The Power of Humility, America begins an annual festival celebrating hubris.

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Confirming my opinions, I read:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/briefing/nfl-draft-picks-vegas-humility-hubris.html?

The Power of Humility
Tonight, America begins an annual festival celebrating hubris.

Josh Allen of the Buffalo Bills last year.Credit...Sam Navarro/USA Today
Sports, via Reuters

By David Leonhardt
April 28, 2022

Tonight at the Caesars Forum Conference Center near Las Vegas, thousands
of people will gather for an annual demonstration of human overconfidence.

The official name of the gathering is the N.F.L. draft. There, with
millions of Americans watching on television, executives of the N.F.L.’s
32 teams will choose which college players to add to their rosters.

And the executives will almost certainly make a lot of decisions that
they later regret.

I recognize that many readers of this newsletter are not football fans.
Still, I think the draft is worth a few minutes of your attention,
because it turns out to be a delightful case study of human hubris, one
with lessons for other subjects, like the economy and Covid-19.

Fundamentally, N.F.L. teams tonight will be doing something that every
employer does: choosing which workers to hire. A major difference is
that the teams will have more information than most employers do. A
hospital or manufacturer generally can’t study videotape and statistics
documenting the record of job candidates.

Yet even with all this information, teams can do a miserable job of
predicting who the best players will be. “The track record is pretty
dismal,” Richard Thaler, a Nobel laureate in economics who has studied
the draft, told me.

The confident Jets
Consider this chart, which shows the quarterbacks picked in the draft’s
first round four years ago, alongside their career touchdown totals:

Pick in 2018 N.F.L. draft
Player
Career touchdowns

Baker Mayfield
1
97

Sam Darnold
3
64

Josh Allen
7
134

Josh Rosen
10
12

Lamar Jackson
32
105

Note: Chart shows a selection of quarterbacks drafted in the first
round.Source: sports-reference.com By The New York Times

As you can see, there is little relationship between performance and
draft order. Were the 2018 draft held again today, Josh Allen of the
Buffalo Bills would almost certainly go first. Besides Allen and Lamar
Jackson of the Baltimore Ravens, the other three might not even play
much next season.

It’s a common story: Tom Brady, the most successful player in N.F.L.
history, was the 199th pick in 2000. Most top quarterbacks today —
including Patrick Mahomes, Aaron Rodgers, Justin Herbert, Dak Prescott
and Russell Wilson — were drafted after quarterbacks who haven’t done as
well.

(Related: When teams defy the conventional wisdom to make a surprise
first-round pick, it rarely works out, an analysis by The Times’s Nate
Cohn shows.)

Predicting performance is unavoidably hard, even in the country’s most
popular form of mass entertainment, where executives can devote lavish
resources to research. “There’s no crime in that,” Cade Massey, a
University of Pennsylvania economist, said. “The crime is thinking you
can predict it.”

The real mistake that the executives make is hubris. They believe that
they can forecast the future and design draft strategies based on their
confidence. In 2018, for example, the New York Jets traded away four
picks for the right to move up only three spots in the draft — to the
third pick from the sixth. With that third pick, the Jets executives
thought that they would draft a quarterback so great that he would be
gone by the sixth pick.

The quarterback they chose was Sam Darnold, who (as the chart above also
shows) has been a disappointment. Imagine if the Jets had instead kept
the sixth pick, taken Allen and also kept their other picks. It could
have transformed the team.

The most successful N.F.L. teams have adopted a version of this
anti-Jets strategy. They have embraced the power of humility. The Dallas
Cowboys of the 1990s and New England Patriots built Super Bowl winners
by exchanging high picks for a larger number of lower picks. In recent
seasons, the Los Angeles Rams have exchanged early picks — whose value
league executives tend to exaggerate, as a 2005 academic paper by Massey
and Thaler showed — for established players.

With those players, the Rams won last season’s Super Bowl. The Jets
failed to make the playoffs, for the 11th straight season.

Five-dimensional chess
What is the broader lesson here? The world is frequently messier and
harder to understand than people acknowledge. We tell ourselves
artificially tidy stories about why something happened and what will
happen next.

The stock market rises or falls, and analysts proclaim a cause; in
truth, they are often just guessing, as Paul Krugman, the economist and
Times columnist, likes to point out.

On the subject of Covid, both experts and journalists have imagined it
to be more predictable than it is. When schools reopened or certain
states lifted mask mandates, you heard confident predictions that cases
would rise. Often, they didn’t. The invisible, mysterious ebbs and flows
of virus transmission overwhelmed every other factor.

In her latest column, The Times’s Zeynep Tufekci argues that public
health officials have given flawed Covid guidance based on a
paternalistic belief that they could see into the future. Zeynep’s main
example is the F.D.A.’s refusal to allow young children to be
vaccinated, based on what she calls a “five-dimensional chess”
prediction that allowing childhood vaccinations will undermine vaccine
confidence.

The most direct analogy to the N.F.L. draft is the hiring process
elsewhere. Most employers still put a lot of weight on job interviews,
believing that managers can accurately predict a candidate’s performance
from a brief conversation. Research suggests otherwise.

Interviews can help people figure out whether they will like another
person — which has some value — but not how effective that person will
be at a job. If you think you’re a clairvoyant exception, you are
probably making the same mistake the Jets did.

To be clear, the implication is not that nobody knows anything.
Structured job interviews, which mimic the tasks that a job involves,
can be helpful. And at the draft tonight, N.F.L. teams won’t be totally
clueless: Higher draft picks have historically performed better than
lower picks, but only somewhat.

The trouble is that human beings tend to overstate their ability to
predict events. People who can resist that hubris — who can mix
knowledge with humility — are often at a competitive advantage.

For more: The Athletic created an N.F.L. draft preview for beginners.
The Times wrote about Ikem Ekwonu, a speedy offensive lineman, and about
the trouble of predicting the draft’s No. 1 pick.