It’s bordering on cultish behavior: the constant reinforcement (high fives, daps) among team members as a (now highly devalued) sign of support. I was watching a doubles match at the French Open Tennis Championship at Roland Garros and one team was high fiving each other after every single point, including the ones they lost. If that’s not a total waste of time, I’m not sure what is — and yet there is no way for them to stop, having established an exceedingly silly custom. What’s worse is that now they need to find another way to express actual support, since they let the hedonic treadmill devalue their standard interaction.
Some individual pre-shot routines (Rafael Nadal as an OCD Catholic cat, Brian Harmon waggling more than 10x per actual shot) are extreme extensions of basic routines which sports science has shown to be helpful in creating consistency. But since winning is hard and outcomes often seem random (with razor thin margins), it is sometimes comforting to adopt superstitious behavior. These tics are often hard to break, because, having initiated them via a non-logical train of thought, they naturally do not respond to logical arguments to cease the silly behavior. There’s no point in doing proper A/B testing — with a statistically significant sample size, testing whether wearing the moth-eaten “lucky” hat actually has a better than random influence on various outcomes.
Will Amazon’s NextGen stats (primarily for American football at the moment) start capturing the tics of each athlete, so professional scouts can determine whether they are inadvertently transmitting valuable information? Andre Agassi famously figured out that Boris Becker had a ‘tell’ for his serve — his tongue would wag in the direction Becker intended to serve the ball, giving Agassi enough time to anticipate the shot and pummel it back as if he was a mind-reader (he was, essentially).
I once jokingly told a friend on his first trip to Japan that upon entering a subway car, it was customary for non-Japanese to go up and bow to each and every person already in the same car, to apologize for intruding fractionally into their space. In the end, he (sadly) didn’t bite, although he hesitated a while to think about whether or not I was pulling his leg (I think the sheer logistics of that many people bowing made the decision easy). But at some level that preposterous idea isn’t that far away from professional basketball players dapping up with all of their on-court teammates each and every time they take (not make) a free throw, a shot which has an average success rate of 80%, a percentage unlikely influenced by their superstitious routines. And as far as I can tell, it’s near universal in the NBA (I’m not sure about saner leagues around the world). It makes more sense for golfers to hire authentic bone-in-nose witch doctors as caddies, if it increases their probability of making long low probability putts, given how important each stroke is in golf.
Missing numbers
How many avertable disputes in business class have arisen because Cathay Pacific skips row number 13 on its aircraft, so the people assigned to row 14 (logically, two rows after row 12) are actually in row 15? All because of a superstition that 13 is an unlucky number in the West (even while Cathay allows rows including the digit 4, the omission of which seems more relevant for a Hong Kong based airline). Incongruously, at the Hong Kong airport, there is no baggage carousel #4, but there is a #13 carousel, so you might avoid an unlucky row to sit in, but the entire plane might get an unlucky carousel (are more bags lost on #13?).
I used to work in Cheung Kong Center, a skyscraper with no floors containing the bad luck digit 4, but also no floor 13, so floor 12 was followed by floor 15, and the entire 40 block of floors was also removed. So while the top floor was marked 68, the building was missing ~17 floors so it was really only 51 floors high. In my Hong Kong bank, my account number (and apparently most bank accounts) end in -888 for good luck, which is a waste of some perfectly good digits.
One ‘fix’ I have seen periodically is to recast anything with a ‘13’ as 12A, so as to keep the order, while avoiding the perilous number of Judas. It’s hard to use that on an airplane, where seats are traditionally a row and seat number, however.
License plates vibes
In Japan, automobile license plates have only four numbers, so vanity plates like 8888 and 88 and 8 are popular. But different strokes… — I believe certain classes of society don’t mind the connotations of death associated with the digit 4, so the 44s and 4444s usually signify morticians, or people who want to make a scary impression, like gangsters. I myself had a vanity plate which was less about vanity and more about gratitude — I once made some money trading warrants on Sony Corp (stock ticker 6758) which enabled me to purchase a car, so I made that my license plate… it’s not a popular number so I had no trouble obtaining it, and hardly anyone outside of the broking community had any sense for the meaning of the number. I haven’t noticed other inside jokes — like putting 7302 (the code for Toyota) on a Rolls-Royce, or 8301 (The Bank of Japan) on an armored car, but I wish there were.
