Who Were the Sea Peoples?

I thought it might be useful to create in a simple, model situation in which hot hands do indeed exist but which yields results totally consist with the finding of Tversky, Gilovich, and Vallone on the phenomenon . Let us assume there is a player, Smith, who has genuine hot streaks when she is "in the zone."* She is ordinarily a 50% shooter, but during those times, she shoots 70%. However, how long she will stay in the zone is random, and on every new shot she has a 50% chance of "losing" the hot hand. At the moment she loses the flow, since she loses through some sort of disruption in her concentration,** she only has a 30% chance of making her next shot. It should be obvious that even when Smith genuinely has a hot hand at time x, for any shot at x + 1 there is a 50% chance the shot will go in, which is exactly her normal shooting average. Applying the method and the criterion of Tversky et al. to Smith would yield their conclusion, "the hot hand is an i...

I'm beginning to detect a pattern of the sort Kahneman likes to find, in his errors. Kahneman talks about times when someone is asked a hard question ("Will Obama win re-election in 2012?" asked in 2011) but substitutes an easier question without realizing it ("What are Obama's poll numbers today?"). Kahneman suffers from the reverse cognitive problem: he asks (or sees someone asking) a narrow question, but when the answer is found, he thinks it is the answer to a broader question. Thus, Kahneman finds the answer to the narrow question , "Do people see patterns in things that aren't really there?" which is "yes," but he thinks he has found the answer to the much broader question, "Is the word more or less orderly than we suspect it is?" Similarly, Kahneman's colleague, Amos Tversky, and two co-authors ask the question, "Does a player having made a series of shots in a row in basketball imply a higher likelihoo...