Think again

Why is it important for us to be right or wrong?!

During the last month (yes, as well driven by the time of the pandemic and kind of social isolation) I was more and more wondering about the root cause of my observation that many people (all?) are discussing and talking about facts and topics by taking an extreme position of right and wrong.

Was there a trend of seeing everything black or white and was I missing a point? Why is it that the majority of people (voter), public media (which addresses again the majority, because they make money with the size of audience) and politics (again, depending on the majority to get re-elected) are taking extreme positions by either taking only one-sided information, too few data or no data at all, as bottom line of their reasoning.

For sure it is one of the key strength of mankind that we are able to abstract data and information to draw conclusions for the greater good. Very early we were convinced that the earth is round and not flat, even we did not have all data available. More data is of course fostering our findings and facts and in many cases it is not changing anything — in some cases more data and more information is necessary to clarify that the original “fact” was wrong an that the precise finding is leading to a different conclusion.

Why is the home-team winning more often?

In the podcast “No Stupid Question” with Stephen Dubner (Freakonomics) and Angela Duckworth (Grit) I was listening carefully within the episode of “Have we all lost our ability to compromise” to the various examples in which one stood out for me:

In a recent study of the “home-game winning”-research, the scientist analyst the reasoning why sports-teams in general (with a specific strong outlier in soccer) are more successful in winning games at home, then the teams playing on the road. The information that was available was specifically enriched by the data of 2020 in which (caused by the pandemic) way less or even no crowd was attending the games.

Until now there were strong overlapping interpretations (abstracts) and believes all over the globe why this is and what causes that the team playing at home was significant more successful in winning games:

• Teams being on the road are more exhausted by all traveling efforts
• Teams being at home, feel more comfortable and secure on their home turf
• Teams that get supported by more fans at home are more energetic and bring in more effort

Surprisingly none of the strong thesis had any significant correlation after the scientist analyzed all data, specifically considering the 2020 data. Nevertheless they found out that the crowd at home has a significants, but different that believed and assumed as “right” before:

The amount of false or biased referee decisions that were in favor of the home team drove in total the significants and therefore lead to a very different finding why the home teams are more successful in all sports.

Conclusion

Considering everything (recently) learned, I believe strongly that mankind needs a new way of considering data resp. data that is not available yet. If we do create facts today and believe they are right, they might be wrong tomorrow.

“Think again” (which is as well a popular book title by Adam Grant) should be our mantra for the upcoming ages and should lead us to a more, better and faster way to process data to use it for better decisions. If it is how we tackle the pandemic, climatic change or other challenges of mankind — please: “Think again”, always!