My brother once had a vanity license plate in the US which was “AEEEH” (if I remember correctly). In addition to being fun and silly, I think its primarily functionality was making it easy to remember, in the various situations where you need to recall your license plate.
In places like Hong Kong and the UAE, where vanity plates can go as high as $15mn (‘P7’ in the UAE), they are also explicit expressions of wealth, since a perfectly functional license plate with a non-prestigious number can be had for a standard fee. In the US, where the vanity plate fees are modest (up to $200 in Texas) some license plates function as ads or personal image enhancers (the movie Con Air featured the plate “AZZ KIKR”), but at some level they just highlight the creative ability of the owner, finding something interesting and personal which doesn’t fall afoul of the various guidelines (no obscene or suggestive content, etc).
I guess the point here is that license plates can have meaning other than pure superstition, although I think some countries and cultures are more prone to this behavior than others.
Feng shui and geomancy
In Hong Kong, where Chinese belief systems intersect with capitalist impulses, employing Feng Shui consultants is pretty common (probably the norm). It would be great to see case studies on companies who ignored these principles to their eventual detriment, or those who efficiently harnessed the flows of Qi to greater and greater heights, but then the data might not make too strong a case.
In recent years the application of Feng Shui has expanded into stock market commentary — Credit Lyonnais, never shy to break the mold, has had a Feng Shui index for local markets for many years, and has been featured on business news programs from time to time, although their disclosures admit that this is light-hearted commentary, and not official research. Chinese property buyers, however, take the principles of Feng Shui much more seriously, even affecting real estate practices in distant places like Australia.
Tournament of seers
Superstitions abound, but they are largely non-intrusive — although I have heard some stories about fortune-tellers being responsible for momentous decisions, especially in Korea. It is easy to poke fun at them, in the humanist era where the scientific method and randomized control trials are the ultimate standard of logical proof.
Many years ago, I watched a silly Japanese show which had a tournament of seers — eight (superstitious) disciplines, from the traditional tea leaf reader, to the deeply serious readers of broken plates, thrown pearls, or (tarot) cards, etc. Each pair played rock-paper-scissors until a winner was determined, who went on to the next round. The show played up the unique ceremony of each prediction, and the confidence of each seer that their ability to see into the future would dominate all other forms. Of course only one method managed to win three bouts in a row (I forgot which discipline won out), but the audience thought it was very amusing and there was no way for seven of the eight players to argue for the superiority of their method.
Dealing with the elements of chance
As readers of this column probably know, I am a fan of variable outcome games — they are the motivating force behind many of our activities, an essential propellant of life itself — and since we directly compete in so many dimensions, we are constantly watching or participating in them. In order to be a game, the outcome is almost required to be in doubt to hold our interest — either because the forces are evenly matched, or because handicapping has been applied to make the odds less unbalanced.
Once the forces have been arrayed on the battlefield, and the conflict has started, the intensive preparation and tactical decisions will play out. Each side attempts to fully dominate the other, but more often than not, the outcome of the contest will be in doubt, and therefore subject to the elements of chance, for which most of us gravitate to mental models, in order to make sense of the chaos of random outcomes… and many of these mental crutches are superstitions. They are ways of making sense of the arbitrary outcomes, because for some reason, most of us are uncomfortable having to deal with pure randomness. And while our superstitions often don’t work, we don’t examine their efficacy ex-post with too harsh a light, because we need them to get through the never-ending gauntlet of variable outcome contests, and it’s too much trouble to develop new and improved superstitions (when the old ones invariably fail).
Mean reversion in sports
Although most sports fans like blowouts (in favor of their team), for the good of the sport, it’s important to make sure that competition is at a similarly high standard (and that strong teams don’t dominate their leagues forever). For this reason, there are many constraints and mechanisms for injecting mean reversion into team strength, from salary caps (rich cities can’t simply “pay to win” like some video games) to draft order (weakest teams get to pick first). The rules of sports are constantly changing, largely to prevent one player or team from getting too much of an advantage, thus negating the ‘variable outcome’ part of the ecosystem — but also to make the spectacle more interesting (the change to the NFL kickoff rules this year are an attempt to make the boring kickoff play a little more interesting and less injury-prone).
