Something Sure is Fishy Here
Another baseball no-hitter. More pure gold for sports journalists - who, apparently, must take reverse-statistics knowledge test before becoming eligible for employment. Similar to the spate of traffic pedestrian deaths in Toronto in early 2010 the likely underlying statistical "law" is the Poisson distribution under which, to simplify a bit, random events can "come in bunches". However, as in all statistics, the Poisson only applies to "independent" events. So what kinds of factors might make no-hitters dependent in some fashion? Everything that goes into a no-hitter, inter alia, the relative skills of the pitcher and hitters, their health, the size of the ballpark, whether the second baseman has had the curse taken off his glove by sacrificing a rooster... The likelihood that some combination of which would follow some non-independent distribution is very remote. In other words, the default presumption of the Poisson is highly likely. This won't stop sports journalists from speculating endlessly on the literally infinite set of factors that putatively are "causing" the spate of no-hitters. In contrast, the increase in home runs that occurred in what we now know to be an era of rampant steroid use is explainable by the application of orthodox statistical methods without elaborate explanations of non-independence of random events.
Which brings us to Tiger Woods. Previously I have argued that Woods has been so dominant because he's been so much better than everyone else - hence he's almost always made the cut and then been in contention for the 4th round - not because of some supernatural "clutch" ability. A posible non-independent factor would have been that he "psyched" the field which I take to be highly implausible. I think that I'm correct in saying that he's now equalled his worst span between majors; if he fails to win the PGA he's in new territory. The big factor going forward, of course, is; has the relative gulf between him and the field shrunk? If he fails and the drought continues this will lead to an orgy of speculation as to its causes. Once again, by Occam's razor, the simplest explanation is preferred and my money is on him having a longer drought simply because he's gone back a little (minor cause) and the field has gotten (significantly) better.
The tendency of sports journalists to ignore statistics and to dwell on "stories" is part of a much larger and more disturbing apect of modern media and its influence on public policy. Longo distingusihes between those who "tell stories" and those who "know how to count". Take a look, for example, of most winners of the Pullitzer, e.g. Friedman, Halberstam, Hersh, etc.. or someone like Gladwell, or Homer-Dixon or Florida (or before their vogue, Magazine, Reich). These are all superb witers, no doubt but their modus operandi is the same. String together a bunch of "telling anecdotes" and character sketches with "insightful" analogies and, hey presto, you have some overaching narrative. They never stop to count, i.e. do these various things add up and can they be checked?
It's occurred to me recently that there's a connection with Foucault and post-modernism. One of the great positive aspects of the Enlightenment and "mechanistic" thinking is that it forces us to count and to check. There is, indeed, an underlying assumption - something is conserved (i.e. you can add up to a checkable whole which is not greater or less than the sum of its parts), mass, energy, populations, etc.. Pushed to the limit a Foucauldian or any other thoroughgoing relativist could say that these conservation principles are just culturally-determined assumptions and its true that the only rebuttal is a Johnsonian kick in the pants but that's a breathtaking denial of modernity. Which, is exactly the point. As long as deconstructers can pick away at intellectual nits with great vituosity they don't have to defend the untenable "whole" worldview that lies at the base of their hermeneutical methods.
Finally, while the World Cup produced a worthy winner and a final that I enjoyed (what were the Dutch to do after seeing a very clean German team get dismembered? - such hypocrisy, everyone who's played at any level knows that you have rough up more skilled teams if you're interested in winning and what a slap in the face to the WC to assume Holland didn't) there's an annoying "buzz" in English punditry sbout completing passes. This is "counting" that's spurious statistics. What's important isn't that Iniesta completes 87.8765% of his passes but that some of them split the defence. My favorite, Sneijder, almost decided the final with one pass - the one that released Robben to have Casillas make a save with his foot. (Btw notwithstanding Casillas being a great goalie Robben did poorly on that chance: van Nistelrooy would have buried it 99.9% of the time.) My guess, e.g., is that over his career Ryan Giggs has a fairly poor completion % - because he attempted so many difficult passes, which when they come off produce a high probability of a goal. The larger lesson; counting without insight is just as bad as stories without counting.