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siegecraft | 2 years ago

Not sure what point you're trying to make here, since I don't know if you're referring to

(a) the initial, intuitive belief that basketball players who had made several shots in a row were more likely to make the next one (b) the analytical analysis that disproved a, which no doubt stemmed from the belief that every shot must be totally independent of its context, disregarding the human factors at play (c) the revised analysis that found that the analysis in b was flawed, and there actually was such a thing as a "hot hand."

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krainboltgreene|2 years ago

I'm talking about the fallacy, you know the reason I included the word "fallacy" in the sentence.

You know we're not talking about sports, right?

HN is wild.

siegecraft|2 years ago

If you assume no one knows the context of your reference, why would you use it? Regardless, I included the details because they're interesting and one sometimes learns interesting things on HN.

Anyway, the lesson of the hot hand fallacy is that sometimes intuitive predictions turn out to be right, despite the best efforts of low-context contrarians. But I don't think that was your point.