Bird’s Eye: We remember a dear friend (and Tikkunista reader) once asking us why a baseball pitcher would ever throw balls.  If you could, wouldn’t you throw all strikes? That question is answered by a brilliant short video exploring Mariano Rivera (the best relief pitcher ever) and showing 1000 of his pitches simultaneously, in a bit of media wizardry that will expand your understanding of baseball. Really. Expanding one’s understanding of football is more challenging (concussions, maybe?), as a fascinating article looks at why NFL coaches consistently make demonstrably dumb decisions. But they’re no different from the rest of us in making bad decisions: we keep thinking rationality is the route to follow. Sadly, it’s not. Proof to follow.

* How Mariano Rivera Dominates Hitters NYT Magazine  YouTube

* Can Irrational Decisions Be Corrected? A Football Case Study Wired Science

Let’s say you are an NFL coach, and you have a fourth and three on your opponent’s 30 yard line. Romer could tell you that 1) you have a 60 percent chance of getting a first down, and that teams with 1st downs inside the thirty yard line score a touchdown 40 percent of the time, for an expected point value of 1.7 and 2) that field goal attempts from the 32 yard line failed almost 65 percent of the time, which meant that going for a field goal only had an expected point value of 1.05. In other words, it’s almost twice as effective to go for it than to attempt a field goal.

So what do most coaches do? They consistently make the wrong decision. According to Romer’s analysis, teams would have been better off going for it on fourth down during the 1st quarter on 1100 different drives. Instead, coaches decided to kick the ball 992 times. This meant that NFL coaches made the wrong decision over 90 percent of the time.

* How Should We Make Hard Decisions? Wired Science

People were asked to choose cars, rationally or intuitively after the cars were rated in twelve different categories. (These “hard” conditions more closely approximate the confusing reality of car shopping, in which consumers are overwhelmed with facts and figures.) In addition to learning about the quality of the transmission and the engine’s gas mileage, people were told about the number of cupholders, the size of the trunk, and so on. Their brain had to deal with forty-eight separate pieces of information.

Did conscious deliberation still lead to the best decision? Dijksterhuis found that people given time to think in a rational manner – they could carefully contemplate each alternative – now chose the ideal car less than 25 percent of the time. In other words, they performed worse than random chance. However, subjects who were distracted for a few minutes found the best car nearly 60 percent of the time. (Similar results were achieved with Ikea shoppers, looking for a leather couch.) They were able to sift through the clutter of automotive facts and find the ideal alternative. Dijksterhuis summarized the implications of the data:

The moral of this research is clear…Use your conscious mind to acquire all the information you need for making a decision. But don’t try to analyze the information with your conscious mind. Instead, go on holiday while your unconscious mind digests it. Whatever your intuition then tells you is almost certainly going to be the best choice.