YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Cohen

lines on the record: 120
first: 2020-03-27
most recent: 2020-03-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“No, like relative to when you are building a team in the NBA, because there are a lot of other players who make $35 million a year because it's the most that you can pay.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. And, you know, the greatest inefficiency are the superstars, right? Because in an open market, LeBron James is worth a whole lot more money than he's paid right now, right? Because his salary is capped. Of course, like that's why you want superstars is because you can't throw.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the teams got lucky too because the only way to win in professional sports now is to find the inefficiencies in the market, right? Sometimes that's the valuable role players.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sport evolved into his favor. Right. And so, you know, his story is really a fairy tale, right? But to me, what made it so interesting was that It's a case study in economics, right? And how we think about how we value players. Not too long ago, Duncan Robinson was not valued all that highly. Now, like every team needs a Duncan Robinson.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, the real answer is Steph Currie because I just love watching him. I still find him just thrilling to watch. But I actually, the most interesting guys in the league are the ones who were misvalued for some reason. And the evolution of the game has changed their value in the league and the premium that teams put on them. And so that tends to be like three-point shooters. And so not this Steph Curry type is almost like the Steve Kerr player type. So I've written a lot about these guys. I've written about Duncan Robinson with the Miami Heat, who went to a small high school in New Hampshire. He went to Exeter Academy. He went to Williams College, D3, Williams College in the NESCAC, transferred to Michigan, went undrafted, played in the G League, and now is the single best three-point shooter in the NBA. And it's a guy who basically the whole sport changed and he adapted and suddenly he becomes this really valuable player.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they're overuse injuries. We're not used to seven footers jumping out and trying to guard three pointers and having to be as mobile as you do now. So I think we're still learning a lot about that. Like I think even the smartest teams know that. They don't know all that much about injuries and injury prevention and like wearables and biometrics. Like this in some ways is the next frontier of all of this stuff.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In his first few years, LeBron played like 42 minutes again. And I think what makes Zion more like Giannis than LeBron is that his minutes are always going to be monitored for his career because of his body type, because of his age, because of the way the NBA has played today, he's going to play like 32, 33 minutes. And that means that like in the playoffs, hopefully he will be fresher.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, but like taller, bigger, beefier. Thick. Oh my God. He's like girthy, right? The thing I think that makes him like Yannis is that they're closer to the same age and they belong to similar generations. So the amazing thing about Yannis this year is that he's probably going to win the MVP Award for the second year in a row and he's averaging about 30 minutes per game. They're 48 minutes in an NBA game, which means that he's only playing 30 minutes and he's putting up stats that he's going to win the MVP.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Like they are going to be excellent building around him over the next few years. And so he sort of lost some of his momentum because he didn't play for a few months and everybody sort of forgot about him. And yet we see him now. And it's like you are like, you're seeing a superstar in the making. Like he's going to lose weight. His body's going to change. He's going to learn how to play the game. You watch him on defense. He doesn't know what he's doing yet, right? He's a rookie. He's 19 years old. But he's quick and he can jump. And he has brilliant vision. He can pass. Everyone knew that he was this incredible dunker, but his game is so well-rounded. He is going to be a sublime basketball.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's fantastic There are not many rookies in the NBA who change the fortunes of their team immediately. You could probably list them on one hand over the course of the last few decades. LeBron James, of course. For sure. Maybe Kevin Durant, maybe Anthony Davis, what Zion Williamson has done after missing the first few months of his rookie season with an injury is that he's turned New Orleans Pelicans into like a real playoff contentment. So like if you look at the numbers, even the plus minus numbers, when he's on the court, they're destroying other teams.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes, right? Sometimes. So plus minus is a stat that over the course of one game, maybe a little bit noisy. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it actually shows a lot. But over the course of a season and over the course of a career, it's like hugely informative. And so for the last few years, who has had the best plus minus in the NBA? It's Steph Curry. And that sort of shows his impact on the game.