Mark Twain on "moral statisticians":

I don't want any of your statistics; I took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it.

I hate your kind of people. You are always ciphering out how much a man's health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years' indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of wine at dinner, etc. etc. And you are always figuring out how many women have been burned to death because of the dangerous fashion of wearing expansive hoops, etc. etc. You never see more than one side of the question.

You are blind to the fact that most old men in America smoke and drink coffee, although, according to your theory, they ought to have died young...And you never try to find out how much solid comfort, relaxation, and enjoyment a man derives from smoking in the course of a lifetime (which is worth ten times the money he would save by letting it alone), nor the appalling aggregate of happiness lost in a lifetime by your kind of people from not smoking. Of course you can save money by denying yourself all those little vicious enjoyments for fifty years; but then what can you do with it? What use can you put it to? Money can't save your infinitesimal soul. All the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this life; therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and enjoyment where is the use of accumulating cash?

It won't do for you to say that you can use it to better purpose in furnishing a good table, and in charities, and in supporting tract societies, because you know yourself that you people who have no petty vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you stint yourselves so in the matter of food that you are always feeble and hungry...

What is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worthless to you? In a word, why don't you go off somewhere and die, and not be always trying to seduce people into becoming as ornery and unlovable as you are yourselves, by your villainous "moral statistics"?

That little tract was penned in 1893 and is still extremely relevant today.

We're going LIVE with the HWX podcast at 11am central (approximately).  Click the magic button below to hear it as it happens.   Sen. John Thune, Michael Barone, John Hinderaker, and Brian Ward, together for the first time, four of the finest young rising minds in the conservative movement.

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Brian and I were having a disagreement about Nate Silver around the time of the election.  I believed that Silver is a hack, a partisan hammer that sees every presidential election as the nail of a Democratic landslide.  In 2008, reality happened to conform to his theory and he was hailed as a genius.  In 2012, the electoral college pointed to a decisive Obama victory.  However, the popular vote margin and the closeness of the race in battleground states like Florida and Virginia point to a more nuanced conclusion that Obama won a close election. 

Brian's opinion is that Silver is a Renaissance Man and a Warrior Poet.  Ok, that's not exactly his position.  He argued that Silver was not only credible, but skilled.  Politically, his skill is debatable due to the fact that he had access to insider statistical models in 2008.  However Brian argued, and I think I'm fairly capturing his point this time, that Silver's writings on baseball have been shining examples of quality sabremetric analyses.  Having never read Silver's take on baseball, I really didn't have a comeback, at least until now.

Nate Silver has weighed in on the American League MVP race and declared an Obama landslide.  Actually, he has declared Anaheim Angels Outfielder Mike Trout more deserving of the award than the actual winner, Detroit Tiger's Outfielder Miguel Cabrera.  I'm not impressed by this critique, and don't believe it is because I am a Luddite pagan without respect for the science of sabremetrics.

First of all, I know that Silver didn't likely write the headline in the linked piece, but I don't like the title, "The Statistical Case Against Cabrera for M.V.P