Daily Prayer, 8 August

One of the highest earning arcade video games of all time was NBA Jam. I can remember playing it AND its predecessor Arch Rivals, and one of the features of both was that if you made two consecutive shots, the game’s announcer would say “He’s heating up.” If you made a third consecutive attempt the announcer called out “he’s on FIRE!” and you would have about a minute or so where every shot you attempted would leave your player’s hand like a fireball and couldn’t miss. Everything you threw up was going in. It was awesome.

It was a new game at the time, but the idea of the “hot hand” is an old one. Get the ball to the guy who’s hot. Streaks are a thing in every sport. Or are they?

In 1985 a couple of Stanford scientists decided to test the theory that a person who has a successful outcome has a greater chance of success in future attempts. They used the best data available at time—which wasn’t much—and determined that there was no evidence to prove the theory true. There is no such thing, they said, as a “hot hand.” They explained that the reason that everyone in the world thinks that it does exist is due to confirmation bias and the tendency of the human mind to look for patterns in randomness. We simply see patterns where they don’t exist, they said.

More recent studies have used the vaster sea of data now available to test the Stanford study’s conclusions, however, and suggest that there is in fact evidence to support the “hot hand” theory, though it hasn’t been—maybe it cannot be—proven conclusively. All I know for certain is that, aside from NBA Jam, I personally have never had a hot hand on the court.

But those guys from Stanford suffered from their own sort of confirmation bias. They believed people make patterns where they don’t exist, but how do they know that they don’t exist? We certainly can’t find them if we don’t look for them. It’s a fascinating characteristic of all societies everywhere that we seek to explain the world around us, we want to make sense out of it, and the best way to do that is to look for patterns. This is, essentially, what science does. There is nothing about an egg, for example, that suggests that it’s a chicken until it hatches, but see enough eggs hatch into chickens and you begin to see the pattern. (Though we still don’t know for sure which came first.)

Of course, one can go too far in searching for patterns. If I told you that four flips of a coin resulted in three heads and one tails, what would you think is the probability that the next flip will be heads? If you’re like most people, you first thought 75%, before thinking that I asked for a reason, and upon further reflection realized that the probability doesn’t change with the number of flips—it is always 50%. Our mind wants to see the pattern, and use it to predict the next flip.

This ability to see patterns in apparent randomness—even if sometimes it’s misapplied—is a gift from God. It is the way that we make sense of the universe and find our place in it, how we carve some order out of the chaos around us. It is also the basis of scientific discovery and the foundation of knowledge.

So don’t let some so-called “expert” tell you that the hot hand doesn’t exist, or convince you to deny what you can clearly see to be true. The hot hand doesn’t only exist on the basketball court. Fortunately for me I can get a hot hand when it comes to other things, like work or other hobbies. I had a hot hand once when fishing for smallmouth bass in Illinois. (That was a great afternoon.)

Use your innate, God-given ability to find the patterns that will help you make sense of your life. They’re there, I promise you. Maybe then you can get the hot hand.

LET US PRAY

Creator God, we thank You for giving us a world filled with discernable patterns, and for giving us the sense and the intellect to both detect those patterns and then integrate them into our understanding. Help us in doing so to discern our purpose, and how we might better fulfill Your purpose for our lives, for You are Holy always, now and forever and to the ages of ages.

AMEN