In ‘Who’s On First’, a review essay published in The New Republic on 1 September 2003, economist RICHARD THALER and legal scholar CASS SUNSTEIN credit a book about baseball with filling a glaring gap in science communication. Until the 1970s, psychological science had proceeded on the assumption of rationality: people, it was thought, typically arrive at their judgements and decisions through rational means, and are only led astray when emotion gets the better of them. Psychologists AMOS TVERSKY and DANIEL KAHNEMAN shattered this assumption by identifying and cataloguing a number of errors that occur systematically in the thinking of normal people — errors not attributable to human passions but, rather, intrinsic features of human cognition. They termed these errors ‘cognitive biases’. Their findings had a profound impact on the field of behavioural economics, and earned Kahneman the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. But it was not until 2003 and the publication of MICHAEL LEWIS’s Moneyball that the implications of this epochal scientific shift were conveyed to the general public. Moneyball is a record of the experiences of Billy Beane, the manager of the Oakland Athletics, who led his exceptionally frugal team to Major League Baseball success by using statistics. In the process Beane flouted much of baseball’s conventional wisdom, which fans and pundits commonly refer to as ‘The Book’. The reason why objective data proved so superior is that The Book lacks cognitive-bias filters, and so traps its adherents in a loop of poor judgement and decision-making. The area in which The Book proved particularly inadequate, and the most exploitable for Beane, was that of player evaluation and recruitment. Stats provided a far more reliable means of predicting a player’s future contribution to team success than the intuitions of scouts and other experts. The latter, for example, tended to rely heavily on whether one’s general appearance conformed to an agreed-upon ‘mental prototype’ of the ideal baseball player — what Tversky and Kahneman called the ‘representativeness’ error. This often led Beane’s rivals to acquire players just out of high school, even though the data clearly indicate that high school draftees almost never live up to expectations. Beane would simply reject high school players, regardless of the media hype surrounding them. Instead, he would pursue players who were ignored by other teams, with past-performance stats as his sole guide, and reap the financial rewards in terms of dollars saved, as well as the competitive rewards of his recruits’ superior performance on the field. Another pitfall that baseball experts seemed unable to avoid was judging a player based on his most recent performance, generally a poor measure of overall worth. Here they fell prey to the ‘availability heuristic’: judging the probability of an event based on how readily one can recall instances of it. The persistence of these and countless other ‘confusions and blunders’ is all the more remarkable when one considers what is at stake in baseball and other professional sports. As far as Thaler and Sunstein are concerned, what makes the publication of Moneyball a social service is the alarming fact that ‘confusions and blunders’ of a similar ilk bedevil experts in other domains, whose judgments and decisions are far more consequential. It is not that the people in question lack the intelligence to recognise the superiority of statistical tools. Rather, their reliance on simple rules of thumb and on long-established ways of thinking and acting is, as Tversky and Kahneman have taught us, all too human. And the reassuring warmth of the validation of their biases by fellow experts only reinforces their blindness.
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