It occurs to me that the difficulty of dealing with the element of chance may be why sports fans are so mean to referees, who have mostly downside because their good calls are rarely lauded but their bad calls become headlines. “Ref you suck” is a common refrain in sports arenas — I doubt if you’ll ever hear a chorus of “Ref you rock.”
Poker: both skill and luck
I would contend that poker (by which I mostly mean head to head games like Texas Hold’em rather than casino games like Blackjack) is both a game of skill, and a game of luck. For the most part, it’s a game of skill, because for the vast majority of players, there is a wide skill differential, and over time and many hands, the most skilled will emerge over the less skilled. At the same time, I would contend that at the highest level of skill — that the game devolves into one of minor skill differentials, with results overwhelmed by the randomness of the cards.
To partially support my hypothesis, I examined the winners of the World Series of Poker, the gold standard of power prowess — the main event has been played since 1970, or more than 50 years. Since that time, there have been six multiple winners of the Main Event, but only one person (Stu Ungar, for the poker geeks) who has won it three times — the other six have won it only twice. There is no Tiger Woods, no Secretariat, no Al Oerter of poker, because the skill of the very top players is close enough (and there are enough of them) that luck is probably the primary factor in deciding the eventual winner, but only at the professional skill level. For mere mortals, Texas Hold ‘em is inherently a skill game. But the element of luck also allows mere mortals the illusion over a few hands, at least, that they can play with the best of them — and therein lies the juicy secret of the game: that pros should only play with amateurs, where they are highly likely to win; pros playing with pros is more or less a zero-sum, random (and thus relatively pointless) game, other than showing amateurs how it’s done.
I wonder whether an AI could consistently beat the top humans in poker: I imagine that at the highest level, skill advances become asymptotic to a theoretical ideal, and the enormous gap that have emerged between humans and machines in games like chess and go are unlikely to emerge in areas like poker where the luck component is high enough… so I’d argue that AIs would struggle to dominate humans at Texas Hold’em. This paper in Science (which I found after I made my hypothesis) suggests an AI can be better than humans, although with a large error component — and does not overwhelm human opponents in the way AIs do in two-player games.
Superstitions are coping mechanisms
Life is difficult, and full of chance events, so we hope that luck (or anything) keeps out of harm’s way. If we are well trained, we have a sense of where to be and where not to be, what the enemy is thinking and what they are likely to target. But once those factors are accounted for, there is still the residual dollop of chance, and it is quite human to want to infuse those absolutely chance events with a large measure of meaning, even if they are essentially meaningless.
“There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result.”
― Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill and George Patton both felt a strong sense that they were destined for greater things, and therefore had little fear of being shot on the battlefield — they would routinely walk around on the front lines like they were invincible to bullets and shrapnel — of course they were only a small subset of people who randomly emerged from those random places of death, and their narrative of “destiny” was essentially passive luck. The larger cohort of misguided generals who had similar inklings of destiny, but whose lives were truncated by a sniper’s bullet, never got to tell their story of feeling the comforting hand of destiny.
Far from the battlefield, for the most part, superstitions are our relatively harmless coping mechanisms. We are offsetting the vicious and illogical outcomes of chance with algorithms of our own which make just as little sense, but give us the illusion that we are somehow ordering the world and making sense of the terror of absolute randomness. It is more important to us to have some ordering mechanism, than whether the mechanism is effective or not. We suspect it is not that effective but we are predisposed to ignoring contradictory data because the superstitious algorithm is the comforting blanket, the coping mechanism, and its presence is more important than its ability to foresee the future.
And that, essentially, seems like quite a human approach to coping with randomness.
So put on your lucky hat, stand on one leg, whistle the Marseillaise, and dap your entire team, if that’s the magic combination of factors you think will propel your team or athlete to victory in the upcoming Paris Olympics! At some level, we all do it.
But on a battlefield, just do it with your head down.
Excellent and quite entertaining. You and I didn't need any of these silly superstitions at #1 doubles, and look where it got us--eternal glory!
In the end, we are all like Michael Scott, not superstitious, just a little stitious.