[FRIAM] Nautilus: Investing Is More Luck Than Talent

[glen ☣]

On 01/23/2017 12:04 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> A centralized experimental protocol rather than a control system for all time.   It can work if results can be ingested and models improved in a dispassionate fashion.   Like new drug treatments, everyone wants equal access to anything that might possibly work, rather than being in the placebo group.

I don't know if that's true.  Most of the people I talk to not only want access to the things that _might_ work, they want everything they try to work.  Like our previous discussion of whether or not people have an intuitive grasp of probability theory, people don't really seem to grok it when their methods fail to work.  When their methods fail to achieve their purpose, they tend to complain about how unfair it all is.  It's especially disconcerting when scientists do it ... some of whom spend their entire lives advocating for ideas that they, themselves, helped demonstrate were false.

Regardless, of the mechanism were dispassionate, it might work.  But who (seriously) wants to live in a world with less passion?  Like our methods, we want our passion(d) but often don't want others' passion(s).

>  I'm not sure how the `neo' part fits in to it, other than perhaps the practical limits on the experiment designers.

The neo part is because pure liberalism takes the needs and wants of everyone into account.  We neoliberals regret the collateral damage that is poverty, death, starvation, epidemic, etc. but we really only measure success by the top X% of the pyramid.  If Peter Thiel lives to be 200 years old, it will be a success we can _all_ claim some part of ... even as I scrounge through dumpsters when Renee' finally gets tired of my contrarian ways.

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☣ glen