Yet more regarding going for it on 4th down

Andrew Gelman has further thoughts on this.

A tax law professor who isn’t currently hiding in Honduras suggests to me the following: Unconventional coaching decisions are employed sub-optimally because of agency costs. In other words, if a coach does the conventional thing and it fails, the players are generally blamed for the failure. If the coach chooses the unconventional path and it fails, the coach will be blamed.

This is related to the much more general social phenomenon that, as Keynes says somewhere, it’s better to fail conventionally than succeed unconventionally. That’s hyperbolic, but if you divide decisions into quartiles [ed.: LGM’s indefatigable commenters point out that the technically correct — the best kind of correct — term here is quadrants] of conventional success, unconventional success, conventional failure, and unconventional failure, the negative weight given to the last quadrant is very disproportionate, especially in comparison to conventional failure. Classic example: all the people who were wrong about the Iraq war were wrong for “good” reasons, while everyone who was right was right for “bad” reasons.

Meanwhile conventional success gets the benefit of both being successful, and of vindicating conventional wisdom, which is always an extremely potent combination. Unconventional success, while celebrated to the extent it’s successful, is always going to disturb the equanimity of The Savvy, hence the inevitable aura of vague disrepute that surrounds it in so many circumstances.