Almost Famous: The One Where Basic English Falls Prey to Number Love

Editor's Note: Before you jump down this particular rabbit hole, please know that it is about the advanced stats debate. It is written for an audience of one, though all are welcome. Enjoy.

Apparently we aren't done yet. We have tried to make it abundantly clear that we here at Hockey Wilderness, and especially myself, really don't give a crap if the stats world finds a bunch of algorithms and pie charts that can predict who is going to win every game from now until eternity. They haven't found a system that can predict who is going to win even one game, let alone all of them, but they sure are proud of their predictive abilities, nonetheless.

Yet, this isn't about the numbers. Why are we delving into this again? Make the jump and find out.

NHL Numbers used to be the go to site for salary cap information on the web. Along came CapGeek, and NHL Numbers was left in the dust. To give them credit, they decided not to simply become an irrelevant copy cat, so they reinvented themselves as a stat head haven. Good for them. They went out and hired the biggest names in statistical misdirection analysis and put them all on one site.

I can only imagine that if you disagree with anyone over there, you are probably met with links back to their own work, being called stupid, and made to feel as if you just aren't good enough because you don't spend your spare time reading about psychological phenomena and how it impacts your fandom of a sports team. Nah, they probably just say, "We respect your right to disagree with our assertion, thank you for stopping by." Right?

The worst part of this is, that somehow, because I don't agree with their numbers, or their assertion that they are the end all be all of sports fandom, that I am somehow less intelligent than they are. As I have read, the stats debate is like religious debate. If you don't agree with the zealots, you are a lesser human being, worthy only of disdain and mockery. You can't simply not believe what they do and everyone get along. It's just not possible for a zealot to understand that you really just don't care what their beliefs are.

All that is fine and good, and I wish I could respect that position, but I can't. The more these writers push their numbers down people's throats and assign some sort of holy objectivity to their own side, while claiming "confirmation bias" for anyone who disagrees with them, the more I begin to lose my respect for their abilities. I want to maintain a respect level for the work they put in, but when they write highly biased articles, and attack others in the process, all while claiming objectivity and holding delusions of grandeur, the work is what loses the respect, and that is sad to me.

We're now 500+ words in, and still we have yet to look at what got us here. So let's do that, shall we?

The Argument Against Basic English

Eric T, who also happens to write over at Broad Street Hockey, has a piece up over at NHL Numbers, that, for some reason, uses an attack on me and my work to prove a point, that after reading it a few times, I'm still not quite sure what the hell the point was, or how it relates to being a hockey fan. Most likely because I don't buy their religious fervor, and don't get how Freud, Jung, and other psych majors who did more cocaine than everyone in the 80's combined make a damn bit of difference about watching a black piece of rubber fly past an armored warrior on knives.

Here's what Eric had to say:

I'll leave the links live so you can see where Eric is linking to.

First off, Eric, once again, assigns emotion to my work which simply does exist. This is a danger writers often fall prey to. They read something, and assign an emotion to it without ever asking the author what they were feeling. I have zero emotion toward stats. I think they are stupid, and don't care in the slightest, but apathy (a complete lack of emotion by definition) and a belief that something is stupid are not emotion.

Assigning emotion to my writing creates emotion in me. It irritates the hell out of me. There is no reason for assigning emotion you cannot prove (which is ironic since Eric's entire piece was about "the need to use as much evidence as possible to form conclusions"), save for supporting your opinion when you have no other means to do so, and belittling the work of someone else as "emotional" in order to dismiss it as not good enough.

Here's my favorite part. "That's why a Wild fan who dug in early in the year..." Apparently, I have so wronged Eric that I am not even worthy to be mentioned, except by team allegiance. It's not as if Eric doesn't know my name, we write for the same damn network, and have conversed many times publicly and privately (mind you, all digitally).

I did, I guess, "dig in early in the year." Though, if A Flyers Fan would actually read my work from time to time (unlikely), he would know I have been apathetic to their numbers for much longer than a season. Of course, that's just my "confirmation bias" at work. Not sure when being confident in your own beliefs became labelled as confirmation bias, but it highly interesting to me that they chose to latch onto that terminology from a communications stand point, since it doesn't actually mean what they think it does.

The Great Save Percentage Debate of 2011-12

I didn't argue that no one said the save % would fall. For fuck's sake, I said the save percentage would likely fall. What I said was that no one made the argument that save percentage slipping would drag the team down the tubes. I still haven't seen someone tell me otherwise.

You will note each word in the phrase "written about several stat-based articles" is a link to a different post from me. I didn't write about them, I linked to them is the daily Walk, with a cursory sentence or two explaining what they were. A Flyers Fan knows what these posts are, and has likely "written" them more than once.

In fact, A Flyers Fan assigns meaning to these posts that simply isn't there.

So, three links to three different Walks that link out to three different stories by stat heads, all based on the same broken logic, and none of the three actually make a case that save % will bring the Wild down.

UPDATE- From Geoff Detweiler, it appears this is the crux of their argument:

This is a small portion of the entire comment, which actually reads:

Read the second paragraph. The argument is NOT that no one said the save % would fall, but rather that no one used that as their argument that the Wild would crash. They used possession stats as their argument, and then claimed victory, despite the possession stats not changing.

You want the very definition of confirmation bias? It's pulling 18 words out of the middle of a sentence in a 194 word argument to buffet your case.

No One Likes to be Wrong, Except Some People

Finally, we get to where A Flyers Fan suggests I am a paranoid idiot. "The subconscious desire not to be wrong can be so powerful that when reminded of those articles, he concluded that they must have been changed after the fact." The subconscious desire not to be wrong? I really don't care about being wrong, I'm wrong all the time. In fact, I love being wrong, because it means I get to learn something. My favorite quote of all time is, "The only way to avoid failure is to learn from it." I take pride in being wrong, in making mistakes, and in learning valuable lessons from them. Telling me I want to avoid being wrong makes me, quite literally, laugh out loud.

Oh wait, they didn't? What the fuck good is predictive ability if you can't predict anything? It's idiotic.

Man, I bet that was just a rousing conversation. I wish you two would have filmed it, to be used in case of extreme insomnia.

Two Thousand Words Later

I really appreciate A Flyers Fan linking to An Oilers Fan, A Jets Fan, and A Canucks Fan for us all again. I do so love having to wade back through the statistical drivel without the benefit of a caffeine drip.

I don't care about the stats. I don't. I am not sure how much more clear I can be about that. You get 2000+ words because people claim to be above bias and issue attacks without having the balls to call that person out by name piss me off. Anyone who does so can fuck right off.

There's your emotion, Flyers Fan.