A Hacker News comment about entrepreneurship, darts, and wealth goes viral
This appears to be a repackaging of an old metaphor designed to illustrate the Efficient Market Hypothesis: that someone can outperform professional portfolio managers by hanging the Wall Street Journal on the wall, and throwing darts at it. Someone did go to the trouble of training a chimp to do just that, and the chimp entered the Guinness Record Book for outperforming all but 22 managers in 1999 [1].<p>But while chimps may outperform thousands of managers for one year, they won&#x27;t outperform a Warren Buffett or a George Soros for decades.<p>The claim that Buffett&#x27;s and Soros&#x27;s performance is due to luck can be easily debunked nowadays after the Covid 19 pandemic. Now lots of people understand p-values. By this I mean lots compared to before, in absolute terms it&#x27;s still too few people who understand null-hypothesis testing. Oh, and if you read this and want to shoot me down with some Bayesian things, you can leave it for some other time. In any case, just like you can test if the outcomes of vaccination are due to random chance, you can check if the performance of Berkshire Hathaway is due to pure luck. In both cases you&#x27;ll get a really tiny p-value, so you can say you decidedly rejected the null hypothesis.<p>In the case with this twit, it&#x27;s difficult to do a statistical significance test. But consider this: it&#x27;s undeniable that Warren Buffett&#x27;s results are not due to randomness, and also Michael Jordan&#x27;s results, and Tom Brady&#x27;s results.<p>Tom Brady has won 7 NFL championship, more than the total wins of all the active NFL quarterbacks in the league combined. But guess what, luck is a huge factor in the NFL, for the simple reason that players get injured a lot. The best team at the start of a season can be decimated by the end of it. Still, somehow he won 7 times in 22 years, in a league with 32 teams. Is this due to throwing darts?<p>Then why is Musk&#x27;s success due to throwing darts? Or Zuckerberg&#x27;s success? Did Zuck throw and miss, then throw again, and again, and again, and hit the bull&#x27;s eye the tenth time? No, he succeeded right away, and kept demolishing every obstacle that he found in his path.<p>This dart throwing metaphor is so appealing: &quot;meh, that guy was just lucky, I could&#x27;ve done the same myself, but I just couldn&#x27;t afford to play the game&quot;.<p>But it&#x27;s also so toxic.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.guinnessworldrecords.com&#x2F;world-records&#x2F;most-successful-chimpanzee-on-wall-street" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.guinnessworldrecords.com&#x2F;world-records&#x2F;most-succ...</a>