Evan Coopersmith

To fans of major American sports, these are household names. Bill Buckner played 22 seasons of major league baseball, but his name evokes the memory of a single moment in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. One error. One mishap, the likes of which has occurred thousands of times before and since, which helped extend the Bambino’s curse, and has become part of baseball lore. The man amassed over 2,700 hits, but tragically, he is remembered for the worst moment of his professional life.&nbsp;

Scott Norwood may have had a respectable career as an NFL kicker, but he is immortalized by Al Michaels’ “wide right” call and the missed field goal that resulted in the first of four consecutive super bowl losses for the Buffalo Bills1.

Subsequent video would reveal the misaligned laces of the football, perhaps dooming the kick to fade right before it was ever struck. This is the basis of the travails of “Ray Finkle” in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Art imitates life, albeit in this case, with a side of cross-dressing to boot.&nbsp;

Bill Mazeroski was an excellent second baseman, but his on-field accomplishments pale in comparison statistically to his fellow members of the baseball hall of fame. But on one October afternoon in 1960, Mazeroski’s World Series walk-off home run felled the mighty Yankees. And for this, he is deified in Pittsburgh2.&nbsp;

My mother, a native of the Steel city and school-aged at the time, noted the crowds in the streets impeding the path of the trolley she was riding, without immediately understanding the cause of the clamor.&nbsp;

There is a natural human fixation with extremes and their pursuit. This is why we climb Mt. Everest or construct tournaments to crown one champion among many contenders. This is why the internet is awash in top-10 lists of the best and worst of seemingly everything imaginable. This is, to paraphrase Eugene Levy in American Pie, “a perfectly normal, natural thing.”&nbsp;

However, though we might be forgiving of a natural inclination, there are consequences we would be wise to address.

In probabilistic modeling, those familiar with Bayesian reasoning will recognize the idea of “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_probability#:~:text=In%20Bayesian%20statistics%2C%20Bayes'%20rule,uncertain%20quantity%20given%20new%20data.">priors</a>.” For those of us who did not spend their formative academic years chugging caffeine to complete problem sets, the idea is simple.

Often, before the first calculation is performed on any set of data, we recognize our initial perceptions, our biases, and our beliefs. This is why when someone flips a coin ten times and heads appear on nine of them, we probably do not conclude that the coin has been altered. We’ve seen thousands of coin flips before, we have a “strong prior” to guide our interpretation, and we understand that even though the odds of 9+ heads is ~1%3, it is more likely that the 1% event occurred than it is that we are dealing with something other than a typical coin.

There are 2^10 (1,024) sequences of coin flips. In 11 of them (10-choose-9 + 10-choose-10), we will observe 9 or more heads (and in the same number, 9 or more tails).&nbsp;

It is this idea that lives in the adage about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence. It is this idea that allows us to change our views without being swayed by every improbable occurrence we observe.

The problem is that, generally speaking, human beings are terrible at Bayesian reasoning.

While one end of the Bayesian spectrum is the individual without any priors who updates their position constantly (essentially, agreeing with the last person to speak, the last piece of evidence observed, etc), far more common is the tendency to retain a belief even in the face of mountains of contrary evidence.&nbsp;

Typically, this is the subject of essays related to religion or politics and the frustratingly entrenched positions of those with whom we disagree.

But there is a greater concern than our tendency to whine at our dinner tables about the irrationality of our neighbors (who are probably simultaneously whining at their dinner tables about us).&nbsp;

<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Chanos">Jim Chanos</a> made his name by betting against Enron before its fraud-filled collapse in 2001. Thereafter, he was a genius among cynics. Of course, he also bet against China’s real estate in 2009, Caterpillar in 2013, and declared that <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/14/jim-chanos-we-think-tesla-is-worth-zero.html">Tesla was worth zero</a> in 2017 (to name a few).&nbsp;

<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouriel_Roubini">Nouriel Roubini</a> (a.k.a “Dr. Doom”) famously predicted the collapse of global markets in 2008. Of course, he’s predicted all manner of economic collapses and depressed asset values since with a track record that would be characterized as “mixed” at best.

<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_J._Shiller">Robert Shiller</a> predicted the bursting of the dot-com bubble, but he also seems to predict a recession and a collapse of asset valuations every couple years4.&nbsp;

Nonetheless, his best-selling "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrational_Exuberance_(book)">Irrational Exuberance</a>" has been published in three separate editions, to the delight of economics aficionados everywhere.&nbsp;

But we aren’t generally blind-followers of experts (our priors suggest we ought not be). So while these “experts” probably do not deserve their exalted status (to the extent that they still hold it), the problem really isn’t about the priors set by correct predictions.

Bill Mazeroski may be, in some sense, overrated…but putting him out on the field after 1960 was still a sound idea.&nbsp;

It is one thing to be a one-hit wonder, then fail to attain similar success. It is another for one’s first prediction to be wildly incorrect. For every name on the list that might warrant mention in the previous section, there are likely thousands of folks who went out on a limb and were never heard from again.

When famous folks with a track record make <a href="https://humanscience.fandom.com/wiki/Worst_Predictions">spectacularly wrong predictions</a>, they may live to err another day. When young employees, entrepreneurs, and writers have the courage of a contrarian conviction, often they will be proven wrong.&nbsp;

Will we remember them for their worst moments like Buckner and Norwood?&nbsp;

Will we trap our priors despite the decades of their words, calculations, and careers that remain unseen and unpenned?

An old saw reminds us that “experience” is learning from one’s own mistakes and “wisdom” is learning from the mistakes of others.&nbsp;

Perhaps then, to be truly wise, one ought to have a few conversations with contrarians now and then.

Or at least, remember that no one is truly as wise or foolish as their best or worst moment.

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