logoalt Hacker News

ifyoubuildittoday at 12:52 PM1 replyview on HN

This is the "nobody got fired for buying IBM" argument. It works in a world where you have trustworthy institutions and its safe to just outsource your decision-making to the authorities.

Your interpretation of events might be that a collective of all well meaning people just got it wrong, and that's your right. A lot of people ended up with different conclusions, like the machine did what it does and made a lot of money, the truth be damned.


Replies

estearumtoday at 3:08 PM

Not really. It's the "making decisions based on best-available evidence is good, even if every once in a while it leads you astray."

You're more than welcome to read the evidence they use to create their policies. If you have evidence that is of higher quality than that which "the authorities" are using, then you should depend on that!

But... you almost certainly don't have higher quality evidence than they do. That's the fundamental problem.

If you think that you do, then you too could actually make a fuckton of money with that information. But again: you don't have superior information.

I don't think people even got it wrong. They got it correct with the information available, and they for the most part got it right even in retrospect.

show 1 reply