andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-642 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: I was recently rereading and enjoying Bill James’s Historical Baseball Abstract (the second edition, from 2001). But even the Master is not perfect. Here he is, in the context of the all-time 20th-greatest shortstop (in his reckoning): Are athletes special people? In general, no, but occasionally, yes. Johnny Pesky at 75 was trim, youthful, optimistic, and practically exploding with energy. You rarely meet anybody like that who isn’t an ex-athlete–and that makes athletes seem special. [italics in the original] Hey, I’ve met 75-year-olds like that–and none of them are ex-athletes! That’s probably because I don’t know a lot of ex-athletes. But Bill James . . . he knows a lot of athletes. He went to the bathroom with Tim Raines once! The most I can say is that I saw Rickey Henderson steal a couple bases when he was playing against the Orioles once. Cognitive psychologists talk about the base-rate fallacy , which is the mistake of estimating probabilities without accou
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1 I was recently rereading and enjoying Bill James’s Historical Baseball Abstract (the second edition, from 2001). [sent-1, score-0.199]
2 Here he is, in the context of the all-time 20th-greatest shortstop (in his reckoning): Are athletes special people? [sent-3, score-0.364]
3 Johnny Pesky at 75 was trim, youthful, optimistic, and practically exploding with energy. [sent-5, score-0.188]
4 You rarely meet anybody like that who isn’t an ex-athlete–and that makes athletes seem special. [sent-6, score-0.655]
5 That’s probably because I don’t know a lot of ex-athletes. [sent-8, score-0.078]
6 The most I can say is that I saw Rickey Henderson steal a couple bases when he was playing against the Orioles once. [sent-14, score-0.186]
7 Cognitive psychologists talk about the base-rate fallacy , which is the mistake of estimating probabilities without accounting for underlying frequencies. [sent-15, score-0.333]
8 Bill James knows a lot of ex-athletes, so it’s no surprise that the youthful, optimistic, 75-year-olds he meets are likely to be ex-athletes. [sent-16, score-0.348]
9 The rest of us don’t know many ex-athletes, so it’s no suprrise that most of the youthful, optimistic, 75-year-olds we meet are not ex-athletes. [sent-17, score-0.26]
10 The mistake James made in the above quote was to write “You” when he really meant “I. [sent-18, score-0.108]
11 ” I’m not disputing his claim that athletes are disproportionately likely to become lively 75-year-olds; what I’m disagreeing with is his statement that almost all such people are ex-athletes. [sent-19, score-0.816]
12 But the point is important, I think, because of the window it offers into the larger issue of people being trapped in their own environment (the “availability heuristic,” in the jargon of cognitive psychology). [sent-21, score-0.466]
13 Athletes loom large in Bill James’s world–and I wouldn’t want it any other way–and sometimes he forgets that the rest of us live in a different world. [sent-22, score-0.322]
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Introduction: I was recently rereading and enjoying Bill James’s Historical Baseball Abstract (the second edition, from 2001). But even the Master is not perfect. Here he is, in the context of the all-time 20th-greatest shortstop (in his reckoning): Are athletes special people? In general, no, but occasionally, yes. Johnny Pesky at 75 was trim, youthful, optimistic, and practically exploding with energy. You rarely meet anybody like that who isn’t an ex-athlete–and that makes athletes seem special. [italics in the original] Hey, I’ve met 75-year-olds like that–and none of them are ex-athletes! That’s probably because I don’t know a lot of ex-athletes. But Bill James . . . he knows a lot of athletes. He went to the bathroom with Tim Raines once! The most I can say is that I saw Rickey Henderson steal a couple bases when he was playing against the Orioles once. Cognitive psychologists talk about the base-rate fallacy , which is the mistake of estimating probabilities without accou
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Introduction: During our discussion of estimates of teacher performance, Steve Sailer wrote : I suspect we’re going to take years to work the kinks out of overall rating systems. By way of analogy, Bill James kicked off the modern era of baseball statistics analysis around 1975. But he stuck to doing smaller scale analyses and avoided trying to build one giant overall model for rating players. In contrast, other analysts such as Pete Palmer rushed into building overall ranking systems, such as his 1984 book, but they tended to generate curious results such as the greatness of Roy Smalley Jr.. James held off until 1999 before unveiling his win share model for overall rankings. I remember looking at Pete Palmer’s book many years ago and being disappointed that he did everything through his Linear Weights formula. A hit is worth X, a walk is worth Y, etc. Some of this is good–it’s presumably an improvement on counting walks as 0 or 1 hits, also an improvement on counting doubles and triples a
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