MAC_32 said:
Bob Magaw said:
Why would you go and intrude common sense, logic and reason into a perfectly self consistent, tautologically insular, impenatrably circular, subjective impression world capable of command overrides contravening superficial irrelevancies like stats and history?
Numbers, shnumbers.
baseball and football are my two favorite sports. They couldn't be much different though. Football is by nature a subjective sport. Based on what I have seen of Dalton, which is a lot, I think the numbers lie about who he really is. It. Will catch up to him if he doesn't make corrections and expecting him to make them at this point is setting yourself up for disappointment.
It's a lot more subjective when you refuse to acknowledge stats. You might be a very acute, keen observer, but unless you have a photographic memory, I don't think you (or anybody) could track things like good/bad game splits to the tenth of a percentage point, or anywhere close to that.
You thought you saw something. You were mistaken. Louche's post #446 basically eviscerated your contentions, it was a pristine, immaculate, Donkey Kong Kill Screen-equivalent of a refutation, and the aftermath has been like the Black Knight scene in Monthy Python and The Holy Grail, you are carrying on as if nothing happened with the numbers lie mantra.
Instead of stats like W-L, completion percentage, Y/A, TDs, INTs (which you fail to acknowledge because you have seen him play 20 times), take another stat. Games played. Without looking it up, I think he has played about 48 regular season games and the playoff games. If you were to say he missed half his games, and others confirmed that the record showed that you were mistaken, and you responded by saying that you mistrusted all that numbers hooey and mumbo jumbo, you saw what you saw, you weren't budging an inch from your contention that he did miss half the games, the numbers lie, you were going to trust what your eyes told you, that was your story and your sticking to it, than you would be in much the same situation you find yourself in now.
If you were to say that, which is akin to what you have been saying (numbers lie), than the contention he had played only half the possible games, and insisting that this was so in the face of attempts to correct you that the belief was mistaken would very much resemble and take on the character and nature of a hallucination. It may seem real to you, in your own world, but it doesn't connect up with what is easily verifiable by others around you. Completion percentage isn't a subjective stat like assists on defense, where the variance between stat keepers and stadiums is notorious. A ball is caught or it isn't, assuming you don't think the record is an internet conspiracy to hoodwink people. A player gets a TD or not.
Modern planes use feedback-driven course correction mechanisms, if they start to drift to the right, the computer straightens out the plane, if it deviates a little to the left, it re-straightens. Stats can be a way to check our observations, impressions, thoughts, etc. Again, nobody needs to google Manning to tell he had a great season last year, or Jimmy Clausen to tell he hasn't had a sparkling career so far. It is precisely with a prospect not as extreme or obvious that stats would be needed most to evaluate whether he has improved or not in three years.
Numbers are like a gun, they aren't intrinsically bad, they can be good, it just depends on how you use them. Obviously they can lead people astray at times, and can be a blunt instrument if not used carefully. But its not like you can't be led astray by your perceptions and cognitive tricks we play on ourselves (observations and stats can be a check against each other, and don't have to be mutually exclusive, even if the former takes primacy). Attention and perception can be selective, we train ourselves to look and think about things in certain ways. There is a big difference between pausing a game in between plays and taking notes like a scout, as opposed to watching a game and than knocking the nachos onto a friend while trying to clean up some beer you just spilled, lets not take what we are doing TOO seriously.
Stats don't have to be a crutch or substitute for watching games, and they can augment our thinking about players. Sometimes the instant something stat related is dropped in a thread, you respond by saying you WATCH GAMES. On a board like this, that is like announcing you breathe. Its practically a given, and falls into the category of information we already possess. Other people watch games, too. The difference is, if stats disprove what they thought they saw, they generally don't respond by distrusting the stats, stubbornly hang on to the discredited belief and repeat numbers lie.
There is no direct, unmediated, mystical intuition into reality by going it alone with "your eyes", you would be fooling yourself (vision itself is a mental construct, in this case of a flat image on a screen, with incomplete camera angle access as noted, so already several big steps removed). Your perceptions and conceptions are mediated whether you realize it or not, and that is a big reason, imo, why it is dangerous to completely rebuke and spurn stats and numbers and fail to incorporate knowledge of them, and if they "disagree" (its weird even saying that, trying to put it in your language) when presented to you, ignore them and pretend they don't exist. There is no such thing as unmediated reality and direct perception of reality as if William Blake* was a scout, being conscious of neutral numbers to augment our thinking and using them accordingly would seem to be at least as safe as winging it while oblivious of unconscious perceptual mechanisms and cognitive shenanigans (memory being imperfect in one obvious instance that comes immediately to mind, another would be taking a handful of bad games and projecting that onto a player's body of work as a whole).
Clearly Dalton has improved in his three years. Seemingly the only way you could persist in the belief he hasn't, you told yourself a story about him, somewhere along the line you believed it, and than you shut it down as far as any kind of scouting apparatus. If he makes a nice play with touch on a scoring pass, you couldn't be weighing it the same as when he does something bad, which you probably seize on and say, see, he is seeing ghosts and being wildly inaccurate again, that confirms what I knew all along.
You've said in this thread better to get rid of a player too soon than too late. That's well and good, but unfortunately we don't have foreknowledge of which is which (thus threads like this). Yes, holding on to a bad player too long is bad, but you left out the part about parting with a good player too soon is arguably worse.
Conviction is appropriate and warranted in thinking 2 + 2 = 4. If you think 2 + 2 = 5, and somebody tries to demonstrate for you on a table that two apples plus two apples leaves four and not five apples on the table, and you persist in saying that your eyes see five, and you don't trust that adding stuff, counting lies, than not so much. No matter how emphatic or adamant that conviction was, it would be monstrously irrelevant because it was wrong. It's great to have conviction, but it is pernicious to dig your heels in when you are mistaken. The great thing about minds is they are malleable, and mistakes can be corrected (if we are open to that possibility). There are alternatives to following your beliefs wherever they lead, if they lead to a place in which you think "numbers lie", instead of modifying your thinking when presented with incontrovertible statistical evidence that your impressions are baseless and unfounded.
* William Blake (from the Marriage of Heaven and Hell in 1793)
"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."
Blake on an early scouting assignment.
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/detail/Detail_blake_william.html
