In 2002, American Major League Baseball team the Oakland Athletics were competing against opponents who could outspend them three to one. They had no way of competing for talent with the top teams. So, their general manager, Billy Beane, stopped trying.

Instead, as chronicled in Michael Lewis’s Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003), Beane asked a more fundamental question: what factors predict winning in baseball? The answer turned out to be different from what baseball scouts believed.

Baseball scouts were evaluating players using visible, intuitive signals like athletic build and physical appearance, pitching speed and the look of their swing. The problem is that these signals felt meaningful but were often poor predictors of actual performance. Scouts were essentially fooled by aesthetics. READ MORE