The debate over WAR and baseball statistics reminds me of the countless (and endless) debates in social statistics fields about how and whether you can quantify huge amounts of subjective data. Sure, you have a great self-contained system that uses statistical methods to analyze data inputs. But! What are the qualitative assumptions that goes into creating the data you input?

It’s like saying, “Based on all these assumptions, this is true.”

That’s good and fine, but you need to say the complete sentence, and not just, “this is true.”

This is my beef with the Freakonomics guys too. Compelling arguments; over-reach on implication. It’s an impulse that seems to be becoming more and more prevalent in public discourse, especially as big data and statistical analysis come into vogue (and we have so many more data points to analyze now, thanks to what the internet—read: smartphone and web browsing tracking—is doing for behavioral study).

It seems to me like another case of people assuming that the the newest epistemological method is the best one, just because it’s new.

Why not say, “hey, this is another good perspective,” and understand its limitations?

What strikes me more and more is that the folks who are really good at stats analysis work (wonky, mathy folks—to make a grotesque over-generalization), also tend to be the kinds of folks whose brains are wired to think in absolutes (see parenthesis above [and irony noted]).

So, when you have a bunch of new data that can be analyzed by people with a particular psychological profile those people start to shape society’s ever-evolving understandings of how to elucidate truth (not to mention whether or not it actually can be). These stats guys tend to say: There is truth here, we can find it, and once we find it, it is IMMUTABLE AND TRUE (Cue the Dungeons and Dragons kid straightening his glasses. He has lots of karate trophies and likes to correct people about arbitrary facts and/or grammar).

This is the same debate happening over Nate Silver elections stats modeling (with much of the same reaction and rebuttal), with one vital difference:

What’s the point of elections? Try to win, then decide who won. That’s a quantitative result.

So Nate Silver’s model and approach are useful tools to that end. And for a nerdy stats guy, he actually has a lot of respect for uncertainty. Pundits and politicos decry his work because it’s transforming the way we do politics—THEIR way they do politics: bullshit babbling & opinion entertainment; which is all fueled by baseless speculation and groping for narrative and causation. Without those things—the qualitative bullshit— their fire goes out.

But with baseball what’s the point?

Watch a game, have fun, argue about everything, and be proved wrong about most things in the end (especially: “My team is great and is going to win”).