One other reason we thought this wouldn't work is that it seemed to us buying in large quantity should get a discount - bulk discount, right? But that wasn't the case. It was cheaper, per unit, to buy hundreds of coal than tens of thousands.

“After all,” he thinks to himself, “if that had really been a $100 bill, someone else would have picked it up already!”

How does this translate to the efficient market hypothesis in general? Not sure, but if I were to dig down into how rational actors handle such situations, I'd expect to discover the math works out over continuous domain, and the joke is a paradox because we tend to think of money in discrete terms.

Do you want to rely on the prior actor framework, or the react to what you see framework? That decision is not rational.

The difference I see between what I wrote above and what you described as not rational choice of a framework is that, per my personal experience, it is possible to reconcile two conflicting seemingly rational frameworks. It just takes time to extend them past their edges until they meet. That is, extend each past the approximation cut-off point.

The efficient market hypothesis always confused me since it seems empirically false. Who is making the trades that make the market efficient in the first place? Plus people (even large groups of them) are often wrong. Startups and the massive value they can create are an example of that.

Markets are a prediction of predictions to some extent and people are far from agents that act only on hard numbers (and they’re often not wrong to do so). Markets are probably the best tool we’ve got for this, but they’re far from perfectly efficient.

In the EMH people do still trade, it's just that only those with new information trade profitably.

In the joke scenario, as a parallel, you just need the economist to model that there's a chance they are the first person to see the bill.

Then you have a game theory game, where your chance of being the first person to see the bill depends on what everyone else thinks their chance was to be the first person, and hence did or didn't pick up the bill.

Then there is some optimal mixed strategy where people try pick up the bill with a certain probability, and it all works out.

On the one hand, we do[0].

On the other, what you're describing is why I don't feel bad about the fact that, 15 years after I had the idea, I've still not learned to use MHD modelling software to experiment with an idea I've had that might make fusors a little more interesting.

[0] ok so they were 12 not 8: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2020/10/middle-sch...

None of this is obtained from genius, but from a father who's experienced in such and most likely an engineer. And I think this is why these sort of tales never have the implied follow through. The unstated implication is '12 year old builds nuclear reactor in toy room' is 'imagine what he'll be doing in 5 years!' And, the answer? Shit posting on Twitter, getting political, and trying to make a AR/VR startup.

Not exactly the Atlas upon which the world can comfortably thrust all of their hopes and expectations upon. And nobody is. Ramanujan [1] was a once in a millennia level of genuine abnormal genius, and he dedicated his entire life to a single pursuit. Yet even that mammoth of a man could but scratch the surface of that which is out there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

If they really are asking the unstated question, they don't have good memories of their peers back at age 17.

{I think I was in the middle of my occult/goth/Wicca phase at that age, and now look at me: I use arcane knowledge, get called a wizard, I fly abroad to consort with dragons and werewolves (and other furries) and my familiar's names are Siri and Alexa… ;)}