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just about everything. Really? To me, the beauty of Shane Badier is that he was someone who the NBA did not value properly because he did not have great stats, right? He didn't score a lot of points. He didn't grab a lot of rebounds. He didn't dish out a lot of assists. But when he played, his team was better when he was on the floor, right? And there was no relationship that embodied this better than Shane Badier when he tried to guard Kobe Bryant. And so I talked to Shane after the tragic death of Kobe Bryant a few weeks ago because I wanted to know, what did he remember from those games when they played each other? And what Shane says is that when they played, he always felt like he was Captain Ahab and Kobe Bryant was his Moby Dick. And he was always chasing him. And they had this strange cat and mouse game where it was not only physical, it was not only on the court, it was psychological. Shane Badier knew that like trying to trash Tog Koby was the worst thing.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How could you sort of incentivize people to take those shots? Is that you change the value of them? Now, I think there are people in the NBA who are encouraged that even though teams are shooting a whole bunch of threes now and all of the good teams are shooting threes, there's not really a homogenous style of play. They're getting those three pointers in different ways. So there is some variety, but the end result is the same. Like the name of the game now is how many three-pointers can you take and how many of them can you make?”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can make an arc, you could add a four point line, but move the three point line in so that you actually make every shot worth the same amount of points. Right now, there is this huge incentive against shooting mid-range shots.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is the best location. The corner shot. The corner three pointer is the most efficient shot. You're the closest and it's the most amount of point. It's still worth three points, right? I mean, there are some funky things that you could do.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that there is talk about a potential four point line. There is talk about moving the three-point line, but we're getting to a point now where about 10 years ago, the number of three pointers in the NBA game accounted for about 22% of shots. Now we're at about 35% of shots. The number of threes per game has doubled over the course of 15 years. I was at the MIT's Sloan Sports Analytics Conference recently and asked someone with a team, like, what is the upper limit here? Like, when do you get to the point of emission returns? Well, the Houston Rockets are taking 50% of their shots now. So for a single team, how high could you get? And this person, really smart, wonky, analytical, mathematical, says that he has studied the numbers and he thinks that it's 65% of the team shots as three. So by those standards, we're nowhere even close to the end of this.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a huge incentive to shooting three pointers. Now, it is more difficult, but not if you're Steph Curry, right? Steph Curry is a 45% shooter from three, and the name of the game now is shoot as many three-pointers as possible. And the game was sort of going there anyway, but whether or not the Warriors would have built around Steph Curry, I'm not sure they would have without this game.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my God. Yeah. But since then. Before that game, he averaged like 18 points and took five threes a game. Since then, he averages 26 points and he takes 10 threes. He's won two MVPs. The Warriors have won three championships. And the most remarkable thing about all of this is that it took the NBA so long to figure this out. Three is worth more than two. It's in the name of the shot, right? It's 3.5%.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Missed his normal bus, his third bus gets pulled over on the way to the garden, he's rushed, he's late, he's gotten into a fight the night before, he's down $35,000, and what happens that night is that he has the single greatest shooting night of his career. He scores 54 points, he plays all 48 minutes, he doesn't come out of the game. He makes 11 of his 13 three-pointers. Nobody in the history of the NBA, let alone him, had ever taken so many threes and made so many of them in the same game. And this was really an epiphany for Steph Curry and for the Warriors generally and actually for the whole NBA because what they were able to do after that night is build a team around Steph Curry's remarkable ability to shoot a basketball.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also timing. So, like, he wants to be at the arena a certain time and he wants to warm up at a certain time and getting there on the first bus is too early and the third bus is probably too late. This day, for some reason he can't remember, he misses the second bus. He takes the third bus. What happens when the third bus leaves the team hotel, gets pulled over by New York City cops on the way to Madison Square Garden? So now he's missed his normal bus now bus”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“During Warriors Road games, always takes the second of three buses from the team hotel to the arena. There are three buses, steps always on the second hotel.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's not suspended. Other players on his team are, however, Steph Curry is fined $35,000, and nobody has ever been so fortunate to lose so much money because the Warriors get to New York and they just don't have their full team, right? There are only a certain number of guys who can play. Now, something else happens before they get to Madison Square Garden, which is very funny in retrospect. Steph Curry.