In many ways, this is a great book! It’s well written (and well read), and it made me care about baseball in ways I usually don’t. It’s also an interesting story—a great example of the power of statistics and data science to do cool things.

That last part, though, is why I read it. I expected to be critical of the book’s take, and I wasn’t wrong. It cheerleads attitudes about (data) science that I’m skeptical of, like its supposed superiority in terms of objectivity and rationality. It acknowledges the reduction of human beings into abstractions without ever really being skeptical of it. As cool as the core idea is, it’s also kind of a horror story, and we can see some of its scarier implications a couple of decades later.

Listened to Jason talk about this story on the 404 podcast while doing dishes last night (interspersed with watching clips of Moneyball, which I’ve never seem), and so I came back to skim the original article.

I don’t really care about baseball, so maybe I’m not allowed to have this opinion, but this all seems like a hellscape that Jacques Ellul’s technique explains pretty well.