If I understand correctly, Carl correctly estimated Mark Zuckerberg’s future net worth as being $100+ million upon meeting him as a freshman at Harvard, before Facebook.
Well, if I understand the post correctly, even as a freshman, Mark apparently had previous experience with owning/running a business, and was deliberately trying to become a tech entrepreneur. Now, given that someone is from a privileged family, is attending school at (almost) the maximally privileged and well-connected institution (at least on the East Coast) for wannabe rich guys, has previous experience with business by the time he reaches age 18, possesses enough intelligence to be going to school at Harvard (which, despite being partly a privilege club, still requires genuine intelligence and work-ethic to get into), and is clearly driven to become a rich tech guy… it’s not that unrealistic to say that he would, eventually, achieve his goal.
It just requires conditioning on a bunch of facts that most people don’t know about Mark Zuckerberg. But once you do condition on the facts that were available at the time… it all adds up to normality.
But anyway, to address the heart of the post… “pattern-matching” and inductive reasoning are similar but not identical. AFAIK, the human mind performs probabilistic causal induction on whatever data “makes it through” the sensory cortices, which are quite possibly but not surely doing something like independent component analysis via unsupervised neural learning… so yeah.
Most people have some solid intuitions about how probabilistic causal induction works, not in quantitative terms but in terms of “What happens if I do this?”. That’s the whole reason TVTropes exists. The problem is that we tell people only special little causal models called “logic” or “debate rules” or, God help the poor victims, “philosophy” are invested with the Special Epistemic Normative Power of telling you true things, rather than specifically training the inductive faculties we really rely on, the faculty of spotting what reality is doing by looking.
Well, if I understand the post correctly, even as a freshman, Mark apparently had previous experience with owning/running a business, and was deliberately trying to become a tech entrepreneur. Now, given that someone is from a privileged family, is attending school at (almost) the maximally privileged and well-connected institution (at least on the East Coast) for wannabe rich guys, has previous experience with business by the time he reaches age 18, possesses enough intelligence to be going to school at Harvard (which, despite being partly a privilege club, still requires genuine intelligence and work-ethic to get into), and is clearly driven to become a rich tech guy… it’s not that unrealistic to say that he would, eventually, achieve his goal.
It just requires conditioning on a bunch of facts that most people don’t know about Mark Zuckerberg. But once you do condition on the facts that were available at the time… it all adds up to normality.
But anyway, to address the heart of the post… “pattern-matching” and inductive reasoning are similar but not identical. AFAIK, the human mind performs probabilistic causal induction on whatever data “makes it through” the sensory cortices, which are quite possibly but not surely doing something like independent component analysis via unsupervised neural learning… so yeah.
Most people have some solid intuitions about how probabilistic causal induction works, not in quantitative terms but in terms of “What happens if I do this?”. That’s the whole reason TVTropes exists. The problem is that we tell people only special little causal models called “logic” or “debate rules” or, God help the poor victims, “philosophy” are invested with the Special Epistemic Normative Power of telling you true things, rather than specifically training the inductive faculties we really rely on, the faculty of spotting what reality is doing by looking.