I think we need to be critical of the Moneyball narrative - and not just because Oakland hasn't actually performed that well under the MB regime ...
The understood narrative is that dummies were choosing players based on broken heuristics and that proper, sober heuristics would uncover hidden value.
Put another way: If you remove human decision-making and replace it with algorithms you will achieve better results.
I am skeptical of that conclusion in every other realm and I don't think baseball (or hiring, as is the case in this article) should be exempt from that skepticism.
Having read MB the book (and seen the movie, for what that's worth) I wonder if Billy Beane is missing the potential for deeper insights that only human brains can put together. It is the thing that we are good at, after all ...
> Having read MB the book (and seen the movie, for what that's worth) I wonder if Billy Beane is missing the potential for deeper insights that only human brains can put together. It is the thing that we are good at, after all ...
The human brain is also very good at misleading itself. Statistics is how you avoid that.
Do remember that Moneyball happened in an era where statistics was just becoming more ubiquitous. Bill James was collecting and collating statistics from a bunch of volunteers who used to snail mail him the scoring sheets from the games. He only quit doing that in 1988 because suddenly there was a flood of statistics.
So, from weak data to Moneyball in less than 10 years is actually fairly impressive.
>and not just because Oakland hasn't actually performed that well under the MB regime
That can't be used as any form of argument. The ideas behind Moneyball revolutionized baseball. However the financial challenges that Oakland had in the book are still exactly the same today. The reason for their lack of ultimate success is that they gave away their first mover advantage by allowing that book to be written. Now every other team has adopted the Moneyball mindset and Oakland is back to being a cash strapped team with little competitive advantage. Even considering that, they have still been one of the more successful teams when compared to their financial peers.
> If you remove human decision-making and replace it with algorithms you will achieve better results.
Not really. We're not talking about computers inventing algorithms from raw data. People typically invent the heuristics and algorithms, so it's still people being clever and creative. They just have computers codify their decisions (i.e., code).
In other words, a spreadsheet didn't come up with the OBP correlation. A spreadsheet was just used to do the analysis more efficiently.
The understood narrative is that dummies were choosing players based on broken heuristics and that proper, sober heuristics would uncover hidden value.
Put another way: If you remove human decision-making and replace it with algorithms you will achieve better results.
I am skeptical of that conclusion in every other realm and I don't think baseball (or hiring, as is the case in this article) should be exempt from that skepticism.
Having read MB the book (and seen the movie, for what that's worth) I wonder if Billy Beane is missing the potential for deeper insights that only human brains can put together. It is the thing that we are good at, after all ...