
What Happens When Baseball-Stats Nerds Run a Pro Team - zonotope
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/opinion/sunday/what-happens-when-baseball-stats-nerds-run-a-pro-team.html
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tempestn
This is a great lesson for hackers in general. Many of us, myself included,
have a tendency to expect data to automatically win arguments. I mean, if
something is irrefutably true with the data to prove it, that's the end of the
discussion, right? But just as in this case, in reality, it's not even the
beginning. Whether you're trying to convince your manager to go in a
particular direction, or you're trying to motivate your employees to rally
behind a cause, the data will help you decide where to go, but you need the
right story to get people to follow you there.

And just because it's a "story" doesn't mean it's some BS you make up to get
people to agree with you. It's more about considering the other person's point
of view (their poorly-documented public API, if you like), and building an
interface between that and your data.

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pimlottc
The best manager I ever had was great at this. He was a former developer who
understood the tech but knew how to speak the executives' language. You could
convince him with a good tech story and then he'd turn around and sell to his
bosses with a good business story.

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danieltillett
Domain translators are undervalued. Anyone who can effectively translate the
different needs and desires between groups is worth their weight in gold.

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ethbro
Agreed! I think this also cuts to the fact that data doesn't win arguments.
Data + time spent studying and understanding data wins.

Most people can't or don't want to take time (it's inefficient). So they make
decisions based on estimates / stories / approximations / biases / gut and the
world keeps spinning.

Which means your goal should be to most accurately frame your data in terms of
their stories (translating as much or little as they require).

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mathattack
I like that this captures something very important about Data Science. The
data may give the truth, but it's the story that makes people change. The
story taps our emotions, which cause us to change behavior faster than hard
data.

The chief analyst at a prior employer once commented that he liked people
"with degrees that suggest storytelling" in addition to their
math/science/engineering pedigrees.

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allisthemoist
Because what is a story really but condensed data?

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rpgmaker
A story can have a lot of noise too.

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RobertoG
not the good ones

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cortesoft
The idea that a baseball team could ever go undefeated for even half a season
is ridiculous. No amount of data analysis can make you do that.

That would be like saying that a perfect poker player could win every hand.
Even if your opponent was playing with their cards face up, sometimes he is
gonna hit his inside straight on the river.

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legohead
I don't follow baseball. Are you saying that a large part of baseball is luck,
and you are bound to lose regardless of how skilled your team is?

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umanwizard
Practically everything in the world more complex than basic physics is non-
deterministic, especially who wins games of skill. Things occur or don't occur
with probabilities.

Even if you have a 95% chance of winning each game (unrealistic IMO), the
probability of winning 81 games in a row is under 2%.

This is less apparent in other sports than in baseball, not because the
outcomes of those games are more deterministic, but because fewer games are
played per season.

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closed
You are a bayesian analysis with strong priors on the chance of winning. I'm
not objecting to your critique (as I don't know much about sports), I just
keep thinking of P(data | model).

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umanwizard
Well, there is no sport or other organized competitive activity I can think of
where the best in the world beats the second best in the world more than 95%
of the time.

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largote
Maybe sprinting?

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ericdykstra
Competitions for "best score" (where score is a time, a number, etc) fall into
a different category of sport than those where competitors are facing off
head-to-head and there is interaction between competitors. And among the "best
score" competitions, those which there is little variance in outcomes will
result in a much higher win rate of "best" versus "second best" (a powerlifter
or sprinter's score may only vary a few % between good and bad days. a
bowlers' or golfers' can be much higher).

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kmnc
It would be interesting to see some scouting models based purely on
psychological and personel relationship data. What kind of metrics are best at
predicting team chemistry. Sports analytics is going to complete change most
sports, we are just getting started.

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drumdance
A different angle is player health. The Golden State Warriors are known for
resting top players when they're in Denver because they found it can take a
player up to a week to fully recover from the effects of playing at altitude.

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mmanfrin
This reminds me of Football Manager (video game series). It's a turn based
moneyball-sort-of game for soccer/football. Players have stats, potentials
(which need to be scouted), training, etc. But there are other relevant
details like how a player is likely to get along with other players that
affect game outcomes.

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wolfgke
> But there are other relevant details like how a player is likely to get
> along with other players that affect game outcomes.

Time for creating mathematical models for predictors of how people are getting
along... :-)

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vwelling
For us nerds who want to effect change, and who are convinced data should be
all you need, the book "Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard" by
Chip and Dan Heath is a highly recommended read. It'll tell you all about the
story, or as they call it: the elephant.

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fallous
Expertise is knowledge within a problem domain. Art, and more importantly
wisdom, is in the implementation and execution.

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SixSigma
No matter how good your analysis, data collection only told you what happened
in the past.

