J.C. Bradbury

The more I read this sort of book, the more I appreciate the uniqueness of Bill James. Math-minded folks seem to have a inveterate tendency toward belaboring the obvious and making huge, crucial assumptions on the way to trivial conclusions. For many of these folks quantification is a sort of religion--there *must* be a way of quantifying anything. If the quantification is inadequate to the phenomenon, well it's the best we've got, so we'll put the inadequacy aside and start drawing conclusions.

Well, sometimes quantification *reduces* knowledge. When our uncertainty can only be expressed in vague and nebulous terms, at least we know we don't know. When we follow the path of the numbers zealots, for whom nothing can be expressed BUT in numbers (and the prose in any of these non-Jamesian books might be offered as Exhibit A in support of this proposition) soon we've got inadequate measures dressed up in the garb of certainty. It doesn't make for an improvement.… (meer)