Why Baseball Is Obsessed With the Book 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' - The New York Times - 0 views
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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.
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Kahneman, a professor emeritus at Princeton University and a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, later wrote “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” a book that has become essential among many of baseball’s front offices and coaching staffs.
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“Pretty much wherever I go, I’m bothering people, ‘Have you read this?’” said Mejdal, now an assistant general manager with the Baltimore Orioles.
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There aren’t many explicit references to baseball in “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” yet many executives swear by it
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“From coaches to front office people, some get back to me and say this has changed their life. They never look at decisions the same way.
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A few, though, swear by it. Andrew Friedman, the president of baseball operations for the Dodgers, recently cited the book as having “a real profound impact,” and said he reflects back on it when evaluating organizational processes. Keith Law, a former executive for the Toronto Blue Jays, wrote the book “Inside Game” — an examination of bias and decision-making in baseball — that was inspired by “Thinking, Fast and Slow.”
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“As the decision tree in baseball has changed over time, this helps all of us better understand why it needed to change,” Mozeliak wrote in an email. He said that was especially true when “working in a business that many decisions are based on what we see, what we remember, and what is intuitive to our thinking.”
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The central thesis of Kahneman’s book is the interplay between each mind’s System 1 and System 2, which he described as a “psychodrama with two characters.”
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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.
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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.
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Kahneman wrote that when System 2 is overloaded, System 1 could make an impulse decision, often at the expense of self-control
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No area of baseball is more susceptible to bias than scouting, in which organizations aggregate information from disparate sources:
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Matt Blood, the director of player development for the Orioles, first read “Thinking, Fast and Slow” as a Cardinals area scout nine years ago and said that he still consults it regularly. He collaborated with a Cardinals analyst to develop his own scouting algorithm as a tripwire to mitigate bias
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Mejdal himself fell victim to the trap of the representativeness heuristic when he started with the Cardinals in 2005