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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

A coin flip with 50/50 odds is understandable even without predictions.

This is a technicality / edge case of 'pure randomness', rather than a rebuttal.

Furthermore, I can predict the distribution of results for a coin quite accurately over long time timeframes. Indeed being the 'understanding' of a successful gambler means being able to make predictions about what will happen with a random process over time.

Roulette for example is analogous to the coin toss; most casinos seem extremely able to predict what will happen over time quite well.

Or are you hinting at a counterargument that most of the world is a truly random process analogous to a coin throw?

In which case, your experience with reality must be terrifying. Will the sun come up today? Who knows? Will gravity work in a minute? And so on.

You can model a coin flip you can't predict it. Next year the US GDP with be the same +/- 50%. That's been true for the last 200+ years, further there is positive bias so it's more likely to be + than -, but the down tail is thicker so it's more likely to be down 9% than up 9%.

Similarly casinos will sometimes lose lot's of money on Roulette when someone makes a big bet. But, the their long term average is positive money maker. Further, they don't pick specific returns just a range with some probability aka more than X not 10,203,556$.

What you want is a prediction for next year, not a model for next year.

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