I don't follow sports much, but I remember often hearing things like, "He hasn't missed a single game in 4 years", or "He has had at least one hit in each of his last 19 games". Another is how many free throws a player made in a row without missing a single one.
I suspect the sports "quants" take a dim view of such records. A much more accurate measure of skill is in percentages. If some guy has missed only 2% of his games in the past four years, but they were in the middle of the four years, his streak would be way less than the guy who holds the record who maybe missed 4% of his games during that period -- it's just they were clustered at the beginning or end. But the first guy is more reliable to be available for the new game. I suppose part of the job of sports writers (or bloggers, or whatever) is to make stories interesting, and "streaks" are kind of interesting in a way that percentages are not.
Maybe I'm unusual in thinking about streaks and percentages in my own life too. But I bet some other people do. I recall trying to bounce a ping pong ball up in the air off a paddle 1,000 times without missing. I think I succeeded after very few attempts (it's not that hard). More recently I played some "Plants versus Zombies" (the original edition). The most difficult challenge is "survival, endless". I think you need to survive 20 levels of this to win the relevant "achievement" within the game context. Naturally, people on the web made posts about their favorite strategies. I developed a strategy I liked and made it through more than 900 levels before the computer crashed, for no apparent reason. Starting over again, I completed 200-odd levels before I died, but due to a clear error I myself had made. I then started again, and got up into around 1500 levels. I finally died when I had a failing hard drive on that computer replaced, but the new drive was not uniformly responsive, so I couldn't reliably make the mouse do what I wanted in a timely fashion. But I was relieved to lose. When working on a streak, every level of play is fraught with tension... If I'm not careful, I could lose now! When you're just working to win a game, you can feel good if you win it and bad if you don't, but a single loss doesn't mar the whole enterprise.
This same issue came up recently in the land of Wordle and Quordle. I guess I am still undefeated in Wordle after 89 games, but try not to think about that. And because of that, even if I'm tired or not feeling very competitive I will play anyway. In Quordle I had 91 wins in a row and hadn't lost a game -- but then I did lose one and once again felt that sense of relief. I've won another 8 since then, so my percentage remains high.
People should set for themselves whatever goals they want, of course. I just think that going for streaks causes extra tension and when your streak ends could be dependent on nothing but bad luck. With percentages you can be a lot more relaxed. A loss is just a loss, and tally that determines your percentage keeps right on going.
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