Con Art - Solution

This is the solution to the question I posed in this post, so if you haven't read it you can safely skip this one too.

Hussein got it pretty much right on in the comments.

What the company could have done is the following.
Identify 32000 recepients, that's a very easy feat and most mailing lists for sale contain way more than that.
First week, divide them in halves. Send to half of them (16000) saying that X stock will go up, and the other half saying that X stock is going down.
Wait for 1 week, see the results. You must have sent the correct prediction to 8000 people, no matter how the stock actually did. Identify those 16000, divide them in halves, repeat the exact same process saying to half of them that the stock is going up and to the other half that it's going down.

At the end of 6 weeks you would've sent 6 correct prediction in a row to 500 people. Collect your money and profit :)
This con game is illegal when/if played on purpose. Do not attempt :)

Adaptation

You know you've spent too much time in Seattle when:

1. You start to panic when you're driving in a small suburban street and the lane markers disappear.
2. You wonder how you ever got anywhere before the invent of live/google maps.
3. On a strange road the first thing you do is start looking for the speed limit signs.
4. You have trouble parallel parking in a spot that is twice the length of your car.
5. You regard a Jeep Grand Cherokee or a mini van as a small car.
6. You walk around with zero cash in your pocket.
7. You wonder how you ever lived without online shopping.
8. You think that a 10 mile drive is a really short one.
9. You're very surprised to find a place that's open past midnight on weekdays.
10. You start using 5+ word phrases to describe how you want your coffee, e.g. Tall Non-Fat Eggnog Vanilla Latte.

Popular and Right

Apparently we tend to confuse these two separate things, or assume some sort of correlation.

This might seem all a bit random but bear with me.

What do you think is the percentage of smart people in a given population?

Trying to come up with a definition for smartness or intelligence is not as easy of a task as it sounds. There are thousands of totally different I.Q. tests which are assumed to measure ability at a skillset and call it IQ.
Being well informed about a specific topic, however, is much easier to define and measure.

So what do you think is the percentage of people who are well versed in medical sciences or philosophy in a given population? The US's or Egypt's for example?

My conjecture says that it's not a majority.

This, in itself, is not so bad. But substitute economics or politics for medicine or philosophy and it becomes kind of dangerous.

Smart or not, you have to be well informed about a subject to be able to take sound decisions regarding matters of said subject. It took countless smart people thousands of years to build a foundation of science that got us to where we are today. You simply can not, no matter how smart you (think you) are, rebuild it all from scratch in one lifetime.

I said earlier that one can get away with little knowledge of medicine because one doesn't get to vote if one wants his son's tonsils removed or not. The decision is made in a dictatorial fashion by someone who is (hopefully) an expert on the subject.

But this very same person gets to vote for what his country's policies should be, at least in a true democracy he does.

To make matters worse, individuals rarely get to pick from individual policies on a decision by decision basis (or else nobody will do anything but attend political meetings and vote for whatever today's decision is). Instead, you and I get to pick a "package deal", be it a political party or a presidential candidate. For example American voters can (and recently actually did) pick candidates from the Democratic Party for the senate or the house. The Democratic party generally stands for a higher minimum wage and legalization of abortion.
If you happen to agree on the latter but disagree with the former, tough luck. It's our package of the day.
Or of course start your own party, good luck with that.

Combine all of the above and you might arrive at the same conclusion I did.
1. The majority of people are not well informed (sometimes ill-informed?) about economics and politics.
2. If you're ill/dis/mis-informed about a specific matter, you shouldn't be expected to take a sound a decision regarding said matter.
2. Voters get to pick one out of several candidates, each is a bag of specific stands on a multitude of subjects.
3. A democracy guarantees that the candidate with the most votes win.

Do you see it yet?
Democracy guarantees the domination of what's popular. It even actually creates an incentive system for politicians to stay "in fashion" with what's popular and form their strategies or advertised agendas accordingly.

The result?
What's popular is what will get done. And what's popular shouldn't be expected to magically intersect with what's right. Not until the majority is knowledgeable about economics and politics (in the very least).

We might as well be flipping coins.

P.S.
I'm not anti-democracy. Nor do I have an alternative worthwhile system that I can suggest. I'm just debating the merits and flaws of what is currently, widely accepted as the best system to run a country.

Con Art

Or How to Make Money using Mathematics.

So here is the question, and I'll answer this one after I get a few responses. Just think about it and don't cheat.


You open your mailbox and you find that a "stock prediction" company sent you this letter saying that it's their business to predict the stock market and they want you as a customer. They provide you with a free prediction that the stock price of company xxxx will go up in the next week. xxxx is a large company like MSFT or something of the sort.
You toss the mail out, but come next week you note that the xxxx stock price did go up. Next week, surely enough, you get another mail from the same company extending one more free prediction that the xxxx stock price will go up (or down for that matter). A week passes by and they were right again.
You get that for 6 weeks in a row, and every time they are spot on right about the stock price prediction.
For the 7th week you get a mail that they had sent you enough free predictions and you should pay for the next one if you want it.

Would you pay? Obviously they're good at predicting stock prices aren't they?
If not then why?
Just think about if for a few minutes and leave me a comment with your answer.
Please don't cheat by looking it up (or otherwise), or at least if you do, don't paste it here in the comments :)

Hofstadter's Law

Have you ever read about Hofstadter's Law?
If not, it's about time you do. It's true.

Probability and Coincidence

A man who travels a lot was concerned with the possibility of a bomb on his plane. He determined the probability of this, found it to be low but not low enough for him, so now he always travels with a bomb in his suitcase. He reasons that the probability of two bombs being on board is infinitesimal.
-John Allen Paulos in Innumeracy

Sacrifice

I just finished watching the movie "The Weather Man". I started watching it at 11:20pm and finished it at 1:02 am.
This line, in my opinion, is one of the truest statements you'll ever find in a movie.

Robert Spritzel, played by Sir Michael Caine, said to his son David:
Sacrifice is... To get anything of value, you have to sacrifice. Do you know that the hardest thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same thing? Nothing that has meaning is easy. Easy doesn't enter into grown-up life.

This post is for you, you know who you are.

Home

If somebody relocates when he's 25 years old to a different part of the world.
If this somebody lives there till he's 50.
Which part of the world is home to somebody? One..., both..., or neither...?

Halloween 2006 aka Borat in Seattle

Time for a less serious, less important, and a more personal post after the couple past ones.

So last year I took a back seat and watched Halloween in the US for the first time. This year I jumped right in.

First of all, if you don't know who Borat is, you need a primer. You will also probably love the trailer.

So, for this Halloween I was Borat! And even though the movie hasn't come out yet, the character is insanely popular. Going out on Friday in the costume was pretty amazing, people are really nice on Halloween. Everybody dressed up in the most creative customes, complementing you on yours. In Borat's case people were taking pictures, yelling lines from the movie. It was truly a weekend of living like a movie star :)

Such a post would, of course, not be complete without photos, so I present you with a few.