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Do you believe false things?
You, high IQ, well educated, traveled and read motte denizen, you personally?
Not ordinary mistaken trivia knowledge, for example when you are unsure whether US has 50 or 51 states, or on what continent is New Guinea, but when facts about the world that serve as bedrock of your beliefs that happen to be totally delusionary, at catastrophical odds to reality. Can it happen to you?
It happens frequently. See the famous poll where about one in 20 of "very liberal people" believe that tens of thousands of unarmed blacks are annually killed by police.
For non-US example, see this poll among Palestinians, where one third of population of Gaza believe that Israel has less than 500k inhabitants.
"No, it cannot happen to me! I was trained in martial arts of rationalism by ancient master Yud the Yumongous! I am unstoppable!"
Well, it can happen not only to "brainwashed libtards" or "dumb Ayrabs".
It happened to credentialed rationalist and one of Yud's disciples.
The short xeet that went viral:
Until I was 38 I thought Men's World Cup team vs Women's World Cup team would be a fair match and couldn't figure out why they didn't just play each other
And the long essay where Eneasz Brodski at request of his readers and haters explains how it happened:
How To Believe False Things - by request, this is an explanation of how I got 38 years old believing a match of World Cup men's team vs World Cup women's would be fair.
TL;DR: EB learned about relative strength of men and women as we all learn all things we know. From his own experience, from media, from experts. EB trusted them all, without considering that his experiences could be extremely unrepresentative, media could be completely fictional and experts could just plain lie to his face.
I think honestly that for the median person, outside of their own area of expertise, you’re very likely to be wrong on most things. You might get around it somewhat by doing research, but most people, unless truly interested in a subject won’t learn more than could be covered in the first three weeks of an “introduction to [topic] course. It’s shallow.
The best way to prove this to yourself is to try to predict outcomes. If the people were rounding up and sending to El Salvador are gang members, crime should go down, right. So then go and look at what actually happens. If you’re correct about whatever you think about deportees, the crime statistics will show it. If Trump is really taking Canada, you can predict that he’ll have to eventually move assets into place to actually do that. If your understanding of the world is true, you’ll be able to get things right before they’re reported. If not, you’ll be wrong and if you’re doing motivated reasoning, probably wrong in a similar direction. I consider it basically conducting an experiment on your beliefs.
The next step would be test your model of the world on the stock market. Which can be humbling.
Short term the stock market isn't modeling what happens, it is modeling what people think is happening, or what people think people think is happening.
Long term you are dead.
Better to stick to sports gambling if you actually have some sort of prediction advantage. Shorter ROIs, actually clear outcomes.
In a related discussion I was having with two sports betting enthusiasts at work today, women's sports are actually fairly popular amoung dedicated sports gamblers as there is a belief that the bookmakers aren't as good at protecting the house advantage in women's sports for whatever reason and an informed, savvy better has a better chance of getting an edge. They also seem to think that more extreme outcomes (one team absolutely demolishing the other) are more likely in women's sports. They were specificaly discussing the WNBA and MMA.
Live betting is also a space where the books are behind the advanced modelers.
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The required advantage to get ahead in sports gambling is pretty small, right? Just slightly above flipping a coin?
Most people say you need to be between 55% and 58% to turn a profit.
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Its a very complicated balancing act. The bookmakers have to offer attractive bets to bring in the action, but at the same time making sure the "coin flip" lands they way they want it to ~51% of the time.
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Depends on how big your bank roll is
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