My initial answer to this query was, "Of course not, that's stupid, it will never work, it's antithetical to the very concept of creative endeavor, art is by nature ephemeral and impossible to quantify, and there isn't even anyone who wants this to statistic to exist."īut then we did it anyway. "Would it be possible," pondered the ever-pondering Simmons, "to create an identical statistic for music in the popular genre of rock 'n' roll?" In other words, is there a mathematical way to calculate how essential a given musician is to his or her band, and would it then be possible to extrapolate that artist's value in comparison to other artists in competing groups? Several weeks ago, key members of the Bill Simmons Institute for Randomly Idealized Utopian Statistics (B-SIRIUS) asked me to create a formula that mirrored the popular baseball statistic VORP, an acronym for "Value Over Replacement Player." The VORP metric (popularized by MIT-schooled Baseball Prospectus writer Keith Woolner) attempts to isolate the merits of a particular hitter or pitcher in comparison to a fictional "replacement player" - a hypothetical strawman who's an average fielder and a mediocre hitter. And I think we'd all agree that one of these demons looms larger than all others combined - we still haven't figured out a way to arbitrarily turn art into math. He must wage war against his own sexy demons. To truly live, man must forever joust against himself. Many of the existential paradoxes originally raised by Gallagher continue to haunt us (parking on driveways, driving on parkways, etc.). It seems like our ACLs are constantly tearing. We're still struggling with cold fusion and time travel. There's still a lot of greatness to be achieved. WE ARE THE PEOPLE, AND WE ARE OUTSTANDING. Dark-hearted humanity critics always want to rave about how "brilliant" dolphins are, but do dolphins have Twitter? No. Assuming we exclude most of Europe during the 12th century, it's been a quasi-terrific, can't-miss, semidelicious 9,000 years - and we humanoids have been the catalyst for everything. We've almost totally conquered polio, racial intolerance, and werewolves. We've already accomplished way more than we deserve: The Great Wall of China (not to mention the numerous Chinese restaurants that share its name), the Renaissance (I wasn't directly involved with this, but whatever), the moon landing ("maybe"), and countless other triumphs that can't be counted (as they are unaccountable). Now, I'm not referring to American society, per se I'm referring to human society, starting with the Mesopotamians and ending with the first wave of solo projects from Odd Future. So let's all put aside our petty complaints and be real, if only for a moment: As a society, we're pretty awesome. I'm not afraid to tell people how great they truly are, even if they're average or less-than-average or openly evil. I attack reality with well-placed, nonironic, nonrefundable LOLs. I give props to my ninjas and kudos to my serfs. I prefer to focus on the ultra-super positive, which is less depressing and more financially rewarding. It's easy to be cynical, but I'm not like that. If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.