Hardly groundbreaking, but a well-conceived and -executed addition to the burgeoning movement of stats-based sporting...
In a Freakonomics for sports, an economist and a sportswriter use the power of data analysis to debunk some of the sports world’s conventional wisdom.
Sports Illustrated senior writer Wertheim’s (Strokes of Genius: Federer, Nadal, and the Greatest Match Ever Played, 2010) familiar, straightforward style effectively complements the reams of data provided by Moskowitz (Finance/Univ. of Chicago) in this examination of a series of sports-related issues, including home-field advantage, the effectiveness of minority coaches and the hoary adage that defense wins championships. The conclusions they draw range from startlingly persuasive to shrug-inducing, a combination that results, perhaps, from the overall credibility of their arguments and the recent profusion of similar literature that makes once unthinkably counterintuitive arguments less eye-opening. Perhaps the authors’ most compelling—and pot-stirringly controversial—argument is the contention that home-field advantage, a statistically credible phenomenon in every sport, is almost exclusively a result of referee bias, itself a product of the psychological effect of home fans exhorting officials to make calls that favor their team, a subconscious influence even the best officials cannot overcome. Less convincing is their examination of the efficacy of performance-enhancing drugs. While they show a plausible link between low income and usage—a phenomenon that occurs in multiple countries, a logical result of those with less to lose and more to gain trying to cheat their way to success—they fail to account for players who have used drugs that either cannot be tested for or in such a way that they managed to avoid detection. Also, old-school fans will undoubtedly have trouble embracing concepts like there being no such thing as momentum and the attribution of “hot” and “cold” streaks primarily to random chance.
Hardly groundbreaking, but a well-conceived and -executed addition to the burgeoning movement of stats-based sporting analysis.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-59179-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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