from Amazon
Monday, November 07, 2011
“Math scares people”
Billy Beane:
So yes, there was certainly some resistance internally, but anytime there is mathematics involved there’s going to be a certain amount of resistance. I think 99 percent of us have some resistance because going back to seventh grade, and when are we going to use this [math], and now you’re seeing somebody use it!
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The great thing about math is there something logical to it, so once we had faith in it among a small group of us, we did really feel like we weren’t taking a risk. You know, it didn’t seem risky to us. That’s what everyone asks all the time, and quite frankly, we were wondering why doesn’t anybody else get this?!
And on Moneyball itself:
So, now you’re starting to get a movement… if there’s anything I think the book did, I think it accelerated it by putting it [sabermetrics] out there for everybody. It was gonna happen anyways.
Also the parallel with technology helped it take off—access to information was all over the Web because it was being gathered. You know, whereas before Bill James was doing it—and he used to print basically these tight little pamphlets—and even some of the stuff that we were originally using was somewhat, not literally, but was somewhat manual, related to how information is gathered today.
I think the parallel with technology also helped it take off, because it just gave it access to more people out there who were sort of running their own models as well. So, there was just more and more evidence that there was something to this.
And Michael Lewis on the parallel between world finance and baseball:
And they rated things as AAA so they could sell them. Because once you got that point you had a whole group of unthinking buyers who just accepted the stats—kind of in the same way that someone in baseball might used to say, “The guy hits .300, he must be really good.”—without thinking whether or not his hitting .300 leads to runs.
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I think the Wall Street story is as illustrative as the Moneyball story… Just be very careful what you measure, because the minute you start measuring the wrong thing it becomes a fetish.
Amusing comment from Lewis. I remembered thinking when I first read Moneyball that it was the same story as Liar’s Poker, but with sabermetric analysts revolutionizing baseball as quants did finance in the ‘80s.