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Friday, July 03, 2009

WSJ: MLODINOW: From banking to baseball, winning streaks owe much to the laws of chance

And do Drunkard’s Walk more than DiMaggio did? All this and more!

DiMaggio’s hitting streak was an inspiration in troubled times. The pursuit of any record comes with pressure—Roger Maris lost some of his hair during his attempt to break Babe Ruth’s home-run record in 1961—but most records forgive you an off day as long as you compensate at other times. Not so with a streak, which demands unwavering performance. And so DiMaggio’s streak has been interpreted as a feat of mythic proportion, seen as a heroic, even miraculous, spurt of unrivaled effort and concentration.

But was it? Or was this epic moment simply a fluke?

Recent academic studies have questioned whether DiMaggio’s streak is unambiguous evidence of a spurt of ability that exceeded his everyday talent, rather than an anomaly to be expected from some highly talented player, in some year, by chance, something like the occasional 150-yard drive in golf that culminates in a hole in one. No one is saying that talent doesn’t matter. They are just asking whether a similar streak would have happened sometime in the history of baseball even if each player hit with the unheroic and unmiraculous—but steady—ability of an emotionless robot.

That randomness naturally leads to streaks contradicts people’s intuition. If we were to picture randomness, we might think of a graph that looks jerky, not smooth like a straight line. But random processes do display periods of order. In a toss of 100 coins, for example, the chances are more than 75% that you will see a streak of six or more heads or tails, and almost 10% that you’ll produce a streak of 10 or more. As a result a streak can look quite impressive even if it is due to nothing more than chance.

Repoz Posted: July 03, 2009 at 07:15 AM | 5 comment(s)
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   1. Raskolnikov  Posted: July 03, 2009 at 06:40 AM (#3241240)
Mlodinow's one of my favorite writers - his A Drunkard's Walk is an absolute must read (a history of statistics) and Searching for Feynman's Rainbow is also a great book.
   2. BFFB  Posted: July 03, 2009 at 07:09 AM (#3241243)
randomness displays clumping, news at 11.
   3. Pasta-diving Jeter (jmac66)  Posted: July 03, 2009 at 07:52 AM (#3241261)
randomness displays clumping

Millions flee cities
   4. Howie Menckel  Posted: July 03, 2009 at 11:32 AM (#3241376)
"the occasional 150-yard drive in golf that culminates in a hole in one."

Um, a tee shot on a par-3 is not a "drive."
I hope he's more careful with the rest of his writing.
:)
   5. Bob Dernier Cri  Posted: July 03, 2009 at 12:00 PM (#3241411)
Everyone who has ever played basketball knows the feeling of being “in the zone.” Your hand is on fire. You can’t miss. But are you feeling a true increase in ability, or is your mind inferring it because you just took a bunch of shots that, for whatever reason, went in?

If a person tossing a coin weighted to land on heads 80% of the time produces a streak of 10 heads in a row, few people would see that as a sign of increased skill. Yet when an 80% free throw shooter in the NBA has that level of success people have a hard time accepting that it isn’t


A couple of random :) observations:

First of all, if an 80% FT shooter in the NBA happens to hit ten straight free throws, I can't imagine anyone except maybe his mom noticing or caring.

Second, both things can be true here: that is, free-throw shooting (or hitting, or any such activity) can be modeled very well by random simulation from the outside, and at the same time, a player who is on a hot streak is certainly not deluded about playing better than he usually does, because he obviously is playing better. DiMaggio hit .408 during his streak, as opposed to .325 over his career. This was because in the summer of '41 he was healthy, young, sleek, well-fed, getting good sleep, getting along well with his family, had the league's pitchers much better figured out than they had him figured out, or any number of other reasons. (Or whatever: maybe he had the worst cold of his life for 56 games and couldn't think of anything except mustard plasters and hitting a baseball.) Psychologically and indeed physically too, this was not a random fluctuation. Factors conspired so that DiMaggio hit very well over that stretch. At other times in his career, he hit worse.

A player's talent, as reduced to, say, .325 over a career, is made up of all those times when he was on top of the world mixed with all those times when he was hung over, had bone spurs in his heel, got up on the wrong side of the bed, and so forth. All these things are real. The effect, as observed from the outside, remains the same: he hits .325 for a career, with a range of smaller-sample performances clustered around that level.

There's really no contradiction in that. The fallacy of the "hot hand" remains a fallacy, but the fact that someone was in the zone while they were hot is also perfectly real. Being in the zone is always, however, counterbalanced by times when you're not in the zone. DiMaggio was in the zone more often than Sibby Sisti, and that made him a better hitter than Sisti. Ted Williams was in the zone more often than either of them. That's how career batting records are assembled.
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