site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2954 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 27, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

One Billion Jews

Recently, Gad Saad was on the Joe Rogan Experience and he asked the host how many Jews he thought there were. Rogan responded one billion, or 500 million minimum, conservative estimate. There are in fact about 20 million Jews. Rogan was off by a factor of 25.

Ha ha. But to be fair if you're not used to doing Fermi estimates you can get tripped up like this.

I asked Claude to challenge me on some that I might be similarly dumb about but I've spent enough time in this kind of community that all of the low hanging fruit, like murder rate in the US or percentage of federal budget that goes to foreign aid has been picked.

The ones that busted me hardest were estimating the age of Proto Indo European (less than 10,000 years old, I guessed 100k) and the number of spoken languages in the world (about 7000, I guessed 1000). I guess I don't feel too embarrassed about not knowing those. And I still wasn't 25x off.

I ask you, fellow Mottizens, do you have facts that we should all know that would probably punk us if we tried to estimate? Tip: you can make something a spoiler by surrounding it with two | characters on each side (check the preview).

That's borderline braindead from Rogan. It's like a child's thoughtless, blurted out estimate.

On the other end of that topic's estimates, you had the Palestininans in a Gaza survey, most of whom were convinced that only 0.5 million Jews lived in Israel. Their ignorance may have played a part in their constant willingness to use violence against Israel. It also may have some root in what may be universal breeding grounds for genocidal thought (my own speculation): "they're super dangerous and evil, but they're super small at the same time, so we should just squash them!"

My q: How many professional, actively managed funds beat their benchmark index over the course of 15-20 years? Guess at a percentage/range.

How many professional, actively managed funds beat their benchmark index over the course of 15-20 years? Guess at a percentage/range.

My naive guess is approximately zero. Google says around 7%, but also "The Survival Factor: Over 15–20 years, a large percentage of active funds close or merge, often due to poor performance, meaning that the surviving pool of funds that actually beat the market is extremely small." So some number perhaps much smaller than 7% since we aren't counting all the failures and merged funds.

0 to1%

Was he high? He might have been literally baked out of his mind, he often is on the pod I think.

My q: How many professional, actively managed funds beat their benchmark index over the course of 15-20 years? Guess at a percentage/range.

My guess is 0.2% to 0.5%

It's a hyper-pareto thing, but it's not quite that bad. What's interesting is how many companies (in various sectors) also fail or lose their independence over the decades. Humans are bad at decision making when money is involved. It turns into something like a 95/5 pareto over a few decades. Some winners manage to stay consistently competent and end up taking a massive slice of the pie.

Wait I fucked up the percentage math. I thought "20-50 out of 1000, that feels like the right number. oh but he wanted a percent that's 0.2-0.5% right?"

I meant 2-5%

Bah!

I don't think it's brain dead, it just means he doesn't have a reference point to compare to. @Corvos mentioned that would be 1/8 of all people on earth, but if you don't know there are 8 billion people on earth (I certainly didn't), then that doesn't help you as a heuristic. If you don't happen to know any reference point on which to base an estimate, and if you're being asked in a setting where you have to answer off the cuff (which he was, since it was on his show), then your answer isn't going to really have any bearing on how smart (or not) you are.

Yeah. I'm sympathetic to this, but also, you should have some reference points. Surely, a person ought to know the population of their own country, their own country's relative size compared to the world, and then be able to roughly estimate the percentage of people who belong to some minority, and get a rough guess.

I'm not going to fault him for getting it wrong off the cuff. I might make the same mistake, and then feel stupid about it a second later as my brain catches up to my mouth.

But it is important, I think, if a person is going to have opinions about a topic in public, to actually have a handle on the statistics involved. It makes a huge difference if you're talking about 10+% of the world's population vs a fraction of 1%.

He's like 50-60 years old. How do you go through that many years (while not literally living in a cave) without ever hearing about the world's population? If you are off by a billion or two, that's understandable, but you gotta have some idea, especially when you've no doubt heard about the populations of India and China being what they are. You shouldn't miss by full orders of magnitude.

I'm 40 years old and I didn't know. It's not relevant to my life; why would I bother to retain that information?

