Romanticism and statistics

A grad school friend of mine has gradually become a bit of a big deal in the world of sabermetrics. While that sounds like a category of lifesaving surgical techniques, it's not, although surely more top brain-hours are devoted to sabermetrics than are devoted to the development of lifesaving surgical techniques.

Sabermetrics, named for the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR), is the the study of baseball through detailed empirical data. I was thinking about sabermetrics when I read Joe Posnanski, a proponent of 'advanced baseball stats' himself, on the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. Among the things that make visiting the museum such a moving experience, I infer from his account, is the room for imagination that exists because of the absense of 'record'.

Through the years, I ... listened to stories from Buck O'Neil and Double Duty Radcliffe and Connie Johnson and the great Monte Irvin, who on his best days, before the war and before integration, might have been the best who ever lived.
     We'll never know that about Irvin, of course, and this is the main thing I used to think about when I and looked through the wire at the statues on the field. We'll never know. We'll never know how good Oscar Charleston was ... and we'll never know how hard Smokey Joe Williams really threw ... and we'll never know how many home runs Turkey Stearnes hit ... and we'll never know what the Devil, Willie Wells, looked like fielding a ground ball ... and we'll never know just how fast Cool Papa Bell ran ...
... and we'll never know anything more than we can imagine.
     That's why I loved the museum so much. When people asked Buck how fast Cool Papa Bell was, he would say: "Faster than that." In other words, Josh Gibson's home runs traveled exactly as far as your imagination allows. And the museum was a place for imagination. It did not have a lot of memorabilia -- too expensive and rare -- and it did not have a lot of interactive exhibits. It was more of a spiritual experience.

Those who know me know I have a bit of a romantic side. I like thinking that things were charming and simple in the past. I'm even known to defend the imperial system against the metric system.*

*For all its 'ease of conversion', the metric system is an imposition of a lab mentality on areas of life where it is inappropriate - areas of life where measurements should have real world referents like cups or feet. I don't need 'ease of conversion' when I'm baking muffins! It's a colonization of the lifeworld by the systemworld, to get all Jurgen Habermas-y.

I love sports stats. As a kid I used to grab the sports section and examine the stats page with an intensity that worried my parents. Even now I rarely watch baseball, but still spend a good deal of time at baseball-reference.com, looking at strange stats most people don't even know are kept or calculated. I still only understand a small fraction of them.   

I suppose stats and records can serve the creation of myths, but even then they can remove their magic. Mythmaking adds to the enjoyment of things past as past, and good recordkeeping can cut the legs out from under local legends, or even support them too coldly.  If all fishcatches were logged, we wouldn't be able to tell that story about the doozy of a fish we caught that day we didn't have the camera. And that one that we almost caught but didn't, it must have wieghted ___. If all homeruns are logged and searchable, it's hard to tell tales of that one I saw that afternoon when I was young: man, it must have been at least ___ feet (down with the metric system!).  “[W]e'll never know how many home runs Turkey Stearnes hit", Posnanski writes. Well, everyone knows how many home runs Albert Pujols hit. We also know that they don't make nicknames like they used to.

I think that'd it'd be great to compose a symphony, after a single performance of which all scores are destroyed and of which no recordings are permitted. Oh, and it'd have to be great, which may be difficult for me, as I don't compose symphonies, let alone great ones. It'd become legendary. People would try to recreate it. People would talk about its sublime this and its soaring that.  A lot of my friends are musicians, and I often hear about jam sessions in living rooms or long-closed bars, where a sort of magic was created that will never be created again. It's a tragedy that there aren't tapes. But it's also an amazing blessing.

Complaining about bureaucratic modernity gets old quickly, but that's not going to stop me! Good record keeping is bad for hagiography, and the absense of hagiography is bad for people. Oh, and that TV show Mythbusters is run by killjoys. 

Jesus, Plato and Confucious all left no records. They're known from the accounts of witnesses. Great leaders certainly aren't hurt by some ambigiuity about authorship (and a few unscrutinable passages). Great athletes need to be able to he remembered as giants. A good cache of stats and records is good fun. A good fish story might be even better.

