Survivorship Bias

Super successful individuals are cases of extreme luck

(Excerpt from The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel) …focus less on specific individuals and case studies and more on broad patterns. Studying a specific person can be dangerous because we tend to...

September 26, 2020| Luck, Randomness, Success, Survivorship Bias Read More

Getting someone’s winning lottery numbers

(Excerpt from Beware of Advice by Derek Sivers) When successful people give advice, I usually hear it like this: “Here are the lottery numbers I played: 14 29 71 33 8. They worked for me!” Success is based on so...

August 9, 2020| Life, Survivorship Bias Read More

Modern society is rent-seeking

(Excerpt from Zero to One by Peter Thiel) Instead of working for years to build a new product, indefinite optimists rearrange already-invented ones. Bankers make money by rearranging the capital structures of already...

September 21, 2019| Life, Survivorship Bias, Tech Read More

Success is 99.9% luck

(Excerpt from Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb) we often have the mistaken impression that a strategy is an excellent strategy, or an entrepreneur a person endowed with “vision,” or a trader a talented trader,...

September 19, 2019| Randomness, Survivorship Bias Read More

Survivors are more obvious than failures

(Excerpt from Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb) There are other aspects to the monkeys problem; in real life the other monkeys are not countable, let alone visible. They are hidden away, as one sees only the...

September 14, 2019| Survivorship Bias Read More

Luck factor increases with sample size

(Excerpt from Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb) The initial sample size matters greatly. If there are five monkeys in the game, I would be rather impressed with the Iliad writer, to the point of suspecting him to...

September 14, 2019| Investing, Randomness, Survivorship Bias Read More

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