Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Daniel Murphy of the Mets, over the course of 162 regular season games, hit 14 home runs. In nine playoff games, he has now hit seven home runs. This is nine times his regular season pace. I'd say he has the "hot hand." UPDATE: The Mets hitting coach is with me here: "I can't even explain Murphy," hitting coach Kevin Long said. "Murphy is on a different planet right now. He really is."

Mungowitz posts a link to an interesting paper vindicating the fact (rather obvious to anyone who has played sports!) that some times you are more "on" than others. Money quote: "We argue that this difference is attributable to endogenous defensive responses: basketball presents sufficient opportunity for defensive responses to equate shooting probabilities across players whereas baseball does not." Yup: one thing masking the hot hand, in the way the original "debunking" was done, is that in basketball the defense quickly sees that a player is hot, and adjusts to defend them better. In baseball, only one player is "up" at a time, so you really can't shift extra defense to that player, and here the "hot hand" shows up robustly.

In ESPN's The Daily Dime , Jim Cavan writes: "The Knicks will and should ride Anthony's hot hand while they can." (No permalink seems to be available.) This is the notion that Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky debunked. It is certainly out there, and they did a good job debunking it: the hot hand, if it exists, is useless for prediction. There is no sense trying to "ride" it.

"Love" is a famously fuzzy concept. Two people who think they love each other might appear to others to be bitter enemies, while two people might each think they loathe each other, while their friends judge them to be in love but unwilling to admit it. What we need to do is to operationalize "in love" so that we can measure it and use it for prediction. Let us focus in on something people who claim to be in love often say to each other: "I will never leave you." Now, the length of time two people spend together certainly is measurable. Therefore, we will take claims about being "in love" to be predictive statements about the probable duration of time the people said to be "in love" will spend together. Thus, when we test Romeo and Juliet's love, we find their claim to have been in love absurd: they only spent a few hours together in their entire life! Furthermore, let's say we run a test on whether "being in love...

Claim one : The idea of a "hot hand" is useless for predicting basketball players' next shot. There is no point in feeding the ball to a player who is "hot," because the fact he is "hot" (if that really has any meaning) has no predictive value as to how his next shot will fair. Tversky et al. have won here! I acknowledge this is true, as I have every time I have written on the topic. Claim two : The notion that players are sometimes "in the zone" is merely a statistical illusion. If you are a player and think you are "hot," you are merely being deluded by your faulty understanding of statistics. As opposed to claim one, people making claim two want to deny that the subjective experience of being "on" has any validity at all. This claim is definitely floating around out there. I post this as Steve Landsburg writes me: "Here's a much simpler model [than yours, Callahan]: "Half the time, players hav...

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...