Okay—now here’s a model for everyone who aspires to cultivate the virtues that signify a genuine scholarly disposition.
As discussed previously (here & here), a pair of economists have generated quite a bit of agitation and excitement by exposing an apparent flaw in the methods of the classic “hot hand fallacy” studies.
These studies purported to show that, contrary to popular understanding not only among sports fans but among professional athletes and coaches, professional basketball players do not experience “hot streaks,” or periods of above-average performance longer in duration than one would expect to see by chance. The papers in questions have for thirty years enjoyed canonical status in the field of decision science research as illustrations of the inferential perils associated with the propensity of human beings to look for and see patterns in independent events.
Actually, the reality of that form of cognitive misadventure isn’t genuinely in dispute. People are way too quick to discern signal in noise.
But what is open to doubt now is whether the researchers used the right analytical strategy in testing whether this mental foible is the source of the widespread impression that professional basketball players experience “hot hands.”
I won’t rehearse the details—in part to avoid the amusingly embarrassing spectacle of trying to make intuitively graspable a proof that stubbornly assaults the intuitions of highly numerate persons in particular—but the nub of the proof supplied by the challenging researchers, Joshua Miller & Adam Sanjurjo, is that the earlier researchers mistakenly treated “hit” and “missed” shots as recorded in a previous, finite sequence of shots as if they were independent. In fact, because the proportion of “hits” and “misses” in a past sequence is fixed, strings of “hits” should reduce the likelihood of subsequent “hits” in the remainder of the sequence. Not taking this feature of sampling without replacement into account caused the original “hot hand fallacy” researchers to miscalculate the “null” in a manner that overstated the chance probability that a player would hit another shot after a specified string of hits….
Bottom line is that the data in the earlier studies didn’t convincingly rule out the possibility that basketball players’ performances did indeed display the sort of “streakiness” that defies chance expectations and supports the “hot hand” conjecture.
But in any case . . . the point of this update is to call attention to the truly admirable and inspiring reaction of the original researchers to the news that their result had been called into question in this way.
As I said, the “hot hand fallacy” studies are true classics. One could understand if those who had authored such studies would react defensively (many others who have been party to celebrating the studies for the last 30 yrs understandably have!) to the suggestion that the studies reflect a methodological flaw, one that itself seems to reflect the mischief of an irresistible but wrong intuition about how to distinguish random from systematic variations in data.
But instead, the reaction of the lead researcher to the M&S result, Tom Gilovich, is: “Coooool!!!!!!!!”
“Unlike a lot of stuff that’s come down the pike since 1985,” Gilovich was quoted as saying in a Wed. Wall Street Journal piece,
this is truly interesting,” Gilovich said. “What they discovered is correct.” Whether the real effect is “so small that the original conclusion stands or needs to be modified,” he said, “is what needs to be determined. Whether the real effect is “so small that the original conclusion stands or needs to be modified,” he said, “is what needs to be determined.”
The article goes on to report that Gilovich, along with others, is now himself contemplating re-analyses and new experiments to try to do exactly that.
In a word, Gilovich, far from have his nose bent out of joint by the M&S finding, is excited that aruly unexpected development is now furnishing him and others with a chance to resume investigation of an interesting and complex question.
I bet, too, that at least part of what intrigues Gilovich is how a mistake like this could have evaded the attention to decision scientists for this long –-and why even now the modal reaction among readers of the M&S paper is “BS!!” It takes about 45.3 (± 7) readings to really believe M&S’s proof, and even then the process has to be repeated at weekly intervals for a period of two months before the point they are making itself starts to seem intuitive enough to have the ring of truth.
But the point is, Gilovich, whose standing as a preeminent researcher is not diminished one iota by this surprising turn in the scholarly discussion his work initiated, has now enriched us even more by furnishing us with a compelling and inspiring example of the mindset of a real scholar!
Whatever embarrassment he might have been expected to experience (none is warranted in my view, nor evident in the WSJ article), is dwarfed by his genuine intellectual excitement over a development that is truly cool & interesting—both for what it teaches us about a particular problem in probability and for the opportunity it furnishes to extent examination into human psychology (here, the distinctive vulnerability to error that likely is itself unique to people with intuitions fine-tuned to avoid making the mistakes that intuitions characteristically give rise to when people try to make sense of randomness).
I’m going to try to reciprocate the benefit of the modeling of scholarly virtue Gilovich is displaying by owning up to, and getting excited about, as many mistakes in my own previous work as I can find!