THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I am with Keith on this one.  When people encounter something different or what they perceive as strange, they often automatically think it is a bad thing, as in “it is a shame that kids these days (fill in the blank)...”

Just another example of how people are incapable or unwilling to think clearly and objectively.

Sort of like taxes.  The Republican mantra that taxes should (categorically) never (or almost never) be raised is outlandishly stupid and illogical.  I am not saying that taxes should be raised - only that, “How do we know that they are not too low OR too high right now?” To say that they should never be raised assumes that they are already too high or just right.  How do we know that is the case?  Maybe they are too low right now (obviously it depends on what taxes we are talking about and what they are going to be used for).  Maybe they are too high and maybe they are not. But to say that they we should categorically never raise taxes is ridiculous.

And to think that one group of people (Dems) believes in higher taxes and that another group (Repubs) believes in lower taxes is a ridiculous and illogical dichotomy.

Usually the folks with market advantage attempt to frame every arguement as a morality play.  The morality play is a last chance gasp at maintaining the market advantage.

They cannot rely on the market to keep pushing the advantge their way (a form of regression to the mean? or the plexiglass principle because their advantage is so one sided.  The fall back position for folks that have a totally one sided market advantage is typically:  “cause that’s how it’s always been” or the phrase “that’s highly unethical”.

Usually this morality play has nothing to do with ethics or logic....and has everything to do with continuing totake advantage of a situation. 

Marvin Miller’s book (of which i forget the name)-pointed out how often management would use these types of strategies to gain advantage over the players.  Whenever a player attempted to break free from these constraints the owners/newspaper writers would frame it as a morality play...throwing logic out the door.  Players would crumble not wanting to appear immoral or unethical.

A Whole Different Ballgame.  Great book.

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Interesting notion about the “morality play”.  I’ll be on the lookout for that.

In another ‘political’ thread here, I mentioned the book “How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World” by former pres. candidate Harry Browne. In chapter 4 (called “the morality trap") he nails that issue.

Here’s what Google comes back for me:

http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/ffp05.shtml

Morality Trap: The belief that you must obey a moral code created by someone else. In order to become more competent (and free) you need to strengthen your understanding of the cognitive links between your actions and the consequences you produce. Morality is basically a set of very general rules concerning what to do and what not to do, generally involving large consequences. Blindly using someone else’s moral code, tends to reduce your competence, because it prevents the forming of proper cognitive links between actions and consequences. To be free you need to create your own moral code.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig8/kramer4.html

The next trap Harry identifies is the Morality Trap, which is living by a moral code dictated by someone else.

According to Harry, there are three types of morality: Personal Morality, which is a code of conduct you devise yourself, only for yourself, based on the consequences of your actions to you; Universal Morality, which is a code of conduct that will bring happiness to anyone who follows it; and Absolute Morality, which is a moral code dictated from someone wiser or better than you, such as God or a human guru.

Harry didn’t believe that Universal Morality exists, because people are too different to all receive happiness from the same code of conduct.

And he believed the weakness in Absolute Morality is that it requires total obedience, even if you believe that certain required conduct would bring you unhappiness.

So Harry advocates following a Personal Morality, which he defines as a code of conduct created by you, based only on the consequences of your actions to you.

In my view, this definition of Personal Morality is one of the weaknesses of the book, and it seems to be something Harry didn’t think completely through; by this logic, it would be fine morally to invade others’ bodies or property if it brought you no bad consequences (some people have little or no conscience and wouldn’t even suffer the consequence of guilt). A more complete starting point for defining personal morality would be to incorporate the libertarian non-aggression axiom, and forbid yourself from doing anything that you believe would bring bad consequences to you or that would violate anyone else’s body or property,

Many will attack Harry as advising people to abandon organized religion, traditional mores and bourgeois values. However, a Personal Morality could incorporate outside teachings, and the bigger lesson to take from this chapter is that, if you choose to follow a moral code derived from someone or something else, you’re still the one who made the decision to follow it. So you’re deciding for yourself even when you try not to decide.

Harry doesn’t necessarily advise you not to follow the advice or teachings of others; he simply advises you not to follow them blindly, without stopping to think about why you’re doing it; or to follow something, whether blindly or in spite of the fact that you consciously know that you don’t really believe it, just because you’re trying to impress others by presenting a false image of yourself.

I am a therapist by trade -so maybe i tend to look at systems from a pathological perspective (which has its own trappings).

Power comes into play in a big way.  The group that has the most power sets up the moral code for that particular society....whether it be baseball or an island full of wild teenagers. 

When it came time for the owners to give a little to the players -to spread the wealth -the threat to the owners was not the loss of money -it was the loss of power through a slippery slope.  What is it that absolutionists fear the most?  They’ll always claim its the slippery slope -relativism.  But what it usually comes down to is having to answer questions, to compromise, to look at their own moral code (which is scary to a lot of people).

The steroid controvery is the perfect example of morality trap --hell, Selig set the damn thing and the press plays right along.  Did the players break a rule?  Where/what are the parameters?  Is there any grace involved by the powers that be (owners)?  Was there a way to give a little and find a moral commonground?  Did they even try to answer these questions in the last 15 years?  Hell no they didn’t --did the try to clarify?  Hell no they didn’t.  They didn’t have to -they held all the cards -set up a higher moral plain and waited for it all to come down on the players.  They knew it would--we all knew it would.

The owners set a up a morality play and the press and public went along.

It takes an entourage to raise a prodigy.

I sometimes wonder if baseball teams don’t see the minors as somewhat of an internship.