John wrote:
Here's a mind-expanding essay on baseball for you. What happens when our statistical analysis fails to explain what we witness with our eyes? Could it be because our analytical tools are insufficient, or we aren't even focusing on the right thing? Could we even be lauding teams for cleverly exploiting market inefficiencies when they're really handicapping their rosters come playoff time by leaving off bad ball-swinging players like Pablo Sandoval? Why aren't we paying more attention to what Arneson argues is the core of the game: pitch selection and what happens when a batter does/doesn't get the pitch he's expecting?
Weighty stuff. Definitely worth your time to read.
Fascinating, but really wrong headed. Arneson needs to get his head out of statistical models and watch human behavior, especially complex motor activities like hitting a ball or walking.
Arneson wants to be able to delineate each step in the mental process of a hitter as he decides to swing at a pitch. But his model is flawed. He's working from a systems model, a computer model, assuming human brain and human muscles make decisions the way a computer does. There's no evidence that's how our bodies work.
To do something simple, like walking, we don't process a series of decisions in order to choose which foot to put out first, how to rotate weight to that leg, push off with the back leg, balance the weight shift and then swing the trailing leg forward to repeat the process. We just let our muscles remember how to do it. There's no cognitive processing.
That's what Arneson has forgotten. There's no cognitive process in swinging at a pitch. A player's MUSCLES determine if, when and where to swing with no conscious, cognitive input. There's no time. The brain is a much slower processor than muscles. Before we can even project where the pitch is going to cross the plate, it already has. If we're going to hit it, we literally stop conscious thought and allow the body to respond more quickly. The body has learned how to hit the ball through sheer repetition and constant refinement. The brain, at least the cognitive part of the brain, the part that uses systems like Arneson employs, is relatively uninvolved in simple physical activities.
Remember how we learned to ride a bike? It's an amazing thing to watch. The brain doesn't do much. If we think about balancing, we lose balance. We have to trust the muscles will balance us without us thinking about it. The sense of balance is located principally in our inner ear, and we learn to FEEL how it works. We don't learn to control how it works with our brain. There is no step-by-step process to master, it's a holistic sensation.
We would never use the flow chart-like processes Arneson describes to teach a child to walk. In fact, we wisely don't do anything to teach children to walk, except walk around them (so they see it can be done) and encourage their earliest efforts to stand on two legs. They learn to walk by trusting the sensations that lead to walking: balance, leg movement, etc. And none of it is conscious or cognitive. The brain, if it's involved at all, is only involved deep in the stem where unconscious muscular memory resides.
The first clue to how wrong Arneson is lies in his decision to use the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis from linguistics as a model for how to think about the incredibly complex motor skill of swinging a bat. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis has been debunked. Most linguists have abandoned it. The traditional examples of how language shaped thought (Eskimos have more words for "snow," or the difference between words for "opinion" and "belief" in English and Swedish) have been mistaken, or based on misunderstandings. Eskimos don't have many more words for "snow" than New Englanders, for example. And Swedes can get just as touchy about the differences between "opinion" and "belief" as can their English-speaking counterparts.
Linguists wanted so much to believe that language shaped thought (just think what a boost that gives to your academic specialty!) that they found examples to support the hypothesis and ignored all the instances when the hypothesis didn't work.
Ditto for sabermetrics. We can find dozens of instances when intense statistical analysis yields nifty distinctions and parallels with actual experience, but we have to ignore the many many times when stats cannot explain events in order to believe, as Arneson wants to believe, that someday, somehow, we can explain why one team wins and another loses.
We never will. Too much uncertainty and too many unknowable causes intervene. And then there's luck, which is simply random chance when it appears to form a pattern.
Baseball is essentially unknowable. Isn't that great?
