Yeah the way I remember it is to compare "casino math" vs. math for real life problems like the stock market. Before reading the book I didn't appreciate how m

Yeah the way I remember it is to compare "casino math" vs. math for real life problems like the stock market. Before reading the book I didn't appreciate how much these are two entirely separate domains, and how much it matters. And even people who "know" that they're two separate domains fail to ACT like they know it. If you're trying to predict what happens with 52 cards or a six-sided die, well that's easy. Everything works out nice and cleanly, with no ambiguity. But if you're trying to predict markets, the math is intractable, for fundamental reasons. An example is that Michael Lewis talks about the "Value At Risk" that Wall St. metric in one of his books, leading to the 2008 crash. That's clearly casino math applied to real life, failing catastrophically. The charitable interpretation is that people saying "well this only happens once in 100 million years" are genuinely naive. The other interpretation is that they know that their gains will be privatized and their losses will be socialized, so they have no incentive to use math that's not nonsense. This is basically the "ludic fallacy" [1], although I think "casino math fallacy" is easier to remember. You're applying the math of games to real life, which is wrong exactly where it matters (in the fat tail). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy