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Originally Posted by classhandicapper
If you read the entire document, he addressed handicappers using Dosage as an eliminating factor for the Derby. It sounds like it annoyed him because that was not the intended purpose and he felt the misuse by others diminished the value of the work.
Imagine I created a class rating to help estimate the quality of a field relative to PAR and people started using it to arbitrarily bet on horses coming out of strong fields and against horses coming out of weak fields. It would fail. The fact that it failed what it was not designed to do does not mean it wasn't doing what it was intended to do really well.
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Class, I think he's partly responsible for what he calls the "misuse" of his work for a couple of reasons.
First of all, he never poured cold water on it. I was around when everyone was talking Dosage in the 1980's, and Roman was a minor celebrity in horse racing. He enjoyed it. As long as the system was winning, he wasn't out there saying "hey, don't use this for handicapping".
Second, it isn't really the truth that the only problem was his system was "misused". In fact, it wasn't a statistically valid study to begin with. There simply are not enough Kentucky Derbies to make ANY statistically valid conclusions about sire influence. And the Derbies that have been run are not remotely a uniform, controlled sample-- for example, the 1973 Derby, with a short field and a superstar winner, is completely different from the 1974 Derby, with a gigantic field and a mediocre longshot winner.
So he was purporting to make "scientific" and "statistical" conclusions about things that he had insufficient warrant to make conclusions about. Maybe he didn't explicitly say "go use this to bet", but he did say "this is meaningful" and it wasn't.
