The odds are stacked against us - Guardian
The single most pernicious threat to liberty today is humanity’s natural
tendency to misunderstand the statistics of rare events. We’re just not wired to have good intuition about things that happen with extreme infrequency.
I’ll prove it. If we were good at understanding statistics, then here’s what would happen when [...]
It’s Fortune magazine, August 2000, Special Investors Issue, Retire Rich
Article: 10 Stocks to Last the Decade
And here’s the list:
Stock
Ticker
Price
P/E
Comment
Broadcom
BRCM
$237
255
Maker of chips used in the next generation of entertainment devices
Charles Schwab
SCH
$36
56
Former discount broker that has grown up along with its boomer clients
Enron
ENE
$73
51
Biggest online broker for coal, oil, and gas; next up — broadband
Genentech
DNA
$150
128
Offers a huge pipeline [...]
Wikipedia
The gambler’s fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the false belief that the probability of an event in a random sequence is dependent on preceding events, its probability increasing with each successive occasion on which it fails to occur. If a fair coin is [...]
5 Ways to Go Broke Getting Drunk
When does a shot of scotch cost $3,300? When the bottle’s going for $38,000 and hits $75,000 in a bidding war. Amazing Google capability: Enter ‘number of shots in a liter’ into Google Toolbar and before you hit enter AJAX serves up the answer of 22.5426817 shots, which [...]
Learning from our mistakes? Flies can do it. Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn’t Better
It takes just 15 generations under these conditions for the flies to become genetically programmed to learn better. At the beginning of the experiment, the flies take many hours to learn the difference between the normal and quinine-spiked [...]
The more George Soros talks, the less people care what he thinks.
What the hell really happened to Crocs?
This pretty much says it all:
Harper’s gets it, why didn’t shareholders? In a word: greed.
Gullibility: Bloggers are suckers for a good headline
There’s no end to the back and forth bashing between bloggers and traditional journalists. Journalists have felt threatened by bloggers really because blogs are too immediate. That doesn’t fit with the process and techniques reporters are taught in journalism schools. With blogs everything they’ve spent years learning seems to go out the window. But really [...]