This has been a statement of ambivalence. It is more a declaration of fogeyness than a denunciation of recordkeeping or statistical analysis.  I'll end this with the same F. Scott Fitzgerald statement of fogeyness that Matt Labash uses to close his fogey essay/rant about Facebook in Fly Fishing with Darth Vader: "It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory." 

I'm not sure that's quite what I'm saying here, but it sure reads pretty.

Conrad Black and the visceral trump card

When it comes to moral systems, hypocrisy, inconsistency and exceptions are different things. Hypocisy, as  La Rochefoucauld put it, is the tribute vice pays to virtue. Hypocrisy reflects an inability or unwillingness to live up to one's own standard or a standard one inauthentically espouses. Sometimes I think hypocrisy gets a bad rap. Implicit in hypocrisy is an acknowledgement of the worthwhileness of that standard. I think we're better off if our cads are Dr Johnsons rather than Hugh Hefners.

But let's talk about the related phenomena: inconsistency and exception. Exceptions are an acknowlegement that a system can't apply to all cases. Inconsistencies, I suppose, are exceptions you can't or don't justify.

The tightest systems allow for no exceptions: I love the fact that exceptions aren't needed for the Roman Catholic divorce prohibition. If what appears to be a Catholic marriage breaks down, it was never truly a Catholic marriage, therefore no Catholic marriage has ever broken down. Many ideologies have the same escape valve.

However, most systems need exceptions, and they need the right kind.  In the public square, an allowable elision or aberration has to be articulated in a way that doesn't undermine the principles behind the rule/system itself. Understandably, a lot of effort goes into this process. Just look at the hundreds of years of writing on Just War Theory. Among one's ideological fellow travellers, however, quite often all one needs for a socially acceptable exception is a shared visceral reaction. 

This brings us to Conrad Black, the recently incarcerated historian, commentator and businessman I recently favourably quoted on this blog.  A lot of political progressives downplay the punitive, retributive and deterrent sides of criminal justice. Criminal sanction is, apparently, for a) rehabilitation/restoration, b) public safety, and c) punishing Conrad Black.

There are reasons for the antipathy towards Black. He is, or at least was, rich. He's vocally conservative. He carries himself in a way that some see as snobbish, the effect of which is exacerbated by his conspicuous propensity to marshall the veritable cornucopia of ostentatious words he has at his disposal. He can come across as a bit patronizing.

In 2006, Black was changed with just about every white collar crime imaginable. Over time, all the charges save one were either dropped, resulted in a 'not guilty' verdict, or were overturned on appeal. He's served 28 months and has lost much of his wealth and esteem. Yet, mention his name in some circles and you'll hear rants about how he should spend the rest of his life in jail, and not the comfortable kind of jail either. This is how exceptions work. When theorizing, they're hard to rationalize; in the real world, we reach for the visceral reaction trump card immediately.

There is no chance Conrad Black will 'reoffend'; no accountant or CFO will let him anywhere near an even slightly grey business deal. I'm pretty sure he's not looking to go back to prison, despite his affinity for those with whom he shared accommodations for more than two years. But Black is the exception. People who lament that barbarism of longer jail sentences, mandatory minimum sentences, or uncomfortable prisons, want him to rot in jail. That says more about humans and less about Black.

This sort of viscerality trumping the system isn't particular to this case of course.  I can't remember who it was that observed that, for the most part, Americans actually believe abortion is allowable a) when the health of the mother is at risk, b) when the pregancy is the result of rape, and c) in whatever my own situation is. This is a bit cynical, but it rings true.

I'm not pointing this out to say that viscerality (visceralness?) has no place in moral thinking, or to approve of a Platonic priority for reason over passions.  But if we're going to have systems, and we need to have systems, we shouldn't toss them out the window when someone or something ellicits visceral hatred or wet-eyed sympathy.

Social Movements of the Obama Era

A lot of my friends were/are apoplectic about the Tea Party movement of the past year or two.  I made this chart for them and you: