It Was Better Yesterday

I am still reading my way, very slowly, through Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. Each chapter is so profound and informative that, if it wasn't for the annoying statistic that 60% of the population of the UK do not read one book a year, it should be compulsory reading for everyone. Notwithstanding the alleged beauty of democracy it does seem abundantly clear that smart people know more than thick ones.

Hoping to finish it this sabbatical. So here's the latest lesson.

Most of us know that we have a tendency to idealise the past. We recall the good and forget the bad. In massive general terms this leads to sentences such as 'It was better in the old days' even though people got rickets and polio, children died in infancy and there was a war on.

The Match of the Day and Football on Five pundits should all read it as a condition of their contracts. Put simply, they are lazy. Which is not as rude as it sounds because it means they are using System 1 thinking (in Kahneman terms) as it is easier than System 2 and we all do that.

So when they say 'A top striker has got to be putting that away' when a gaping goal is missed, they are fooled by highlights' packages. They have in their heads every goal of last week's top four tiers and those showed, time and again, strikers putting away simple chances. System 1 recalls that. What they do not have is ready head-access to the hours of footage of appalling football. System 2 would do the hard thinking necessary to find that. Highlights are highlights. Lowlights packages don't sell, although this was recently voted the worst twenty seconds of football ever and it is compelling.

So pundits recall many occasions when simple chances were taken and not the far more numerous occasions when they were not.

Someone who cares more than me, enough to do actual research, watched hours of football clips of top strikers recently and found that 'simple' chances were taken on less than half the occasions they presented themselves. Put simply, missing easy open goals is more likely than not.

If our history is told only as a series of 'good things' then we will look back on it more positively.