Regarding the Definition of the Word 'Unscientific'

So, yesterday the left-wing part of the internet had a bit of fun reading this essay (of sorts) by one Charles C.W. Cooke for the National Review Online. Apparently NRO hasn't heard of single-page formatting, so that link goes only to page 1. The thing I'm gonna talk about in this post is on page 2. However, you should read the whole thing, because it is staggeringly, mind-blowingly, hilariously awful. It's basically a rant against the supposed "nerd culture" of American liberalism, with a bizarre fixation on Neil deGrasse Tyson as the emblem thereof. I could probably write a post that had a one paragraph per sentence ratio of response to this essay, but that is almost certainly a poor allocation of resources so I'm mostly gonna let it speak for, and against, itself.

But I did want to make a bit of a point regarding one particular paragraph late in the article. After criticizing liberals for claiming that their worldviews are driven solely by data, he says the following:

This is nonsense. Progressives not only believe all sorts of unscientific things — that Medicaid, the VA, and Head Start work; that school choice does not; that abortion carries with it few important medical questions; that GM crops make the world worse; that one can attribute every hurricane, wildfire, and heat wave to “climate change”; that it’s feasible that renewable energy will take over from fossil fuels anytime soon...

The sentence continues, but this is the part I'm interested in.

Polling Reveals Major Doublethink in America

George Orwell, in 1984, defined "double-think" as "[t]he power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them." I mean, he defined it in a lot more detail than that, but that's the typical canonical statement. Well, Kevin Drum brings up a recent Gallup poll that asked people whether they thought various different things would improve the quality of governance in this country. He's mostly interested in the fact that an overwhelming majority think having more businessmen in Congress would be an improvement. That's admittedly a somewhat disconcerting result (really, guys? 18% more people think having more businessmen in Congress would be an improvement than having more women? that's pathetic) but it's not the thing I find most interesting. Here's the chart summarizing the results:

Focus on the third and fifth entries. Apparently 63% of people think that we'd be better off with more people in Congress who will pursue compromise rather than sticking hard to their principles, and 56% think we'd be better off with more people in Congress who would stick hard to their principles rather than pursuing compromise. 30% and 38%, respectively, disagree. Eeeeexcept... uhhh... those numbers add up to 119%. That is to say, a minimum of 19% of the respondents in this poll said both that X was better than Y and that Y is better than X. ...yeah.

All of which is to say, this poll is yet another piece of evidence that people are just super unhappy about the state of the world right now, in general. They're not upset at anyone in particular; or rather, they're upset at everyone. So anything you present as an alternative to the status quo is going to sound good. (Note that every single one of these got a net positive response.) That's true, apparently, even if you present two completely contradictory alternatives! (Okay I suppose they're not necessarily 100% contradictory if there are some people who fall into neither of those categories; maybe what people just want is a higher concentration of extreme compromisers and extreme hardliners, with few people in the middle of that particular spectrum. But I'm not buyin' it.) I bet if they had stuck "men" in their poll as one of the things we might put more of in Congress, they'd have gotten a positive result for that, despite the fact that the "women" question is literally the inverse of that question. 63% of their respondents literally said something that is equivalent to thinking it would be a bad thing if we had more men in Congress, but I bet you that an awful lot of those people would have said the exact same opposite had they been prompted.

So don't take polls like this too seriously.

The Argument for Keeping the Mets Together

The Mets are playing well right now. They're something like 7-2 over their current homestand, having won each of the three series in it and going for a sweep of the Marlins tomorrow behind suddenly en fuego Jacob deGrom. This is always really easy to do when things are going well over a short time scale, but I can't help myself from thinking that there's a really good argument to be made for keeping this current team together, more or less, for next year.

Here's what that roster could look like, more or less, using only people under team control already:

Regarding Stephen Drew

Sort of at random today I happened to be reminded of this article from FanGraphs from back over the offseason, basically wondering out loud why the Mets hadn't yet signed Stephen Drew given their obvious, glaring hole at shortstop in the form of one Ruben Tejada. And I happened to skim over some of the comments (something you can actually do on FanGraphs without wanting to gouge your eyes out afterwards), all of which thought that no matter what reasons the author could come up with why the move wasn't as obvious as everyone thought, it was obvious and Sandy Alderson should just stop making excuses and get it done. So I thought I'd just point the following out:

Ruben Tejada, 2014: .241/.356/.299, 0.7 WAR
Stephen Drew, 2014: .135/.198/.258, -0.4 WAR

Now, in a lot of ways that's unfair to Drew. Since the Mets didn't sign him, and in fact no one signed him until the Red Sox did mid-way through the season, he didn't get to play a normal Spring Training. In a sense these past 27 games in the Majors have been his Spring Training. So he'll probably pick up the pace, especially given his .175 BAbip. Tejada sports a perfectly normal .304 BAbip, although given his traditionally high line drive rates there's reason to think he could go higher than that and he's been hitting really well the past month or two. Tejada does have the better plate discipline numbers, with a 13.9% BB% and a 19.1% K% (although the former is somewhat inflated by intentional walks), while Drew has walked just 7.3% of the time and has whiffed a staggering 31.3% of the time. Drew has more power than Tejada, but if he doesn't start putting the bat on the ball a bit more he'll have trouble hitting replacement level. Oh, and it's also not like this came completely out of nowhere. Here's what Drew did last year in the playoffs for the World Series Champion Red Sox:

