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NancyLebovitz comments on Rationality Quotes June 2014 - Less Wrong
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Igon value
I think you're making a joke, but I'm not sure what the joke is.
Presumably that people who know what they're talking about are less likely to make obvious errors in jargon. And that Gladwell was the person who made that particular error in jargon, in the very book that's being quoted, and that this is an example of Gladwell's glibness and lack of deeper knowledge of things he's talking about in this case and in general.
It's sort of an odd example, though, since Gladwell himself consistently succeeds.
ETA: Given the downvote, maybe I should clarify that I don't mean that Gladwell succeeds at being the kind of writer that I would want to read. I mean that he consistently succeeds at writing best-selling books. The "igon-value" thing was cringe-inducing, but it plausibly hasn't done any significant harm to his sales. Apparently, you can be careless in that way and still succeed fantastically, again and again, with his target audience.
So, in that sense, he's not a good example for the claim that "people who success many times in the row, tend to employ eigenvalues rather than use igon value." (Though, of course, his existence doesn't disproves the claim, either.)
Nerds fear getting Malcolm Gladwell book for Christmas (The Daily Mash)
The point is that the consecutively successful investment managers tend to have more clue than unsuccessful ones. Of course, the luck plays a huge role, but over ten years, if we assume that super skilled have success rate of 0.6 and low skilled have success rate of 0.4, there's 57-fold difference in 'survival'.
Let me point out that you can make very straightforward Bayesian estimates of performance/skill/alpha by starting with, say, zero-alpha prior and then updating on monthly returns.