I'm a fan of Levitt and Dubner - the Freakonomics guys. This week Dubner wrote an interesting post on their blog about decision-making and how it's influenced by experience vs. information.
As in...do you decide what to do based on what you have actually experienced? Or, do you choose based on information about what could happen?
Mostly it's situational, of course...depending on whether you have personal experience to draw from (how to drive a car) or whether you need to go out and get information (how to buy a car).
Dubner links to a psychology paper on this topic...which says that when people make decisions based on experience, they give less credence to the probability of rare events. When they make decisions based on information, they give more credence to the probability of rare events.
I'm over-simplifying -- please read the paper for more -- but what intrigued me is it's like a self-imposed kind of decision-making hypochondria. Banking on information is more likely to make you catastrophize.
So how does this fit with baseball? It's a stats game. That's a huge part of what we all love about it. Did I mention I actually subscribe now to baseball-reference.com's play index?
But this data might indicate that, for players at least, the more you research, the more you may be swayed by what you think you know. (This pitcher hit 16 guys last year!)
In contrast, the more you go with experience (this is the guy who pitched inside on my last at-bat), the more you probably just swing for the fences and hope for the best.
Maybe the outcome is the same. Or maybe you just feel better about it. But either way, it can't hurt to know that what you know -- or think you know -- might very well hurt as much as it helps.
Or...maybe not. It's just a thought. We gotta ponder something on these damn no-baseball days!
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