Comments on When Worse Is Better

TeMPOraL said:

When facing binary choices (yes/no), stupidity is being ~50% correct, not ~0% correct. When someone is correct e.g. only 5% of times, it means they're strongly anticorrelated with reality, and you just have to do the opposite of what they say to be 95% correct.

ncm said:

We named people like Bob "Oracles of Wrong".

In any big enough group there is always an Oracle of Wrong. They are very precious. It's very hard to be right all the time, but less hard to be wrong all the time.

Over decades I have puzzled over the existence of Oracles of Wrong. One clue is that they always come from privileged backgrounds. Taking the easy, wrong choice has never caused them any personal discomfort, but has often saved them some minor inconvenience that the hard, right choice would have cost.

jpt4 said:

I was initially expecting this to be about power law distributions, such that Bob was right about the high impact 5%, and Alex about the orders of magnitude less impactful 80%. If only decision spaces were so bipartite!