Quote:
Originally Posted by mugaliens
Put simply, when someone sees a disconnect between how they think things should work and how they really work, and they jump to the conclusion that the disconnect is with everyone else, and not themself...
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This is one problem.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mugaliens
On the other hand, history has plenty of examples where the one that breaks from the herd, often to the ridicule of the herd, is actually the one in the know.
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This is the other.
Their judgement of probabilities is wrong. It's
far more likely that the crowd is correct and you are wrong, than the crowd is wrong and you are right. Unfortunately, because the large pay-off of the latter, people tend to over-estimate the probability of success of the contrarian strategy. For every Einstein, there are a million ATMers who go uncounted, for every Warren Buffet, there are a million traders whose loses never get analysed.
Edit: Seeing as most of us aren't great at estimating probabilities anyway, I would say the ATM behaviour the OP brings up is simply an extreme example of normal human behaviour. A humorous extreme example.
Edit2: should words starting with 'h' be preceded by 'a' or 'an'?