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“7'2 and weighs two of Steph Curry's, right? And what happened is exactly what you might think happened, which is Ray Haber just sort of brushed him aside for his entire life, Steph Curry's great disadvantage had been his size, right? But for this one night, it was his improbable advantage. He was too small to do any real damage in a fight of MBA players. So they fly to New York that night.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Steve Kerr was the three point shooter around Michael Jordan. What if Michael Jordan were the three point shooter, right? That's sort of the question that has become prevalent in the NBA over the last few years. This was a night that nobody thought would be Steph Curry's breakthrough, his coming out party. The night before, the Golden State Warriors had played in Indiana. They'd gotten into a fight. Steph Curry was actually involved in the fight. And if you watch the clip now, it's kind of amazing because he charges this guy named Roy Hibbert.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the through line of Steph Curry's career until a certain point of his life was that nobody really thought that he could be as good as we now know him to be. He was lightly recruited out of high school. He went to tiny Davidson College. Even after coming out of Davidson, where he had this incredible, unforgettable run in the NCA tournament in 2008. You know, he was the seventh pick in the NBA draft. There were lots of questions about whether someone who was as small as him and shot three pointers as much as him could really be like a force in the NBA. And those questions kind of lingered until this one night in February 2013.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll even lay two to the one up. Yeah, I'll give you two to one odds. 40%. The interesting thing about Daryl winning that award is that that's an award voted on by your peers. And for a very long time, I think there was resistance among NBA general managers to acknowledge that Darryl is a really smart guy and he was using statistics and analytics and information in really interesting ways.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to me, it was just, of course, Daryl was involved because Daryl is, I love the guy. I've written about him as much as I've written about anybody in the NBA. He's so smart and so interesting. And he's this real Renaissance man of the NBA. If you were to ask me, which MBA executive would unwittingly start something like this, of course it would be Daryl because Daryl is in the middle of everything.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said that he thought the loss could be about like $400 million. So it was a lot of money. But it was a very fascinating issue because it pitted American democratic norms of free speech against trying to do business in China. And I think this is something that every company is going to have to be dealing with at some point. And it was just sort of this dry forest. And I think Daryl's tweet turned out to be the kindling that nobody really thought would blow everything up, but it kind of did.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, it's the most important foreign market. And like the league has always cultivated China over the course of three decades or so. And like this one tweet imperiled that relationship overnight. I mean, to this day, I mean, the NBA is still not on CCTV. So a lot has changed. Was”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and also the NBA has this long running financial relationship with China, right? I mean, China is the engine that is powering the future growth of the league.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they haven't had a great few months since that story came out, but a couple months ago, my colleague at the journal, Jared Diamond and I, Jared covers baseball. I cover basketball. We went down to Houston to have lunch with two really smart executives there. One is named Darrell Moray, and he's the general manager of the Houston Rockets. The other is Jeff Lunau, who was the general manager of the Houston Astros. And we just thought it would be fun to get them together and just talk about how much their sports have changed. And it was fun, and it made for a really interesting story. And about a week later, Daryl became the most interesting man in geopolitics. He was already the most interesting man in sports. And I love Daryl, but he set off this feud between the NBA and China with this tweet supporting Hong Kong.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was the great white whale of Hollywood. I mean, Trufo tried to make it. Norman Jewison, Robert Redford tried to direct it and star in it, and still nobody could get it made. Goldman liked to tell this story that one studio had bought the movie and was fired the next weekend. Nobody could get this movie made. And you could argue that if Rob Reiner knew about this, maybe he wouldn't have. And even when he went to Goldman to try to get his permission to make the Princess Bride, he was terrified. And Bill Goldman opens the door and says the Princess Bride is my favorite thing I've ever written like don't screw it up. And he was able to get permission and he was able to make the movie. And I think we are all luckier for it.