Russ Roberts: belief

Transcript context

…The sabermetrics revolution in baseball — overrated or underrated? I think it’s still underrated. It’s kind of amazing how far it’s come. A sociologist — maybe it’s already been done, but a sociologist should study how that world changed and how it changed sports writing, sports reporting, sports commentary. And yet, it’s so hard for people to accept things that disagree with what they see with their own eyes. That OPS adjusted is commonly used now is an extraordinary thing, an incredible achievement of Bill James and the others, John Thorne and Pete Palmer — the three people I associate with this revolution. It’s, of course, spread to other sports. It continues to spread, the application of analytical technique. In that sense, it’s underrated in that I think there’s still some really bad sports commentary. It’s overrated in that it’s part of a revolution that I’m deeply worried about — big data is part of that — that everything can be reduced to measurement. We can measure everything important, and if we can’t, we will. Eventually, everything will be quantified and we’ll get better lives as a result. I think that’s a misreading of the human experience, and I’m not an optimist on that. Penn Station in New York City — overrated or underrated?…

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