The Pain of Ignoring Variation

I spent much of my life talking about variation and trying to help people understand why it was important. After all, if you don’t understand it how will you help your children or future generations understand it. So today I offer some simple teaching advice that ranges from something as inconsequential as football to something as important as the hottest political topics of today.

Variation is as simple as this: imagine standing in a downpour, watching raindrops splatter against your windshield. Each drop catches your eye for a split second—some bigger, some smaller—but no single raindrop tells you anything about the storm. People behave the same way with information, fixating on whatever data point currently pelts them hardest. Instead of stepping back to observe the entire weather system—the pattern of clouds, wind direction, barometric pressure—they make life-altering decisions based on whichever raindrop just happened to explode directly in front of their face.

Right now, understanding variation isn’t just academic—it’s downright essential but let’s take the silly NFL playoffs thundering across our screens this January weekend to offer advice. The so-called experts and weekend warriors with betting apps are frantically jabbing at their phones, eyes glazed with recency bias.

Saturday I watched the Seattle Seahawks absolutely dismantle the San Francisco 49ers—bone-jarring tackles sending crimson jerseys sprawling across rain-slicked turf, while the Seattle crowd roars like a storm-tossed ocean. Vegas had Seattle as only a 7 point favorite because millions witnessed the 49ers demolish a battered Philadelphia Eagles squad the Sunday before —- a performance that featured highlight-reel touchdowns that looped endlessly on SportsCenter all week long.

Then I watched the Denver Broncos squeak out an overtime victory against the Buffalo Bills—a nail-biter that ended with a field goal sailing through the thin mountain air. Gambling money poured in on the Buffalo Bills, based on nothing more than recency bias and highlight reels. Why? Because they looked great last Sunday, with Josh Allen threading laser-precise passes between defenders’ outstretched fingertips. Few bettors considered the brutal reality of Buffalo’s schedule: flying from the humid swamplands of Jacksonville to the oxygen-starved peaks of Colorado in just seven days, their bodies still carrying the bruises and micro-tears from last week’s physical battle. Meanwhile, the Denver Broncos lounged at home for two straight weeks, healing and game-planning, before welcoming the exhausted Bills to Mile High Stadium—where the 5,280-foot elevation sucks the stamina from visiting players’ lungs and where the Broncos boasted an intimidating 6-2 playoff record.

Then on Sunday I sank into my favorite armchair, remote in hand, as the Houston Texans rolled into Gillette Stadium, tipped to trample the New England Patriots. Just seven days earlier, Houston had annihilated the Pittsburgh Steelers, flaunting a defensive mastery few had ever seen. Pundits and bettors brimmed with confidence that this ironclad Texans squad would shred New England’s youthful quarterback on his home turf. Yet as sunlight streamed through my windows and warmed the room, the Patriots—precise as clockwork—dismantled Houston’s swagger. New England’s defense closed every seam, their offense methodically marched downfield, and the crowd’s roar echoed off the stands. Those fixated on one dazzling victory in Pittsburgh overlooked that the Patriots had built their dominance over an entire season, earning the AFC’s number-one seed and the privilege of playing before a frenzied home crowd.

Later, the scene shifted to Soldier Field, where a sea of navy and orange bristled with expectation against the cross-country visitors from Los Angeles. Experts again banked on home-field advantage to carry the Chicago Bears to victory over the Rams. But football rarely bows to wishful thinking. Los Angeles, though jet-lagged and sluggish at kickoff, found its rhythm. The Rams would have won by 7 except for a truly miraculous bomb thrown by the Bear’s quarterback, but regulation ended in a deadlock, and in the hush before overtime, you could almost hear the Bears’ confidence crack. The Rams seized their chance, methodically advancing the ball before delivering the decisive blow—another upset fueled by season-long strength rather than the Bears’ fleeting home-field glow.

These NFL playoff clashes highlight a familiar human quirk: we’re hypnotized by the freshest spectacle, persuaded that the latest headline or single data point trumps deeper trends. This bias doesn’t stop at the fifty-yard line and much more important issues permeate a society that focuses on last data points, or any data point that matches their belief systems.

Liberal shoppers clutch their chests at the grocery checkout, eyes bulging at the $7.99 organic kale bundles and $14.50 free-range chicken breasts, then storm home to post rage-filled screeds about runaway inflation on neighborhood Facebook groups. Meanwhile, they scroll right past the Federal Reserve’s meticulously compiled quarterly reports showing inflation cooling from 7.0% to 2.7%. Across town, vocal critics of law enforcement pack community meetings in church basements, their faces flushed as they pound podiums and declare billion-dollar operations and urban sweeps “utterly worthless,” conveniently ignoring the FBI’s comprehensive crime database documenting dramatic declines in crime rates and the CDC’s latest figures showing the first “credible” drop in fentanyl deaths since 2018.

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the political spectrum, red-faced conservatives pound their fists on talk radio microphones and congressional podiums, insisting that every razor-wire fence, every dawn raid, every detention facility represents essential national security. They dismiss emotional responses as irrelevant sentimentality while ignoring the trembling hands of the grandmother clutching her purse on a Minneapolis bus, or the second-grade teacher who watched many of her favorite students disappear or forcing hysterical parents and US citizens to present documentation and force their way through agents just to retrieve their sobbing toddlers from nap mats.

We latch onto what our senses feed us—the tearful mother clutching her deportation notice on the evening news, the bloodied teenager sprawled across rain-slicked pavement—or whatever inflammatory headline screams from our phone screens in bold crimson letters. We devour these emotional appetizers instead of digesting the multi-course meal of systematic data served in bland PDFs, academic journals or credible surveys about “how people feel”!

We trust the goosebump-raising anecdote over the eye-glazing statistical analysis. Why? Because these vivid stories validate our pre-existing worldviews with the precision of a sniper, delivering cherry-picked evidence that slots perfectly into our mental architecture. Conservatives brandish crime statistics from border towns while progressives circulate heart-wrenching videos of cage-confined children, each side wielding their preferred emotional cudgel while ignoring the complete picture that might demand uncomfortable compromise.

In the meantime, we continue to mistake the blinding, supernova-bright glare of the latest data point or viral image for the steady, amber glow of reality. We’re like moths batting ourselves senseless against a porch light when the entire star-filled night sky stretches above us, unnoticed.

Yes, instead of sitting down like adults around mahogany conference tables with spreadsheets, historical trends, and peer-reviewed studies spread before us—evaluating the complete tapestry of available data and designing nuanced solutions that might reform heavy-handed tactics while still maintaining effective security—we perpetuate this exhausting cycle of partisan blindness.

The human tendency to disregard mountains of methodical, data-driven analysis—thousands of carefully compiled spreadsheets, decades of peer-reviewed studies, centuries of historical patterns—in favor of whatever thirty-second highlight reel exploded across their retinas last Sunday afternoon has always struck me as darkly comical. This cognitive blindspot—this almost religious devotion to the immediate and visceral over the statistical and contextual—has padded my leather-bound betting ledgers for decades.

No, we can’t change the world or force the same kind of mature behavior on politicians associated with understanding variation I once demanded in business . I guess I will simply watch the masses chase yesterday’s touchdowns and last week’s data points with the frantic desperation of gamblers on tilt and hope that my children, and their children’s children learned some lessons that will improve their small world and the larger world around them.