Joe Lemire wrote a New York Times article titled This Book Is Not About Baseball. But Baseball Teams Swear by It.
« In Teaford’s case, the scouting evaluation was predisposed to a mental shortcut called the representativeness heuristic, which was first defined by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In such cases, an assessment is heavily influenced by what is believed to be the standard or the ideal. »
« Mejdal himself fell victim to the trap of the representativeness heuristic when he started with the Cardinals in 2005. His first draft model projected Stanford’s Jed Lowrie as the top available player. Mejdal lived nearby and went to go see this “imagined Paul Bunyan of a second baseman,” he recalled, only to find a player who seemed too small even for a college field. »
« No area of baseball is more susceptible to bias than scouting, in which organizations aggregate information from disparate sources: statistical models, subjective evaluations, characterizations of mental makeup and more. Kahneman emphasized the importance of maintaining independence of judgments to decorrelate errors — that is, to separate inputs so that one doesn’t influence another. »
« The central thesis of Kahneman’s book [Thinking Fast and Slow] is the interplay between each mind’s System 1 and System 2… System 1 is a person’s instinctual response — one that can be enhanced by expertise but is automatic and rapid. It seeks coherence and will apply relevant memories to explain events. System 2, meanwhile, is invoked for more complex, thoughtful reasoning — it is characterized by slower, more rational analysis but is prone to laziness and fatigue. »
« Kahneman wrote that when System 2 is overloaded, System 1 could make an impulse decision, often at the expense of self-control. »
« Keith Law, a former executive for the Toronto Blue Jays, wrote the book The Inside Game — an examination of bias and decision-making in baseball — that was inspired by “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” »
Articles of Interest 