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was able to elevate his career to another level, right? And I have to say, like, I have run this theory by Rob Reiner. He doesn't exactly agree. What he remembers from this period is it was still so hard to get the Princess Bride made. But to me, that's actually proof of the hot hand that was shaping everything. Because if he remembers it was still so hard and it was that hard, it simply would never have been made if he weren't hot.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is it that you want to do? And he says, You don't want to do what I want to do. And she says, no, really, just tell us what movie do you want to make next? And he says, no, really. I'm telling you, you're not going to want to make this movie. And she says, just name the movie. And he says, the movie I want to make is the Princess Bride. And she says anything but the Princess Bride. And that sounds crazy now because the Princess Bride is this cult classic and one of the most beloved movies ever made, right? It was written by William Goldman, who had written Butch Cassidy. He had written all the president's men. Like you could take his grocery lists and win an Academy Award.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First few movies he made were Spinal Tap and The Sure Thing and Standby Me. And those were all successes in their own way, whether it was critically or commercially. And it sort of earned him the runway to make a fourth movie. Now, all three of those movies were in movies that nobody wanted him to make, and they were huge hits regardless. They were these delightful contradictions. And he had this conversation with a studio executive around this time when he's trying to figure out what he wants to make next. And the studio executive says, We want to do anything you want to do, right?”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of each other, and we have these hot hand periods in our careers, and in those periods we tend to produce the work that indoors and that other people remember.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And not only their most productive work, their most memorable work. There's a statistical physicist at Northwestern named Dash and Wang who tried to look at this idea like, is creativity clustered? Do our hits come in bunches? And that's really hard to do in a lot of industries because there's just not great data, right? And so what he tried to do was try to put some objective numbers to subjective issues of taste, right? So for movie directors, that's IMDb ratings. For scientists, that's Google Scholar citations. For artists, it's auction prices. Now these are not perfect metrics, but they're about as good as we could do given what we have. And what he found was that if you tell him what your best work is, what your highest rated movie or what your paper that was cited the most by other academics was, he can find the second and third best work. And it's because those works come together. Like they build on top.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, that's not remotely true. Shakespeare ran hot and cold. He wrote in streaks. And one of the great hot streaks of his career was when he wrote King Lear, Macbeth, and Anthony Cleopatra in this very concentrated amount of time. Some scholars believe as short as two months, which is crazy, right? And the reason he was able to write those plays, and the reason those plays were such a success was that it happened to be a plague year. And the plague actually worked to his advantage in very odd ways, but the plague was this force that shape Shakespeare's life from the very beginning. Like, he probably should have died when he was a kid of the plague. It was just always around in London. And to me, it spoke so neatly of the hot hand because the hot hand is not this random occurrence. It's this collision of talent and circumstance and a little bit of luck. And sometimes circumstance appears when you least expect it. Sometimes it's the plague.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is oddly timely now, right? Yes. Which is kind of terrifying. Shakespeare was never a metronomic writer. So scholars for a very long time were not exactly statisticians, believe it or not. And when they would look at like 24 Shakespeare plays, if he wrote them over the course of 12 years, they said, okay, Shakespeare wrote two plays a year.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ginormous to the point that the people who were running the company when they saw the numbers in the test arcade, they just refused to believe in them. They thought this has to be a typo. Like there's no way that these kids are playing NBA Jam so much, and yet they were. And part of that is because it was a basketball game and it was fun and you could do crazy things like somersault over the basket and throw down breathtaking slam dunks and foul anybody you wanted. But really what we wanted to do was catch fire. So in NBA Jam, if you make a few shots in a row, you hear the announcer for the game say he's heating up. And then if you make your next shot, you hear he's on fire and the ball turns into a fireball. And what happens when you're on fire is that you cannot miss. And that was compelling to so many people. Like it was this amazing example of Mark Tramel, the childhood pyromaniac, still playing with fire. And to me, I think he sort of single-handedly brainwashed this generation of impressionable young minds into believing the concept of the hot hand.