= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
hyporational comments on Rationality Quotes December 2013 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (457)
I'd be interested in some guesstimations on how much luck it would take to be Warren Buffett, for example. Survivorship bias in finance is often employed as a just so story.
Less than you think given that he was able to cheaply borrow money through his insurance company.
Can you think of any investor billionaires who seem to have become rich mostly by chance? I suppose they'd have to be people who were already rich and didn't have to make many decisions to become even richer.
How would you distinguish an investor billionaire who became rich by chance from one who chose wisely, after the fact? If you have access to information regarding how they made their investment decisions, you should be able to tell them apart, but in most cases that information probably isn't available.
One of Jon Ronson's books (probably Lost At Sea, but I've since returned it to the library and no longer have it for reference,) features interviews with individuals at levels of income on steps of about five times apart, and one of those individuals, whose wealth was not in the billions, but was in the hundreds of millions, had made his wealth because a college friend introduced him to one of the founders of.... some major online corporation, possibly Amazon, so that he could provide startup money which he'd received from his father's business. So his acquisition of his wealth was largely effortless and due to chance by his own admission.
I don't know to what extent this is normal for very wealthy people, but his perception seemed to be that it was quite common.
Assess how many decisions they had to make to get there. Did they make a couple of large successful investments, or many smaller successful investments?
My point exactly. Fewer decisions to make by flipping a coin to become even richer, less chance of losing your money. There are fewer billionaires than millionaires who got there that way, because the initial money needed is harder to come by. I wonder if one could become a successful investor by studying people who made their fortune gradually.
Just because someone made their money through many small investments though, doesn't mean that they didn't make their money by luck. You'd have to be quite lucky, but then, there are quite a lot of people involved with the opportunity to get lucky.
Also, even a "smaller investment" in a business that grows explosively can be sufficient to produce considerable wealth. Suppose that of an investor's investments, 49 out of 50 fail or stagnate, but the remaining one grows in value by 100,000%. Overall, the investor has multiplied their investment twenty times. It's not necessary for an investor to usually pick right, just to occasionally pick very right. This is the principle that Paul Graham works by in funding startups.
Of course it doesn't, are we speaking in certainties now?
That's not "people who make their fortune gradually". Don't learn from people who hit for every 20 misses.
That depends on how much money they have in the first place and how often "occasionally" means. Also if this is a generally successful strategy, then obviously they are not just lucky.
Since what we're examining is the set of investors who're already rich, then the fact that a strategy has a low prior likelihood of working by chance doesn't tell us that the investor probably didn't achieve their success by chance, if there are enough people trying the strategy.
It's a successful strategy for those who are able to make large winners a significant fraction of their total investments, and this is something that could conceivably be achieved by intelligent selection or by luck.
Would you say the same of successful neurosurgeons? Your argument is missing something.
I would say the comment isn't relevant with respect to neurosurgeons, because there isn't a large body of people attempting neurosurgery, most of whom are unsucessful.
One can become rich through investment through frequent failure and occasional large success, but to be successful in neurosurgery, your success must be consistent. Successful neurosurgeons stand out among regular neurosurgeons for extra-consistent success out of a field where consistent success is already the standard.
This isnt hitting directly at the crux of this conflict, but I wanted to make this recommendation to you since you mentioned this strategy of 49 companies outta 50 failing... you oughtta check out this book called the black swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It deals with small events having large impacts and how difficult it is to foresee some of these events. Also, he reasons that these events seem very predictable with hindsight. I think it will add significant value to this discussion thread
I'm not able to distinguish chance from skill for investors like George Soros.
What exactly do you mean by "by chance"? I am quite sure that the subset of people who invest by consulting a high-quality random generator is pretty small.
That we should probably ask from the quoted or the provider of the quote. If you can think of an interesting way to steelman it, please let me know.
The question is: luck in what, specifically?
Luck in every single trade?
Luck in that first trade that made him big money?
Luck in being exposed to trade at such a young age?
Luck in being born at the right place, right time?
Luck in having a specific set of genes that, say, gives him a high intelligence?
If you say "all of the above", then being Warren Buffet is pure luck, and since there is only one Warren Buffet in 7 billion people, the maximum likelihood estimate for the probability of having enough luck to be Warren Buffet is about 1/7,000,000,000.
This answer probably doesn't help at all, I'm just trying to point out some of the difficulties in guesstimation :)
I'd venture a guess luck/chance in this context means winning against the odds, making decisions that should have negative or zero/little expected utility given the available information and becoming rich in spite of that.
Is luck really this difficult a concept?
Yes?