Great work in yesterday's session! I feel the class is off to a good start now.
Reminder: Read Moneyball from middle of 頁192 - top of 頁205, top of 頁206 - bottom of 頁217, bottom of 頁234 - middle of 頁257, middle of 頁258 - bottom of 頁280 (We will skip a few more player biographies, principally that of Chad Bradford. We will skip the humorous/sentimental epilogue about Jeremy Brown. And we will skip Lewis complaining in the "afterword" about sports journalists who misunderstand his book; implicitly he is comparing them to the dumber traditionalist GMs like Phillips, Minaya, Williams, and Sabean).
Reminder: Read They Say / I Say 30-40
Reminder: Please complete the "debate about student grades" exercise on the previous post... 13 of 13 students have now commented.
Reminder: Please buy Blink from the campus bookstore!
Bonus: We haven't discussed the use of advanced statistics in sports other than baseball, so here is an interesting example. (Wake Forest is where I did my B.A. degree.)
13. (Martin) Philosophical question: what is the purpose of a baseball team?
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14 (Elsa) . If I told you that Billy Beane's two closest professional disciples (Paul DePodesta and J.P. Ricciardi) both failed as general managers, are there any clues in "The Trading Desk" chapter that could help you theorize why?
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15. (Catherine) Once the "student grade debate" exercise is complete, change all of the "says" verbs in each entry to better verbs from the list on 頁39-40. (You can't change the original postings, so just copy them and re-post them with better verbs.)
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16a. (Cathy) In the concluding chapters of Moneyball, Michael Lewis presents an indirect defense of the intuitive or non-quantitative side of baseball. Consider the contrast between the experience of the players and that of the G.M. which you see in "The Trading Desk." Or the contrast between Beane's theories and his own practice. Or the description of the crazy game in "The Human Element" (I saw this on TV at the time and was jumping out of my seat!) Or the intriguing quotation on 頁248 that contends that "every player" is a "sample size [of] one." Give a "closest cliche summary" for Lewis' general argument here. (Maybe pretend you are Joe Morgan?)
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16b (Doll). Instead of a "closest cliche summary," give a "list summary."
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16c. (Alice) Instead of those two bad summaries, give a fair, complex, and commanding (but brief) summary of the kind that Graff & Birkenstein advocate.
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16d. (Kim). Instead of those other kinds, give a "satirical summary" that presents Lewis' true logic but makes it sound ridiculous. (You might imagine yourself as a strong anti-intuitionist like DePodesta or McCracken.)
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In his best-selling Moneyball, Michael Lewis on the one hand gives Billy Beane, the ever so unique GM of Oakland A, credit for effectively and efficiently running a baseball team; while on the other hand, suspecting Billy's ability to handle anything concerning himself rationally, as if to suggest that a skillful surgeon who saves many lives can by all means perform a surgery on himself without failing.
ReplyDeletejenna780818 said...
ReplyDeleteJenny agrees that one's grades could present one's ability to do things. If he knows how to manage his school grades, he must know how to deal with everything.
陳冠倫 said...
I, Aaron, argue that, grades are not so important. For me, it is important that one man should learn how to get along and communacate with other people. I don't want to hire a person who is good at studying but doesn't know how to get along with people.
PeterOrz said...
Aaron asserts that communication is more important than grades. But I complain that what he said is nonsense. If one guy who doesn't have something in his brain, how can he communicate with others?
玫妙 said...
Peter claims something in the "brain" is prior to the communication skills, yet that is nonesense too, coz we are born to "talk." Also, "a paper of grades" can't prove we are capable of anything; that paper actually destroys the potential talents.
amy7802182000 said...
I, Elsa, do not deny with her idea about talking. But I think what is learned from college can be transformed into the communication. If you have not enough knowledge, you can only talk superficial things. Just like if you don't know how to walk, how can you run?
Tiara said...
I, Tiara, support that knowledge is important. However, I don't admire college education do teach students the art of talking. Our companies want to hire some people who can sell our products, not people who talks Shakespeare with customers.
Cathy said...
I acknowledge Tiara's saying about college doesn't teach students the art of talking, talking all about Shakespeare don't do any good to a company. However, a student's grades not only represent how much he or she has learned, but also represent one's sense of responsibility to his works, and that's a important point to consider when hiring people.
容聞 said...
I, Alice, corroborate Cathy's opinion that grading indicates a student's sense of duty. However, I insist that grading cannot tell a student's responsibilty. I think that one of the consideration is working experience. I believe that if the school education focus on grading, the students may spend time on getting good grades instead of obtaining more working experience.
catherine said...
I, Catherine, repudiate Alice's definition about the working experience. Most of students graduate from colleges without any working experience, so the only standard for the employer to judge the employee is the grades which represent his/her past performances. If you deny the function of those statistics from school, what kind of experience can you rely on to judge a person you never know? And if you deny the objective grades from school, do you also regard studying in college is useless for the future when finding a job?
亭汝 said...
