101–110 of 156 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've found that frequently bluffing in life pays off. Other life pro tips: - Stealing is a way to get money - Murder may be useful - Fraud is profitable
None of those are bluffs, or even close. A bluff, in this context, is claiming or insinuating you're in a better position that you really are.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Congrats, that's also thinking like a poker player. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion
This is off-topic, but the mobile wikipedia link you posted is surprisingly nice to read on desktop. Seems a lot more pleasant than the wide lines on the desktop site.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There might not be an alternative. However, the example is simply wrong (IMO) since it assumes that within a 30 year timeframe you'll have gained 8% on average (adjusted for inflation). If this would be true, thne yes it would be a decision-making trap. I think that's what morley is getting at. I'm arguing it's a tough sell that the S&P 500 works like that. If one would agree that the S&P 500 might not continue to gi…
There are ETFs that invest in international stocks. VT for example. That way you're not betting it all on one country.
Just this morning I was reading Scott Adams's How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, and he was talking about making bets in Life that don't cost any money (they only cost time) and if we do this there's ~100% certainty of winning. Of course he's more eloquent and elaborate. It's also another way to look at "we miss 100% of the shots that we don't take".
This article, like Duke's book, has a solid premise, but fails to provide any actionable advice aside from a simple risk/reward framework. When I read the book, I was hoping there would be more information about how to properly handicap various situations, but there just wasn't. Business and life decisions aren't as simple as calculating pot odds and outs. Anyone who has estimated a complex and unfamiliar programming…
After all, although we don't know which the unknown unknowns are, the possibility of them is known. And they do, in my experience, tend to increase the required effort by, say, 1--30 × depending on task complexity and familiarity.
So even in the most complex and unfamiliar of tasks, you can adjust the upper end of your estimate by 30× and there you go! Unknown unknowns accounted for in your effort estimation.
(Simpler or more familiar tasks require smaller adjustments to their upper end. Knowing how much adjustment is appropriate is a matter of deliberate practise.)
Well you can play millions of poker hands online. Life isn't like that. You have only ~30 years, and you have 30 * 365 = 10950 hands if we count each day as a hand. So what you need to work on is how you define "success" in life. Money is a high variance objective, whereas self-improvement is a low variance objective. I think finding a good balance of variance and tolerance to risk is a key to happiness.
Slight offtopic, but this is why the "if you try hard enough you will succeed" advice sounds like BS to me. Even if the most dedicated entrepreneur can only try so many startups in their lives. If the odds are vanishingly small then success is far from guaranteed. Rejecting the role of luck in our outcomes is delusional, and people who support it have something to peddle (if only their own personal brand as thought l…
The suggested step 2 in this article is 'calculate the expected value' . . . but isn't this going to be far more complicated in practice? See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value#Expected_values... Probability distributions are complicated . Even determining what kind of distribution you are look at is difficult in many cases. Such distributions are also skewed in real life by things like insider information…
So you're not even dealing with a somewhat countable list of distributions -- everything has its own unique distribution!
Fortunately, you don't need to model things exactly. A very rough approximation often gives me miles better results than plain gut feeling.
The suggested step 2 in this article is 'calculate the expected value' . . . but isn't this going to be far more complicated in practice? See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value#Expected_values... Probability distributions are complicated . Even determining what kind of distribution you are look at is difficult in many cases. Such distributions are also skewed in real life by things like insider information…
>If financial institutions (and crypto players) are using these kind of approaches to make their bets, then isn't the individual investor hopelessly outgunned in the vast majority of cases?
When its your job, you're better at it compared to someone for whom its a hobby. And also, larger firms are able to manipulate the market which tilts the balance in their favor.
I attended a talk by Richard Garfield, the game designer behind Magic: The Gathering. He made a point that adding randomness to a game can be a way to give it that property of "easy to learn, hard to master", and in turn make it easier for a community to grow around the game. When you add randomness, it becomes possible for novices to sometimes beat more experienced players through sheer luck. Contrast that with e.g.…
This is an interesting comment, and I'd add one other element to this, which is that randomness is way more realistic, if we think of games as something intended to represent the real world in some way. In real life the best marksman can get wiped out on the first day of a war, the best business strategist can get done in by a once in a generation disaster, and a hapless idiot in business can get an early big break.…
I've also heard this topic referred to as "results-oriented thinking," which is generally what you don't want: you shouldn't judge a decision based on its result, but on the information you had at the time. The key to this idea, which I don't see covered in the blog post, for making future decisions is that you shouldn't let past bad luck affect your future decisions. If you lose a positive EV bet, it shouldn't shy y…
Results-oriented thinking is just one of many human cognitive quirks that are often maladapted to the modern world. A major one is how we tend estimate probability. We naturally do that by equating it with how easy it is to imagine or remember it happening. This worked well in a tribal situation where our world was very small...if Grog got attacked by a tiger, there's a good chance that tiger attacks are a serious da…