Eric mentions the late and much missed Oliver Sacks. One of my favorite examples from the book cited speaks directly to a view that was widely held among analytic philosophers in the Anglo-American world back when I was younger. The view was that there were certain contrast dependent terms such as up/down, in/out, before/after, and right/left which could only be understood as a pair, so that it was, it was said, impossible to understand the concept "up" and yet not be able to understand the concept "down." Sacks offers the example of a patient who had suffered a traumatic brain injury which left her able to understand the concept "to the right" but not "to the left." If she was sitting at dinner and wanted her knife, instead of looking to her left she would do a complete 360° right turn until she came upon it.
This has nothing to do with that example, but since I am talking about favorite scientists, let me mention the only time I ever read anything by Stephen Jay Gould with which I disagreed. Gould argued that professional basketball players who talk about "being in the zone" so that they could not miss, were actually wrong.The likelihood of streaks of successful shots at the basket (or hits at the plate, for that matter) was much larger than people understood. He pointed out that a 300 hitter in baseball was actually more likely than we thought to have streaks in which he hit successfully in a remarkably large number of games. He then claimed that the only streak of which he was aware that was simply outside the realm of probability was Joe DiMaggio's famous 56 game hitting streak.
I understood Gould's point about statistical probabilities, \but I thought he should have paid more attention to players who were actually in the game.If Lebron James says he was "in the zone," we should pay attention to him. The description of a baseball player as a "300 hitter" is a summation of his batting performance, not a characterization of them such as "6 feet tall" or "having very good reflexes." It is quite possible, and in fact I think actual, that some players are better at concentrating on their hitting even in games where it may not matter whereas others bear down only when they think something depends on whether they get a hit. A story about the great old notoriously curmudgeonly player Ty Cobb makes the point. The first time an old timers' game was held, Cobb showed up together with a great many other famous ballplayers from an earlier era. Most of them were just there to have fun, but when Cobb got to the plate, he turned to the catcher, said solicitously, "you had better back up a step or two. I have not hit the ball in some years and I do not want to hurt you by mistake." The catcher dutifully backed up, whereupon Cobb laid down a perfect bunt and beat it out to first base. You will recall that in the great movie "Field of Dreams," the other players called back from heaven to play on the field say that they did not let Cobb come with them because they thought he was such a son of a bitch.
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Baseball, unlike any other sport I can think of, lends itself to humor. One of my favorite stories was one told by Joe Garagiola, who spent much of his career as a back-up catcher. In one of his relatively rare starts, he came to bat with a team mate on first. He got a good hit to the outfield and was able to stretch it to a double when the outfielder threw to home to cut off the lead runner.
When the next batter came up, the pitcher went into a full windup, not paying any attention to Garagiola on second. “I knew I was no gazelle,” he said, “but to ignore me entirely was insulting.” When the same thing happened on the next pitch, Garagiola broke for third. He slid into the base, looked up, and saw his teammate who asked, “Where in hell are you going?” Garagiola answered, “back to second if I can make it.”
Interesting to note that streaks are actually statistically less likely than our intuitions would tell us, due to an odd form of selection bias (more discussion here). The relevant snippet from the older version of the paper is:
"Jack takes a coin from his pocket and decides that he will flip it 4 times in a row, writing down the outcome of each flip on a scrap of paper. After he is done flipping, he will look at the flips that immediately followed an outcome of heads, and compute the relative frequency of heads on those flips. Because the coin is fair, Jack of course expects this conditional relative frequency to be equal to the probability of flipping a heads: 0.5. Shockingly, Jack is wrong. If he were to sample 1 million fair coins and flip each coin 4 times, observing the conditional relative frequency for each coin, on average the relative frequency would be approximately 0.4."
This caused the famous 1985 paper to describe a 'hot hand fallacy' where there was none, and systematically underestimate streakiness in their own data when there really does seem to be robust evidence for it existing. I believe that this paper led many people (perhaps Stephen Jay Gould?) to believe that peoples intuition about 'randomness' made streakiness seem less likely than observed, when it appears to be precisely the opposite.
This really is quite a counter-intuitive result (see statistician Andrew Gelman learn about it here), so it's not surprising that the belief that the 'hot hand' is actually a misunderstanding of randomness seems to live on.
I loved the Boston Celtics and specifically Larry Bird. Many players commented on how much of a trash talker Bird was. He once felt insulted because a white guy was guarding him. On a few occasions, he told Players guarding him. " Right corner head fake, jumper nothing but net. This was not a one-time Bird action telling the guarding player what he would do before doing it. I don't think this is an example of a streak but it certainly brings a smile to the face of a Bird lover, no pun intended.
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