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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, I will say the one thing I've learned in thinking about this book and writing this book and talking about this book is that I'm not great at talking about this part of the book. It's hard even for me as the best thing I could do is say, actually go back and listen to your episode with Josh Miller because he does a better job of explaining it than anybody. But what I will say is that it has to do with sequences and sampling without replacement, right? And figuring out when you look at a sequence of even three coin flips, if you look at the average chance that you will get a heads after a heads, it's not 50% as our brains are conditioned to believe. It's actually lower. It's biased in a negative direction.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to say the funny thing about this is that I, let alone Josh and Adam, got the same reaction that Gilovich Vallon and Tavsky did, which is there's no way this is true. Over the course of 35 years, that paper, which was so counterintuitive at the time, became conventional wisdom, was the way we thought about the high.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was, yes. Well, and the reason I remember this is not because I'm bragging, but because I was terrified when that story came out. It was very nerve-wracking because the math had been rubber-stamped by mathematicians, by Andrew Gelman himself. Like the math was accurate. However, the journal is really not in the position to be writing full stories about preprints, right? Papers that have not been peer-reviewed or published by journals that you can trust. And so this paper was floating around the internet. It had been uploaded to SSRN and Andrew Galman had written a blog post about it, and people were talking about it. But if this paper had been published in Econometrica, which it has been now, it's very easy for the Wall Street Journal to write a story about that, right? But when it hasn't, suddenly it's just these two guys, these two young American economists in Europe, and a statistician with a blog saying that it's right, is that enough for the Wall Street Journal to write?”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we all know sometimes when you flip a coin, you get seven tails in a row, right? But you would never do that if you were imagining what a string of coin flips actually looks like.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but it's a brilliant website. And I talked to Andrew Gelman about this. And what he told me about how he is able to tell his classroom, he splits his classroom into two, and he tells them, like, you know, one group flip a coin, the other group imagine what it looks like when you flip a coin, and then write the sequences on a chalkboard, and I will walk in and I will be able to tell you which one is real and which one is fake. And so he leaves the classroom and he does essentially this magic trick for a statistician, right? He comes in and he always knows. And it's because the real one is the one that looks fake, right?”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is an incredible statistician at Columbia named Andrew Gelman, who runs this very popular blog, which sounds kind of like an oxymoron, like a popular statistics blog.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it defied something that we all thought to be true, right? And we are not very good when people tell us something we are convinced of isn't true.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely. And not only that, even if you do believe in the hot hand, I don't think it is this exaggerated fireball of our imagination, right? Like you can miss when you feel hot. And also, like, there are plenty of times when you are in an environment that does not allow for a hot hand. And believing in the hot hand can be disastrous, costly. It could really backfire and burn you. And so I do think that paper is still really important. And we should all read it. I mean, part of the whole fun of this concept, I think, is figuring out what you think about it for yourself, right? And toying around with the idea and seeing where you land.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's nothing that could have delighted professors more, right? Like just believing in the hot hand doesn't make it any more true. And Mos Taverski used to love to tell this story when he taught the hot hand, he would tell the story of Red Hourback because he loved the Boston Celtics and like what better way to illustrate this idea that people refuse to believe than Red Auerbach saying that it was all a bunch of baloney.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, yeah, exactly. But something amazing happened when this paper came out, which is that it was so unbelievable that people just simply refused to believe it. We had all felt the hot hand and seen the hot hand and now these professors were coming along telling us there was no such thing. And that was really hard for us to wrap our minds around in the same way that it's very hard for us to wrap our minds around randomness.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They end up publishing this paper in 1985. It's in the canon of behavioral economics, right? It's one of the most famous papers ever written. It's really easy to understand. Like there's nothing really obtuse about it. It's a great paper. It really holds up.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The great Amos Diverski was a brilliant professor there. And they looked at the hot hand because they thought that it was this beautiful way to illustrate this phenomenon of seeing patterns.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one was by Josh Miller and Adam Sonhuro, who did this thing where they looked at this very old problem in a new way and they found something that nobody had seen before. And usually what happens, I have to say, after I spend a lot of time thinking about a story and writing a story is that I don't want to think about that story anymore. Leave me alone. I'm sick of it. The opposite really happened here. I couldn't get the hot hand out of my head. And I just thought that there was something bigger here that I wanted to explore. And that's how I end up spending three years writing a book about it.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're on fire. But it's not. But it's really not just about basketball. I think of this as about human behavior. I think we are all familiar with this feeling of the hot hand. And what I've learned is that if we take advantage, it can really change our lives. So this book really started with two stories in the Wall Street Journal in 2014 and 2015, both calling into question this seminal classic 1985 paper about the hot hand. One was by this team of Harvard undergraduates, so not grad students or PhD students or professors, but kids in their college dorm.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a feeling that this will be the year that the Warriors don't make the finals. So, the hot hand, there's really no singular definition, but I like to think of it as when success leads to more success. Now, in basketball, for example, the hot end has always been studied through basketball, which is one of the things I sort of found irresistible about the whole phenomenon. In basketball, it's when you make one shot and then another shot and then another shot, and you feel more likely to make your next shot.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For us, Rupert and I go way back. So for the first few years, I was at the journal, I covered college sports. In 2014, we didn't have a national full-time NBA reporter. And I still think one of the reasons why I did get this job was that it was like July 10th, 2014. And our sports editor, this brilliant guy named Sam Walker, looked around and said, oh my God, LeBron James is about to choose his next team and we don't have someone to write the story. And he sort of pulled me into his office and said, I think that you should cover the MBA for us. And I said, Sam, you're just saying this because you need someone to write about LeBron going back to Cleveland. And lo and behold, the next day, he goes back to Cleveland, I write the story. But it turned out to be this incredible stroke of fortune because at the time, the NBA was about to enter this real golden age. So I still have never covered an NBA final that the Golden State Warriors were not playing in. It's been five years in a row.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did not really have any rules in sports before I got there. We started a sports page around the same time that I was hired. So 2009, Murdoch buys the paper in like 07. Get that kid.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not like most schools. It's a real position. And the paper itself is a real newspaper. I mean, it's a daily paper. I definitely spent more time in the newspaper office than I did in any classroom. I mean, we were working, the top editors of the paper there were like 60, 70 hours a week. It's a crazy job. And so when you're covering Duke basketball, you're really competing with like everybody on the planet, right? And so that really gave me great grounding. And I got lucky a few times along the way with some internships and some other opportunities. And when I graduated a couple weeks before graduation, the journal was looking for a sports intern. They had just started a sports page and the person they had hired to be the intern had taken a job elsewhere. And so literally two weeks before graduation, the sports editor of the paper emailed me, we had talked in the past about a potential internship and he offered me an internship and I kind of kept my foot in the door and didn't let it close them.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bribery. Bribery is always a good thing. No, I worked really hard at Duke. I've always known that I wanted to be a journalist and specifically a sports journalist. It's a deeply uncool thing to say, right? Like there are some people who grow up dreaming to be astronauts and flying to the moon, and I wanted to cover Rutgers for the Star Ledger in New Jersey, right? So I went to Duke. Most kids who like sports in New Jersey. And I was the sports editor of The Chronicle, which was the student newspaper at Duke.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure to be on the show because so much of this book is actually based on past episodes of your show. So it's a treat for me.”
2020-03-27 · Masters in Business · Ben Cohen on the Science of Winning Streaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source