The Moneyball Fallacy

There's a common fallacy that I see people make; I don't think it has a technical Latin name like most good fallacies, so I like to call it the Moneyball fallacy. Moneyball is a book from 2003 chronicling the Oakland A's front office, led by their general manager Billy Beane, who have applied new statistical principles to find baseball players undervalued by the market, allowing them to remain competitive as a low-revenue, small-market team. Probably the most famous statistical principle from the book is the idea of on-base percentage, which, unlike batting average, looks at how often a baseball player gets on base in any way, including walks, which are ignored in batting average. Beane and the A's front office found that on-base percentage was both extremely valuable and widely ignored, and therefore cheap.

The lesson of the book is that new knowledge can and should be used to exploit inefficiencies in a market, particularly when traditional impulses cause the new knowledge to be widely ignored. The lesson that everyone got from the book, however, is that on-base percentage is important, and now it is, in fact, overvalued in the market. That's the Moneyball fallacy. It's the fallacy of ignoring the real, more general, underlying lesson from a situation or experience and instead focusing on and taking away the simpler, more contextual, less valuable lesson. This fallacy can be seen all the time in all sorts of fields. For example, during coverage of the 2004 election, broadcast networks waited until late in the night to announce the results from the Florida election, but announced the results from the Ohio election relatively early even though it ended up being closer than the Florida election. This is because the the lesson they got from the 2000 election debacle was "Call Florida correctly", not "Don't call any states until you're certain of their outcome."

I brought this up because I had a very current and topical example of the Moneyball fallacy in action, but now I can't remember what it was. Hopefully I will.