Yikes, not sure I've seen a front page HN that was this blatantly wrong. The second half of this article is complete nonsense because on one hand, he's seeming

Yikes, not sure I've seen a front page HN that was this blatantly wrong. The second half of this article is complete nonsense because on one hand, he's seeming to arguing that extreme evidence is "easy to get", but it obviously can't be that easy when it's in a competitive environment where the number of people who could get that info is absolutely limited to something like only 1 percent of people. Taking this quote: > One implication of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) is that is it difficult to make money on the stock market. Generously, maybe only the top 1% of traders will be profitable. How difficult is it to get into the top 1% of traders? To be 50% sure you’re in the top 1%, you only need 200:1 evidence. This seemingly large odds ratio might be easy to get. As other commenters pointed out, that is absolutely not what the EMH says - it doesn't say it's difficult to be profitable (it actually says the exact opposite, especially when taken together with modern portfolio theory), it says it's difficult (or, rather, impossible) to outperform the market. But the more important point is that the author is implying that it's easy to get enough evidence to put you in the top 1%, as opposed to getting enough evidence to conclude that someone is in the top 1%, or to conclude that they're in any particular percentage actually. In other words, if you take his argument at face value, it may be possible to gather evidence to determine who is in the top 1% of traders, but that's very different from getting enough data to put yourself in that top 1%.