Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
- Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
Is that supposed to be funny? The fact that you have a computer means you have won something. I'd be willing to guess that more technologies will emerge and you'll use them. That's like winning a lottery. But you don't get more successful unless you make intelligent decisions. Stupid decisions are punished, there are exceptions to this...
But seriously, lottery is a loaded term. It's often used as a metaphor for 'capitalist trick' (which smart people avoid).
The idea that thing average out depend on the assumption of success being due to a lot of independent events.
Computer simulations of markets with trades of equal skill have no problem to produce the kind of difference in financial results that the traders we observe in reality produce.
The fact that some authors write books that are more popular than the book of other authors is explainable without difference in skill or book quality.