Moneyball
by
Michael Lewis
Published 1 Jan 2003
It is startling, when you think about it, how much confusion there is about this. I find it remarkable that, in listing offenses, the league will list first—meaning best—not the team which scored the most runs, but the team with the highest batting average. It should be obvious that the purpose of an offense is not to compile a high batting average.” Because it was not obvious, at least to the people who ran baseball, James smelled a huge opportunity. How did runs score? “We can’t directly see how many runs each player creates,” he wrote, “but we can see how many runs each team creates.” He set out to build a model to predict how many runs a team would score, given its number of walks, hits, stolen bases, etc.
…
He still needed a baseball genius to divine his true worth but any moron could see the value of his older brother, at the plate. In all of baseball for the past few years there has been only one batter more useful to an offense: Barry Bonds. Giambi has all the crude offensive attributes—home runs, high batting average, a perennially high number of RBIs. He also has the subtler attributes. When he’s in the lineup, for instance, the opposing pitcher is forced to throw a lot more pitches than when he isn’t. The more pitches the opposing starting pitcher throws, the earlier he’ll be relieved. Relief pitchers aren’t starting pitchers for a reason: they aren’t as good.
Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, + Website
by
Matt Blumberg
Published 13 Aug 2013
It was hard and we made mistakes aplenty but using a baseball metaphor, we managed to “hit with a high batting average.” We were able to successfully navigate them by following many of the themes that Matt outlines below and our efforts were rewarded when we sold Quickoffice to Google in 2012. The alignment of your business strategy with your resources is really tough and you will rarely know you have done it well or not so well, until after the fact. I believe your goal is to achieve that “high batting average” so your business will stay healthy enough to continue forward successfully. That’s the lesson I hope you take away from this section.
Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work
by
Steven Kotler
and
Jamie Wheal
Published 21 Feb 2017
In 2015, a team of scientists led by Oxford neuropsychologist Molly Crockett7 joined forces with the Black Rock City Census to take a closer look at the festival’s power. In their study, 75 percent of attendees reported having a transformative experience at the event, while 85 percent of those reported that the benefits persisted for weeks and months afterward. That’s an incredibly high batting average: Three out of four people who attend the event are meaningfully changed by it. And this doesn’t just happen by accident. Wandering out into the middle of that intentional chaos at 2 a.m., surrounded by fire-spewing dinosaurs, giant neon-lit pirate ships, and the throbbing beats of galactic hip-hop, you’re ripped away from all familiar reference points, totally unstuck in time, and well beyond normal awareness.
Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer
by
Duncan J. Watts
Published 28 Mar 2011
Even for more ephemeral skills, like outstanding positional play in professional basketball, that are harder to measure directly but still help the team win, we have almost one hundred NBA games each season that we can watch to observe a player’s effect on his team and on the outcome.13 At first, it seems that an accomplishment like beating the S&P 500 for the year is a pretty good equivalent of a batting average for fund managers—and indeed fund managers with long streaks do tend to beat the S&P 500 more often than average, just like baseball players with high batting averages. By this measure, however, in a forty-year career a fund manager will get only forty “at-bats” total—simply not enough data to estimate the true value with any confidence.14 THE MATTHEW EFFECT And finance is in many respects an easy case—because the existence of indices like the S&P 500 at least provide agreed-upon benchmarks against which an individual investor’s performance can be measured.
Every Patient Tells a Story
by
Lisa Sanders
Published 15 Jan 2009
Indeed, the great majority of medical diagnoses—anywhere from 70 to 90 percent—are made on the basis of the patient’s story alone. Although this is well established, far too often neither the doctor nor the patient seems to appreciate the importance of what the patient has to say in the making of a diagnosis. And yet this is crucial information. None of our high-tech tests has such a high batting average. Neither does the physical exam. Nor is there any other way to obtain this information. Talking to the patient more often than not provides the essential clues to making a diagnosis. Moreover, what we learn from this simple interview frequently plays an important role in the patient’s health even after the diagnosis is made.
