Ben Cohen on the Hot Hand

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4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 10 August 2020

⏱️ 69 minutes

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Summary

Journalist and author Ben Cohen talks about his book, The Hot Hand, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. At times in sports and elsewhere in life, a person seems to be "on fire," playing at an unusually high level. Is this real or an illusion? Cohen takes the listener through the scientific literature on this question and spreads a very wide net to look at the phenomenon of being in the zone outside of sports. Topics include Shakespeare, investing, Stephen Curry, and asylum judges.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:08.0	I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:12.0	Our website is econtalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this podcast,
0:17.0	and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.0	We'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever done going back to 2006.
0:27.0	Our email address is mailadycontalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.
0:33.0	Today is June 30, 2020, and my guest is author and journalist Ben Cohen.
0:37.0	He writes about sports for the Wall Street Journal, and he is the author of the hot hand,
0:42.0	the mystery and science of streaks.
0:45.0	And his book is our topic for today. Ben, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:48.0	Thank you for having me.
0:50.0	What a fascinating book this was.
0:53.0	It happens to be something I'm deeply interested in, the question of evaluating whether you can get in a zone,
1:03.0	whether you improve performance after you've been successful, or that's just a statistical illusion.
1:09.0	On one level, it's a book about those things. On another level, it's about a lot more than that,
1:13.0	a lot of different aspects of life and art, and investing.
1:16.0	It's really a fascinating book, and it's a page turner, which is pretty impressive.
1:22.0	I enjoyed this book thoroughly. There aren't many page turners about probability and uncertainty.
1:29.0	I want to start with an idea of pastycon talk guest Ed Lemer.
1:35.0	He says, talking about human beings, we are storytelling pattern-seeking animals.
1:41.0	As Nassim Nicholas Taleb says, we're easily fooled by randomness.
1:46.0	Actual coin flips, a sequence of actual coin flips don't often look like we imagine they would look.
	...

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