I'm not trying to do anything too tricky.
You don't want to influence the same system you are trying to forecast.
Plenty of pundits have really high IQs, but they don't have any discipline in how they look at the world, and so it leads to a lot of bullshit, basically.
Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge.
Basically, books were a luxury item before the printing press.
Any one game in baseball doesn't tell you that much, just as any one poll doesn't tell you that much.