By Professor Doom
Allow me to start
by discussion of a gambling strategy that is, mathematically, guaranteed to
win. Yes, I’m using “mathematically” as a weasel word, but let me explain the
basics of it.
Suppose you go to
a casino, and you can make a $5 wager on a single die roll. If a 1 or 2 comes
up, you are handed $10 (i.e., you win a net of $5) and if anything else comes
up (i.e., a 3, 4, 5, or 6) you lose your bet.
Now, this isn’t a
fair game, right? You double your money less than half the time, and lose
everything the rest, so it’s a game a casino would be happy to have you play.
The way how
mathematicians and rational people consider these situations is with “expected
value,” weighing the payoff and probability of winning against the amount and
probability of losses. Every time you play this particular game, for example, you
mathematically expect to lose $1.67…a terrible game, and any rational person
will tell you not to play. Ever.
But there is a
strategy here you can use that, on paper (again with the weasel words, I know),
will make you a winner, and you can win quite a bit. Here’s how it goes, step
by step:
1 ) First, bet $5. If you win, great, you’ve won $5, and
start over from step 1. If you lose, go to step 2.
2 ) Double your bet to $10, and play again. If you win,
well, you’ve doubled your $10 bet, so, combined with the $5 you lost in step 1,
you’ve won a net of $5. Go back to step 1 and play again. If you lose, go to
step 3.
3 ) Double your bet to $20. If you win, well, you’ve now won
a net of $5, so go back to step 1 and play again. If you lose, go to step 4.
4 ) Double your bet to $40. If you win, take your $5 net and
start over with step 1. If you lose, step 5 for you!
5 ) Double down again. I trust the gentle reader sees the
trend here.
This method,
endlessly doubling down, will mathematically create wins for the player, even
when it’s a losing a game, a game no person should ever play. Yes, you could
hit a losing streak, but as long as you can keep doubling down, you’ll win
(there’s a less than 20% chance you’ll even need to double down 5 times in the
above terrible game—even with awful odds you’ll most likely come out $5 ahead
if you only go through the doubling down procedure one time).
So we have a
guaranteed winning strategy, right? The devil is in the details, of course.
The first detail
is the one the casinos address right away: casinos put a maximum on your bet.
Casinos only let you bet so much at a table—even in an unfavorable game, they
need to make sure they stay in business, it’s their absolute priority (which is
why the mainstream claim that Paddock “made a living” playing at video poker
machines is pure idiocy…it just doesn’t work that way).
The second detail
is reality for most human beings: you need an infinite amount of money to use
this strategy. Sure, you’re likely to win most times, but sooner or later
you’ll hit a losing streak, and won’t have the money to double down again. To
call this scenario a “losing streak” is a bit unfair, as this is a terrible
game and this streak will happen eventually…the idea of using a strategy where
you can risk thousands of dollars in an attempt to gain a measly five bucks is
ridiculous.
Even if the casinos
didn’t shut it down, this “guaranteed to win” strategy only works if you have
an infinite amount of money. Nobody has an infinite amount of money, so you
can’t actually use this strategy. It’s probably just as well…this is a terrible
game, nobody should play it, having an infinite amount of money just means
you’d be pouring an infinite amount of resources on something you shouldn’t
touch at all.
In short, the
doubling down strategy leads to major economic disaster for anyone who plays it,
eventually; if you have more money, it’ll take longer, but it’s always a
disaster in the end.
While “doubling
down” is a terrible strategy for normal human beings, there are two places
where doubling down seems to be the only course of action.
The Federal
government, through their fiat monetary system, basically has an infinite
amount of money. They can print up whatever they want, so it doesn’t matter how
horrible the ideas they’re pursuing, they can just keep doubling down, over and
over again. Trouble is, most things the government tries to do are horrible,
not nearly as “fair” as the simple dice game I proposed above. A “losing
streak” for a government policy is about as commonplace as a wet spot where a
chunk of ice used to be.
We began to see
major doubling down in the Reagan era, when our debts first broke
$1,000,000,000,000. It was such an innocent time. Because the government has
infinite money, it saw no reason to stop, and so has doubled down at least 4
more times since then, and now the debt is over $20,000,000,000,000 (although
more realistic estimates, using accounting methods you or I would normally use,
put the debt in the 200,000,000,000 range, only a few more doubling downs,
really).
There’s not even
the slightest hint this will ever stop. Effects of this doubling include a
stock market that can’t drop even 1% even when we have cities crushed by
hurricanes, economic stagnation for almost everyone in the country (to clarify:
for everyone without access to the doubling down spigot), and spiraling costs
for the things people really want, in addition to those beyond-astronomical
debts.
Trouble is, the
government doesn’t really have infinite money, it just has the ability to make
infinite amounts of currency. At some point, the fiat currency will assume
intrinsic value (i.e., 0), and we’ll have the ultimate economic disaster my
gambling strategy predicts.
--I haven’t
read this book, but the point is it’s a powerful strategy…until it fails
utterly.
The rise of
political correctness has been truly astonishing the last 30ish years. When its
primary advocates, the Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) first arrived on campus,
they were looked at strangely. They had strange ideas, things that were
obviously wrong on multiple levels (among many examples, things like “men and
women are exactly equal in all ways, which is why we need to give women special
privileges”).
They were first
pointed at with accompanying laughter, and their ridiculous ideas were shown as
ridiculous.
But the SJWs
doubled down, insisting they were in the right. The SJWs didn’t have infinite
money, of course, but they have infinite bravado, fueled by a zealous
conviction of being in the right. All attempts to argue for common sense, for
scientific reason, for basic decency, failed in the face of endless doubling
down.
Time and again
their ridiculous ideas (I’m not saying all their ideas were ridiculous, mind
you) were laughed at, but they kept doubling down…eventually getting lucky on
every aspect of their agenda. This is why, in the face of all logic and reason,
we have “Diversity Institutes” on our campuses, staffed by ridiculously
overpaid Diversity Commissars, promoting the exact opposite of diversity, to
the point of viciously attacking anyone who dare show even a hint of diversity
of opinion.
However, it’s
starting to become apparent that the era of the SJW might be ending. Trump
winning the last election was such an epic slap in the face, a resounding
strike to knock some sense into these guys, that it should have made a
difference.
It didn’t.
They responded
with another double down, insisting, despite all reason, “Trump is not my
president” and supporting every cockamamie idea that might somehow change this
cold, hard, reality. There’s a distinct possibility they’ve run out of capital.
Finally.
We now have
books detailing how to fight the SJW, how to stop them from
“converging” those few institutions remaining in the country that have not
fallen under their sway. We have formerly peaceful
law-abiding countries now turned into rape-capitals by following SJW ideals. We have
people talking about getting “red pilled” into understanding that SJWs are
insane.
In response to
these obvious failures, the SJWs can only double down instead of consider that,
perhaps, they’re playing a losing game and need to change what they are doing. It’s sad that
their zealotry won’t allow for the possibility they’ve made a mistake. Already
I have friends who swear that all their future votes will be in direct
contravention to whatever SJWs want, and I believe the day is coming where
there will no longer be even a slight attempt to negotiate in any way here.
That’s a shame,
because the SJW does have a couple decent things to say. But, much like with my
gambling game where one must consider the expected value of playing, the bottom
line here is playing their game is a losing proposition, and so it’s
reasonable, if sad, that we must abandon the possibility of winning in the near
term in the face of mathematical certainty of losing in the end.
Too bad we don’t
get that option with our fiat currency system.
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