4 ms·

> If there's 1 thing I've learned in the past 2 years, it's that experts can be deadly wrong But most of the time, they are in fact right. I don't know why a c

• smokeyj 9y ago
  The experts typically aren't experts in any sense of the word. Columnists get paid to write articles by the word to sell advertisements and get people riled up. Let's not glorify bloggers.
• exceptione 9y ago
  He makes a discrimination between informed/uninformed times. "They seem to be good at predicting things with known variables, but not with unknown unknowns." Bitcoin is a big unknown, for experts and enthusiasts alike.
  • trey-jones 9y ago
    Exactly. The only experts that know what the next year will bring for bitcoin valuation are the liars and the fools.
• quantdev 9y ago
  Your reasoning is an example of failing to understand the difference between a random variable and an exposure to a random variable. Experts are almost always right when the outcome is irrelevant. Economists can accurately predict next year's GDP growth most of time, sure. Except that time they're all somehow wrong at the same time and it's a massive miss and we enter a recession. This is really the only time we care about them being right ("Housing can't be in a bubble"). Until economists are financially harmed or benefited in proportion to how bad or good their predictions are, they won't understand this idea either.
  • parenthephobia 9y ago
    Sounds like reverse survival bias to me. Experts are usually right, so people make financial decisions on that basis. When it turns out the experts were wrong, those decisions don't pan out. The worse the outcome, the more likely we are to hear about it. We don't hear about all the times that following expert advice doesn't lead to an economic disaster, even though it happens nearly every day.