Like, at all. That’s just classic gambler fallacy.
If you want an example of reverse gambler fallacy, see here - https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=20231181&goto=threads%...
There the author says “10k heads have shown up, so 10k tails are waiting to show up”
which is equally rubbish.
There’s this weird thing where people on HN keep falling prey to Gambler’s fallacy. Maybe it’s like a programmer’s blind spot ?
If you have a bunch of people tossing dice and stopping when they roll a 1, only ~1/6 will succeed immediately. Most people will take a few tries; a few will take many tries; there's a nonzero chance you will wait forever without a success.
That's not to say that a success gets more likely with time (the Gambler's Fallacy) but on the whole, you'd expect most successes to have some prior failures, unless the dice are rigged.
yes. if success means to roll a 1, and anything else is a failure, you will on average roll the die 6 times before you succeed. E(x) = 1/p for a geometric with p = 1/6. your variance is q/p^2, so 30.
so then, my rational decision as an investor is to quit rolling the die after 17 rolls ( mu + 2 sd = 6 + 2*sqrt(30) = 17 ). I wouldn’t wait until heat death of universe.
> Maybe it’s like a programmer’s blind spot ?
Nah this must come from entrepreneurs , which is a lot more like gambling than science etc.
Past performance can often predict future success that's why geniuses often are serial geniuses, sometimes in more fields than one. But we often forget that before they became known as geniuses they passed through a string of failures as is necessary. Im not sure if it's a problem with the geniuses themselves, or a problem of perception from our side, as we become intolerant to their failures.