2 ms·
Economics and statistics understand perfectly well the distinction between gambling returns that happen in parallel versus gambling returns that happen in serie
by fanzhang 9y ago
Economics and statistics understand perfectly well the distinction between gambling returns that happen in parallel versus gambling returns that happen in series.
For example, in financial economics, suppose you're investing and the returns of each stock during each year is an iid random variable R.
If you split your money over 10 stocks and 1 year, you take the arithmetic expectancy of R to calculated your expected returns. If you're investing in 1 stock over 10 years, you should take the geometric average of R to get your average yearly return.
In other words, if each stock returns 50% chance 3x and 50% chance 0x, you should definitely invest if you can split your money over a pool of 100 independent stocks over the one time period (you'll have > 99% chance of >100% gross returns!), but definitely not if you were forced to invest in one single stock for 100 time periods (you have a >99.999% of 0% gross returns).
I'm not sure why NNT feels it necessary to say the smartest Nobel Prize winning physicists are needed to under this. I'm pretty sure anyone with a rigorous high school math education can understand this. As a matter of point, the above distinction was belabored to me in undergraduate statistics class and a first year graduate economics class, both many many years ago.