The difference betwen skill and luck.
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The difference betwen skill and luck.
1–10 of 42 posts
Re: The difference betwen skill and luck.
#2This reminds me of a discussion on a mailing list where someone pointed out the most amazing scam.
You find 256 people and email them the details of a 50/50 prediction. 128 people should get the right prediction. You then email them another 50/50 prediction. Of course, 64 of them receive the right prediction twice in a row. You then make a third 50/50 prediction to the 64, another to the 32 positive responses and so on until you find a manageable number of people who now believe you have some amazing insight into the future.
As much as we may want to think things are not random, sometimes they really are, sometimes they're just probabilities.
Re: The difference betwen skill and luck.
#3"In the mid-1970s, a man sought a ticket that ended in 48. He found a ticket, bought it, and won the lottery. When asked why he was so intent on finding that number, he replied, 'I dreamed of the number seven for seven nights. And seven times seven is 48.'"
Something tells me this guy did well by not taking math in grade school too seriously.
Re: The difference betwen skill and luck.
#4This reminds me of a discussion on a mailing list where someone pointed out the most amazing scam. You find 256 people and email them the details of a 50/50 prediction. 128 people should get the right prediction. You then email them another 50/50 prediction. Of course, 64 of them receive the right prediction twice in a row. You then make a third 50/50 prediction to the 64, another to the 32 positive responses and so…
Exploitations of people's failure to understand statistics are a lot older than email.
Even in my grandmother's time there would be somebody who would offer to predict the gender of your unborn child - "if I am wrong, I'll give you your money back!".
Re: The difference betwen skill and luck.
#5This reminds me of a discussion on a mailing list where someone pointed out the most amazing scam. You find 256 people and email them the details of a 50/50 prediction. 128 people should get the right prediction. You then email them another 50/50 prediction. Of course, 64 of them receive the right prediction twice in a row. You then make a third 50/50 prediction to the 64, another to the 32 positive responses and so…
That scam is an old one going back at the least to newspapers in the early 1900s. Specifically, sports prediction services did it in classified ads (and continue to do so in some places). I think most con-artist scams haven't really changed, just adopted new mediums and new technologies.
Re: The difference betwen skill and luck.
#6This reminds me of a discussion on a mailing list where someone pointed out the most amazing scam. You find 256 people and email them the details of a 50/50 prediction. 128 people should get the right prediction. You then email them another 50/50 prediction. Of course, 64 of them receive the right prediction twice in a row. You then make a third 50/50 prediction to the 64, another to the 32 positive responses and so…
Reminds me of http://xkcd.com/628/
Re: The difference betwen skill and luck.
#7 > Always compare results with a null model that reflects luck.
It's possible to win lots of money based on making exceedingly poor bets and getting very lucky. There's one card left to come, there's a 5% chance an Ace will come, but if it does you'll have an unbeatable hand, if not, you have a hand that beats 66% of the possible hands. Do you bet? What happens if the Ace doesn't fall?
A poor player who gets lucky will attribute his success to his obvious skill.
A skillful player who gets lucky will chide himself for making a poor decision.
Re: The difference betwen skill and luck.
#8> He found a ticket, bought it, and won the lottery. When asked why he was so intent on finding that number, he replied, "I dreamed of the number seven for seven nights. And seven times seven is 48."
Need say no more.
Re: The difference betwen skill and luck.
#9The difficulty in separating skill and luck is unconsciously illustrated by the author himself in his basketball example. We're asked to consider how much of a 'hot hand' is attributable to chance, and how much to skill. But what is chance in this context? Clearly he doesn't mean the likelihood of a ball launched in an arbitrary trajectory finding its way to the basket. More likely, he means the shooting average of an average basketball player in the type of game being observed (pickup game, college, etc). Clearly skill contributes to such a baseline average.
With basketball we have a skill that can easily be measured for nearly anyone: we just have them toss a basketball a few dozen times and we have a good gauge of how skillful they are compared to others. But what about, say, a venture capitalist? The game that they are supposed to be skilled at has so much overhead that very few are ever played, and not all those that want to play can (you've got to have a lot of money to even sit at the table). It's quite possible that success as a VC is entirely attributable to luck, with no contribution from skill at all. For these kinds of activities we have no way to generate a meaningful statistical baseline. We can only engage in a thought experiment: if hypothetically the success in question was actually due solely to chance, would the world we see look any different?
Re: The difference betwen skill and luck.
#10It was interesting but I was hoping for some more concrete suggestions than just a 'you should consider randomness vs luck.' What is a better way than ESOs? Give me a concrete example of how to untangle this rather than just saying untangle it. It doesn't have to be universally applicable but an example would be nice.