ReplyDeleteI, Ting Ju, support that many students may not have a real "work experience"; we indeed need some other system to judge those students. However, I reject that school valuing system is that "objective" as Catherine suggests. Coming from different schools, teachers(judges) and classmates(competitors), how can you say that school grades are objective? I emphasize the new system should put club participation, part-time job, volunteer experience and social ability into consideration. We need someone who can manage various things well, rather than just focusing on getting good grades.
schone Katze said...
Ting reports that the valuation system should not only focus on academic performances; I, Esther, praise that. However, with the same theory Ting points out－ different teacher will have different standard to valuate students－ so does people's mind! They do the same thing with totally different thought. If we take club participation, part-time job, volunteer experience and social ability into consideration, don't you think that students will spend too much their effort on them rather than on study, which are easier to have a well-done than academic performances? That's nothing more than put the incidental before
the fundamental. Furthermore, since people will do anything to seek personal gain, if we introduce extracurricular performances into the valuation system, speculators will swarm to participate in volunteer jobs without real enthusiasm, which will cheat job interviewers as well as stain the original beautiful meaning of volunteer works.
Kim Huang said...
In the debate over whether the recruiters should hire new employees based on their college grades, many will readily celebrate the fact that grades can tell us how intelligent and responsible the candidate is. But what cannot convince me is the nature of the exam itself. As Ting Ju points out, the valuing system can be pretty subjective and thus not a sound ground to assess the candidates coming from different institutes. Also, exams can only test a student's knowledge input, but what those knowledge can be put into use is what a recruiter should concern.
Martin Ramos Perez said...
In discussions of whether if school grades are or are not an important factor to determine the efficiency of a prospect, one controversial issue has been the “papers of grades” which reflect the overall work and effort a student has put into his studies during his study years.
On the one hand, some observe that, even though grades may reflect responsibility and duty, this is not an objective method to measure one’s abilities to communicate and much less to recognize the percentage of the overall knowledge which can be actually put into action.
On the other hand, other people remind us that it is necessary to rely on the grading system because it is a way to correctly rely on something objective: the professors are judges and students are competitors that wish to obtain higher grades, provided that in an honest competition, the grades reflect the quantity and quality of knowledge obtained.
My own view is that while certain skills can only be obtained from books, some other different skills in life can only be learned in life itself. Indeed booksmarts and streetsmarts are two different kinds of people who possess different qualities.
However, I also reaffirm that college gives us a chance to obtain both kinds of knowledge since most universities (word which derived from Latin means “community of teachers and scholars”) not only offer classes on several courses, but also offer several extra-curricular activities such as all kinds of sports, concerts, and clubs which grant the interaction of students, resulting in a whole development of the being. It follows then that, it cannot be said that the “papers of grades” are only papers with numbers of no meaning whatsoever. After all, people have been paying to get degrees, because companies prefer more those who are specialized than that those who don’t.
I've changed the color of those verbs, but it does not work... i am sorry :P
ReplyDeleteThere are so many questions in 16a, and I am going to answer the two most impressive questions to me. First is the contrast between Beane's theory and his own practice. Billy Beane always holds a rational point of view toward baseball, and he says that there is no need to get into a player's mind, trying to change a player is totally useless because they are who they are. However, as a matter of fact, he does something to change them. Billy manipulates his players almost unaware, such as the bet he made with Ramon Hernandez. As to the crazy game in "The Human Element" in this chapter, I think it reveals an idea that baseball is not a game that as rational as Beane claims; on the contrary, it is somehow unpredictable and crazy because the participants, the human beings, are not ruled by reason.
ReplyDeleteI think it's because that Billy don't care about what those baseball players think. He trades them in a some how very impressed way that I even can't figure out what he's doing. All I understand in the chapter The Trading Desk is that Billy is managing a farm system, not baseball system. Though I think animals also should be cared about what they feel, in the chapter I find that Billy takes the players as goods, just gifts from complicated mutual trade. In the chapter, Billy wants to release Mag, though Mag was just in the game for a short time. Billy has no space for any argument and reconsidering. He sends Paul to do it, but Paul doesn't like it for the reason that he thinks it's cruel to call Mag out of the game and filed him. I think maybe Billy's having no sympathy for those players are the reason why he can manage but his disciples failed.
ReplyDelete(Doll)
ReplyDeleteIn Moneyball, first, the author Michael Lewis shows the traditional way scouts choose a player. Then he tells a new way based on statistics strongly endorsed and practiced by Billy Bean, GM of Oakland A’s. Besides, Lewis supports the new way by giving examples of the process of how Oakland A’s won many games. But after that, Lewis contradicts a bit, saying “luck” plays a role in the game. And last, Lewis still admires Billy and his using different theory from all others.
16c. (Alice)In this chapter “The Human Element”, Lewis believes that baseball games are on the human elements. He observes every player is unique, and he also questions that if a scout forecast the future of the players. However, Billy Beane reminds us that baseball players actually follow the similar pattern. I think both of Lewis and Beane emphasizes it is hard to change people, including baseball players. While there is a extraordinary aspect that Beane points out. I admire that although Beane insists on “objective” scientist experiments, he is aware of those “human elements” that influence players’ performance such as age, mass media and religion belief. I agree that Beane manipulates these human elements in his managing policy.
ReplyDelete