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.

randomness displays clumping, news at 11.

randomness displays clumping

Millions flee cities

"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.
:)

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.