Astonishing. Someone went to, maybe 30 seconds trouble to write that blog. You would have thought that, well, they would have thought about it for some of that 30 seconds and realised it makes no sense.
If you plan on being at startup school, maybe I can express in plain English to you face-to-face "how the hell" this story made top page...I'll be the guy in the Purdue t-shirt.
Major Premise: 2 out of 3 millionaires are entrepreneurs.
Minor Premise: You could be an entrepreneur.
Conclusion: You could have a 2/3 chance of being a millionaire.
Am I getting the argument correctly? I'm hoping that I'm missing something or interpreting it wrong
The argument presented is invalid. This does not mean that you (or all entrepreneurs) have a 2/3 chance to making it to millionaire, but that millionaires have a 2/3 chance of being an entrepreneur. The question to ask yourself is how many entrepreneurs aren't millionaires? What if 9/10 entrepreneurs go bankrupt? The decision is not quite as easy as the author makes it out to be. Maybe only 1/3 millionaires are royalty, but 9/10 of royalty are millionaires. It makes more sense to be the 1/3 royalty than the 2/3 entrepreneurs. Your odds are better. (Crazy examples used for educational purposes only. You can't decide to be royalty in my experience.)
Please don't misunderstand my motives. I have very strong entrepreneurial leanings and I hope to support myself in the future by my own ventures.
your absolute chance of becoming a millionaire isn't 2/3. 2/3 millionaires are entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurial route to millions is at least double that of the non-entrepreneurial route (assuming there are no more entrepreneurs than there are non-entrepreneurs -- a reasonable assumption)...in the example game given at the post, the non-entrepreneurial route is assigned the chance of 1/3 (assuming 1 out 3 non-entrepreneurs are millionaires -- not so reasonable assumption)...so 2/3 is at least double of 1/3.
To be clear, if there are 30 millionaires and 3K non-entrepreneurs and 3K entrepreneurs, the entrepreneurial route obviously wouldn't be 2/3, but it will be double that of the non-entrepreneurial route.
Ok, I see your reasoning, but I think it would be better to word it like this: "You are (statistically) twice as likely to be a millionaire if you are an entrepreneur than if you are not an entrepreneur (assuming that less than two thirds of the total population are entrepreneurs)."
But this still leaves a correlation/causation problem if you want to use it to imply that choosing the entrepreneurial path makes one twice as likely to become rich.
