False Alarms: Why We Say “No” When We Should Say “Yes”
Fear
Amidst the idealized notions of a green grass, sunflower seeds, bubble gum, and hot dogs is the reality of little league baseball, as experienced by an anxious child. No, I wasn’t the kid in right field praying that the ball would never find him. That kid is waiting for the orange slices, the snow cone, and the freedom from the pastime he never wished to experience. I was something else entirely, a perfectionist. The diminutive only child, nerdy, studious, and willing to spend hours firing a tennis ball against the wooden paneling of a partially-finished baseball for hours on end to refine eye-hand coordination. The coach’s kid who received a steady diet of ground balls in fading sunlight at the local park. Throw to the proper base. “The best throw is no throw.” I loved baseball. I hated the possibility of failure. The thought of striking out struck terror into my soul. Most would have navigated this anxiety by choosing something else to do on sunny spring days.
But not me. Baseball is everything a numerically-inclined, bookish kid could ever hope for. A rich array of statistics-driven narratives spanning a century penning new chapters annually. The trips to the stadium with father and its mixture of ritual and duty in carefully filling the scorecard with the details of every pitch. Baseball was a romantic pursuit. Catching a ball was the gateway to social acceptance as the new kid at school. And still, striking out was horrifying. How could I avoid the shame?
The answer was a shortened swing coupled with an almost pathological fixation with putting a ball in play when a pitch entered the strike zone. Though anxiety produces the type of plate discipline that generates a fair number of walks when opposing pitchers are navigating the awkwardness of their adolescent growth sports, I also generated more harmless ground balls than Mario Mendoza. I avoided a strikeout for literally years. In professional settings, we often cannot choose where and when we enter the batter’s box. The disapprobation of striking out is an unmistakable, career-damaging outcome. However, in far too many cases, the cost of risk-aversion is larger, more difficult to quantify, and a corrosive toxin that prevents taking the swing upside demands.
Data scientists will, without fail, perform the salient expected value calculation and estimate the probabilities of successes and failures acceptably. What neither they, nor the vibe-coding platforms that enable them can account for is the stage on which those failures occur. The world of professional tennis is filled with men and women who deliver their first serves with triple-digit velocity and pinpoint precision. These missiles land within the lines over 70% of the time for some elite servers and in excess 75% of the time for a few folks on the men’s tour with heights that wouldn’t be out of place on an NBA court. When these first serves succeed, the player’s probability of winning the point is extremely high. Alas, tennis offers servers only one opportunity to “miss,” after which the dreaded “second-serve” must be offered, lest that server gift their opponent with a free point. In their hopes of being spared the indignity of double faults, second serves are meeker attempts and the probability of winning the point behind the lesser offering falls significantly.
This chapter is in progress — the opening (Fear) is drafted; the remaining sections are outlined.