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.
The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience.
This new power, which has proved itself to be such a terrifying weapon of destruction, is harnessed for the first time for the common good of our community.
Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence.
Every living being is also a fossil. Within it, all the way down to the microscopic structure of its proteins, it bears the traces if not the stigmata of its ancestry.
Having been the discoverer of many splendid things, he is said to have asked his friends and relations that, after his death, they should place on his tomb a cylinder enclosing a sphere, writing on it the proportion of the containing solid to that which is contained.
People think if you have deciphered the genome of humans that you can change everything. But you cannot change everything, because you do not know what the genes mean, and you have no methods for changing them, and you can't do experiments with humans like you can with animals.
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