Thursday, June 3, 2010

To Err is Human

To make an error in baseball is inevitable--built into the statistics.  Last night, a pitcher was robbed of a perfect game because an umpire got a call wrong.  Not just any call wrong, but the one that would have been the last out.  Pretty unfortunate.  The good news is that most of the folks involved are handling it pretty well.

The really strange thing is that this would have been the third perfect game in a relatively young season when baseball has never had two in a season before.

What can we learn from the reactions to this event?  That people read into an event what they want. Cognitive consistency has been a recurring theme in my blog (here and here, for instance).  So, I guess I should be self-aware enough and realize that I am seeing cognitive consistency because that is what I tend to see everywhere due to my own bias to see cognitive consistency. 

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