herbijudlestoids Hope I can show you some cool stuff when the sample size gets bigger.
Vexual Trade it herbi.
mircea_popescu Night all.
kakobrekla Make a blog, post results. I hear that is what people do. Nite mp.
mike_c Sell predictions. Tell half of them it's going up, the other half it's going down. Next week, split your list again and repeat. Works for sports touts.
herbijudlestoids I might buy a couple of bitcoins and bet on just dice...maybe...kind of got my heart set on buying as much MPOE as I can.
mike_c That would be better than betting on jd.
herbijudlestoids Best mates here, peace.

* Now talking on #bitcoin-assets
mircea_popescu Wow mike_c knows how the sport tout biz works. Props.ⁱ Incidentally, this is how idiots like Keiser work, too. All the obscure web "financial experts", or bet picking experts, or so on work on the same business model :

1. You put up a site with some content and drive a ton of traffic to it. Google ads, whatever. This is your start-up cost.
2. You gather leads for your "special picks" list, which you contact via email. This is your stable of suckers.
3. You split them in equal halves and give one half one pick, the other half the opposite.ⁱⁱ Now you have 50% of the list worth of people who think you must be on to something.
4. You subdivide both divisions and feed them a new pick on a new event. Now you have : a list of people who know you fucked up twice, this you discard ; two lists of people who think you got one out of two, these you merge ; a most valuable list of idiots who think you got 2 out of 2. That latter list is your money maker. The merged list is where you mine for idiots.

This simple scheme allows you to actually extract a profit out of the stupidity of people who are too stupid to realise just how stupid they are. It's also how government works, without exception, everywhere.
ThickAsThieves Now swap lists for Financial News Networks.

mircea_popescu "all the obscure web "financial experts", or bet picking experts" :)
ThickAsThieves Surely someone has done a study how often TV picks work out to be worse than flipping a coin.

mircea_popescu Surely nobody has bothered. Because the scammors can pay, and can scream, whereas the idiots can't pay, and can scream too, and they will scream against their own interest and in support of the scammors. You don't get a MPOE-PR in all venues. In fact, she's so novel that people that guide themselves by "what I've seen"ⁱⁱⁱ generally imagine she's a poor PR.
ThickAsThieves It's also funny that this is just economics, nothing sinister. Having MPOE-PR on TV just wouldnt be as profitable ad Mad Money.

mircea_popescu Well, science employed to dominate idiocy is the idiot's definition of sinister.

In general, a poor understanding of sampling, biases and other matters statistical is naught but an invitation to having your pocket picked while you're busy thanking the picker for doing you the favour and praising him to others for having taken the time.

Other than that, the direct results of this thing and its bretheren are that recommendations from nobody in particular are worth nothing at all ; that anonymous entities are not allowed to voice an opinion, nor are secret bloggers worth any credence^iv ; that social proof is meaningless in any online conversation (yes, that means nobody cares how many followers/likes/whatever you have) ; that voting is dead as a legitimizing device (not just culturally, but in politics too - you can no longer claim you represent Jormania on the grounds of having received X votes from random Jormanians) and plenty of other such goodies.

Welcome to the post-post-structuralism the Internet generated. I hope you'll like it here.

1. The more models you know, the better chances you are to find one that works in any circumstance you may find yourself. Think of it like it were shoes : the more shoes a woman has, the more likely she is to not be able to go anywhere because she has no shoes. Erm... Ok, maybe that wasn't the best example I ever gave, but I still trust you get the idea. [↩]
2. Obviously if multiple variants are possible you can multi-split your list. For instance if an event has possible results A, B, C and D with chances 50%, 30%, 10% and 10% respectively, you'd be well advised to split your list into 4 bits in the same proportion and feed them the respective answers (so 50% of your suckers get A, 10% C etc). This can result in lists of people who think you're God, because you picked the right 10% event X times in a row, and all it cost you is whatever aggregating suckers costs - which since the Internet isn't really much at all. [↩]
3. As opposed to trying to understand what's happening. Simple pattern recognition, like most celenterates. [↩]
4. For all you know he's running fifty of the damned things, on the same model. Conde Nast for instance is trying exactly this, and has been for the past decade. Among plenty others. [↩]