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Has Moneyball Killed Baseball? June 20, 2017

Posted by Peter Varhol in Education, Publishing, Strategy.
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Moneyball was a revelation to me.  It taught me that the experts could not effectively evaluate talent, and opened my own mind to the biases found in software development, testing, and team building.  Some of my best conference presentations and articles have been in this area.

But while Moneyball helped the Oakland Athletics, and eventually some other teams, it seems to be well on its way to killing the sport.  I’ve never been a big sports fan, but there were few other activities that could command the attention of a 12-year old in the late 1960s.

I grew up in the Pittsburgh area, and while I was too young to see the dramatic Bill Mazeroski home run in the 1960 World Series, I did see the heroics of Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell in the 1971 World Series (my sister was administrative assistant at the church in Wilmington NC where Stargell had his funeral).  I lived in Baltimore where the Pirates won a Game 7 in dramatic fashion in 1979 (Steve Blass at the helm for his third game of the series, with Dave Guisti in relief).

But baseball has changed, and not in a good way.  Today, Moneyball has produced teams that focus on dramatic encounters like strikeouts, walks, and home runs.  I doubt this was what Billy Beane wanted to happen.  That makes baseball boring.  It is currently lacking in any of the strategy that it was best at.

As we move toward a world where we are increasingly using analytics to evaluate data and make decisions, we may be leaving the interesting parts of our problem domain behind.  I would like to think that machine learning and analytics are generally good for us, but perhaps they provide a crutch that ultimately makes our world less than it could be.  I hope we find a way to have the best of both.

On Technology, Discovery, and the Modern World June 20, 2017

Posted by Peter Varhol in Technology and Culture.
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I have a book that I bought at a used bookstore in Meadville, PA, circa 1976.  It’s titled The History of 19th Century Science, and is full of stories of scientists in the 1800s and their discoveries in fields such as biology, geology, and chemistry.  That century really was the Golden Age of science and discovery in the modern era.  The advances in science during the latter part of the 1800’s was really amazing.

(I paid the $1 written on the flyleaf, although the proprietor groused that it was mis-marked and probably worth more.  One of these days I’ll have to find out if it’s worth anything.)

But original science today is usually a very different beast.  Much of science, especially the physical sciences, are funded at millions of dollars, with large teams pursuing, quite frankly, is often incremental knowledge.

And that’s what many scientists have come to expect of the fruit of their labors.  In an era where scientists seem to be satisfied with very modest advancements over the course of decades of research and millions of dollars, there remains the opportunity to do significant and important work.

The real problem is that taking a mental leap is not the safe way to do science.  And if you are trying to establish a life career as a research scientist, you won’t take chances, so you won’t look for a breakthrough.

If you are a scientist, maybe you should look for breakthroughs more often.