The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

by Nate Silver

By looking at statistics for thousands of players, James had discovered that the typical player9 continues to improve until he is in his late twenties, at which point his skills usually begin to atrophy, especially once he reaches his midthirties.10 This gave James one of his most important inventions: the aging curve. Olympic gymnasts peak in their teens; poets in their twenties; chess players in their thirties11; applied economists in their forties,12 and the average age of a Fortune 500 CEO is 55.13 A baseball player, James found, peaks at age twenty-seven. Of the fifty MVP winners between 1985 and 2009, 60 percent were between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine, and 20 percent were aged twenty-seven exactly. This is when the combination of physical attributes and mental attributes needed to play the game well seem to be in the best balance.