Originally Posted by Bob21 View Post
Kj, sorry for spelling Ed Thorp’s name wrong. That’s how it came out when I did voice dictatation. I’ll get it right from here on out. It sounds like you come from the Don Schlesinger’s school of evaluating intelligence. As with you, he believes it comes back to how much someone is worth. So I guess in both of your books scientist would not be considered very intelligent because most don’t die with millions of dollars.

And you never did attack the central tenet of my post. Does that mean you agree with me? Ed Thorp tried to relate the math of Blackjack to somehow allowing him to figure out a mathematical formula for the stock market. Do you believe that makes sense? I stand by my comment: That is stupid to the nth degree. I didn’t call Mr. Thorp stupid, I called his belief that he was able to relate the math behind Blackjack to math to predict the stock market.
I most certainly do not believe a persons wealth is reflective of their intelligence. 2 examples. I have an uncle who is far and away the smartest person I have ever personally talked with. He was ranked #1 in both his high school class, not a big school, about 200 graduates and #1 in his college class at Bucknell, certainly not an Ivy league school but still a significant achievement. The man completely wasted this gift, living at home until he was 40 and bouncing around from relatively low paying jobs. He is now in his 60's scraping by on social security and probably don't have enough money to pay for burying himself.

Example #2, some people just fall into money by some dumb luck thing. Think of the guy that did those crazy videos with the girls or someone that invented the pet rock or even just lottery winner. Have you seen some of these lottery winners? No one is going to accuse some of these hillbillies of being all that intelligent.

Now back to Thorp. The couple times I have heard Thorp speak, I was lost after about 20 seconds, mostly that wasn't about blackjack though. With blackjack, I can follow along a little better, but still much is above my head. Thorp is a mathematician. THAT was his sole interest in blackjack. Now I have no idea if these theories could translate into the stock market. But guess what? He made 800 million, so I guess they could and DID! To say you find it stupid, knowing that it did, seems kind of bizarre. That would be like me saying I think that man traveling to the moon is stupid to the nth degree. Well we have done it! So how stupid can it be?

And BTW, Thorp isn't one of my favorite people in blackjack history. Again because his interest wasn't in making money via blackjack, he spilled the beans of his findings, which ultimately changed the way the game was played, making it harder to win and for what? It wasn't about making money?