Quote from: iamnotback on February 28, 2017, 02:16:56 PM

Quote from: dinofelis on February 28, 2017, 01:49:14 PM

Quote from: iamnotback on February 28, 2017, 01:25:35 PM

@mining1:

Thanks for your cordial post. My counter argument is the following essay by Nicholas Taleb:

Quote from: iamnotback on February 28, 2017, 11:33:50 AM

Before you read this, please read Surgeons Should Not Look Like Surgeons by Nicholas Taleb, the progenitor of antifragility.

Hahaha

The problem with that statement is that you get an unsolvable game-theoretic recursion.

If, to be *recognized* as a successful surgeon, you have to look like a lumberjack, then the smoothest of actors will of course adapt to this perception, and most scammer-fake-surgeon charlatans will look like lumberjacks, to adhere to the image that the best surgeons "don't look like a surgeon"...

Yeah I thought of that too, but by that implication he was intending that you will use no criteria at all to predict that which can't be predicted and the great failures cost of groupthink instead of decentralized annealing. But you may be missing Taleb's point as you are apparently reading it too literally and not focusing on the generative essence he is trying to convey. His point (as evident in the opening where he writes "Business plans are for suckers Donaldo Hiring practitioners the glory of bureaucracy") is that we can't know creativity and fitness a priori. He is making the point that IQ tests are abused "on the other side" of the mean as you (correctly) stated.

Past performance and well scoped plans of mice and men are not the predictors of success in the game of unknowable creative discovery and achievement. For more than a decade after my successes of WordUp and CoolPage, I produced only flops (aka lemons).

This is why speculators should not buy an ICO and instead buy that which is already launched and clearly a successful divergent paradigm-shift.

It also means that after 3 years of waiting for Ethereum to gain millions of adoption, its established inertia is not necessarily indicative of future success. Inertia tends to metastasize and rot. Saplings grow to oak trees, but aging oak trees don't grow to the moon. The early adopter exponential phase of Ethereum's growth is over. Just like Bitcoin, the dynamic headroom of what it can be is already baked into its inertia. ETH and BTC have one more 10 bagger (up to and less than 100X) run in them (per the technology adoption curve since they passed the first hump already), but that is all. Ditto Monero and Dash.

Speculators are attempting to know what is impossible to know too early. And thus they are being taken in by 100s of ICOs and going to end up in an ICO graveyard.

It used to be that speculators could perhaps gauge which ICOs had a superior level of hype and marketing, so they could speculate not on actuated creative technological achievement, but on the ICO being the actual launch of the manipulation of the minds of speculators (aka "mining the speculators"). But now we are entering a new phase where there will be an an oversupply (market saturation) of ICOs which have copied that "the ICO is the launch of the reality distortion field" paradigm. Ethereum is spawning offspring (i.e. smart contract) copycats of its own reality distortion field business model, which may cannabalize ETH itself.

I entirely agree. This is always the same law: predictions are difficult if they concern the future. It is the crypto equivalent of Malkiel's thesis, that there's no "smart investor" that *systematically* can outsmart the market, and that in the long run, monkeys playing on the stock market do just as well as hedge fund managers.

But of course, on every time slice, there are lottery winners, who think they have something special.