Vintage Bill James.

Given an option to do so, all men prefer to reject information. We start out in life bombarded by a confusing, unfathomable deluge of signals, and we continue until our deaths to huddle under that deluge, never learning to make sense of more than a tiny fraction of it. We get in an elevator and we punch a button and the elevator starts making a noise, and we have no idea in the world of why it makes that noise or how it lifts us up into the air, and so we learn in time to pay no attention to it.

As we prefer to reject any information that complicates our understanding of the world, we especially prefer to reject information about things that happen outside of our own view. If you simply decide that [data that you lack the energy to process] are meaningless, then you don’t have to worry about trying to figure out what they mean. The world is that much simpler.

Bill James is, of course, a famous baseball quant. He was not really the first–I would give that honor to Earnshaw Cook. But James was a dogged empiricist, always questioning and refining his own methods. Instead of manipulating data to support his opinion, he manipulated data in order to arrive at reliable answers. In that respect, I think he sets a great example for economists, which too few emulate.

But the reason I am reading vintage James is because the man could write. There are now many baseball quants, and some of them may have even more baseball-statistics knowledge than James, but they are not worth reading for pleasure.

The quoted passage is from the Bill James Baseball Abstract for 1985.