Notes from the Diamond #5: Wannabes Beware

If the Lord were a pitcher, he would pitch like Pedro [Martinez].  — Pro baseballer


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Comments

  1. “Doing this in a timely and effective manner presupposes a distinctive mindset: one resembling closely if not perfectly the mindset animating David Swensen’s ongoing labors on Yale’s behalf, and the mindset of Swensen’s countless wannabes not at all.”

    There is a lot to glean from this read…the above strikes a cord with me! We had one mindset in my prior life, the only easy day was yesterday, TEAMs and put as much knowledge/skills into muscle memory as humanely possible and finally that TEAM exists of nothing but individual leaders making up a common purpose/mission, you take one out, the TEAM continues unperturbed.

    Thoughts:

    A prediction can be broken up into 3 steps:

    1. The specification
    2. The due-date
    3. The probability

    [Overall, I am for betting because I am against bullshit. Bullshit is polluting our discourse and drowning the facts. A bet costs the bullshitter more than the non-bullshitter so the willingness to bet signals honest belief. A bet is a tax on bullshit; and it is a just tax, tribute paid by the bullshitters to those with genuine knowledge.

    I understand poker players have a saying - if you can’t spot the fish at the table, you’re the fish. So, the bad-and-self-aware won’t participate. If you are trading in a prediction market (aren’t all markets, prediction markets?), you are either good-and-aware or good-and-ignorant or bad-but-ignorant. Ironically, the latter two can’t tell whether they are the first group or not. Ref: gwern.net]

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