I will also add that many problems in the US and other countries stem from the perversion of incentives and benefits of the few over the many. What I mean is that keeping this broken system in place as it greatly benefits the insurance companies, of which there are a few. It’s so valuable that they have the money and resources to buy the politicians, pay for the media campaigns and lobby the propaganda outlets to mitigate any power the populace has to address the issue. This allows industries to control pretty much all policy in the US. It’s a sad state of affairs.
It took the ER 4 hours to give me pain meds for my kidney stone. They sent me to imaging where the tech asked “did they give you any pain meds?” and I said no, and she sighed. The PA knew within two minutes I had a stone but it took them hours to give me anything for it while I lay in a gurney in on the open floor while Covid patients coughed all around me during the height of the pandemic.
This is the point Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes in his book Fooled by Randomness. In a long enough timeline luck plays a big part in performance. People or firms like Melvin can perform well in a short timeline but when you stretch the timeline out the reality becomes clearer.
This reminds me of a metaphor made by Burton G. Malkiel in “A Random Walk Down Wall Street”. He attempts to give a possible explanation to why there are star traders or funds that greatly outperform the market. It’s something I like to remind myself of from time-to-time.
The metaphor was a coin flipping tournament. You have a bracket of players who flip a coin against an opponent. In each matchup, the player that flips a heads advances to the next round to face another opponent who won a parallel matchup in the previous round. Suppose this is a 100 round tournament, that would mean the eventual winner would have had to flip a heads 100 times to win. You might look at this coin flipper and think they are an extraordinary coin flipper. That they have some innate ability to flip a coin and make sure it lands with the head sides up. In reality, it was just random chance that they flipped the coin correctly, they do not posses any more coin flipping talent than anyone else. They just got really lucky. You can potentially look at a successful hedge fund or trader through this same lens. They have survived the proverbial coin flipping tournament and random chance was on their side.
This was a common investment scam in the past. Create an email newsletter, split it in half and give opposing advice to each side. You then keep ramping up the fees to the winners until eventually they become one of the losers. Once the list gets too small, create a new entity and start again.
I think you'll find it's not a real implementation. OP's example requires 2^100 people ~10^30
It's a similar problem with the email list.
50+ years ago Scrooge McDuck also had this happen to him. He had a treasure map for gold (In Antarctica I think) which he got conditional on profit sharing and he found gold.
The map sellers ran this scam, sold heaps of different maps because someone would find gold.
I personally don't think Scrooge McDuck was just lucky though.
Either I did not understand it, or this doesn't make sense. If the head flipper moves ahead, then that person, truly flipped 100 heads.
Your example would have made sense, if you talking about the 100 times consecutive winner in a coin flip match, with each match, the winner can be heads or tails.
Good idea, but bad example: a 100 round tournament (single elimination) would require 2^100 humans, that is a 20 orders of magnitude increase!! You could do 32 rounds at most.
Yes correlation != causation. As vkou noted, it's who gets to pick the candidates that matters, which leaves us to pick between a giant douche or a turd sandwich.
It's pretty simple, politicians are paid by large corporations to gut, capture and deregulate these agencies to be able to increase profits and decrease costs.
How many Dollar Stores are in your town? Here is very interesting podcast outlining how Dollar Stores kill supermarkets that carry necessary products like produce.
