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No More “Insight Porn”

jakobgreenfeld.com

321–323 of 323 posts

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#322
Totally agree with author. I hate the popular books about successful success, like "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People". I said it to every fan of this bullshit for 10 years maybe.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#323
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, one extreme example is buying lottery tickets; it's the best way to expose yourself to the potential upside of winning the lottery, yet the expected value is quite negative. That example is quite bracing, but I think it points out that there are many ways to build this 'luck surface', and the expected values of each are probably very different, and likely situational.

Expected value is really a dumb way to evaluate lottery tickets. I can't believe even supposedly good mathematicians use it. The next dumb way to evaluate lottery tickets is to compare it with other long odds (lightning strikes, marrying your favorite actor). If you want to play along, the probability of you winning the lottery is 10000000000000x more favorable than the probability of you existing in this universe. B…

Being a bayesian, the probability of me existing in this universe is 1
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