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, NBA Jam was developed by this game designer named Mark Termell. And when Mark Termell was a kid, there were three things that he loved. He loved basketball and he loved video games and he loved fire. He was actually a bit of a pyromaniac. And he was able to combine these three childhood loves into the biggest hit of his life. So I grew up playing NBA Jam. I am right around the same age as Steph Curry. And so I know that NBA Jam machines were sort of ubiquitous in our childhood. They were everywhere. And what I did not know while we were both playing NBA Jam is that NBA Jam was one of the most lucrative, successful arcade games ever made in the first year of its existence. It made a billion dollars in quarters.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What the companies had to do was wrap their minds around the way that humans really think, right? Like there was no amount of money or engineering talent that could solve this problem. There was something about the way that randomness paralyzes the human mind, that the companies had to come to grips with. And so they could have been stubborn and said, no, of course this is random. This is how randomness works. But what they did was they gave their users what they wanted.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Flipping a coin. And it's the same thing. It's actually not what we want out of our playlist, right? And so what Spotify did was they tweaked their code. They evenly distribute songs and artists over the course of a playlist so that it's random the way that we think about random. So really what they did was to make it feel more random. They actually had to make it less random.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The academics were the only people who were saying that everybody else was wrong, right? And that was the beauty of their paper, was that it challenged something that is so universal. There is this fundamental belief in the hot hand that's in the original paper. They polled basketball fans and NBA players and like something like 90% of them said, of course that there is such a thing as the hot hand, right? Like if you had asked me the one time in my life that I was not completely terrible at basketball was in high school and I scored more points in one quarter of one game than I had in my entire career combined. There was something magical about that day that I still remember now. And it would never have even crossed my mind that this thing didn't exist because I thought that I knew what I felt and not until reading hundreds of papers over the course of like four decades that I realized that like everything I thought I knew might be wrong.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I wanted it to be, I wanted it to be something that anybody could read, right? Like, you don't need to be a mathematician. Right, exactly. And you could read it on a beach, which I love reading books on the beach.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Please. And also, you called it wonky beach reading, which I think is the best description of the book I've heard so far. It really tickles me to hear that.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only to be told that it wasn't, only to be told that actually maybe it was. And that was just so irresistible to me. And so the narrative itself is great. And then what I tried to do in this book is apply the lessons of that narrative very widely, right? Because that's why these people have been studying the hot hand for so long. It's not because they wanted to argue about whether or not the hot hand is real. It's because it has these implications far beyond academia, farther beyond basketball, right? Like they sort of apply everywhere.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's crazy. Imagine writing a book about it. But that was actually what was so intriguing to me about all this because at the Wall Street Journal, what I have learned is that every great story needs tension, right? Tension is really what makes stories. And I just couldn't believe how much tension there was in this fight over an idea, right? Here was something that we all thought to be true.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, if you look at the difference, if you look at the difference of what we thought to what we think now or what some people think now, it's like 12, 13 percentage points. And the difference is huge. Like in the NBA, the difference between, in the NBA, the difference of 12 points is the difference between Steph Curry and a league average shooter. We now have reason to think that not only can we believe in the hot hand, but it actually might be a pretty sizable effect. Now, this is, I think there are reasonable people on both sides of this debate, and that is what was so intriguing to me, is that we have very smart people, brilliant minds, who have been thinking about this for a very long time. And, you know, you could come out to thinking about this in different ways. And I think we still are. I think we are still trying to think about what we should think about the hot hand.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and then the next obvious question is, well, what does that mean for the hot hand? And really, what it means is that for many years, for 35 years, to be precise, we thought that if a 50% shooter was shooting 50% when he had the hot hand, when he felt like he couldn't miss, that was evidence against the hot hand, right? There was no difference. He wasn't any more likely to make his next shot. What it actually was was evidence for the hot hand all along. Because when you are shooting 50% and you take out those heads and tails and you look at what happens heads after heads, you should be shooting lower than 40%.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source