The Corpses Of Our Motivations– The Lawrence Arms
Up through the election, we heard paeans to Silver, hilarious jokes about the fools who tried to ‘unskew’ the polls, and the general triumph of reality-based analysis.
Then Silver returned to his old stomping grounds and wrote a pretty straightforward post explaining why Mike Trout is (rather obviously) the correct choice for MVP. And out came the crazy. The comments section on the article reads like a greatest hits of all the stupid things people on the right said about Silver in regards to the election.
But, the Tigers made the playoffs (despite winning less games than the Angels, and playing in a terrible division). And, your analysis didn’t account for the fact that Cabrera volunteered to move to third (in fact, it does account for that – because the replacement level for third base is higher than first base. Cabrera struck out less than Trout (totally irrelevant information). Cabrera led in total base, slugging percentage, homeruns, and OPS (all of which measure much the same thing – and no one is contesting that Cabrera had a narrowly better offensive season). RBIs (which are a function of opportunity, and Trout scored more Runs). It’s pretty much impossible to measure defense (it is difficult, but it’s difficult in the same way that single polls are never perfectly accurate. But they sure do provide some information).
The point here is that people were absolutely willing to walk through fire to defend Silver’s secret sauce, his commitment to objectivity, etc. But once his opinion began to differ from the preconceived value of his fans, he became just another media fool incapable of correctly assessing the situation.
The attitude of ‘I’ve been watching baseball for decades; you’re not going to convince me that the Triple Crown doesn’t = MVP with some supposed facts’ is strikingly similar to ‘I’ve been watching political campaigns for a long time and it feels like Romney has momentum.’
Suddenly everyone is an expert and Nate Silver is just a rube.
Motivated reasoning is a powerful thing.