The first movie is of course 'Moneyball' and the second is 'Trouble with the curve'. Both movies are about recruitment of players in baseball. But both movies take a completely different route for this. This article seeks to point out the extreme difference and I seek views of all of you readers.
In Moneyball, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) is a the General Manager of a poor Oakland Athletics team. He develops a statistical model for player selection with a Yale economics graduate. The focus of selection is numbers and not intuition and experience of the scounts. Gus (Clint Eastwood) is an aging scout for Atlanta Braves in Trouble with the Curve. He has a very weak eyesight. He rejects a star prospect based on the sound of the bat hitting the ball. This is in spite of his amazing statistics. In the end Gus is proved right.
The debate is between using analytics and individual insights for decision making. In the movies both seem to work. In real life a lot of importance is given to the brilliance of an individual manager who seems to be able to make better decisions. Books by Kahneman and Taleb negate the role of intuition and seem to suggest a role for random luck. They support the decision making with numbers view.
What would you do? How much importance would you give to decisions taken on the basis of analytics versus the gut based decisions of an experienced manager?
In Moneyball, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) is a the General Manager of a poor Oakland Athletics team. He develops a statistical model for player selection with a Yale economics graduate. The focus of selection is numbers and not intuition and experience of the scounts. Gus (Clint Eastwood) is an aging scout for Atlanta Braves in Trouble with the Curve. He has a very weak eyesight. He rejects a star prospect based on the sound of the bat hitting the ball. This is in spite of his amazing statistics. In the end Gus is proved right.
The debate is between using analytics and individual insights for decision making. In the movies both seem to work. In real life a lot of importance is given to the brilliance of an individual manager who seems to be able to make better decisions. Books by Kahneman and Taleb negate the role of intuition and seem to suggest a role for random luck. They support the decision making with numbers view.
What would you do? How much importance would you give to decisions taken on the basis of analytics versus the gut based decisions of an experienced manager?
