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| No, No ! Not again... !! Y-e-e-a-a-hh.... |
"Only a few years ago, they helped bring the global economy to its knees. Now the quants have football in their sights."
That quote was a lead-off in a book review of: The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Football Is Wrong - by Chris Anderson and David Sally (Financial Times 6/22/2013). The use of statistics in attempting to analyze sports performance is old-hat for American readers of "Moneyball" and the success of the Oakland A's.
But the review had much to say about the continuing "foolishness of failures" brought on by the "quant-lite" practitioners in the field - those knowing too little to be wise, but just enough to be dangerous to the rest of us.
"There is something disturbing [ in this book]
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| Limitless Pontificators ! |
about the limits of statistical analysis. All involved in this area would do well to remember how badly the hubris surrounding the math whizzes in finance has served the world economy in recent years. It is ironic indeed that just as business seems to be moving away from belief in the unbounded power of data towards a renewed appreciation of intuition and common sense, football is setting off in the opposite direction."
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| "If it walks like a quant and..." |
Let me rephrase that: "How badly the hubris surrounding capital markets "specialists" has served the credit union movement in recent years and... "
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| ... they still don't get it ! |
1 comment:
Mark Twain wrote:
"Figures often beguile me," he wrote, "particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
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