There is a great book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb called Fooled by Randomness, which examines the role of luck in all areas of life, particularly business and investing.

Taleb is a professor of mathematics and a derivatives trader. Not much to do with sport. But his business is complexity. There is something in statistics called “survivorship bias”. There is a danger that what we measure excludes those that have fallen by the wayside, distorting our view of the world.

Sport is a bit like that when it comes to injury and overtraining. The winner is the best on the day, and not necessarily the best over time. What we certainly don’t see at all are the no-shows, the non-runners, the might-have-beens. Imagine England’s rugby performance over the past few years if Jonny Wilkinson had not been injured.

Taleb is a fitness fanatic and keen cyclist. He says he is not interested in competitive sports, so he does not offer much to help an athlete understand success, except to offer the proverbial observation that a baseball hitter is normally cursed when he appears on the front of Sports Illustrated as it is normally followed by a reversal in fortune. (Mathematically, the previous winning streak was in fact an unsustainable run of luck).

In competitive sport, luck is not very likely to take an average athlete to a gold medal. But bad luck will certainly remove good prospects from the population of potential winners. Reducing that component of luck is what athletes strive for. In my own more modest marathon ambitions, I’m trying to do the same. Except there is not any pressure to win, just a pressure to turn up. That is not a small pressure, and if you are raising money for a charity, that pressure builds the nearer you get to the day. I ran my first marathon injured and while still recovering from a virus, dangerously toughing it out so as not to let down those who’d sponsored me.

Continue reading ‘luck, latent talent and training’

The Marginal Revolution has a good link to an article about the psychology of procrastination.

The most salient quotation for non-exercisers in this article is this:-

“Fifty per cent of heart attack patients don’t manage to make the lifestyle changes that could save their lives.”

I know what that feels like. It took a major wrench to wake me up and determine I needed to save a few more heart beats for when I might need them much later. The problem is you never know how much time you have.

This fits quite neatly into an area of study that ties the marathon and the concept of delayed gratification together with other ways we tend to favour the short term in the choices we make:-

“Over the years, psychologists have come up with a lot of ideas about what makes people procrastinate. In addition to anxiety and perfectionism, some suggested that procrastinators were self-sabotaging, hostile and rebellious, or depressed.

But for Steel, procrastination can be explained by an insight borrowed from behavioural economics called hyperbolic discounting [my link]. This is the tendency to value near-term rewards more than long-term ones. For instance, some people will choose a payoff of $50 today over $100 tomorrow.”

There’s an old fashioned saying: “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. But, as with all such adages, there are times (whether it is saving for our pensions, or keeping fit) when it may be wrong.

Resting heart rate 53

Weight 72 kg

Sick with heavy virus

Mood

When a bomb goes off in a busy city, it is reported by eye witnesses that the immediate aftermath is followed by silence. This makes sense, because so dramatic and unexpected, so random is such an event, that all our senses must be reorientated to take account of what has happened to determine what danger we are in and what course of action is necessary.

In media terms, with 24-hour news programmes available to the public, there is no silence any more. Not only are those engaged in reporting, editing and presenting not allowed any moment for reflection, they stream unbroken incoherence to the public, depriving them the necessary time and distance as well as accurate facts to make their own sense of what has happened. This creates a new danger; a sort of information pollution that sets up and feeds particular biases.

In the immediate aftermath of last Thursday’s bombing of London, initial reports described seven blasts–six on the underground and one on the bus. There was double counting because those escaping the three underground blasts emerged from six underground stations.

This was still the case at least three hours into the story. At that point too, only two deaths had been reported, which commentators were already taking to indicate a much less serious incident than was initially feared. While the casualties went up, and the number of bombs went down, the latter information was taken to indicate a much lower level of coordination, or fewer people involved, again suggesting a much weaker organization than at first feared, or compared with the Madrid bombing.

The police, however, described the crime scene on Monday as the biggest in British history, and urged patience on the part of victims families, as their evident frustration was starting itself to be picked up by the media. How can a forensic, scientific examination match the media’s real-time response rate, and flexibility with the need for accuracy? If we don’t acknowledge the need for reflection, we won’t get it. Those with the ability or propensity to rush to judgement will get promoted. Decision making will be impoverished, and the risks will increase.

Real-time coverage leaves its mark. Few people will return to more considered writing, or pick up on the smaller, often more salient facts that emerge at a much later date.

Risk aversion and making suboptimal decisions is hard wired into our evolutionary biology. This seems to be the finding of tests on Simian monkeys and their responses to a variety of reward systems.

Essentially, just like humans, the monkeys demonstrate a preference for avoiding loss over the prospect of an extra gain. MRI scans have shown that we compute losses and gains in different parts of the brain, so the latest tests on monkeys revealing they too have a loss aversion suggests some older biological need is being answered.

The Economist reasons that in our natural habitat food supply is erratic, so that the pangs of hunger are felt more keenly than the prospect of abundance. While agriculture and the affluent society have changed all that on the “supply side”, we retain the attitudes of the hunter-gatherer.

In an information society, it becomes much more important to understand these biological drivers and the biases they build into our evaluation processes.

Experience suggests these features of human behaviour are better understood by marketers than economists. As has been observed before, they know the power of the statement “Hurry, while stocks last!”