Less is More?

[rdiam]

Something to think about:

“In 1974, Paul Slovic—a world-class psychologist, and a peer of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman—decided to evaluate the effect of information on decision-making. This study should be taught at every business school in the country. Slovic gathered eight professional horse handicappers and announced, “I want to see how well you predict the winners of horse races.” Now, these handicappers were all seasoned professionals who made their livings solely on their gambling skills. Slovic told them the test would consist of predicting 40 horse races in four consecutive rounds. In the first round, each gambler would be given the five pieces of information he wanted on each horse, which would vary from handicapper to handicapper. One handicapper might want the years of experience the jockey had as one of his top five variables, while another might not care about that at all but want the fastest speed any given horse had achieved in the past year, or whatever.

“Finally, in addition to asking the handicappers to predict the winner of each race, he asked each one also to state how confident he was in his prediction. Now, as it turns out, there were an average of ten horses in each race, so we would expect by blind chance—random guessing—each handicapper would be right 10 percent of the time, and that their confidence with a blind guess to be 10 percent.

“So in round one, with just five pieces of information, the handicappers were 17 percent accurate, which is pretty good, 70 percent better than the 10 percent chance they started with when given zero pieces of information. And interestingly, their confidence was 19 percent—almost exactly as confident as they should have been. They were 17 percent accurate and 19 percent confident in their predictions.

“In round two, they were given ten pieces of information. In round three, 20 pieces of information. And in the fourth and final round, 40 pieces of information. That’s a whole lot more than the five pieces of information they started with. Surprisingly, their accuracy had flatlined at 17 percent; they were no more accurate with the additional 35 pieces of information. Unfortunately, their confidence nearly doubled—to 34 percent! So the additional information made them no more accurate but a whole lot more confident. Which would have led them to increase the size of their bets and lose money as a result.

“Beyond a certain minimum amount, additional information only feeds—leaving aside the considerable cost of and delay occasioned in acquiring it—what psychologists call “confirmation bias.” The information we gain that conflicts with our original assessment or conclusion, we conveniently ignore or dismiss, while the information that confirms our original decision makes us increasingly certain that our conclusion was correct.

[Mitch44]

Sartin did some research on information also. His conclusion was the more information given the more indecisive the handicapper became. I believed he called it informational overload. He concluded more than 3 or 4 pieces of information was all that was needed.

As an exercise to prove his point he blackened out most of the information in the DRF for each horse and had everyone handicap the race. He proved his point that most of the information wasn't needed for handicapping and only caused more confusion. He blackened out weight, jockey name, owner, trainer, info on sire,& dam., horses that finished 2nd & 3rd along with the comments for each race etc. etc. Basically he kept the dis. surface, running times to include internal fractional times,SR & variant.

Even today handicappers pay attention to too much useless information such as weight. They never have done any impact studies(or number of starters for any factor)of their own and buy into data that is falsely collected or came from studies years ago that are irrelevant to today such as old pars. Old statistics abound in this game such as the winning percentage of favorites. They abound because their too lazy to gather their own data and rely on old axioms or falsehoods of the game.

The game changes and evolves and in most cases the data collected was flawed from the start. There is an art (or commonsense) to collecting data that most fail to grasp and those too lazy to collect their own data, well they are forced to rely on someone else's flawed data.

Todays TrackMaster PP's were designed by Sartin not only for a specific variant procedure but also to eliminate a lot of useless information to prevent informational overload. Now there are those of us that can juggle more that 2 or 3 balls at a time but for the most part the majority can't. When I scan a horse's PP's I only look at certain information, most of it is totally unnecessary. RDSS zero's in on key factors and ignores a lot of garbage. Even Sartin left some garbage in the program to appease some or perhaps to cause maximum confusion to the pirates and members that were always stealing from him.

Take out the trash and your game will advance.

Mitch44


Mitch44

[carl153]

Thanks a lot. This is really good advice.

carl