Autistic, teen, perfect bracket

You may remember my "debate" with linguist James Geary on whether numbers are needed to tell stories. While I valiantly defended numbers, and gave an example of an influential number ("Average American Owes Average Chinese $4,000", etc.), James pointed out the power of using anecdotes.

That I can't deny, especially when you see things like this. Thanks to John M. for the pointer; the original story came from NBC, and was carried by Huffington Post.

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Statisticians and probabilists will have a field day breaking apart why the odds are not "13 million to 1" as asserted (attributed to "odds-makers"). But what interests me is why so many people read this story; it's been circulating in cyberspace, attracting lots of comments.

Which part of "Autistic" "Teen" "Perfect Bracket" are people reacting to? Do we need all three parts or not?

My head is spinning with variations:

Autistic teen perfect bracket

Autistic teen predicts Canada's record Olympics haul

Autistic teen adopts abandoned dog

Autistic adult perfect bracket

Autistic student perfect bracket

Autistic bar-tender perfect bracket

Artistic teen perfect bracket

Athletic teen perfect bracket

Schizophrenic girl perfect bracket

Laid-off coal-miner perfect bracket

...

Here's how I see it:

Perfect Bracket

"Perfect bracket" makes the piece current. It's in the moment. If we change it to a less timely feat, maybe the press won't carry it. "Autistic teen predicts Canada's record Olympics haul" probably won't get the attention now that Vancouver is behind us. Although... if someone came up with this story at the end of the Olympics, it probably will get noticed.

In addition, the feat described has to be perceived as highly unlikely. "Autistic teen adopts abandoned dog" probably won't catch as much attention.

Teen

What if the headline said "Autistic adult perfect bracket"? "Autistic student perfect bracket"? "Autistic bar-tender perfect bracket"? Hard to say, but I don't think people are drawn to the word "teen". Autism is associated with youth, which is itself curious since they do become adults when they grow up.

Autistic

How about "Artistic teen perfect bracket"? "Athletic teen perfect bracket"? Neither of these sound as interesting to me so I think "autistic" is a key word.

Not quite, other ailments would work too, such as "Schizophrenic girl perfect bracket".

It's the combo

What makes the headline tick appears to be this structure: unusual person did something unlikely. I think both parts are needed. Joe Sixpack did something unlikely, or unusual person did an everyday thing just doesn't sound as interesting.

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As a statistician, I find it completely unremarkable that it is this kid with autism who picked the perfect bracket. Based on the odds, a number of people will have picked the perfect bracket, and luck determines the identities of the winners. It could be the kid with autism, or the old lady who never watch basketball, or a sports nut with a sophisticated predictive system, or a monkey throwing darts.

So, I wonder why the reporter feels compelled to tell us about the kid with autism in particular. What did the reporter intend to convey with the structure of the headline? It could be one of the following:

• having autism causes someone to have a better ability at picking brackets (cause-effect)
• people with autism are more likely to have better ability at picking brackets (correlation)
• having autism causes someone to have a worse ability at picking brackets, and therefore, it is a surprise to find one kid who picked well (cause-effect)
• people with autism are unlikely to be good at picking brackets, and therefore, it is a surprise to find one kid who picked well (negative correlation)
• the juxtaposition was random, the headline was purely descriptive, and no meaning was intended

If any of the first four is true, it would be helpful to point to some research to further enlighten us.  If the fifth point is true, then "autistic teen" could have been substituted with anyone else; but "Laid-off coal-miner perfect bracket" just won't get the same number of clicks, will it? 

***

So, my conclusion is: the headline is most dependent on the words "autistic teen".

If there are linguists reading this blog, I've love to hear how you would analyze this.

Comments

[William Ockham]

I'm not a linguist, but I think I can explain what you're missing here. First, the most important background detail here is that the heavy favorite (Kansas) for the tournament lost in round two. None of the experts saw that coming. In fact, this autistic kid maybe the only person who predicted it. That's the key to the story. If Kansas had won their game, there would be hundreds, if not thousands of people with perfect brackets.

Next, you're missing the "Rain Man" connection. That movie established the popular link in people's minds between autism and the older notion of the idiot savant. In the movie, Dustin Hoffman's autistic character performs all sorts of "magical" feats with numbers. Since then, any story that features an autistic person (the younger the better, but that's a generalized feature of feel-good stories) doing something amazing and at least vaguely math-related will get a lot of attention.

All this is an example of how stories that reinforce certain narratives (modern day myths, really) get a lot of play and attention. The Language Log folks (really linguists, btw) are usually all over this. I strongly suggest you send them a link this post and see what happens.

[Kaiser]

William: I can't agree with your first point. Of all the people participating in brackets everywhere, there's got to be many more than one person who picked Kansas as an upset.

The Rain man is proof that it's about the "autistic teen", and it doesn't really matter whether it's a perfect bracket or some other magical feat. Depending on whether you believe in causation or correlation, the Rain Man scenario is one of my first four scenarios. So we are agreeing on this point.

I sent a note to the Language Log folks, and also to James since after all he is the linguist!

[William Ockham]

espn.com says that there were 4.78 million brackets submitted to their site and none of them were perfect by the end of the second round. This kid's bracket isn't perfect anymore, apparently.

[John Duns Scotus]

The kid's bracket is clearly a hoax. His bracket was using a program that does not "lock" the brackets at the start of the tourney. As William points out, there are 5M brackets on espn.com , even the best one through 2 rounds (48 games) misses at least 4 or 5 games. 2^48 ~= 2.5 x 10^14. Even with 4-8 first and second round (not this year with Kansas though) gimmees, you're still talking astronomical odds.

[Kaiser]

John: That's why I stayed away from talking about odds and so on. Any realistic odds computation has to include behavioral assumptions, similar to what William pointed out above, such as the fact that there will be many fewer brackets predicting upsets. Plus, as you pointed out, there is also fraud.

The point I raised transcends all that, though. Andrew gets it.