Tonight at the Caesars Forum Convention Center near Las Vegas, thousands of people will gather for an annual demonstration of human overconfidence.
The official name of the set is NFL Drafts. There, with millions of Americans watching on television, the executives of 32 NFL teams will choose which college players to add to their roster.
And executives will almost certainly make a lot of decisions that they later regret.
I realize that many of the readers of this newsletter are not football fans. However, I think the draft is worth a few minutes of your attention, because it turns out to be an interesting case study on human arrogance, a study with lessons for other topics, like the economy and Covid-19.
Essentially, tonight’s NFL teams are going to do one thing every employer does: choose which workers to hire. One key difference is that groups will be more informed than most employers. Hospitals or manufacturers in general cannot study videotape and record statistics of job applicants.
However, even with all this information, teams can still do a tough job in predicting who will be the best player. “The track record is pretty bad,” said Richard Thaler, Nobel laureate in economics Who has studied the manuscript, let me know.
Confident jet person
Consider this chart, which shows the quarterbacks selected in the first round of the draft 4 years ago, along with their total career drop points:
As you can see, there is very little relationship between performance and draft order. Will the 2018 draft be reorganized today, Josh Allen of Buffalo Bills will almost certainly go ahead. Aside from the Baltimore Ravens’ Allen and Lamar Jackson, the other three probably won’t even play much next season.
It’s a common story: Tom Brady, the most successful player in NFL history, was the 199th pick in 2000. Most of the top quarterbacks right now – including Patrick Mahomes, Aaron Rodgers, Justin Herbert , Dak Prescott and Russell Wilson – were drafted after the midfield neither had nor finished.
(Related: When teams defy conventional wisdom to make surprise picks on the first turn, it rarely succeeds, an analysis by Nate Cohn of The Times shows.)
Performance prediction is inevitable, even in the country’s most popular form of mass entertainment, where executives can devote a lot of resources to research. “There’s nothing wrong with that,” said Cade Massey, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania. “Crime is thinking you can predict it.”
The real mistake that executives make is arrogance. They believe they can forecast the future and design draft strategies based on their confidence. For example, in 2018, the New York Jets traded four options to increase only three positions in the draft – to a third pick from a sixth. With that third pick, the Jets executives thought they’d draft a quarterback too great that he is leaving on the sixth pick.
The quarterback they chose was Sam Darnold, who (as the chart above also shows) was disappointing. Imagine if the Jets had instead kept the sixth pick, capturing Allen and also keep their other options. It may have changed teams.
The most successful NFL teams have adopted a version of this anti-jet strategy. They have embraced the power of humility. The Dallas Cowboys of the 1990s and the New England Patriots built Super Bowl winners by trading high picks for much lower picks. In recent seasons, the Los Angeles Rams exchanged options early – value tournament operators tend to exaggerate, like a 2005 academic paper Massey and Thaler show – for established players.
With those players, the Rams won the Super Bowl last season. The Jets failed to make it through to the knockout stages, for the 11th consecutive season.
Five-way chess
What is the broader lesson here? The world is often messier and more confusing than people admit. We tell ourselves fake organized stories about why something happened and what will happen next.
The stock market rose or fell, and analysts announced a cause; In fact, they are often just conjecture, as Paul Krugman, economist and Times columnist, likes to point out.
On the subject of Covid, both experts and journalists imagine it to be more predictable than it really is. As schools reopen or some states lift mask regulations, you’ve heard confident predictions that cases will increase. Often, they did not. Invisible, mysterious ebbs and viral transmissions overwhelm everything else.
In her latest column, Zeynep Tufekci of The Times argues that public health officials have given Covid’s flawed guidance based on the patriarchal belief that they can see the future. Zeynep’s primary example was the FDA’s refusal to allow young children to be vaccinated, based on what she called a “five-way chess” prediction that allowing childhood vaccinations would undermine trust. about vaccines.
The most direct analogy to the NFL draft is the hiring process elsewhere. Most recruiters still place great emphasis on job interviews, believing that managers can accurately predict a candidate’s performance from a short conversation. Research shows the opposite.
Interviews can help people find out if they have as another person – has some value – but not his or her performance at work. If you consider yourself a clairvoyant exception, you are probably making the same mistake as the Jets did.
To be more specific, the implication is not that nobody knows anything. Structured job interviews, which simulate the tasks a job involves, can be helpful. And at tonight’s draft, NFL teams won’t be completely ignorant: Higher draft picks have historically performed better than lower picks, but only partially.
The problem is that people tend to exaggerate their ability to predict events. Those who can resist that arrogance – those who can combine knowledge with humility – often have a competitive edge.
For more: Athletic was created NFL draft preview for beginners. The Times wrote about Ikem Ekwonua fast attack guide, and about the trouble of Predict the number 1 option of the bill of exchange.
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