Lewis is actually speaking here of a central finding in cognitive psychology. It pointed out that when baseball experts evaluated baseball players their judgment could be clouded by their prejudices and preconceptions-but why? I’d stumbled upon a mystery, the book reviewers noted, and I’d failed not merely to solve it but also to see that others already had done so. So why do they blunder?” My book clearly lacked a satisfying answer to that question. They have every incentive to evaluate talent correctly. “They are paid well, and they are specialists. “Why do professional baseball executives, many of whom have spent their lives in the game, make so many colossal mistakes?” they asked in their review in The New Republic. The book attracted the attention of a pair of Chicago scholars, an economist named Richard Thaler and a law professor named Cass Sunstein (now a senior official in the Obama White House). The book was ostensibly about a cash-strapped major-league baseball team, the Oakland A’s, whose general manager, Billy Beane, had realized that baseball players were sometimes misunderstood by baseball professionals, and found new and better ways to value them. I had that feeling soon after I published Moneyball. We’re obviously all at the mercy of forces we only dimly perceive and events over which we have no control, but it’s still unsettling to discover that there are people out there-human beings of whose existence you are totally oblivious-who have effectively toyed with your life.
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