"糟糕"的全球著名統計學家

“I’m not a statistician,” says Bill James, a legendary statistician. He adds, “I’m also a very bad statistician. I’m sloppy, I’m impatient, I make mistakes and I don’t care about them.”

“我不是統計學家，”具有傳奇色彩的統計學家比爾•詹姆斯(Bill James)稱。他補充道：“我還是個非常糟糕的統計員。我粗心，沒耐心，會出錯誤，而且我不以爲意。”

This “bad statistician” is arguably the father of today’s analytics revolution. In the 1970s, while minding the furnaces of a pork-and-beans plant in Kansas, he began to reinvent baseball stats. Data analysis has since spread everywhere from financial trading to political punditry. Recently James even applied analytics to serial killers.

這位“糟糕的統計員”可謂是當今分析學革命之父。上世紀70年代，當詹姆斯還在堪薩斯(Kansas)操作一家豬肉燉豆廠的火爐時，他開始徹底改造棒球統計學。自此之後，數據分析推廣至各個領域——從金融交易到政治解析。最近，詹姆斯甚至把分析學應用在了連環殺手身上。

I met him earlier this month at the “sports summit” of the Dublin Web Summit, one of his rare ventures into public space. Twenty thousand techies were running around showing each other their apps. James, a plump and grey-bearded 65, was possibly the oldest person there and almost the only one wearing a suit. Scrunched awkwardly into an armchair, he looked much smaller than his 6ft 4in. He rarely meets your eye and often searches agonisingly for the right word. He’s short on “people skills”, he admits. But he has rethought the world using numbers.

不久前，我在都柏林網絡峯會(Dublin Web Summit)的“體育峯會”(sports summit)上遇到了在公衆場合鮮有露面的詹姆斯。2萬名技術高手在會場上穿梭，向彼此展示自己研發的應用軟件。65歲的詹姆斯體態微胖，鬍鬚斑白，可能是在場最爲年長的人，也幾乎是全場唯一穿西裝的人。他彆扭地擠在一把扶手椅上，看起來沒有6英尺4英寸的身高那麼魁梧。他很少與你眼神接觸，說話時也經常痛苦地斟字酌句。他承認，自己不擅長“人際技巧”。不過，他藉助數字重新思索這個世界。

James could see things afresh partly because he was a born outsider. “My father was a small-town school janitor. I had that strong sense when I was young: I just didn’t have any innate talent for being nice to people. I’m not a type of person that academics were going to take under their wing. And it comes from the way I grew up and from being a contrarian. I just don’t naturally accept what I’m told.”

詹姆斯能夠以全新視角看待事物，部分原因在於他生來就是個局外人。“我的父親是一所小鎮學校的清潔工。我從小就有種很強的感覺：我就是沒有對人客套的天賦。我不是學者會收入門下的那類人。這源自我成長之路，以及我與別人相反的思維。我就是不會輕易接受別人告訴我的事。”

When he began studying baseball, he instinctively disbelieved the game’s received wisdom. He assembled new stats to show, for instance, that time-honoured baseball strategies like bunting or base-stealing were dumb. He says, “My skill was seeing new things that people weren’t measuring but that we could measure.” In short, the bad statistician had imagination.

當開始研究棒球時，他本能地對有關棒球賽的公認智慧產生了懷疑。例如，他收集了新的數據來證明，像短打或盜壘這種由來已久的棒球策略都是不明智的。他稱：“我的能力在於看到別人不在衡量、而我們可以衡量的新參數。”簡言之，這位糟糕的統計員富有想象力。

He had also chosen the right topic. Baseball began collecting game stats early. By the time computers became widely available, it had 100 years of numbers waiting to be crunched. James says, “The analytic revolution hit in baseball before it did in finance, for example, and that made baseball sort of a paradigm of how this works.” It’s no accident that today’s leading political number-cruncher, Nate Silver, began as a baseball statistician.

他還會選擇合適的研究對象。棒球很早便開始收集比賽數據。當計算機變得普及時，這項運動已經有了100年的數據等待研究。詹姆斯稱：“在應用於金融之前，分析學的革命便已在棒球界展開，這使得棒球在某種程度上成爲分析學應用的範例。”並非偶然的是，當今頂尖的政治數據分析師納特•西爾弗(Nate Silver)是棒球統計員出身。

James had another useful attribute for a revolutionary: good prose. Quite simply, he is an astonishingly skilled writer of non-fiction. In 1977 he self-published his first photocopied, stapled Baseball Abstract. His style – American vernacular wrapped in formal grammar – soon spread his fame. I currently cannot stop reading his 2011 book, Popular Crime. His insights pour out: serial killers are almost always thieves, too; men who murder their wives are typically having an affair; a secret-service agent startled by Lee Harvey Oswald’s shots probably accidentally fired the bullet that killed John F Kennedy.

