MIT Blackjack Team perspective on the financial crisis

[jeffrey]

The mathematics of probability that govern the trade-offs of risk and
reward are fundamentally counter-intuitive.

The reason that societies ban pyramid schemes outright, instead of
relying on the market to make them unprofitable, is that most people
trust their intuition, and their intuition leads them astray. If you
were to wait for the market to run its course on a pyramid scheme, the
losses could devastate a whole country, as Albanians found out a few
years ago.

In our days of outwitting casinos around the world, we have come
across many people who thought that they also had a great system, but
were in fact compulsive gamblers who eventually lost everything.
Among the false systems that intuitively feel right, there is none as
insidious and deadly as the Martingale, where a player doubles his bet
after every loss...

The real cause of the financial crisis

[Joan.of.the.Arch]

I enjoyed reading the author's bio and seeing his smiling face on the main page of that blog. I was thinking, "Hey, I like this guy," when suddenly I realized that being taken as a result of trusting one's intuition was exactly what he'd been talking about in the blog. Therefore, I decided to dislike him instead. Oops, but that would demonstrate that I had intuitively trusted his advice not to go by intuition alone. So I decided to like him again. I will place all my bets on Semyon Dukach. That's a sure thing, right?

[kork13]

They made a movie, "21", about the MIT Blackjack team... GREAT movie....

[sweeps]

Originally Posted by Joan.of.the.Arch

I enjoyed reading the author's bio and seeing his smiling face on the main page of that blog. I was thinking, "Hey, I like this guy," when suddenly I realized that being taken as a result of trusting one's intuition was exactly what he'd been talking about in the blog. Therefore, I decided to dislike him instead. Oops, but that would demonstrate that I had intuitively trusted his advice not to go by intuition alone. So I decided to like him again. I will place all my bets on Semyon Dukach. That's a sure thing, right?

Hahaha.