most successful casts ever. If instead of casting the six actors they did, they had cast six entirely different people, it would almost certainly have been less successful, simply because it\u2019s extremely rare for a show to be that successful. But I don\u2019t know that I would have thought, really, that if you had cast six different people that they would have been worse actors in any sense. I would have said that the ones they cast turned out to be the right<\/i> actors, not necessarily the best actors.\r\n

On the other hand\u2026 I repeatedly referred to John Kerry as the Neifi Perez of Politics<\/a>, by which I meant that he was very, very good at it\u2014much better than you would think, since you only really see him in comparison with other people whose skills are even more extraordinary. And I don\u2019t know if I ever went into this in any detail, but I think this is something about athletics that\u2019s it\u2019s a bit difficult to get one\u2019s head around. When you\u2019re in high school or middle school, you probably were in gym with someone who was the best athlete in the school. That person was extraordinary, even at that age. Ran the fastest, had the best hand-eye coordination, was the strongest, all that stuff. That boy or girl may have seemed like an alien with superpowers\u2014he did at my school. And that maybe that guy went on to a Division One college and it immediately became obvious that he wasn\u2019t up to that standard. And most of the guys who play at Division One colleges aren\u2019t up to the professional standard. I\u2019m met two guys who were picked in the MLB draft, and both of them told me that they had no chance\u2014none\u2014of ever hitting the curve balls of the guys who were in the rookie leagues. And the guys who can hit the rookie leaguers mostly don\u2019t make it to the majors. And most of the guys who make it to the majors aren\u2019t all-stars.\r\n

My point being that unlike my assessment of the incoming class of Harvard frosh, if you replaced the players on the Baltimore Orioles with those on the Lehigh Valley IronPigs or the Memphis Redbirds, everyone would be able to spot the difference in the quality of play immediately. That\u2019s not even a question. Baseball statheads argue about what replacement value<\/i> is because baseball players are difficult to replace. Harvard frosh aren\u2019t. And politicians\u2026 I mean, I think my Neifi Perez of Politics line only works if the best politicians really are irreplaceable in some sense, so I suppose I\u2019ve been thinking that politicians generally are like that.\r\n

On the other hand, my reaction to the candidates currently running for the Democratic Nomination is that they\u2019re pretty much all fine. Senators Klobuchar, Harris, Booker, Gillebrand and Warren, and Governors Inslee, McAuliffe and Hickenlooper, and Sherrod Brown, and Beto O\u2019Rourke, and Juli\u00e1n Castro, and even Handsome Ol\u2019 Joe Biden, Gd Bless Him, all seem like they would do just fine in the White House. I mean, I have preferences, and I expect I will have stronger preferences as time passes, but that\u2019s a dozen people who I think I\u2019d be perfectly happy voting for in November. Doesn\u2019t that make them replaceable?\r\n

[this is a line indicating the passage of time, like 🕐 🕑 🕒 🕓 🕔 🕕 🕖 🕗 🕘 🕙 🕚 🕛 or a series of ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ things, which all look so terrible on a blog post, don\u2019t they?]\r\n

Having written all the above a couple of days ago and having set it aside to consider if it was worth posting, today I discover, in the obituary for Albert Finney<\/a> that he rose to fame after (among other things) going on for Laurence Olivier in Coriolanus<\/cite>. I wish I\u2019d seen Albert Finney onstage, and also that there was proper film available of his Shakespeare roles (Sir\u2019s Lear in The Dresser<\/cite> definitely not counting), and I consider him one of the great actors of a generation that includes (f\u2019r\u2019ex) Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi and Eileen Atkins\u2014but replacing Laurence Olivier? Yeesh.\r\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-item"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19933"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19937,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19933\/revisions\/19937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}