That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.
Michael LewisRead
The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto.
Interpretation
The pursuit of knowledge in baseball illustrates both human passion and the potential for more impactful discoveries.
Michael Lewis's quote reflects on the immense intellectual energy devoted to understanding baseball, highlighting the fascinating yet perplexing dedication to a sport at the expense of potentially more significant scientific breakthroughs. It raises questions about priorities and the ways in which human curiosity can lead to both enriching experiences and missed opportunities for addressing critical issues.
In practice
During a baseball seminar, one could use this quote to emphasize the joy and complexity of the game's analysis.
That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.
People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.
Commitment, by its nature, frees us from ourselves and, while it stands us in opposition to some, it joins us with others similarly committed. Commitment moves us from the mirror trap of the self absorbed with the self to the freedom of a community of shared values.
Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.
The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance.
A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will.
Autoimmunity is probably the next frontier. The majority of cases of autoimmune disease result from a complex genetic problem that has environmental influences. It is a colossal task for the immune system to maintain tolerance to self and yet be ready to react to everything in the world around us.
Perhaps some day in the dim future it will be possible to advance the computations faster than the weather advances and at a cost less than the saving to mankind due to the information gained. But that is a dream.
At the heart of quantum mechanics is a rule that sometimes governs politicians or CEOs-as long as no one is watching, anything goes.
The mineral world is a much more supple and mobile world than could be imagined by the science of the ancients. Vaguely analogous to the metamorphoses of living creatures, there occurs in the most solid rocks, as we now know, perpetual transformation of a mineral species.
Where we have good, testable explanations, they then have to be tested, and we drop the ones that fail the tests.
I think the question is, are there women and have there been women who want to do science and could be doing great science, but they never really got the opportunity?
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