Ontic Oren

Hey Mr. Big Shot, how did you get there? We humans seem to have serious issues considering the role randomness plays in our life. I’ve run into this many times before - my least favorite boss ever was the typical “Master of the universe” type who insisted it was his way or the highway. He justified this since he had “been successful so many times before”. You run into these people all the time. Survivor bias is a nasty nasty thing. One of my favorite books - Fooled by Randomness - has a great thought experiment:

Assume someone offered you $1M to play Russian Roulette. Would you? I’d argue that almost everyone out there can evaluate if this makes sense for them - I’m sure most would say no, but someone desperate enough may well say yes, and know what they’re getting into. Now let’s say that you are offered $1M/year, for 30 years to play it ever year. Now would you? You would have to be insane.

But what if 100, 1,000, or 1,000,000 people all did in fact play this “game”.

After 30 years, you’d have over 4,000 people with $30M. Yes, you’d have almost 1,000,000 dead people too, but hey, that’s 4,000 very RICH people. And I bet they would find each other, and offer the fact that there are THOUSANDS of them as PROOF that if you follow their SUREFIRE method, you too can be a multi-millionaire, GUARANTEED! Just jump on one foot before pulling the trigger. Or maybe flap your arms. Or pray to your god. We really are just pigeons.

Want to know what the odds are? Go ahead and play with some numbers: