We are steadily moving from a qualitative to a quantitative world, not just in the sciences but also in politics, sports, mass entertainment and many other creative endeavors.

    The old guard—mostly over 45 (but not everybody over 45!)—is somewhere between despondent and angry over this state of affairs. Many of these people feel that numbers lack nuance, that measurements lack emotions, that data lack drama, and most of all that numerical insight lacks human understanding. And they've got good reason to feel this way, because it's in their DNA.

    Human beings have evolved as storytellers, readers and listeners. Dating back to at least 2000 BC and the writing of the Gilgamesh—the epic poem from Mesopotamia, regarded as the first surviving piece of literature—we have explained our lives and the world around us in story. Narrative is not just how we discuss the world, it's how we interpret it, how we bundle our neurological impulses and responses to make sense of our immediate environment, which has far too many data points for us to ever live solely by the numbers.

    But narrative has been digitally disrupted for most of us, since the mid-aughts. Now, instead of experiencing a packaged story we're able to simply choose the bits and pieces we want to read, listen to, or watch.

    In sports, watching highlights has trumped the experience of the game, so much so that one NFL team is considering showing the RedZone channel on their stadium scoreboard during games. In music, songs have trumped albums. Images captured as pictures and video now trump the experience of life—go to any sporting event or rock concert and it's clear that most of us are far more interested in capturing the moment than truly experiencing it. It's no longer about being at the event, as much as it's about showing the world that you were at the event. Many of us now feel we can experience the world through an HD screen. Indeed, as of this summer we can merge ourselves with the screen by putting on a pair of internet enabled glasses that provide us with a steady stream of augmented reality and digitally annotates our life.

    All of which means that if you are under 25 there's a good chance you are an active participant of the first generation since the Gilgamesh not compelled to put life into a narrative, if for no other reason than you're too distracted.

    But the bits of life are not the guts of life.

    In order to communicate causality, theory, insight, comedy or drama in depth—in order to truly move audiences, whether they be one person or millions—data still need narrative, because people are hardwired to be moved by emotion.

    For those of us who care about storytelling in the digital age, the question has become how do we get the best of both? How do we create new forms of storytelling that incorporate the quantitative into the qualitative?

    Television, frankly, has been awful at this. And sports television in particular has been surprisingly awful at creatively integrating statistics into its coverage. For the most part it has simply littered the screen with scores and tickers—it's done a great job of bringing us multiple streams of real-time information, but it's done a lousy job of using data to bring any new dimension to what we're watching.

    我们正在稳步地从一个质的世界走向一个量的世界，不仅仅是在科学领域，甚至在政治、运动、大众娱乐和其它创造性领域也是一样。

    面对这股潮流，很多抵御派感到消极失望，甚至是恼怒。这些抵御派大多年纪在45岁以上（但并不是说每个45岁以上的人都是抵御派），他们中的许多人认为数字失于精致，标准缺乏感情，数据没有戏剧性，而且数字化的视角不易于人类理解。他们这么想有充分的理由，而原因就存在于人类的DNA里。

    人类早就进化成为一种爱讲故事、爱读故事、爱听故事的生物。早在公元前2000年左右，美索不达米亚平原上就诞生了史诗《吉尔伽美什》（Gilgamesh），它也是现存最早的文学作品。从那时起，人类就开始用故事的形式解释我们的生活和我们的世界。故事不仅仅是我们探讨世界的方式，也代表了我们对世界的解读，如何把我们神经的冲动和反应结合起来，以理解我们当下所处的环境。而环境中有太多太多的数据点，不可能全部单纯地靠数字的方式来解决。

    对我们大多数人来说，我们熟悉的叙事习惯已经被数据颠覆了，尤其是自从2005年左右以来。现在，我们不必在一串打包整合的故事中听我们想听的内容，而是可以直接选择我们想要听到、观看到的那一部分内容。

    观看体育节目的时候，与其看完整场比赛，人们更爱看精彩时刻。以至于美国国家美式橄榄球大联盟（NFL）的一支橄榄球队甚至考虑在比赛的过程中，在球馆的记分板上播放NFL的RedZone频道。音乐方面，人们更喜欢听某几首歌曲，而不是听完整个专辑。甚至人们对图片和视频中的影像的喜爱超过了真实的生活体验。比如你到任何体育比赛或音乐会去转转，你就会发现，我们大多数人更感兴趣的是捕捉下这一刻的镜头，而不是真实感受它。也就是说重要的不是参加这个活动，重要的是告诉全世界我参加了这个活动。现在很多人觉得，我们通过一块高清屏幕就可以体验整个世界。事实也的确如此，从今年夏天开始，我们只要戴上一个能上网的现实增强技术的眼镜，就可以把我们自己和屏幕融为一体，用数字化的手段解读世界。

    这一切意味着，如果你的年龄在25岁以下，那么你很有可能将成为继《吉尔伽美什》叙事时代之后，一个新时代的主动参与者。

    但是数字化的生活并不是生活的本质。

    要想深刻地传达信息——不论是因果论、原理、洞见、喜剧或是戏剧，要想真正感动观众——不论他们是一个人还是一百万人，数据仍然需要会讲故事，因为人们生来就是感情动物。

    对于在数码时代仍然关心怎样讲故事的人来说，问题是我们怎样能同时取二者的长处？如何建立一种新的叙事方式，让它既涵盖了量化的需求，也照顾了质的需求？

    坦率地说，电视在这方面做得很差，而体育节目尤其不擅长把数据统计创造性地融入到节目里，最多只不过是把比赛的分数和时间显示在电视上。体育节目很擅长为我们带来多个实时信息流，但是非常不擅长利用数据给我们观看的内容带来任何新的维度。

    Nate Silver's arrival at ESPN (DIS) just might change that.

    ESPN, which doth bestride the sports world like a colossus, isn't just the biggest sports network in North America, it's also one of the continent's largest news and information companies. When it comes to news and data-gathering ESPN has scale—massive scale—and that ability to capture and parse big data is ESPN's next competitive advantage.

    At ESPN Nate Silver is potentially an intellectual leader whose presence could be transformative to sports television. At the New York Times, Silver was a prognosticator and a brand, a conjuror who with his FiveThirtyEight.com blog was scarily accurate in predicting the outcomes of elections. That was the sizzle. But the actual steak is that Silver is able to tell stories we can all dine out on using data. That's what's so exciting.

    Just as Steven D. Levitt's Freakonomics changed the way the lay person—or, at least, the people who write for the layperson—frames social issues by revealing how economic incentives affect human behavior on both micro and macro levels, Nate Silver through FiveThirtyEight.com parsed datasets and analyzed deltas to reveal human behavior in the aggregate and deliver fascinating takes on outcomes in the political world. Silver's ability to use numbers as a thread and weave data throughout a coherent narrative, when coupled with ESPN's resources, gives him the opportunity to transform how sports stories are told on the TV.

    。

    As we move from a qualitative to a quantitative world, as sabermetrics has migrated into all the major sports—and Moneyball has become Moneyballs—there are two new major areas of focus for sports journalists and sports fans:

    --What the available numbers tell us about patterns of performance: How, When, Where and Why do sports executives, managers, coaches, players and agents make their decisions about personnel, contracts, pre-game and in-game strategy, and a host of other coaching and management decisions; and

    --How can the data be visually represented and animated to actually illustrate patterns of cause and effect with regard to the

    decisions and performances of the players and teams that we love and hate, to bring a new dimension to sports coverage.

    Nate Silver isn't the Billy Beane of sports journalism—that honor goes to Bill James, the man who gave birth to sabermetrics—but Silver could be something special if ESPN supports him with production, vision and creativity. To get the most out of their substantial investment in Silver, ESPN needs avoid thinking of him as just some new talking head who requires infographics instead of highlights. Instead, ESPN needs to start thinking up new production values, elements and animations to support Silver's style of storytelling.

    内特•希尔加盟ESPN有可能改变这一点。

    ESPN无疑是体育界的巨人，它不仅是北美最大的体育电视网络，同时也是北美最大的新闻和信息公司之一。在新闻和数据收集方面，ESPN的规模是非常大的。这种收集和分析大数据的能力，正是ESPN的下一个竞争优势。

    内特•希尔可能会在ESPN担任一个总军师的角色，他的到来对体育节目来说可能是革命性的。希尔在《纽约时代》（New York Times）工作的时候就是一个预言家，一个品牌，甚至是一个魔术师，他的博客FiveThirtyEight.com对选举结果的预测准确到令人发指的地步。这就是笼罩在希尔头上的光环。但是更重要的是，希尔可以利用数据讲故事，从而让我们大受裨益。这就是让人兴奋的地方。

    史蒂芬•D•莱维特的《魔鬼经济学》（Freakonomics）一书通过微观和宏观层面揭示了经济刺激是如何影响人类行为，从而改变了经济学门外汉对社会问题的看法。跟它一样，内特•希尔的博客通过对大数据的剖析揭示了人群的集体行为，而且在政治问题上给出了准确的结果。他能利用数字这根线将数据编成一个连贯的故事，再加上ESPN的资源，使他有了一个改变电视体育节目演播方式的机会。

    随着我们从一个质的世界进入一个量的世界，随着棒球经济学从棒球进入所有主要体育项目，电影《点球成金》（Moneyball）里的那套数据分析法也真的起到了“点球成金”之效。目前体育记者和体育迷们有了两个新的关注领域：

    ——首先，在表现模式方面，现有数据能告诉我们什么。也就是说，球队的老板、经理、教练、运动员和经纪人们是在何时、何地，如何做出关于人员、合同以及赛前和比赛策略的决策，以及他们是怎样做出一系列其它管理和训练决策的。

    ——其次，数据怎样才能直观地展示出来，告诉我们对于我们喜欢或讨厌的球员和球队来说，决策和球队表现之间的因果关系到底是怎样的。

    内特•希尔并不是体育新闻界的比利•比恩（电影《点球成金》里的男主角），事实上发明棒球经济学的人是比尔•詹姆斯。但是，如果ESPN在节目、愿景和创意上支持希尔的话，他还是大有可为的。为了使花在希尔身上的投资实现最大价值，ESPN不能把希尔当成又一个坐在演播里解释数据的传声筒，而是应该开始考虑设计新的节目价值、元素和活力，以支持希尔擅于讲故事的风格。

    The final piece of the Silver puzzle will involve his on-air personality. ESPN needs to think hard about the personal dynamics that are the emotional core of why viewers watch particular shows. Case in point: ESPN's NBA studio show "NBA Countdown," a show that would stand out for its lack of creativity, vision and personality even if it wasn't inevitably compared to TNT's "Inside the NBA" starring Charles Barkley. This past season watching "NBA Countdown" featuring Magic Johnson, Michael Wilbon, Jalen Rose and Bill Simmons (ESPN's most innovative personality—in text) was like watching four guys who had just met at a convention and found themselves stuck together in an elevator. They were all there for the same reason, but they weren't going anywhere.

    Enter Silver. (Please.)

    TV shows at their core are about relationships—both friendship and friction—that's what bonds viewers to them, as the Today Show, Good Morning America, and Charles Barkley & Co. make abundantly clear. ESPN now has a chance to recreate its NBA coverage with creative information, combined with "creative tension" between "The Quants" (Silver and Simmons) and "The Classics" (Wilbon and Magic). (Or as some might eventually call them, the Quants versus the Quaints.) But that will only work if ESPN puts serious production values—and resources—behind both Silver's and Simmons' insights.

    The network has shown that it can be innovative when it comes to coaches X's and O's, but can they be innovative when it comes to zeros and ones?

    希尔在ESPN能否成功，最后的一个关键就是他的直播风格。ESPN要认真对待风格问题，因为对于观众来说，这在情感上是吸引他们看一个节目与否的关键因素。比如ESPN的一个NBA直播节目“NBA 倒计时”（NBA Countdown）就非常缺乏创意、眼界和风格魅力。这个节目不可避免地要与TNT的“深入NBA”（Inside the NBA）相比，而后者的主持人是著名的“大嘴”巴克利。上个赛季观看由玛吉克•约翰逊、迈克尔•威尔本、贾伦•罗斯和比尔•西蒙斯四个人主持的“NBA倒计时”的时候，给人的感觉就像四个人刚刚在一次活动上认识，然后就一起被困在了电梯里。他们因为相同的原因走到了一起，但是哪也去不了。

    还是把希尔换上来吧。

    电视节目的核心就在于人和人的关系。它既包括友谊也包括摩擦，这正是有些节目吸引观众的原因。《今日秀》（Today Show）、《早安美国》(Good Morning America)、Charles Barkley & Co等节目就充分说明了这一点。现在通过创造性的信息，加上“统计学家”（希尔和西蒙斯）和“老牌主持人”（威尔本和玛吉克）之间的“创新性张力”，ESPN可能有了一个重建这个NBA直播节目的机会。但前提条件是ESPN为希尔和西蒙斯的观点提供充足的制片效果。

    ESPN已经证明了它在某些方面是有创新性的，但是在大数据方面，它还能保持这种创新性吗？

    可能这就是决定ESPN能不能通过希尔“点球成金”的关键。（财富中文网）

    译者：朴成奎