Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
I've watched enough baseball games to be pretty damn sure there are pitchers who are harder to hit solidly whether you put the ball into play off them or not, but maybe it's all an illusion. Incidentally Maddux' BABIP for his career was 9 points below the league average, and if you exclude his end of career seasons probably a bit better than that. That seems significant to me but I don't know. Kershaw -- 23 points below.
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Peter,
I'm with you. It's the interperative abilty of some people that seems to totally fail them. Oh, they can compile the data and create the formulas and all, but they still have to then determine and interpret the results and how truly meaningful they really are.
Example, there are a ton of different tax programs out there that are used by accountants, and some are definitely better (or worse) than others. Truthfully, most accountants/CPAs will tell they all have issues and could use lots of improvements to work better and more effectively. But the problem is these programs are created by programmers, not the accountants/CPAs that most often use them. And when we complain to programmers about issues, shortcomings, and errors in these programs they invariably give us their excu.....er, reasons, for not being able to really change anything because they are the programmers, we are not, and they know what they are doing so that is how it is. Hard to believe there could be so many variations in tax software out there when they are all supposedly trying do the same calculations across the board. One would think all tax programs should pretty much be exactly the same, basically this minus that times this rate = income taxes due, right? But its not, because programmers know programming, not taxes. And each different programmer puts their own unique thinking, biases, and such into the tax software product they create. And that's why their different tax software can end up being easier or harder to use than others, can do more or fewer things, and can even come up with completely different tax liability results.
Now go back and swap statisticians for programmers, and ask them to develop their formulas and equations to determine who the greatest lefty pitcher of all time is, instead of how to figure out what your income taxes will be next year. Want to guess how many statisticians will come up with different equations/formulas, along with different answers to the question, especially since each statistician will likely complete their assignment using their own definition of what "greatest" means, without ever asking what you or anyone else thought or wanted it to be?