let me quote book i’m reading now:
A quick hypothesis: say one million monkeys speculate on the stock market. They buy and sell stocks like crazy and, of course, completely at random. What happens? After one week, about half of the monkeys will have made a profit and the other half a loss. The ones that made a profit stay; the ones that made a loss you send home. In the second week, one half of the monkeys will still be riding high, while the other half will have made a loss and are sent home. And so on. After ten weeks, about 1000 monkeys will be left - those who have always invested their money well. After twenty weeks, just one monkey will remain - this one always, without fail, chose the right stocks and is now a bilionaire. Let’s call him the success monkey.
How does the media react? They will pounce on this animal to understand its ‘success principles’. And they will find some: perhaps the monkey eats more bananas than the others. Perhaps he sits in another corner of the cage. Or, maybe he swings headlong through the branches, or he takes long, reflective pauses while grooming. He must have some recipe for success, right? How else could he perform so brilliantly? Spot-on for twenty weeks - and that from a simple monkey? Impossible!
it’s worth considering, given our current wider situation. it’s from The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli. i can’t recommend it highly enough - worth spending the afternoon with.