Given enough participants, spectacular track records appear by chance alone — success is evidence of skill only after you count the entrants.
I now treat a strong record as weak evidence, discounted by how many people were playing and how short the game was. Munger’s incentive question comes first, this one second.
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Typed edges. Anything below the line was authored on the other note and derived here.
contradicts →Weight opinions by believability — track records, not titles, decide whose view counts on a given question.Dalio's idea meritocracy runs on weighting people by demonstrated record. If records are mostly noise in the domains that matter, believability-weighting is a confident method for amplifying luck. This is the load-bearing disagreement between the two systems.
← requiresJudge a decision by the distribution of outcomes it could have produced, not the one that happened to occur.
The general principle from which the track-record argument follows. If outcome is a corrupted signal of decision quality, then a record of outcomes is a corrupted signal of skill.
← supported byYou only ever see the winners — the graveyard of identical strategies that failed is silent and uncounted.Supplies the mechanism: the sample you reason from was filtered by the very outcome you are trying to explain.