The 50 over cricket World Cup final turned out to be a damp squib, much like most of the World Cup as well.
Batting first New Zealand made just 183 runs. With such a low score it was more likely than not that Australia would win. But many posts sprang up on the social media during the break between the two innings, saying that New Zealand would beat Australia.
The victorious Australian team. PTI
Individuals making such statements had seen a pattern. India had scored 183 runs batting first in the 1983 World Cup final and gone on and beaten the then mighty West Indies. Given that New Zealand had made the same number of runs, they would also beat the now mighty Australia.
This was the logic offered. Because something had happened in the past once, nearly 32 years back, it would happen again. QED.
The irony of course was that other than the same score in a World Cup final, there was nothing common between the two situations. The matches were being played in different cities, in very different weathers and had a gap of over three decades between them.
Further, over the years one day cricket has become more and more a batsman's game (not hat it wasn't already to start with). The bats have become thicker (even though the size of the ball has remained the same). The pitches are more batsman friendly. Only four people can stand outside the 30 yard circle. Two new balls are used in a 50 over match. This means that reverse swing has more or less been taken out of a bowler's armoury.
What this means is that the 183 scored in 1983 was a much bigger score than the 183 scored in 2015.
Nevertheless, people still saw a pattern and posted that New Zealand would win, because India had won 32 years earlier after posting the same score batting first.
We human beings are pattern seekers and like to seek patterns in the world around us to make sense of it, more often than not. As Daniel Kahneman writes in Thinking, Fast and Slow: "We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities appear not by accident...We do not expect to see regularity to be produced by a random process and when we detect what appears to be a rule, we quickly reject the idea that the process is truly random."
This need to seek patterns, Kahneman says is "a part of the general vigilance that we have inherited from our ancestors." As Gary Smith writes in Standard Deviations: "Our ingrained preference for symmetry is an example of how recognizing patterns helped our human ancestors survive and reproduce in an unforgiving world." So, the presence of dark clouds would lead to rain. A sound in the brush might signify the presence of a lion, and so on.
"Those distant ancestors who recognized patters that helped them find food and water, warned them of danger, and attracted them to fertile mates passed this aptitude on to future generations. Those who were less adept at recognizing patters that would help them survive and reproduce had less chance of passing on their genes. Through countless generations of natural selection, we have become hardwired to look for patterns," writes Smith.
This pattern seeking behaviour is visible other areas of life as well. Take the case of the stock market and the investment industry. Investors are looking for patters and explanations all the time. The so called stock market experts and commentators feed on this need. As John Allen Paulos writes in A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market: Phenomena that are truly random often appear almost indistinguishable from real-market behaviour. This should, probably won't, give pause to commentators who provide a neat post hoc explanation for every rally, every sell-off, and everything in between."
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"Such commentators generally don't make remarks analogous to the observation that the penny happened by chance to land heads a few more times than it did tails. Instead they will refer to Tommy's profit taking, Henry's increased confidence, labour problems in copper mines, or countless other factors," writes Paulos.
The pattern seeking behaviour of investors also leads to situations where they attribute what might be sheer luck to inherent competence. As Jason Zweig writes in Your Money and Your Brain: "Just a couple of accurate predictions... can make an analyst seem like a genius, because viewers have no practical way to sample the analyst's entire (and probably mediocre) forecasting record. In the absence of a full sample, a small streak of random luck looks to us like a part of a longer pattern of reliable foresight."
Zweig also talks about a three's a trend fallacy quoting the legendary investor Benjamin Graham who once said: "The speculative public is incorrigible. In financial terms it cannot count beyond 3."
Zweig takes the example of a "blindfolded monkey" throwing darts at the Wall Street Journal. Such a monkey writes Zweig "has a 50% chance of beating the market in any given year." "Over three years, a chimp flinging darts in the dark has a 12.5% chance of outperforming the market average. Yet investors think a fund manager who beats the market for three years in a row must be a stock-picking genius. All too often, the public flings money at a “genius” only to find out that he's a chimp.”
To conclude, the pattern seeking behaviour that worked well for our ancestors is a liability for us. As Smith puts it: "Unfortunately, the pattern-recognition skills that were valuable for our long-ago ancestors are ill-suited for our modern lives, where the data we encounter are complex and not easily interpreted...We believe stories simply because they are consistent with the patterns we observe and, once we have a story, we are reluctant to let it go."
And that's something worth thinking about.
(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)
