Is The Hot Hand Fallacy A Fallacy? | Hacker News Reader

Is The Hot Hand Fallacy A Fallacy?

rjlipton.wordpress.com

36 pointsdmvaldman8 comments

Well timed, this article. I just got back from a trip to Vegas. I kno intrinsically that my chances of winning from one deal to another at a blackjack table are equal (card counting notwithstanding). And yet I can't deny that there were times when I was "hot." Of course you'll occasionally win a few times in a row, but it seemed to change with dealers and new shuffles.

About the only thing I could attribute it to was my own change of pace and self awareness. If I was hot, I might hit out of confidence without second guessing myself. Incidentally, this is what the dealer will also do, only they do it under the guise of requirement.

Could it be "in the zone" vs "out of the zone"? For example playing a team multiplayer game, the first 20 minutes the team is tight, and we're winning and making lots of kills. Then one member of the team did something inadvertently that annoys another member of the team, and that other member begins hurling insults and negs through the rest of the game, knocking everyone out of the zone and the team disintegrates.

It seems almost impossible to me that physical sports maneuvers like a golf shot, basketball shot or baseball hits are truly random variables. In my own (laughable) sports experiences, I am working to build muscle memory -- a good move or bit of mechanics absolutely increases my likelihood of recreating that move. And, as time drops, the correlation between my mechanics and that 'great' mechanics moment drops -- my body forgets, and that's where the benefits of practice come in.

Blackjack though, maybe. I suppose it depends how on point you are with playing the odds.

Neurologically, sports performance can be envisaged as a search for a target in a space. If you are a beginner, then any training that takes you closer to the target is beneficial. So eg a beginner learning tennis will benefit from playing badminton, squash, etc.

However, as you become more expert then the risks are greater (your opponents are better) and the margins are increasingly minimal. So your training has to become incredibly specific. No more badminton if you want to be an excellent tennis player.

Also, for even the world's finest sports players, performance degrades just minutes after practice or competition. This is the purpose of warming up : to fine-tune the nervous system, to bring your performance in the search space as close as possible to the target.

Human systems are chaotic, so performance is subject to fluctuation from even the tiniest perturbations. This is why even the finest sports player cannot expect 100% reliable performance every single time.

A study found there is a mild hot hand effect in the NBA, but players who've made several shots in a row and guarded more closely by the defense, negating the effect. As n example, If a player hits 2 50% shots in a row, his next shot will be a 45% shot, which he will hit at a 47% clip

I think the point of the article is that if you use the naive selection criteria, anything over 41-43% on a 50% random chance is actually 'hot'. So it's probably worth reviewing that study's selection criteria to see if in fact there's a larger hot hand factor than you might think at first glance.

The second point the article makes is that it's very likely the selection criteria in your NBA study is not precisely defined enough to determine the baseline percentage.

The fallacy here is in the definition of random.

Here is Stephen Jay Gould on Joe DiMaggio's great 1941 hitting streak: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1988/aug/18/the-str...

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