behaviour
The graveyard is invisible
The rule
You only see the winners. The ones who lost the same way are gone and silent. Every success story stands on a hidden graveyard of failures.
Where it flips
You can push this too far and refuse to learn from anyone who won. Some winners truly had skill. Calling every success pure luck is its own blindness.
It is easy to judge a plan by looking only at the people it worked for. A chart trick or a trader is praised when it wins. But you are never shown the many times the same trick failed and its followers quietly lost their money. Losers do not post screenshots or write long messages. So the trick looks far safer than it really is. Always ask: how many people did the exact same thing and are simply not here to tell you?
A worked example
A 'head and shoulders that predicted the crash' is shared everywhere. Hidden are the hundreds of same-looking charts that broke and then went the other way, whose followers lost and stayed quiet. [illustrative]
How to spot it
- ·you ask 'where are the ones it failed for?'
- ·you trust success stories less because of the silent losers
- ·you doubt a trick's win rate instead of counting only winners
Nassim Nicholas Taleb · Fooled by Randomness