.111/.140/.204, 3.5% BB%, 33.3% K%

That's... even worse. At the time I remember the announcers speculating about whether Drew's awful performance would tank his free agent market. It appears to have done so (among actual GMs if not among internet commenters), and, well... so far it doesn't look like that was wrong. As a matter of basic human decency I hope that at some point Drew starts looking like a competent Major Leaguer again, but I gotta say, based on everything that's happened so far this year I would must rather have Ruben Tejada for $1.1 million than Drew for something like three years and $36 million, or even for just one year and $14 million really. This kind of looks like one where Sandy Alderson did the unpopular thing and was completely right in doing so.

Chris Young Just Earned His Salary for a Long Time

Boom.

A minute or so ago, there was a curious little exchange in the Mets game against the Miami Marlins. Ruben Tejada had drawn a walk with one out, bringing up the pitcher's spot. Terry Collins sent up Chris Young to pinch-hit, and the Marlins responded by removing starting pitcher Tom Koehler and bringing in right-handed reliever Brian Morris. The Mets' announcers were speculating that this might have been a cagey move on Collins's part: by sending up Young, he got the Marlins to bring their righty reliever into the game, and he could then respond with Bobby Abreu, who is (a) left-handed, and (b) better than Chris Young. Had he just sent Abreu out initially, they would have brought in a lefty reliever instead. Apparently that wasn't what Terry was thinking, though: he left Young in there, for one pitch.

Because Young homered on that pitch. To tie the game.

I immediately commented to a friend on IM that Chris Young had just earned his salary for the month. The thing is, I'm not sure I was wrong. He's being paid $7.25 million this year, and the season is obviously about six months long, so the monthly salary is something like $1.2 million. Now, the current understanding is that the market price of one Win Above Replacement on the free agent market is something like $6 million. One WAR is approximately equivalent to ten net runs, either added on offense or saved on defense (including, obviously, pitching). If we assume that Young's home run was worth +2 runs, that's +0.2 wins, which translates to... $1.2 million. Of course, a replacement-level player wouldn't necessarily have resulted in zero runs in that spot, so we can't really think of what Young did as being worth +0.2 WAR all by itself. Actually, though, FanGraphs says that CY has been worth 0.2 WAR today, so my calculation is pretty accurate.

And if I wanted to get a bit less context-independent, I could say that I was underestimating the value of what Young just did. Right now the Mets are a team that's been struggling all year but which has been playing well of late and has dreams of sneaking onto the fringes of contention at the All-Star break. Moreover, as I said a while ago, there are reasons to think this team should get better as the year progresses. Winning this series against the Marlins is important for keeping that momentum; if they could, for instance, sweep the Marlins, they'd get to just five games under .500 at the break. That sounds a lot better than seven games under, or even nine games under if they lose both of these games. This is, in other words, a pretty important game. And Young added a lot to their chances of doing just that. His blast increased the Mets' Win Expectancy by 35.6%. To put that in context, a team that wins a game has a total Win Probability Added of +50.0% for the day, since they started out with a 50% chance of winning and end with a 100% chance of winning. So +35.6% WPA is basically like adding 70% of a win, in fully context-dependent terms. And that's a win above average, a slightly more stringent standard than mere average. If we give Young credit for adding seven-tenths of a win instead of two-tenths, then that one swing on that one pitch that Young just faced was worth somewhere around $4 million, or over half of Young's salary for the entire year.

Think about that: with one swing, Chris Young may have just justified his presence on this team for the entire first half of the season.

Of course, teams should never, ever pay for "wins" in the WPA-derived sense I'm describing. There was no sense in which anyone, in March or earlier today, could have predicted that Young would hit such a meaningful blast. You pay for what you can expect to receive, and your expectations have to be largely context-independent, except perhaps for relief pitchers and maybe for elite pinch-hitter types. Besides, of course, it's not like that swing was the only thing Young has done this half-season; he's also hit .199/.280/.354 over 233 plate appearances (including that one today), which, combined with poor outfield defense, has been worth -0.3 WAR. (It was -0.4 WAR prior to his pinch-hitting appearance, presumably because of rounding effects.) So it's not like he's actually been worth a net positive amount of money so far.

But even though you can't pay for context in advance, you might be able to use context in retrospect to feel okay about the purchases you made. No matter how much we can't let ourselves think that the home run Chris Young just hit affects his "true talent" or what he's really worth, it was still worth a lot to this team. If the baseball gods had appeared to Sandy Alderson during that pitching change and asked him how much he would be willing to pay for a home run on the next pitch, it's possible that he would've said something in the range of $4 million. Chris Young delivered that value right there, and in a certain sense nothing takes that away. Through yesterday his contract may have been like lighting money on fire, but today, for one glorious pitch, Chris Young was worth every penny.

Your 2014 All-Stars

So they're announcing the selections to the 2014 All-Star Game right now. I just thought I'd briefly say how I'd set the starting lineups if I were managing for both sides (which would, in fairness, be rather weird). First, the AL:

Mike Trout, CF (R)
Robinson Cano, 2B (L)
Miguel Cabrera, 1B (R)
Jose Bautista, RF (R)
Nelson Cruz, DH (R)
Adam Jones, LF (R)
Josh Donaldson, 3B (R)
Salvador Perez, C (R)
Derek Jeter, SS (R)

Now the NL:

Carlos Gomez, CF (R)
Andrew McCutchen, LF (R)
Troy Tulowitzki, SS (R)
Giancarlo Stanton, DH (R)
Paul Goldschmidt, 1B (R)
Yasiel Puig, RF (R)
Aramis Ramirez, 3B (R)
Chase Utley, 2B (L)
Yadier Molina, C (R)

A few notes. Good god those are some super right-handed lineups. Honestly I could basically flip-flip Gomez and McCutchen, either in the outfield or in the lineup, though I'm probably more committed to putting Gomez in center field. You could move Puig to more around the top of the batting order, which is where he's mostly been hitting for the Dodgers, but with Gomez and McCutchen it's not like they're starved for leadoff hitters so I've got him hitting sixth. It's not like he doesn't have the power for an RBI spot, heh. I'm assuming that Stanton is the DH because, well... he's Giancarlo Stanton. And as for the AL... look, I know Derek Jeter isn't going to be batting ninth. He'll probably hit second. Or first. But he should be hitting ninth. As sort of a lesser-included-case of how he shouldn't be in the game at all. He's a below-average player. He's a below-average hitter. Fangraphs has him at 0.5 WAR, but that's giving him a bizarrely large amount of credit for his defensive work, which I don't buy. For all that they're gonna be going on and on about him, he's not a good player anymore, and if they've got to start him, they should at least bury him in the 9-hole.

Also, Kershaw's gotta start for the NL, there's no question there. And King Felix looks like he's been just clearly the best pitcher in the AL, so I'd go with him as well.

Every Sperm is Sacred, Declare Five Old Catholic Dudes In Robes

So apparently in the batch of orders issued the day after the final actual day of the Supreme Court's term, they basically indicated that yesterday's Hobby Lobby decision doesn't just apply to those methods of birth control which certain religious groups choose to describe as abortion-y. Apparently closely-held companies whose owners are Catholic, and particularly the kind of Catholic who thinks contraception and the recreational sex it makes possible are sinful, can get out of giving their employees health insurance that covers any kind of contraception. Basically, this:

Oh, and did I mention that the particular five Justices constituting this majority are all Catholics? Hmmm, interesting coincidence ya got there.

UPDATE: Attempts to Limit Hobby Lobby Turn Out To Be Gibberish

So my previous post was about how the way Justice Alito distinguishes the contraceptive mandate from other potential health insurance tells us that the real point of his opinion is that he doesn't think it's that important to provide universal access to contraception. Apparently that's not entirely correct. Apparently the Court assumed that the government interest in the case was compelling, and based its decision on the whole "least restrictive means" thing. But this is a problem. RFRA violations are those laws which substantially burden religion and which are not the least restrictive means to further a compelling government interest. Thus, if one thing is a RFRA violation and another isn't, then they must differ in one of three ways: either one of them substantially burdens religion and the other doesn't, or one of them is in furtherance of a compelling interest and the other isn't, or one of them is the least restrictive means to furthering such an interest and the other isn't. It could be all of those three, but it's gotta be at least one of 'em. But if Alito was stipulating the strength of the government's interest, then that can't be the difference. The fact that, in the passage quoted in the previous post, he discussed not the question of the burden on religion but of the government's interest suggests he thinks that vaccine mandates do substantially burden religion, so that can't be the difference. So the difference must be the least-restrictive-means thing, right? Well, wrong. Because as Justice Kennedy points out, the government could just pay for this part itself. That would be less burdensome on the Green family's religion. So would establishing an all-out single payer system where the government just does all of this stuff directly and leaves the employers out of it. And both of those are gonna be there as less restrictive alternatives for all of these mandates, aren't they? Like, the logic is in fact exactly the same, Alito's protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

So.... it looks like the "legal reasoning" behind limiting this to contraception is basically just bullshit. There is no reasoning. It's narrow because Alito wants it to be narrow, as do Roberts, Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas. Maybe because they think Congress might actually amend RFRA or something if they issued a broader decision? I dunno. But it seems pretty likely that the only reason why they're treating contraception differently from all other kinds of potential health insurance mandates is that it's suddenly become politically controversial, and/or that they're five old Catholic dudes who have been taught from birth to believe that contraception is sinful. Whatever it is, it ain't law.