The Yogi Berra Fallacy
Choose other people’s words carefully
I used to do a lot of copyediting in the field of investment management, and one thing that struck me about those (mostly male) people writing about financial matters was their apparent inability to resist a Yogi Berra quotation.
What’s wrong with a good Yogi-ism? Nothing at all. The problem was that these writers’ penchant for quoting Mr. Berra often blinded them to a couple of important considerations.
The future
The investment types who write books particularly favor the following nugget, some version of which “baseball great Yogi Berra” “famously” “said”:
It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.
Funny. And true. And yet Yogi Berra didn’t say it, as the reviewers of those books written by investment types frequently point out (though not frequently enough, I guess).
According to the wonderful, thorough people at Quote Investigator, that irresistible statement about predictions has also been attributed to Nostradamus, Niels Bohr, Mark Twain, and Samuel Goldwyn, among others. But “current evidence indicates that this comical proverb was first expressed in Danish, and the author remains unknown.”
Theory and practice
Here’s another alleged Yogi Berra saying of which financial writers seem especially fond:
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
One book review that criticizes the incorrect attribution of this statement to Yogi Berra adds that “an easy internet search” reveals the true source to be “the late computer scientist Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut.”
Wrong again.
Albert Einstein and Richard P. Feynman have also been proposed as the inventors of this saying, but Quote Investigator concludes that its originator was in fact a young Benjamin Brewster, writing in the February 1882 issue of the Yale Literary Magazine (an undergraduate publication).
So check that quote! Both the wording and the source. And remember that book publishers don’t routinely fact-check manuscripts, so a quotation’s appearance in a book unfortunately doesn’t guarantee that anyone has verified its accuracy.
Tone deafness
Even if a quotation is accurately reproduced and correctly attributed, there’s another consideration: is it a good fit?
In their enthusiasm for witticisms by Yogi Berra (whether actually his or not), those financial writers I copyedited often betrayed an abysmal ear for tone.
I found it jarring to encounter a humorous Yogi-ism in a postmortem of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, for example, or an opinion piece about the dire state of Social Security.
The tone wasn’t appropriate to the context.
If you’ve been invited to give a toast at a big dinner in Las Vegas full of investment industry folks, by all means, be entertaining. Quote as many comedians as you like. Wear a funny hat.
But if you’re submitting an article to a well-respected journal in a serious field, the writing should be relatively formal. Flippant humor probably isn’t a good match for the tone of that journal.
Whether it was tone deafness or something else at work, the financial writers seemed to go out of their way to include Yogi Berra. For example, I know of at least one attempt to establish the term “Yogi Berra Fallacy” to describe a particular accounting problem: a methodology that assigns different valuations to the same pension plan assets and liabilities when they are partitioned differently among plans “is susceptible to the ‘Yogi Berra fallacy,’ under which a pizza is less filling when sliced into fewer pieces.”
This phenomenon, as Forbes explains, is named for “the baseball player who may or may not have said to the waitress, ‘you'd better cut that pizza into four slices, because I'm not hungry enough to eat six.’”
Explaining an accounting problem with a Yogi Berra quote might add humor, but does it add clarity?
The truth
To a copyeditor (or a fact checker), a quotation is a little knot of questions: Is the wording accurate? Is the attribution correct? If the author cites a published source, is the citation done properly?
Inaccuracies spread much faster and more easily than truth. Correctness requires effort.
I want writers to mean what they say. I want them to care whether the people whose words they’re incorporating into their own writing actually said what they’re saying they said.
And even if you’re not a copyeditor, would you take investment advice from a guy who doesn’t even check his quotations?
Yogi Berra himself recognized the downside of being so irresistibly quotable. As he remarked in 1986 (the financial writers like this one a lot too),
I really didn’t say everything I said.
P.S. Is there a misquotation or misattrubution that particularly bugs or amuses you? Do tell.