** Barbarous Statistics **
I don’t follow baseball, but I can’t escape statistics. Whether making hiring decisions, investment calls, or building experimental design, statistics haunt every day.
In Moneyball, Lewis has found an all-star protagonist and crowd-pleasing backdrop to spin a yarn worth listening to. Lewis’ lesson is not that one should use statistics over gut instinct. Instead it is that statistics are only as useful as the totality of their methodology. A mistake in any level that started by translating the real world into quantized data, then aggregated it to actionable insights, invalidates the entire process.
As the story progresses, baseball scouts become the villains: * like a Greek chorus, it is their job to underscore the eternal themes of baseball. * But as Lewis reveals in later chapters, these scouts are indeed using statistics, just useless ones developed by a cricket player generations ago. So even with the veneer of pure math, such numbers are corrupted to the core by opinions from the past. Garbage in, garbage out. Experiments become wisdom, wisdom becomes dogma, dogma becomes an opportunity to profit.
I don’t follow baseball, so the implications on the sport didn’t resonate. But as one subject summarized: * If gross miscalculations of a person’s value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of 30,000 and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? * And if we weren’t getting in our own way on the pursuit of baseball truth, we would be fooled by randomness anyways: * In a 5 game series, the worst team will beat the best about 15% of the time. […] Baseball science may still give the team an edge, but that edge is overwhelmed by chance. The baseball season is structured to mock reason. Because science doesn’t work in the games that matter most, the people that play them are given one more reason to revert to barbarism. *
So for just about all of us, just about all of the time, statistics are just barbarism.
** 6th book of 2022 **