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> being disgustingly lucky Getting lucky once can happen. Getting lucky twice, with Facebook and Bitcoin, is so improbable that it asks for a different kind of

> being disgustingly lucky Getting lucky once can happen. Getting lucky twice, with Facebook and Bitcoin, is so improbable that it asks for a different kind of explanation.

derefr 9y ago
Lots of people with high risk-tolerance got kind of rich by buying Bitcoin early. The only difference with the Winklevosses is that they had a lot more money to leverage in that early investment. It's not improbable that someone was going to have a lot of money and put it into Bitcoin.
- golergka 9y ago
  It's also not improbable that someone got involved in the earliest stage of what was Facebook by pure luck. However, both those things together are starting to get just a little bit improbable from the pure luck standpoint, don't you think?
  - derefr 9y ago
    Any professional investor is riding on a combination of a very long lucky streak, and portfolio-based risk-adjusting. Paying attention to the Winklevosses here is a selection effect; you're ignoring everyone who executed the exact same investment strategy they did, but ended up making bad bets rather than good ones. You can entirely explain away the Winklevoss' success by supposing an investor pool of sufficient size that you can pick a set of first-pass winners (1:10000, say) and then pick a second-pass winner from that set (1:10000 again), where they happened to be the ones to be drawn, and everyone else wasn't. The sheer number of people trying to win explains away the improbability required to win—in exactly the same way that the number of people entered into a lottery explains away the improbability of the winner's guess. Also, we only know who the Winklevosses are because they were a first-pass winner. So there's no reason to privilege them here; it'd make much more sense to look at all first-pass winners (in this case, early Facebook investors), rather than this random famous example of one, and then ask about this set's cumulative probability of at least one of them having gotten even richer from an early Bitcoin investment.

> being disgustingly lucky Getting lucky once can happen. Getting lucky twice, with Facebook and Bitcoin, is so improbable that it asks for a different kind of explanation.

derefr 9y ago

Lots of people with high risk-tolerance got kind of rich by buying Bitcoin early. The only difference with the Winklevosses is that they had a lot more money to leverage in that early investment. It's not improbable that someone was going to have a lot of money and put it into Bitcoin.

golergka 9y ago
It's also not improbable that someone got involved in the earliest stage of what was Facebook by pure luck. However, both those things together are starting to get just a little bit improbable from the pure luck standpoint, don't you think?
- derefr 9y ago
  Any professional investor is riding on a combination of a very long lucky streak, and portfolio-based risk-adjusting. Paying attention to the Winklevosses here is a selection effect; you're ignoring everyone who executed the exact same investment strategy they did, but ended up making bad bets rather than good ones. You can entirely explain away the Winklevoss' success by supposing an investor pool of sufficient size that you can pick a set of first-pass winners (1:10000, say) and then pick a second-pass winner from that set (1:10000 again), where they happened to be the ones to be drawn, and everyone else wasn't. The sheer number of people trying to win explains away the improbability required to win—in exactly the same way that the number of people entered into a lottery explains away the improbability of the winner's guess. Also, we only know who the Winklevosses are because they were a first-pass winner. So there's no reason to privilege them here; it'd make much more sense to look at all first-pass winners (in this case, early Facebook investors), rather than this random famous example of one, and then ask about this set's cumulative probability of at least one of them having gotten even richer from an early Bitcoin investment.