April 03, 2005
Bill James on understanding reality
"I believe in a universe that is too complex for any of us to really understand. Each of us has an organized way of thinking about the world—a paradigm, if you will—and we need those, of course; you can’t get through the day unless you have some organized way of thinking about the world. But the problem is that the real world is vastly more complicated than the image of it that we carry around in our heads. Many things are real and important that are not explained by our theories—no matter who we are, no matter how intelligent we are.
For those who don't know, Bill James is the father of scientific analysis in baseball - he was the first to argue that you could use statistics [well, numbers really, not a lot of baseball analysis is really statistical...] to better understand the game and what was actually going on. This approach of course was made famous to many via Michael Lewis' Moneyball. But the point James is making is that our attempts at understanding this are always, no matter how sophisticated they are, somewhat simplistic, by definition simplified, invariably abstracted. This is the point Virginia Postrel is working around in her latest NYT column that I mentioned yesterday.
Posted in: Random
Previously: Rogers Cadenhead on open source and the ecology of softwareNext: More naivety from the Archbishop of Canterbury
