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Funny that this would come up now... Recently read a repost at lookoutlanding.  I went and glanced through the comments and saw a detecto citing and a present Graham comment about the poor quality of the detecto comments.  I was totally turned off, as I have been many times at lookoutlanding.  Obviously, Graham could care less about my opinion, but he might be surprised by my CV... or not.  
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I am a physical chemist, and as such, trained in mathematically based models.  Note this is modeling quite distinct from what you learn in engineering or the social sciences, often technically simpler but much more clearly defined.  In principle, the Schrodinger equation tells us all we need to now about non-relativistic phenomena.  In practice, it begins to 'fail' with the He atom, much less a field effect transistor.  But it's not true failure, but rather progress requires approximations.  The key is we can investigate the quality of different approximations by making comparison to experiment and in the process learn something about He and FETs.
In sabr-metrics we have no Schrodinger equation.  We start with approximations, but we aren't even sure what they are.  But baseball is fun so we forge on for entertainment and insight.  The issue I have is that many people are more dogmatic about TRA or DER or FIP than I am about the Schrodinger equation.  This lack of humility kills the debate and impedes progress.
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My rule of thumb is never to enter a discuss where I don't want, and ideally expect, to learn something.  Too many on the internet approach the conversion with the goal of teaching not learning, which leads to pedantic attempts at indoctrination neatly wrapped in the innocuous cloth of community edification.