The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead
by
David Callahan
Published 1 Jan 2004
Economic inequality has led to striking changes in our society. ♦ In America's new winner-take-all society there is infinitely more to gain, and to lose, when it comes to getting into the right college, getting the right job, becoming a "hot" reporter, showing good earnings on Wall Street, having a high batting average, or otherwise becoming a star achiever. ♦ Higher inequality has led to more divisions between Americans and weakened the social fabric—undermining the notion that we're all "in it together" and bound by the same rules. ♦ Inequality is also reshaping our politics as wealthier Americans get more adept at turning money into influence—twisting rules to their benefit and escaping punishment when they break the rules
Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
by
General Stanley McChrystal
,
Tantum Collins
,
David Silverman
and
Chris Fussell
Published 11 May 2015
But this limited definition of efficiency meant that they passed on information that was often less useful than it should have been, late, or lacking context. Had each of our teams been an individual at BUD/S, he would have gotten booted in week one. They took pride in their own team’s performance, like the prima donna slugger who touts his high batting average as his team consistently loses. Instinctively, the silos of our organization looked inward, where they could see metrics of success and failure. The habit of constraining information derives in part from modern security concerns, but also from the inured preference for clearly defined, mechanistic processes—whether factory floors or corporate org charts—in which people need to know only their own piece of the puzzle to do their job.
Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
by
Steven Pinker
Published 14 Oct 2021
This tension was explored in my favorite essay by the paleontologist, science writer, and baseball fan Stephen Jay Gould.65 Gould discussed one of the greatest achievements in sports, Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak of fifty-six games in 1941. He explained that the streak was statistically extraordinary even given DiMaggio’s high batting average and the number of opportunities for streaks to have occurred in the history of the sport. The fact that DiMaggio benefited from some lucky breaks along the way does not diminish the achievement but exemplifies it, because no long streak, however pushed along by favorable odds, can ever unfold without them.
Inside the House of Money: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Profiting in a Global Market
by
Steven Drobny
Published 31 Mar 2006
Aside from their trading acumen, Stan and Nick are the class acts of the hedge fund business. Their word is their bond, they eschew publicity, and they are dedicated family men. George Soros, on the other hand, is much more volatile than Stan and Nick. He is the opposite of Warren Buffett. Buffett has a high batting average. George has a terrible batting average—it’s below 50 percent and possibly even below 30 percent—but when he wins it’s a grand slam. He’s like Babe Ruth in that respect. George used to say, “If you’re right in a position, you can never be big enough.” Having worked with both Soros and Jim Rogers, what differences did you note between former partners?
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't
by
Nate Silver
Published 31 Aug 2012
A good baseball projection system must accomplish three basic tasks: Account for the context of a player’s statistics Separate out skill from luck Understand how a player’s performance evolves as he ages—what is known as the aging curve The first task is relatively easy. Baseball, uniquely among the major American sports, has always been played on fields with nonstandard dimensions. It’s much easier to put up a high batting average in snug and boxy Fenway Park, whose contours are shaped by compact New England street grids, than in the cavernous environs of Dodger Stadium, which is surrounded by a moat of parking lot. By observing how players perform both at home and on the road, we can develop “park factors” to account for the degree of difficulty that a player faces.
The Evolution of God
by
Robert Wright
Published 8 Jun 2009
In parts of Siberia, effeminate boys were good prospects, and once they were shamans some dressed as women and married a man. 19 Eerie early achievements—having a weird and prescient dream, surviving a lightning strike or a snakebite—could in some societies mark a shamanic prospect. However they arrived at their stations, shamans everywhere, to keep their credibility high, had to muster ongoing displays of supernatural power. But how could they do that, given the seeming falseness of their supernatural beliefs? In some realms, a high batting average is inherently likely. Among the Aranda of central Australia, one of the shaman’s jobs was ensuring that solar eclipses would be temporary—nice work if you can get it. 20 And since most illnesses are, like eclipses, temporary, the average shamanic medical intervention is also likely to be vindicated.