Open thread, December 7-13, 2015

polymathwannabe

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

Trump is a billionaire because he's good at dealmaking

It's not clear that that's true. E.g., earlier this year someone asked the question: If Trump had just taken all his money in 1987 and put it in index funds rather than trying to grow it himself, what would have happened? The answer, apparently, is that he'd be about 3x richer than he is now.

The reason for picking 1987 is less than fully convincing, though, so it's possible that there's some misleading cherry-picking going on. This article, as well as quoting the other one, says that if he'd put his money in index funds in 1978 instead of 1987 he'd now be about twice as rich as he actually is. Trump apparently disputes both the "before" and "after" figures, but if instead we use his own figures for 1976 (why 1976? because that's when we have figures from) he still ends up having underperformed the market.

So, I dunno, maybe he's good at dealmaking, but it seems like the main reason he's rich is that he inherited a fortune from his family. Everything he's done since to grow his wealth could have been done at least about as well (and maybe much better) by just putting the money into the stock market.

It doesn't follow that because he did worse than the optimal strategy his strategy wasn't equally as optimal. It could be that the strategy he followed is as optimal as the other one, but is subject to chance and he got unlucky.

You can't say "strategy A produced a better result than strategy B, therefore strategy A is a better strategy" based on a single example of someone using strategy A.

6ChristianKl11y

That's not a good comparison. There are many more people who inherited as much money and who haven't increased their wealth. But apart from pure numbers, if I observe Trump style of interaction with journalists who interview his looks to me a lot like Carl Icahn's style. In both cases there an extreme amount of frame control that comes across as pretty rude. That's the kind of stuff that get's Scotts Adams write gushing articles about Trump. I think that Scott Adams predictions are widely overconfident but I see what Scott Adams means when he speaks about Trumps language usage. Then I have had hypnosis training just as Scott Adams, so it can be that the patterns are otherwise hard to spot.