The problem isn’t that people don’t reason. They do reason. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not ours.

Due diligence, hard work, discipline combine with patience and consistency and the realization of the "right type of thinking" can lead us to achieve a result with a very high probability. Beyond that, it is all randomness: either by taking high, enormous and unconscious risks, or by being extraordinarily lucky. Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance

Courtesy of Aaron Bornstein 07/10/05

Courtesy of Aaron Bornstein 07/10/05

An engineer, a mathematician, and a physicist went to the races one Saturday and laid their money down. Commiserating in the bar after the race, the engineer says, "I don't understand why I lost all my money. I measured all the horses and calculated their strength and mechanical advantage and figured out how fast they could run..."

The physicist interrupted him: "...but you didn't take individual variations into account. I did a statistical analysis of their previous performances and bet on the horses with the highest probability of winning..."

"...so if you're so hot why are you broke?" asked the engineer. But before the argument can grow, the mathematician takes out his pipe and they get a glimpse of his well-fattened wallet. Obviously here was a man who knows something about horses. They both demanded to know his secret.

"Well," he says, between puffs on the pipe, "first I approximated all the horses as identical spheres..."