The biggest problem with things like this, which almost nobody talks about in the context of investing, is publication bias.

100 people try to develop a profitable trading algorithm. 1 comes up with one that looks great on back-tests at a 1% confidence (in other words, exactly what you'd expect from random chance alone over 100 trials).

That person writes an article/pitch/business plan based on their algorithm. You never see results from the 99 who failed.

Going forward, the successful algorithm is no more likely to work than the failed 99, but from the perspective of the general public it sure looks like a winner!

It's much worse than this with machine learning approaches. Imagine a million people trying to find a profitable algo, all on your laptop, and you are choosing the best one out of all of those.

If you are used to pen-and-paper trading strategies, or even excel spreadsheets, machine learning is just a completely different level to this. And probably how it works will be unintelligible to anyone. I don't even see how someone can write a business plan based on this.

Once in a blue moon you might be stuck without access to power for hours and hours, and you will be thankful for the battery life.

Every other day you will be cursing the subpar display and lousy performance.

(FTFY)

I think you mean that truckers FEEL like they deal with that dilemma all the time. If they ACTUALLY dealt with an A or B dilemma, they would routinely end up in situation A or B: running over a passenger car or flipping the truck. It happens SOMETIMES, but infrequently.

In reality the situations where other drivers do something stupid are probably much better handled by the self-driving truck, which doesn't panic, doesn't feel a fight-or-flight response, doesn't overstate the gravity of the situation... doesn't do anything except assess what to do next without emotion.

Let's generalize the content so you can see what I mean:

"A massive trove of documents was just leaked from a law firm that helps companies and individuals create and operate shell companies in [jurisdiction X]. We don't know what those shell companies are used for, but they could be used for wrongdoing! And this law firm was suspiciously focused on protecting its clients' identities, which further suggests wrongdoing."

Jurisdiction X in this case in Panama. Ok, it sounds dubious to us 'Muricans.

What if jurisdiction X was Delaware? Would you think the law firm was setting up shell companies for "wrongdoing", or because starting and operating a business is complicated and there are a variety of practical reasons to base your corporate in entities in Delaware rather than (say) Maine? Would you think the law firm is protecting its clients identities because of an effort to conduct fraud, or because law firms generally err on the side of preserving the sanctity of attorney-client privilege whenever possible?

Now let's say Jurisdiction X is Ireland. Are the companies that use Irish shell companies engaged in wrongdoing? Or are they responding to the bizarre and complicated world of international regulation and taxation as any rational actor would? Certainly secrecy is not the goal - everyone, including the IRS, knows everything about how e.g. Apple uses Irish entities to conduct business.

Now let's say Jurisdiction X is Cyprus. Are the shell companies for tax avoidance in the home country, or for the reasonable avoidance of double-taxation? One reason investment firms use structures based in Cyprus (or the Caymans, or BVI, or Luxembourg) is that these countries have mutual tax treaties with most Western nations, while the US does not. Those tax treaties ensure that the investor will end up paying taxes only in their own domicile, not the nation they invest in AND their own domicile. For US persons investing in (say) Poland through a Cyprus entity, they end up paying their full slate US taxes (NOT avoiding them - in fact they usually pay higher US taxes than they otherwise would, because for technical reasons the Cyprus blocker often results in paying ordinary income tax rates on what would otherwise be treated as capital gains) but they avoid having to pay BOTH Polish taxes AND US taxes. This is akin to the reasons why many/most private US businesses are set up as pass-through entities rather than corporations - avoiding double taxation is not the same as dodging taxes.

*

I'm not an expert on Panama, or international tax for that matter - I just have some experience dealing with these issues. So I can't say for sure in what specific purposes using a Panama entity is equivalent to using a Delaware entity or a Cyprus entity, vs. a blatant attempt to dodge taxes.

All I know is that, from my own experience, there is a huge gap between the public PERCEIVED reasons why companies and individuals establish overseas shell corporations (tax avoidance! money laundering! bribery!) and the ACTUAL reasons they do so (procedural efficiency, clear legal rules, full payment of taxes but not OVERpayment of taxes, etc.).

The reason why there are lots of different statistical methods is that different problems and different samples from different populations call for different approaches. And frequently the reason why a certain approach is invalid in a particular use case is subtle, difficult to explain, and easy to miss. Abstracting that complexity away from the would-be "scientist" is an invitation for them to develop unreasonable confidence in their results "because the model said so." We have more than enough of that attitude already, thank you very much.

This is why I (for one) am strongly biased towards hiring older developers.

With age comes experience and also comes a strengthening of biases. Older people, so the stereotype goes, are inflexible and set in their ways, if very experienced in those ways.

It's not really paradoxical, it just depends on what tradeoffs you're willing to make as the person responsible for hiring, which depends on your line of business. There are few things more tiresome than someone making mistakes you already made two decades ago and tried to warn about, and the same applies to someone ignoring the new and improved ways to get things done just because they've always done it that way and know it the best.

Like most stereotypes, it might be true in some cases but far from universal. The literal two best developers I know, both over 50, are FAR from set in their ways. They are both constantly seeking new ways of doing things, exploring new languages and technologies, sometimes playing with low level projects (like making lights blink in interesting ways on breadboards), sometimes playing with high level projects (spawning hundreds or thousands of cloud instances to see how it works), but always looking for new things.

They might SEEM set in their ways when they shoot down bad ideas from expert beginners, but that's only because the expert beginner is confusing wisdom for lack of flexibility.

I'm a musician. I've been playing guitar since I was a teenager. As a technician, I've peaked out. I will probably never play faster, cleaner, or more complex than I do now. If anything, I'll start to go downhill as age takes its toll on my hands. But as a musician, I'm always getting better. I'm growing more conscious, more sensitive, more subtle, more sophisticated. I'm a better musician now than I was a year ago, and a far better musician than I was five years ago.

There's a similar thing in software. When you're still learning, still approaching real expertise, it's easy to think that being a great software engineer is about technique. It's not. I know a bunch of over-50 programmers. Sure, many are basically dead in the water, but many are not, and are constantly improving. It's not because they learn a new language, or a new framework. It's because they learn better taste. They learn more and more what is and is not important, how long things will take, best use of resources, translating requirements more effectively... these things will all make you a better engineer than writing glorified Hello Worlds in framework-of-the-month ever will.

In the end the real 'problem' with older developers is they expose problems with your organization by providing what you ask for. If you keep asking for tight deadlines thinking people are going to ignore them you squeeze out creativity.

Survivorship bias? Perhaps all the bad 50-year-old programmers transitioned out or became "incompetent dinosaurs" in low-challenge areas where you can't easily see them.

"If you make major life decisions against your clear preference in a vague effort to please your parents, you will probably regret it."

Way too many people either try too hard to please their parents, or ignore their advice entirely. With time, you learn to not swing too much either way.

Then again, the authoritarian dictator has to play up the credibility of the foreign agitators so they seem more real. I must be a member of the regime trying to consolidate power.

It's bots and sock puppets all the way down.