the virtues of looking stupid - musings
People understand skill and chance as individual concepts but struggle to reason about games that involve both. In chess, we can rank players by ability (Elo) and the higher-ranked players...
People understand skill and chance as individual concepts but struggle to reason about games that involve both. In chess, we can rank players by ability (Elo) and the higher-ranked players reliably beat the lower-ranked ones. This is skill. On the other end, you have games like roulette, where you can't really be "good" and it wouldn't make sense to rank the best players. This is chance. Startups are somewhere in the middle and intuitively closer to poker. There's an extreme amount of short-term variance, but we know who the good players are, and over sufficient timescales they outcompete ever
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