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Comment by gustavus | Hacker News Reader

There's an episode of Sienfeld about this. George realizes that he always makes the wrong decision so he decides to do the opposite of whatever he would normally do, and it ends up working out for him pretty well.

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There are some real life “George” figures that I pay attention to. If they think something is a great idea and that’s in line with something I’m thinking about doing, I’ll take a hard look at what I might be missing since X’s judgment is usually terrible. In an odd way, their consistently bad judgment has proven a valuable tool.

There's even an investment fund on this principle. If Jim Cramer goes up on CNBC to talk about a stock, they buy the opposite of his recommendations. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/love-him-or-hate-him-new-e...

Amusingly the inverse Cramer ETF is in the red YTD

presumably Cramer is including the inverse-Cramer into his picks; 4D chess

Same vibe: https://galloway-index.webflow.io/

wallstreetbets is a really funny place in this regard. Lookup the legend fscomeau.

Most of the best decisions of my life were the opposite decisions my parents would have made. They're not stupid people, but they grew up in a totally different time and place. Nowadays I sometimes ask for their advice as "inverse input."

I suspect part of this is that there are other parts of society (corporations) that are preying on their older intuition. It also means that as we get older, we should also question "obvious answers", because others will have learned to take advantage of them (and any accumulated wealth).

I figured out a long time ago that the Reddit hivemind is a superb contraindicator.

God damn, break out the AI...we are on to something

Unfortunately, the AIs were all trained on Reddit, so we're basically doomed.

No worries.

    -- (AIAssistant (RedditHivemind (x)))

For what?

Yeah, I would like some qualifiers too because I've seen reddit hype up relatively obscure product niches at the time that later became popular with mainstream consumers.

Speaking of X...

There are some political figures I do this with - if I'm unsure about a issue, I'll do the opposite of what they say. Bernie Sanders is probably the biggest - even his own party usually votes the opposite of what he wants.

There are also some true idiots in the Republican party that work similarly.

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