Being overwhelmed in the information age

It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much. - Yogi Berra

Chance
ESPN
Columbia
By the Numbers
rogerebert.com

And that's just a sampling of what I try to keep track of by reading them on a regular basis.

I keep finding that anytime I read something, there are 10 other things that I feel like I have to read in order to understand where this discovery, reference, or insight is coming from. It's enough to drive a man bonkers. And with my information appetite, it often does.

However, this chase for knowledge has left me wondering to what end does it go. Can a renaissance man exist in the age of Google? Can trying to know something about everything lead to knowing nothing about anything? In other words, can you try to make yourself so smart you just make yourself dumb?

While the advent of the blog has given millions a public voice they never had, there are times when it comes to be a disservice. To be honest, I have no clue how on earth scholars 2 centuries from now (provided the human race isn't consumed by the expansion of the Sun at that point in time) will be able to study this age like we were able to study early American history. There is just so much information to go through that it'll take years for something meaningful to define our society to be discovered from it.

At the present though, I believe all this information does need to humble us all to accept this fact: We may all know something about everything, but nobody knows everything about anything. If you think you do know everything about something, please feel free to say so. I have a bludgeon right here to knock some sense into and arrogance out of you.

So, why did some of us get like this? Let's look at the story of one Martin Luther, perhaps the patron saint of the blog. He sure had some ideas, and decided to list them on a piece of paper and post it for public viewing. Boy, he sure created quite a stir, the legacy of which is the numerous denominations of Christianity beyond the Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches. Were these multiple churches what Luther had in mind when he wrote his 95 theses? Most certainly not, but others felt embolden by his actions to speak out against the Catholic Church, and felt they could start their own church. Remarkable how one idea, whether confirmed right or wrong, can lead to such a fragmentation of society when reaction takes precedence over reason.

Baseball Analysis.... dead?

When I was a wee lad, I collected baseball cards and poured over the statistics on the back side, creating a fascination with numbers and numerical calculations that has propelled me into a statistics degree and a job as a statistician. But even as I work in a retail setting, my first love of numbers always will be baseball statistics. It is why I joined SABR, and why I have continued and growing interest in sabermetrics.

With this in mind, one can imagine what my initial reaction was to reading these words: "Baseball analysis is dead." Now, I need not detail my direct disagreement with the statement made by Mr. Huckabay, as it does not add to what has been stated by many a person already (see Rob Neyer's ESPN blog if you have access or the response by Dave Studeman on Hardball Times). Rather, I feel that it is not a funeral march that was written, but a challenge to the entire sabermetric/baseball analysis community.

Mr. Neyer and Nate Silver of Mr. Huckabay's Baseball Prospectus, as noted by Mr. Studeman, both cite that sabermetrics is an analytical science, albeit covering a much more finite realm than a more traditional science like biology. As with any science, discovery can be classified into two broad groups: ideas with practical application and ideas that foster new ways of thinking about the subject. Mr. Huckabay's view is focused almost exclusively on the former, and it is to this end he is challenging the sabermetric community to reach for. He is mindful that baseball organizations have far more data than is available publicly (even on his own website), particularly scouting data, and while the use of sabermetrics like WARP, Pythagorean records, and FIP is informative to the fans of the game, it is the organizations who stand to profit the most from the science. If a sabermetrician does not strive for discovery which can immediately impact or lead to another discovery that impacts front office thinking, then the practice of the science is in vain.

Perhaps my favorite example of this latter idea is only double Nobel laureate in physics, and a genius by any standard. John Bardeen, while at the University of Illinois in Chambana, IL (that's Champaign-Urbana for those unfamiliar), made two extremely important discoveries that modern society now takes for granted as a part of everyday life. He invented the transistor and, later on, the superconductor. Both of those discoveries are enabling the PC you are currently using to read this to even be in existence, as they are the fundamental building blocks of the computer, like protons and nuetrons in chemistry. Now, did he know then what his discoveries would lead to? Not in full, I'm sure. But his discoveries lead to a revolution in how society interacts and operates. This is what sabermetrics must do as well: make discoveries that lead to impact, directly or indirectly.

Going back to BP or Hardball Times or any other publication that includes sabermetric articles, and this much is clear: those meta-discoveries that can lead to the discoveries of direct impact are still being made.