[dang]

I answered your argument in my initial reply (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27070820): pg isn't saying that all crazy ideas by domain experts must be true, so a flagrant counterexample doesn't prove anything. Indeed, flagrant counterexamples are to be expected, since almost by definition, crazy ideas will have more variance than conventional ones.

The problem is that there wasn't really much of an argument there. You converted his point into something stupid that he didn't say, and then did a bunch of name-calling. Since the "argument" was so flimsy and the name-calling so mean, I asked why you would bother to do that. I'm still interested in the answer, even if the answer is that you don't think you did that. It's not really personal, I'm just curious. But yes I understand how it could come across that way.

[lvs]

No, your reply was a flagrant straw man. "every such idea must be true" != "confusing chance with wisdom or luck with skill." A straw man is where you're evading an argument by pretending it's something it isn't.

I certainly didn't "convert his point" into anything more "stupid" than what he said. In a somewhat farcically stereotypical way, this venture capitalist argues he makes decisions -- better than a coin toss presumably -- based on the notion that "domain experts" know what they're talking about. My contention was that venture capitalists don't pick winners better than a coin toss at all. They are simply gambling. When they win a jackpot, they construct a fiction that the win was predestined on some rational basis and not simply chance.

(Persisting with your ad hominem, by the way, isn't working.)