Fire and Knowledge

There is nothing really “extreme” about extreme sports. Nothing that boarders do in a half-pipe is even remotely as dangerous as playing football. Extreme sports are just sports for people who don’t want to be mistaken for jocks. Once the jocks start doing them, the distinction will be lost, and so it will be time to move on to something new.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 132

Everybody knows about hot hands. The only problem is that no such phenomenon exists. Stanford psychologist Amos Tversky studied every basket made by the Philadelphia 76ers for more than a season. He found, first of all, that the probability of making a second basket did not rise following a successful shot. Moreover, the number of “runs,” or baskets in succession, was no greater than what a standard random, or coin-tossing, model would predict….

Our error lies not in the perception of pattern but in automatically imbuing pattern with meaning, especially with meaning that can bring us comfort, or dispel confusion.

–Stephen Jay Gould, “The Streak of Streaks” in Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (1991), p. 469

The silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with a stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum. (The effort reeks of silliness because baseball is profound all by itself and needs no excuses; people who don’t know this are not fans and are therefore unreachable anyway.)

–Stephen Jay Gould, “The Creation Myths of Cooperstown” in Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (1991), p. 46