October 24, 2008
Bipartisan Healthcare
Via Athletics Nation, Billy Beane helps Newt Gingrich and John Kerry make a pitch for healthcare reform.
I'd like to see more of this from sabermetricians. Nate Silver is looking at polling this year. It's a nice problem to solve but adds little value to anything. It will teach future candidates how to better game elections, but I'm not sure that works to the betterment of society. I'd love to see people like Nate turn their expertise to assigning value to government programs to see which are actually helping. Maybe a VODN index, Value Over Doing Nothing.
Posted by David Pinto at
11:51 AM
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Great point about gaming the system. We already see too many messages from our National leaders and potential leaders being directly targeted to small pockets of the population. We don't need that message any further refined and filtered.
Yeah, I dunno. People who spend their lives writing about baseball are not in a great position to tell other people to spend more effort on the betterment of society.
I don't spend my life on the betterment of society either, by the way. In case anyone was wondering.
Wow. That's pretty harsh, James.
I'm not allowed to have an opinion about something unless I do it? And for the record, I wasn't telling anyone to do anything. I just said I'd love to see it done.
Wouldn't you at least want input from someone who's won something?
I think improving polling would be to do a service. Polls exist, and are widely reported and widely acted upon. It can only help if those polls are made to more accurately reflect the views of the population being polled, or else we all proceed on false assumptions. I agree that it is at least an open question whether or not we'd be better off without polls at all, but that isn't going to happen, so in the alternative the work people like Silver do is worthwhile. If not worth a gold medal, at least Silver.
(Not to mention that there is an argument that responding to actual public opinion is precisely what a politician in a democratic society is supposed to do.)
But we can agree, I think, that it would be a shame to have the better sabermetricians distracted from the important work of refining our knowledge of baseball.
I am certain that the world would be in a much better place if 10% of the critical thinking used in sports were directed to politics (and by that I mean the real politics: health care, education, transportation, etc.).
Who hasn't won anything, Bandit? Beane? (Does that mean that Joe Maddon's managerial moves can't be applauded until after the Rays win the Series?) By the way, unlike most general managers, Beane did play in the majors, so please don't bother with that tired retort.
Billy Beane but John Kerry's a loser too. And you. At least Maddon won the pennant.
And Bill James (and Theo too?) was a joke in your book until the Red Sox won the World Series in '04, Bandit? (Oh, that's right, James is still an idiot in your book because he never played professional ball!) Your logic is flawed. Get over it and move on. By the way, winning a major party's nomination is pretty impressive, even though I disagree with him 90+% of the time.