Give and Take

Episode 218: The Hot Hand, with Ben Cohen



May 17th, 2020  •  37 mins 46 secs  •  Download (34.6 MB)  •  Link with Timestamp

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For decades, statisticians, social scientists, psychologists, and economists (among them Nobel Prize winners) have spent massive amounts of precious time thinking about whether streaks actually exist. After all, a substantial number of decisions that we make in our everyday lives are quietly rooted in this one question: If something happened before, will it happen again? Is there such a thing as being in the zone? Can someone have a “hot hand”? Or is it simply a case of seeing patterns in randomness? Or, if streaks are possible, where can they be found?