I vaguely remember people making a big deal about China and India both having more than a billion people, and the US having less than half that, which seems at least a bit grounding, and I don't pay close attention to these things.

Yeah, reference points are hard. I once lost a general knowledge quiz for my team by getting us to the tiebreak and then being asked, “What is the distance between London and the closest point in Canada?”

I thought for a bit, tried to imagine them on a map relative to a journey in the UK I knew and thought, hmm, easily ten times that.

Said, “1200 miles”.

Teammates not best pleased.

How many professional, actively managed funds beat their benchmark index over the course of 15-20 years?

My first estimate would be close to none. 20 years is a really long time, especially for an actively managed fund. And the risk is asymmetric - if you get lucky and win, the investors will take the extra money out and spent it on cocaine and hookers charitable projects, and if you get unlucky once and lose, the fund goes bust and is no more. Well, maybe by pure luck there are some funds that survive that long and show positive returns above market, but I'd say excluding Madoff scenario, quite a small number.

How many professional, actively managed funds beat their benchmark index over the course of 15-20 years? Guess at a percentage/range.

Is that including their fees, or just straight fund vs. Index?

Pick whichever one you feel confident about giving a percentage/range on.

Ignoring fees, 10-20%. Accounting for fees, <5%.

I want to say that's pretty much my intuition too.

About 1% if even that, I believe.

1 billion Jews is ridiculous, though, it'd be one in eight humans on earth. Perhaps in certain parts of America it feels that way - Rogan likely has disproportional contact with intelligent, unusual people and maybe that skews his estimates. But Israel would have to be the size of China.

About 1% if even that, I believe.

I think you have over-corrected here. It's more like 5-15% before fees and 5-10% after fees. They (professional investors and fund managers) are largely, in Peter Lynch's words, 'oxymorons', but it's not quite as bad as you suspected. Funnily or appropriately enough, the percentage lines up almost exactly with the percentage of amateur traders who succeed consistently. Yet so-called professionals and those with credentials are consistently awarded more credibility and respect.

That isn’t quite true. “Amateur investors” includes everything from sensible people who manage their 401ks with a little panache and a slight preference in sector exposure to “day traders” of the WSB type who gamble on far out of the money options or who put their life savings into heavily leveraged short ETFs.

Among the latter, most data shows perhaps 1% make money consistently, far below professional active managers. In addition, their losses are far higher, while many active managers (loathe as I am to defend them) only marginally underperform the market.

That study regarding 1% of retail traders being profitable doesn't account for positive churn. if your account is profitable next thing you know it's shut down and either 1] run at a fund 2] done through a different entity 3] both. so you're only left w the weirdos w profitable accounts who don't go pro

I don’t think it’s very common for even the tiny minority of successful retail traders to join a professional fund, the approach to risk management alone would make that a compliance challenge at the best of times. It has happened, but far more common is what Jane Street, Two Sigma etc do (as far as I know) where they pay savants for trade ideas directly. There are quite a few basement dweller math geniuses who make a living that way.

I did not say amateur investors (the larger group). I said amateur traders, who attempt to take their activities quite seriously. Around 10% of them succeed consistently, afaik.

What separates a trader from an investor? You can discuss this professionally (traders execute to balance liquidity, market depth, optimize, PMs strategize, order etc), but its not relevant to amateur investing where the PM/trader distinction is definitionally irrelevant.

Rogan is a stand up comedian, 1/8 professional comedians are probably Jewish.

Best explanation!

In New York City, I think about a quarter of white people are Jewish. In LA it is much lower, though maybe 1/8th still makes sense.

YouGov says (link above) Americans think 30% of US people are Jewish. In reality, about 10% of New Yorkers and about 2% of Americans are Jewish (which would make it about 20% of whites in NY, though there are non-white Jews, but not too many of them in New York I presume). And this likely including people who have any Jewish genes, about half of them probably do not have any connection to Jewish culture or religion - though in New York due to large Orthodox population likely the distribution is a bit different.

That said, for comedians specifically I'd say 1/8 is probably low, could be as high as 20% if you count successful professional comedians, though I haven't seen any exact or well-supported figures anywhere.

Fair.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats