Replies

“The 6 Most Statistically Full of Sh** Professions”

#1 Sportswriting

“Millions of guys would love to spend all their time watching games and telling people their opinions about sports, but only a select few get to do it, and they do so partly by keeping up a pretense of having some exclusive knowledge about the game that no one else does.

Any sports fan will tell you what a retarded hack their hometown sports columnist is, but sports fans (as with fans of anything, really) tend to be just as lazy as they are abusive, and not many compile a statistical analysis of their hated sportswriters’ inaccuracies.

One man, however, did take it upon himself to prove the point empirically in 1971 with an actual study on sportswriters’ ability to predict college and NFL games. Their success rate was .476, which you may notice is slightly worse than a coin. The coin’s writing ability is arguably superior.

Before writing sports journalists off as complete morons, keep in mind that even Accuscore, a service that charges for its sports predictions based on complex computer algorithms that crunch stats and predict trends, only claims about 53 to 54 percent accuracy, which is still enough to make its customers money.

So, sports prediction is something that almost nobody can get a handle on, but still... worse than a coin toss?

If you want to tie your brain in a knot, think about this: If those guys sitting behind the desk at ESPN are performing worse than chance when they try to make an “expert” judgment about who’s going to win the game, that means they could improve their accuracy by always betting on the team they actually think is going to lose. Hell, some of them are wrong so often they could beat the Accuscore service simply by going against their instincts every time.

Eh, they’d still probably f*** it up somehow.”

http://www.cracked.com/article_18380_the-6-most-statistically-full-shit-professions_p2.html