One of the things I don’t like about high school athletics (while coaching high school athletics) is that we can be myopic. But, it’s an effect of competition.
To succeed at something, especially in zero-sum competitions like sports, means to over index on certain factors. To succeed in cross country, our runners are not that strong, especially in their arms. Some strength is good, but runners look like runners for a reason.
How do you succeed at running is a different question from should I succeed at running?
Victor Hagani noted this in the context of trading. His firm built a simulator to answer this question: If you knew the news 24 hours ahead of time, could you make money?
The answer was mostly not really. One hundred business school students cumulatively earned a 6% return and one-sixth lost all their simulated money. Professionals did well, but not crystal ball well.
Hagani is updating the simulator to include AI. But this forces users to compete with the AI. How does he think it will go? “All you want to do is beat the AI. You lose your mind. You just go crazy. I think people are going to go bust much more, beucase when you fall behind the AI, it’s like “No More”. It’s like, “How can I beat Grok!”.”
Competition then, really needs to be worth it. Winning the thing means losing something else, the under indexed. Is winning worth that?
