MichaelVassar comments on Financial incentives don't get rid of bias? Prize for best answer. - Less Wrong

3 [deleted] 15 July 2010 01:24PM

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Comment author: MichaelVassar 21 July 2010 05:40:08AM *  1 point [-]

Right, and my position is the strong pro-contrarian hypothesis. There are visibly countless opportunities for extremely but boundedly irrational individuals to benefit from solving commons problems, therefore almost no-one is extremely irrational but boundedly so for an extremely permissive bound, almost everyone is even more irrational than that.

One of my best data-points is that so few people did the obvious and invested in Buffett once he had the best track-record of any other investor 35 years ago. With some leverage, any such people who started out with reasonable investments could be billionaires today, and if many existed he would have been swamped with funds and unable to continue to overperform. Why would rational people who give their money to a money manager give it to one who didn't have the best or almost the best track record. Yes there are reasons, but not plausibly for the number of people who didn't buy Berkshire.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 21 July 2010 09:31:04AM 1 point [-]

Do you have any theories about why so many people didn't invest in Buffett?

Any chance that if Buffett had been swamped with money, he would have rethought his strategy and come up with something useful for the changed circumstances?