In his latest Joe Morgan Chat Day recap, Mike rants:

Remember when a transporter malfunction split Kirk into two separate entities, one his good self and the other his evil self (sans beard), and the good Kirk couldn’t make decisions? He needed the evil half to survive. That was awesome!

Call the evil Kirk "emotional", and the good Kirk "rational", and you've got it. For humans, it's impossible to make rational decisions when there's damage to the emotion centers of the brain.

It appears that the rational parts of our brains are able to follow step-by-step instructions without the use of emotion, but when it comes time to actually decide, the emotional system takes over and makes the decision. Without emotion, we end up utterly indecisive, just like "good" Kirk.

So when Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta blather on about keeping emotions out of their decisions, don't believe them. It's impossible to keep emotions out of it. The human brain doesn't work that way. Every decision is an emotional decision. The best you can say is that they have trained their emotions to react negatively to non-rational analysis.