I know sports aren’t too popular on LW, but I happen to be an avid College Football (Specifically, LSU, UT, and the rest of the SEC) fan, and I heard about a book on the Freakonomics blog called Scorecasting. I haven’t finished it yet, but what it has been so far is mostly how cognitive biases produce suboptimal strategies or outcomes in most professional sports. I’ve found it really interesting so far, but if sports aren’t your thing, you probably won’t.
Here is the link to the freakonomics post for those interested. I thought it was OK. You might also be interested in the works of Bill James. Bill James was doing freakonomics and cognitive bias analysis back in the early 1980′s, selling his Bill James Baseball Abstract self-published to a list of subscribers gathered by word-of-mouth. He is the man most responsible for the state of modern Major League Baseball statistical analysis—the emphasis of On Base Percentage, the de-emphasis of pitchers’ Won-Loss totals and a number of other changes and innovations.
I tried to argue in this post that the collection of large numbers of baseball player performance statistics and the incessant analysis towards meaning and reliability of them by fanatics make them as good a raw data set on human performance we have anywhere. The prediction accuracy of Las Vegas sports bookmakers may well be the singular most successful prediction market anywhere at anytime.
Sports are not my thing. However, I read the first few chapters of that book and it was great. Then I lost my copy. I second RobertLumley’s recommendation on limited information.
Anyway, here goes:
I know sports aren’t too popular on LW, but I happen to be an avid College Football (Specifically, LSU, UT, and the rest of the SEC) fan, and I heard about a book on the Freakonomics blog called Scorecasting. I haven’t finished it yet, but what it has been so far is mostly how cognitive biases produce suboptimal strategies or outcomes in most professional sports. I’ve found it really interesting so far, but if sports aren’t your thing, you probably won’t.
Here is the link to the freakonomics post for those interested. I thought it was OK. You might also be interested in the works of Bill James. Bill James was doing freakonomics and cognitive bias analysis back in the early 1980′s, selling his Bill James Baseball Abstract self-published to a list of subscribers gathered by word-of-mouth. He is the man most responsible for the state of modern Major League Baseball statistical analysis—the emphasis of On Base Percentage, the de-emphasis of pitchers’ Won-Loss totals and a number of other changes and innovations.
I tried to argue in this post that the collection of large numbers of baseball player performance statistics and the incessant analysis towards meaning and reliability of them by fanatics make them as good a raw data set on human performance we have anywhere. The prediction accuracy of Las Vegas sports bookmakers may well be the singular most successful prediction market anywhere at anytime.
If you like movies, Moneyball is recent and about sabermetrics.
Sports are not my thing. However, I read the first few chapters of that book and it was great. Then I lost my copy. I second RobertLumley’s recommendation on limited information.