#AcademicRunPlaylist - 3/9/25

I had a nice end to the weekend in Boston, and before heading down to Philly tomorrow for Phenom's event I was able to listen to some talks/books for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

Next was day 2 of the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. I particularly liked the sessions on basketball analytics and fandom (Deepak Malhotra, Sue Bird, Evan Wasch, Mike Zarren, and Daryl Morey), the new NFL front office (Lorrissa Horton, Scott Pioli, Kevin Demoff, and Connelly, Bill), and the session on AI and sports (Sendhil Mullainathan, Pablo Torre, and Daryl Morey) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG1ADA8_efg

Next was an interesting talk by Zhaofeng Wu on how LLM semantic representations across languages and modalities at the MIT Embodied Intelligence seminar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xObamPDkKHo

Next was "Free Market" by Jacob Soll. This book is an incredible journey through Western economic thought. Given the centrality of Adam Smith in the popular narrative around the free market concept, I was surprised at how late he comes into the picture here. Instead this is a more complete history, demonstrating how Smith, among other thinkers, contributed to the developing consensus in the West and how that consensus continued to change through the 20th century. Highly recommend https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/jacob-soll/free-market/9780465049707/

Last was "Higher Ground" by Alison Taylor. Alison nicely merges academic research with real world expertise to create an extremely useful and timely book that everyone in management and corporate governance needs to read. For those in academia this will provide a healthy dose of reality about the inherent challenges of ethically guiding large, complex, multinational organizations, while for those in practice this book cuts through most of the BS that's out there to provide research and evidence-based policy frameworks. Highly recommend https://store.hbr.org/product/higher-ground-how-business-can-do-the-right-thing-in-a-turbulent-world/10558