Why we don’t like to think chance is the reason behind great stories

The Triumph of the Random

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

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204556804574261942466979118.html

This is a great article from the Wall St Journal about how chance and randomness plays a huge part in our lives but we all want to see patterns and believe success is due to hard work and talent rather than randomness because it makes us feel better. Example is the “sporting streak” which is much more likely to be from chance than anything else but that story does not resonate with us:

This holiday weekend—the Fourth of July—kicks off the home stretch of a two-month period that made Joe DiMaggio Sr. an icon of American culture. In 1941, a few months before Joe Jr. was born, and sandwiched between the day Hitler’s insane deputy Rudolf Hess parachuted into Scotland on an unauthorized peace mission and the day a secret British report concluded that the Allies could complete an atomic bomb ahead of Germany, there was a period of 56 successive Yankee games in which Joltin’ Joe had at least one hit.

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?………………….

“The analyses can get long and the number of data needed unwieldy, so the jury is still out, but one of the studies, by Samuel Arbesman and Stephen H. Strogatz of Cornell University, attacked the problem by having a computer generate a mock version of each year in baseball from 1871 to 2005, based on the players’ actual statistics from that year. The scientists had the computer repeat the process 10,000 times, generating in essence 10,000 parallel histories of the sport.

The researchers found that 42% of the simulated histories had a streak of Di Maggio’s length or longer. The longest record streak was 109 games, the shortest, 39. In those 10,000 universes, many other players held the record more often than DiMaggio. Ty Cobb, for example, held it nearly 300 times.

So much of our thinking about the future is coloured by our view of the past and we need to better understand how our minds works when thinking about things to think better about the future

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