The Base Rate Fallacy: Start With How Common It Is
The quiet, bookish stranger sounds like a librarian. There are a hundred times more salespeople — so the shy ones alone outnumber every librarian in the country.
Topic
Venture Capital
The Principal-Agent Problem: Your Agent Earns ₹2,000 From Your ₹5,00,000
Holding out two weeks for a better house price is worth a fortune to you and pocket change to your agent. No dishonesty required — just a small gap between what you want and what they're paid for.
Survivorship Bias: The Bullet Holes That Weren't There
Wartime analysts mapped damage on returning bombers and proposed armouring the places full of holes. A statistician pointed out those were the survivable hits — and inverted the entire dataset.
Compound Interest: The Pond Was Empty Until It Wasn't
A lily pad covering a pond on day thirty covered half of it on day twenty-nine. Nothing about its growth changed — only the base it grew from. Human intuition fails at this reliably and expensively.
Power Laws: When the Average Describes Nobody
The world's tallest person barely moves a room's average height. The world's wealthiest moves it by a factor of millions. Almost all statistical intuition is built for the first case.
Startups: Most Advice Comes From the People It Worked For
Persistence and bold bets describe the founders who succeeded — and just as many who didn't, and aren't being interviewed. A structural view of these companies is more useful than the folklore.
Venture Capital: The Maths Only Works With Outliers
Most investments return little; one or two return the entire fund. Every practice in the industry that looks strange from outside is a rational response to that distribution.