skyking162

In a discussion of ideas, power not only lies in having the more intelligent ideas, but also in presenting them persuasively and clearly. One reason statheads can get a bad rap is because we spend a lot of time on the ideas and not nearly enough time with presentation. We need to sound less arrogant, write less argumentatively, explain concepts in simpler terms, and present less information all at once.

The guys at USS Mariner have a successful blog because they’re smart guys and excellent writers who usually adhere to the above prescription. Today’s post is an excellent rebuttal to some traditional ideas, as presented by Mariners’ beat writer Geoff Baker. It’s long and you can feel free to skim the first half (it’s a rehashing of the personal aspects of the Baker-USSM debate).

Here’s my favorite part, tackling a mistake that I find extremely annoying: just because things turn out how you thought they would doesn’t make you right.

We have a coin that has been altered so that it will come up heads 60% of the time and tails only 40% of the time. It?s designed to give the advantage to the person who calls heads. If you know this ahead of time and call tails, you have made the wrong decision, regardless of what happens after that. That coin can come up tails 10 times in a row and you still made ten wrong decisions.

Also, let’s say you picked heads and the coin came up heads. Did you know it would come up heads? No, that was just the most likely outcome. Let’s say you picked heads because you looked outside and the clouds were in the shape of Lincoln’s head. Were you right? No, the coin didn’t come up heads because of the reasoning you presented. It came up heads due to weighted random chance. You’re just crazy. It’s like predicting a homerun — sometimes you’re “right”, but you didn’t actually know the homerun was about to occur. In baseball, you almost never know what’s going to happen — you just make the best “guess” possible based on the information. Better analysis is like using a coin that comes up heads more often. Would you rather have a 60% coin or a 70% coin? Obviously the second one even though it’s still going come up tails a significant amount of the time.

In summary, read the article.

Popularity: 2% [?]

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 1:09 pm and is filed under Baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.