This is interesting to me though. Didn’t most people (at least in developed countries) take tests in school? Get grades? I would think if you did below average on those you kind of…should know that you’re in the bottom half?

I get that it’s possible to make changes after schooling, and grades are only somewhat reliable (in that they also rely on effort) but still.

I don’t have a good business idea, not everyone has to. That’s not even what we’re talking about.

VC is clearly not “a joke”. All you have to do is Google “major companies that took VC funding” to see the impact of it. Of course this leaves out the thousands of others that failed, but long term the winners are going to have a very positive impact on driving innovation.

You may say “those companies would have succeeded anyway” and maybe so, but I doubt it would have happened nearly as fast, if at all.

This comment doesn’t even pass the smell test.

If every company that took VC money failed, VCs wouldn’t make any money.

The reality is MOST VC investments fail, but the few who make it are home runs. This is how they make money. The risk/reward of your company was just not a favorable investment for them. Whether it’s because you went to an Ivy League or not is irrelevant.

Without VCs, many of those homeruns would never be able to get off the ground and the US economy would be significantly less dynamic

I’m not sure I understand. Does war declaration being a state action require recognition the state of Palestine? Or can they declare war on “Hamas” or any other entity/group of people. Or do they even have to state who they are at war against? Can they just say “we are at war”?

Yes I think it’s very possible that if you were to graph a population’s Intelligence using a some empirical score, then it has a high probability to NOT look exactly like a normal distribution.

For example, let’s say that there was some score called “intelligence score” that scores people’s intelligence from 0-100. Do you think that if you were to graph a given population’s “intelligence score” that it would be EXACTLY centered around 50 in a Normal distribution? I think that’s unlikely. It’s more likely that there would be local maximums or minimums, or various skews in the graph. There could be a small peak at score 75, or a trough at 85. There could be all sorts of distributions.

And guess what? Given this hypothetical distribution, you could STILL draw lines somewhere on the graph showing quartiles. Those lines might not be at 25-50-75. They might not even be the same distance apart from each other. But you CAN draw them somewhere to split the scores. Just because a graph “has quartiles” does not mean it will always look like the OP.

Spendrill is not misunderstanding the OP. He’s just saying that if intelligence could be measured by a better metric, then distribution of that metric among the population would not look as smooth as the one in the OP.

Lol. People read your comment and think you didn’t understand the original post. When in reality they are the ones who didn’t understand your comment.

Buying land for the purpose of building property is bad? I think any policy that discourages development of additional housing is probably not going to be great for house prices. Or if you’re handing out houses in a lottery system, it won’t be great for housing supply at least.

What if I build a house on a piece of land I own and want to rent it out?

The second construction is completed I’m all of a sudden a scumbag for privatizing someone else’s right to shelter? Even though it’s a house I built on my land? Doesn’t make much sense to me.

Yeah this is not an unpopular opinion, especially on a site like this.

I don’t understand how this relates to the problem. Yes 50 percent is greater than 33 percent, but that’s not what the Monty hall problem is about. The point of the exercise is to show that when the game show host knowingly (and it is important to state that the host knows where the prize is) opens a door, he is giving the contestant 33 percent extra odds.