詹姆斯還有另外一點身爲革命者的有利特質：寫得一手好文章。很簡單，他是一名天賦異稟的非小說作家。1977年，他自己出版了第一本用複印機和訂書機裝訂成冊的書——《棒球彙編》(Baseball Abstract)。他的風格——在正規語法包裝下的美式白話——迅速使其聲名鵲起。最近，我對他2011年所著的《熱門罪案》(Popular Crime)愛不釋手。他的見解如行雲流水般道來：連環殺手幾乎也都是竊賊；殺妻者通常都有婚外情；在聽到李•哈維•奧斯瓦爾德(Lee Harvey Oswald)的槍聲後在驚恐之下意外扣動扳機的一名特勤局(Secret Service)特工，很可能射出了打死約翰•肯尼迪(John F Kennedy)的那發子彈。

When I ask James for his literary inspirations, he names economists: Paul Samuelson, Robert Fogel and “early writers in econometrics”. Good analysts tend to make good writers, he explains.

當我問及詹姆斯的文學啓蒙時，他說出了幾名經濟學家的名字：保羅•薩繆爾森(Paul Samuelson)、羅伯特•福格爾(Robert Fogel)以及幾個“計量統計學的早期著述者”。他解釋稱，優秀的統計學家傾向於成爲好作家。

James remained an outsider for decades. Had he never been recognised, he admits, “It would have eaten me away. I’d have been bitter and sarcastic, like when I was young.” But gradually insiders began paying attention. One early reader was a commodities trader named John W Henry. Later Henry bought the Boston Red Sox. Now James advises the club on baseball matters: “Should we sign this player? Should we use this player in this way?” James has also helped statisticians from Henry’s English football club, Liverpool.

詹姆斯保持局外人的身份達數十年。他承認，如果從未獲得認可，“那會讓我極度失落。我會變得憤世嫉俗、尖酸刻薄，就像我年輕時那樣。”不過，圈內人逐漸開始關注他。詹姆斯的早期讀者中有一位名爲約翰•W•亨利(John W Henry)的大宗商品交易商。不久後，亨利買下了波士頓紅襪隊(Boston Red Sox)。如今，詹姆斯是該俱樂部棒球事務的顧問：“我們應該籤這名球員嗎？我們可以這樣用這名球員嗎？”詹姆斯還爲亨利的英格蘭足球俱樂部——利物浦(Liverpool)的統計員提供幫助。

 . . . 

……

Almost every big sports club now employs a team of Jamesian analysts. However, the big decisions are still made by smartly dressed executives. James admits he couldn’t do their job. “You need a lot better people skills than I have. I don’t carry a phone. I don’t understand how people who carry a phone can get any work done.”

如今，幾乎所有的大型體育俱樂部都聘請了一個詹式分析師團隊。然而，重大決定仍然由西裝筆挺的經理們做出。詹姆斯承認，他做不了經理的工作。“那需要比我出色得多的人際交往能力。我不隨身攜帶手機。我不明白帶手機的人怎麼能完成工作。”

Still, the outsider has finally become an American success. “I’m very pleased,” he admits. “In a sense I won my argument with the world. The world has been very good to me – as an adult, not when I was a child.

話說回來，這位局外人最終成爲了一個美國標杆。“我很高興，”他坦白道，“在某種意義上，我向世界證明了自己的論點。世界對我不錯，當然這是在我成年之後，在我小時候並非如此。”

“I’ve gagged on the fallacies of all organised systems of thought.” But he has ended up creating his own organised system of thought: baseball analytics, known as “sabermetrics”. He invented today’s conventional wisdom. Surely that discomfits him? “A lot of organised sabermetrics doesn’t work,” replies James.

“所有思想組織體系的謬論讓我作嘔。”不過，他最終創造了自己的思想組織體系：棒球分析學，即“賽伯計量學”(sabermetrics)。他發明瞭如今的傳統智慧。難道這不會困擾他嗎？“賽伯計量學的很多理論不管用，”詹姆斯回答稱。

“A lot of it’s bullshit. What we don’t know is always – in my own view – a million times bigger than what we do. There will never be a shortage of ignorance.”

“很多都是胡扯。在我認爲，我們不知道的事總是遠遠超過我們知道的事。這世界永遠不會缺少無知。”

And he includes himself in that. Bill James is contrarian even about Bill James. Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball lionises him; James, possibly uniquely among sports statisticians, hasn’t read it. “I think that I’m in no sense a phony,” he says, “I think I don’t pretend to be anything I’m not. However, a lot of what people say about me isn’t true. I’m not smarter than anybody.”

而他也把自己歸入其中。比爾•詹姆斯甚至是自己的反派。邁克爾•劉易斯(Michael Lewis)所著的《魔球》(Moneyball)對他評價甚高；而詹姆斯很可能是唯一一個沒有讀過該書的體育統計學家。“我覺得我決不是冒牌貨，”他稱，“我認爲我從不會假裝成其他人。不過，別人口中的我有很多不是真的。我不比任何人聰明。”

Then, to his immense relief, I let him go.

然後，我讓他離開了，這對他來說是個極大的解脫。